Axios

Mark Zuckerberg took to Facebook this afternoon to speak out about Trump's executive orders on immigration.

Expanding the focus of law enforcement beyond people who are real threats would make all Americans less safe by diverting resources, while millions of undocumented folks who don't pose a threat will live in fear of deportation. —Mark Zuckerberg

He also took the opportunity to applaud Trump's pledge to "work something out" for Dreamers, or immigrants who were illegally brought to the U.S. as kids. His organization, FWD.us, will work with the administration on this, he said. And he made a case that everyone benefits when "the best and brightest from around the world can live, work and contribute here."

Why Silicon Valley cares: Beyond personal reasons (Zuckerberg notes that his family and his wife's family immigrated from elsewhere), tech companies have real workforce issues to consider. A large number of so-called Dreamers live and work at these companies, and they also have a lot of engineering and technical jobs they need to keep filling through temporary visas for highly skilled workers.

Industry groups are joining a push to roll back the FCC's privacy rules for internet providers.

The details: The groups — which represent companies like Google, Facebook, Verizon and Comcast — want lawmakers to pass a resolution rescinding the rules using a law called the Congressional Review Act. It lets Congress block agency rulemakings within a certain period of time. They're echoing a similar call from conservative groups yesterday.

What this would mean: Internet providers would be able to use and share their subscribers' data without first asking for explicit permission, as the current rules require.

A sign of things to come: Even though the FCC's rules don't actually apply to "edge providers" like Google and Facebook, the groups say "the onerous and unnecessary rules it adopted establish a very harmful precedent for the entire internet ecosystem."

Key context: Even if Congress doesn't act here, the FCC's new Republican leadership could take steps to reverse or change the privacy rules.

A short section of President Trump's immigration executive order that tells agencies "ensure that their privacy policies exclude persons who are not United States citizens or lawful permanent residents from the protections of the Privacy Act regarding personally identifiable information" is drawing attention in tech circles.

Why privacy hawks are worried:

• Nuala O'Connor, the head of the Center for Democracy and Technology, said that the order sends the message that "people who don't hold a U.S. passport or current green card are not entitled to the same dignity as those of us who do."
• It raises questions about the United States' broader approach to protecting the data of non-citizens.

The bigger picture: The order has worried some in Europe, where recent revelations about American tech companies working with the government surveillance regime have caused officials to be wary of Silicon Valley. It also raises questions about the fate of the US-EU Privacy Shield agreement governing the transatlantic transfer of data.

Hold your horses: A European Commission spokesperson told TechCruch that the Privacy Shield agreement "does not rely on the protections under the U.S. Privacy Act." But the body has promised to keep an eye on the issue.

Update: Ken Propp, a director at software trade group BSA, says that the executive order "should not affect the privacy protections afforded under the US-EU Privacy Shield," and cited the agreement's grounding in a law called the Judicial Redress Act.

Apple has built a suite of products to keep the iPhone at the center of consumer life (a la HomeKit), and Google has invested heavily in home-automation (think Nest thermostat).

But with its fast-growing Alexa voice-based digital assistant and Echo speaker system, Amazon is quickly dominating how people interact with all their devices in the home.

When the iPhone rolled out in 2007, everyone developed [software] for that. Right now, everyone is developing for the voice-activated Internet. —Mark Mahaney, RBC Capital Markets

Why the hype? So-called connected home is a near-term holy grail for major tech players want to own the way people communicate, shop, work and run their households. Amazon is hoping to facilitate all these interactions without an Apple phone or Google web browser as middle man, as Reuters pointed out this morning in a good breakdown of these companies' efforts.

So what? By cutting Google or Apple (at least partly) out of the equation, Amazon easily wins the "smart-home" race for a market expected to be worth $100 billion by 2020, according to Juniper Research. Developers working on software for products to "plug in" to the smart-home infrastructure, in turn, are making sure they're betting on the leading horse.

Facebook is changing its video algorithm to incentivize publishers to create more long-form video. They'll be looking at the percent completion rates to determine video interest and they'll be weighing the percent completion higher for longer videos.

Why it matters: It's another step to compete with TV networks for ad dollars on long-form content.

Facebook's step-by-step :

1) introduced a live platform and paid publishers $50 million collectively to produce content for it as an incentive. They incentivized those partners to make live videos longer by algorithmically favoring videos at least 10-minutes long.

2) Rolled out a video tab to test housing an in-platform destination for long-form video.

3) Announced they were testing mid-roll ads that can be monetized for publishers but are only available for videos longer than 90-seconds.

What to expect: Facebook will still count a video view at any length as three seconds, but without the financial and algorithmic incentive to produce short video, you'll probably see less of that from publishers in your newsfeed.

Amazon has been granted a patent for a robot that would pack shipping boxes with goods ordered by its customers. In an example offered by the company, the robotic arm would use suction to grab a coffee mug and place it in a box.

The filing was first spotted on Twitter by Nick Wingfield of the New York Times.

Who currently packs the boxes: Human workers. CNN reported late last year that Amazon warehouse employees only spend a minute on each order, including the 15 seconds it takes to pack an item into a box with bubble wrap, tape it shut and send it off for shipping.

Why this matters: Policymakers are trying to understand the impact that increased automation will have on jobs. Researchers associated with McKinsey found recently that' "scenarios suggest that half of today's work activities could be automated by 2055" but that only a small percentage of jobs could be fully automated.

Here's a graphic of all of the things Amazon envisions the robotic arm interacting with:

Just days after Facebook's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, denied that he's planning to run for U.S. president, COO Sheryl Sandberg is already the next target of the same rumors.

The clues, according to Real Clear Politics:

• She's planning a tour to promote her upcoming book "Option B" and is reportedly interviewing potential aides with campaign experience and hired staff with political experience when she arrived in Silicon Valley
• It's reportedly "common knowledge" in Democratic Party circles that she's considering a run.

Counterpoint: Last year, Sandberg dismissed rumors that she would take a job in the Clinton administration, should Hillary Clinton win, and she hasn't publicly said anything about the women's march last weekend. Sources also told BuzzFeed earlier this week that Zuckerberg believes he can have a bigger impact as the leader of Facebook, an argument that could also be made for Sandberg.

The ascendence of self-driving cars has opened a debate about whether man or machine is liable when there's an accident involving an autonomous vehicle. At a panel discussion in Washington on Thursday, experts highlighted an area where those questions are particularly difficult to answer: the moment when the software in a self-driving vehicle hands off control of the vehicle to the human behind the wheel.

"We're calling it the hot potato situation, right? The car is driving along the road at 60 miles an hour and all of a sudden something doesn't look right to the vehicle and it's a hot potato and just hands the control back to the driver." — Paul Lewis, Vice President of Policy and Finance at the Eno Center

Lewis said that he could see two ways for policymakers to resolve this thorny question:

1. Release "very explicit" liability laws at either the federal or state level
2. Let the courts decide as they vet lawsuits over the issue

Real world context: Tesla has already had to deal with the potential for lawsuits about its Autopilot feature. Federal officials indicated last year that liability may continue to be regulated at the state level.

The bigger picture: Numerous Silicon Valley firms — Alphabet and Uber included — are throwing their lot in with self-driving cars. And that doesn't include the Detroit automakers who are experimenting with autonomous vehicles. They say that having clear, nationwide regulations for the vehicles would encourage en masse adoption of the technology.

Yesterday I received two separate calls from Silicon Valley types, taking me (and my media peers) to task for expecting Snap's IPO to be "successful." In short, they don't believe the numbers add up.

"Successful" is a tricky term when it comes to IPOs, particularly since different companies list for different purposes (capital raising, employee liquidity, market cachet, etc.). But these folks were essentially saying that if Snap does manage to price at around a $20 billion valuation (fully diluted), it will have a very difficult time maintaining that past the lock-up period (at least for a while).