The tech industry was riding high a decade ago: Facebook and Twitter were becoming vital tools for pro-democracy protesters around the world, Apple's iPhone was taking off, and a new class of startups like Uber and TaskRabbit appeared ready to change the world.
As we close out the 2010s, the love affair we all had with tech .
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2019's Top 5 tech turkeys
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Social media may be helping connect people, but it's also been twisted into a tool of propagandists aiming to upend our elections. It's become home to serial harassers, who send out troll armies that . It's become a hotbed of revenge porn and conspiracy theories. It's the way mass murderers have
But it wasn't all Facebook, Twitter and YouTube screwing up. There was also Uber's IPO, WeWork's failures and MoviePass' passing -- among many, many fiascoes.
As we prepare for 2020, here's a look back, in no particular order, at the crazy year that was 2019.
This isn't just about what we think about 2019, by the way. Tell us about anything that caught your attention, and why, in the comments below.
Angela Lang/CNET
Two years after we learned of Facebook's malfeasance in allowing the profile information of as many as 87 million people to be
"Despite repeated promises to its billions of users worldwide that they could control how their personal information is shared, Facebook undermined consumers' choices," said FTC Chairman Joe Simons in a statement announcing the fine. "The relief is designed not only to punish future violations but, more importantly, to change Facebook's entire privacy culture to decrease the likelihood of continued violations."
Few were impressed with the outcome, though. Some noted that it's a drop in the bucket for Facebook, which made $22 billion in profit last year.
Kara Swisher, , who's interviewed Zuckerberg in public several times, wrote : "Put another zero on Facebook's fine. Then we can talk." The thrust of her argument was that such a small fine in the face of Facebook's overwhelming wealth "won't change anything."
For his part, in a statement that the social network would make "major structural changes" to how it builds products and conducts business.
"We have a responsibility to protect people's privacy," Zuckerberg wrote. "We already work hard to live up to this responsibility, but now we're going to set a completely new standard for our industry."
When Tesla CEO Elon Musk got on stage, he had everything ready. He had a cheering crowd, an eye-catching new vehicle to show off and a demo to give. Two and a half minutes later, his plans were shattered.
It all began with the
To appeal to the truck-buying people who see ads like "," Musk & Co. concocted a series of dramatic experiments to show how much tougher the Cybertruck is.
First, one of Musk's lieutenants swung a sledgehammer at a normal truck door, leaving a dent. Next, he slammed it into the Cybertruck's steel door, and the door was unblemished.
Then it was time to show off the "armor glass," which Musk claimed was a "transparent metal-glass." His team began by dropping a huge ball bearing on a normal pane of glass from several feet in the air. It immediately cracked. Next, the armor glass. The first few tries, it came away looking fine. The ball fell with a different-sounding thud, and as it was dropped several more times, anyone wincing and waiting for the glass to break had likely calmed down and was thinking "Musk planned this demo; it'll go how he wants it to."
That, dear reader, is .
After the stage-demo science experiments, a proud Musk asked his lieutenant to throw the ball bearing at the Cybertruck's driver side window. A moment later, a web of cracks appeared where the ball bearing hit the glass. Musk, seemingly horrified, let out an expletive. For some reason, the lieutenant repeated his assault on the back passenger's window, and broke it too.
Musk attempted to save face, saying, "it didn't go through."
For the rest of the presentation, the broken windows just sat there, behind Musk: the new symbol of the Cybertruck. And Tesla will go down in history for one of the biggest fails in stage demo history.
Sarah Tew/CNET
We've been hearing for years about grueling working conditions in Amazon's warehouses, but in May, CNET reported that the e-commerce giant
The ones who stayed on the job quickly learned that Amazon's grueling work environment was even more unforgiving to pregnant employees. For example, Amazon tracks when employees go to the bathroom, something pregnant ladies do quite often.
"I said, 'I'm telling you this because I'm going to have to use the bathroom more,' and [a manager] said, 'It's still against the rules,'" said Beverly Rosale, one of the women who struggled with work while pregnant. "We can't control our bladders. If we have to go, we have to go."
When Amazon fired Rosale, she said, the company told her she'd been taking too much time off, without acknowledging her pregnancy.
"It is absolutely not true that Amazon would fire any employee for being pregnant; we are an equal opportunity employer," an Amazon spokeswoman said in a statement. "We work with our employees to accommodate their medical needs including pregnancy-related needs. We also support new parents by offering various maternity and parental leave benefits."
Amazon earlier said it wasn't able to discuss the specifics of Rosales' lawsuit or other lawsuits. But in response to a request for comment for this story, the company said it "works hard to provide a safe, quality working environment for the more than 300,000 full and part-time employees working in our fulfillment and operations facilities across the US," adding that it offers up to 20 weeks of maternal and paternal paid leave, a work flexibility program for new parents, and full medical, vision and dental insurance.
Getty Images
Oh, Congress, will you ever understand technology? So far, the answer appears to be a resounding "no." And thanks to that, we got several Capitol Hill hearings this year that went far off the rails.
Chief among them was a hearing on white supremacy, which devolved into partisan bickering.
, of the conservative college activist group , argued to the committee that the hearing's actual goal was "fear-mongering, power and control" on the part of the committee's Democrats. One lawmaker responded by playing a video of Owens discussing Nazi leader Adolf Hitler's .
By the end, many of the committee members had left, and all Twitter could talk about was Owens' fiery rhetoric and the streams of racist and ugly comments
A Senate hearing the next day was no better. Titled "," it became a series of of Texas argued, without evidence, that social media companies were broadly silencing people they politically disagreed with.
Angela Lang/CNET
As the 2020 election campaign heats up, tech companies are scrambling to make sure they don't get blamed for any problems that might arise.
Twitter, for example,
"The reason for [this policy] is that we believe that in a democracy, it is important that people can see for themselves what politicians are saying," Zuckerberg
Many people disagreed with him, including Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, of Massachusetts, who ran an ad with a lie about Zuckerberg supporting Trump, just to make her point.
"Facebook changed their ads policy to allow politicians to run ads with known lies -- explicitly turning the platform into a disinformation-for-profit machine," . "This week, we decided to see just how far it goes."
Zuckerberg still hasn't backed down.
Graphic by Pixabay/Illustration by CNET
Cruz isn't the only person who worries about how conservatives are treated by the tech industry. It's also a pet issue for Trump, who's claimed -- without evidence -- that tech companies stifle his and other people's social media posts.
The White House even
Still, that didn't stop people from pushing on tech companies directly over conservative issues. They've argued the companies need to embrace "," a twist on the tech industry's efforts to bring more ethnic and gender diversity into its ranks.
One of the most dramatic moments this year was at Apple's
"Diversity is not what someone looks like, it's the sum of what they think," activist Justin Danhof said at the meeting. Danhof, who's general counsel for the National Center for Public Policy Research, added that the tech industry's focus on increasing racial and gender diversity is "racism and sexism."
The proposal was shot down, with more than 98 percent of voting shareholders casting ballots against it.
"We are open to people from all walks of life," Apple CEO Tim Cook said in response, noting that this includes political points of view, religious beliefs and sexual orientation.
Angela Lang/CNET
Before May, Uber seemed poised for an upswing. New CEO Dara Khosrowshahi helped turn around the company's toxic work culture, and appeared to be settling fights with cities around the world. And don't forget that Uber was one of the world's largest startups,
Then we found out Uber was hemorrhaging cash. Like, more than $1 billion a quarter. It turned out Uber
The next day of trading, Monday, the stock fell even further, to $36 per share. "Like all periods of transition, there are ups and downs," Khosrowshahi wrote in an email to employees,
It's currently bouncing below $30 per share, valued at about $50 billion.
Alfred Ng/CNET
Uber: Well, that was a rough IPO. WeWork: Hold my beer.
The company rose to stardom offering "co-working" space, a Silicon Valley-esque office environment you could rent, with beer on tap, Wi-Fi and comfy couches.
Initially, it was all the rage with aspiring entrepreneurs, but soon it was being used by big companies .
By 2019, WeWork was valued at $47 billion, based on investments including .
I'm sure you can see what's coming next: The disaster began to unfold when WeWork filed its IPO paperwork publicly, disclosing a complex web of companies that made up "We," and other shady business practices. On top of all that, it turned out the company's CEO, Adam Neumann, had done questionable things like buying buildings WeWork was based out of and . Or trademarking the company's brand, and then licensing it for $5.9 million (, though).
Neumann "stepped down" from his job in September, but not before agreeing to a golden parachute of $1.7 billion. At that point, the company's valuation was in shambles and it pulled its IPO plans.
James Martin/CNET
Voice assistants have had a bumpy run so far. Sure, they promise to play music, help you automate your smart home, and even tell you the occasional joke if you ask, but they don't always understand you correctly.
That said, they've been getting better since their debut a decade ago. And recently, we learned how.
It turned out that were all sending anonymized recordings to a group of contractors to "grade" how well the voice assistants understood us and to help them learn when they got things wrong. Oh, and they didn't really do a good job telling us they were doing this. Which is a problem when Alexa accidentally records you in intimate moments, or in the middle of an important meeting, or anything else really.
Throughout the year, each company admitted publicly that it had in fact been listening to a sampling of recordings, and promised to audit its processes to make sure our security was protected.
Apple went a step further,
Stephen Shankland/CNET
Last year, Google employees made history with their , spurred by sexual harassment allegations at the company. But soon after, employees alleged they were being unfairly targeted by management for their organizing efforts.
Two walkout organizers, Claire Stapleton and Meredith Whittaker, said their roles were minimized. Stapleton said she was asked to go on medical leave even though she wasn't sick. In May, six months after the walkout, employees to protest a "culture of retaliation." Both Stapleton and Whittaker quit Google this year.
Employees accused Google of retaliation again at another , after the company put two employees on administrative leave for accessing documents and calendar information that Google says was beyond the scope of their jobs. Activists at the company, though, said the move was punishment for speaking out against Google. Both employees had been involved in many employee protests, including a petition urging the company not to bid on contracts to work with border agencies, as well as a campaign against promoting harassment on YouTube.
James Martin/CNET
Around the same time Amazon canceled its New York plans, Bezos announced
The gossip magazine, whose owner has close ties to President Trump, said the paper threatened to publish nude photos of him unless he ended an investigation into how the publication had
Instead, Bezos published the email exchanges he'd had with the publication, in an effort to expose the plot against him.
"Rather than capitulate to extortion and blackmail, I've decided to publish exactly what they sent me, despite the personal cost and embarrassment they threaten," Bezos said in the post, which includes emails allegedly from National Enquirer publisher American Media Inc.
This was particularly interesting not just because Bezos' dirty laundry was about to be aired, but also because ," even though it's Bezos himself who owns the paper, not Amazon.)
AMI, meanwhile, had admitted just two months prior to "" with the Trump campaign to pay off a women ahead of the 2016 election to quash her stories of having an affair with Trump.
The case is still ongoing.
Electronic Arts
Electronic Arts seemed to have a megahit on its hands when it announced in 2017. The game followed a group of people in mechanical "javelin" suits (like ) as they traveled around the world getting rid of dangerous animals, fighting enemies and protecting one of the last human colonies on an alien planet.
The hype followed for years until 2019's February release, during which things turned decidedly worse. At first reviewers, like CNET sister site GameSpot, found technical glitches, inconsistently fun gameplay and a poor story. "Anthem has good ideas, but it struggles significantly with the execution," GameSpot's . "You never quite shake that feeling of disappointment -- of knowing, throughout the good parts of Anthem, that you'll inevitably come crashing back down."
But the community was already angry. EA staggered the game's release, giving access at first to its .
The game ultimately earned a ("mixed") out of 100. Only 5 of the 76 critics Metacritic tracked gave it a positive score.
Two months later, Kotaku detailing . At the E3 video game conference in June, EA said it "learned a lot" from Anthem's release, but the company
At this point, EA is reportedly -- again, -- in the midst of revamping the game. We'll see if the second time's a charm.
Truthinitiative.org
Juul was a huge success, until it wasn't.
The vaping company,
The company marketed itself as helping "improve the lives of 1 billion adult smokers by eliminating cigarettes." But it was quickly accused of , effectively creating a new class of addicted customers.
Juul was surging in popularity, despite efforts to stop it. Even San Francisco
Everything changed in August, when Illinois . Soon, reports of respiratory illnesses in e-cigarette smokers were rising, and more people started to die.
Though Juul wasn't the only e-cigarette maker, the Food and Drug Administration called the company out
By mid November, .
Juul meanwhile said earlier this month it , or about 16% of its workforce, as part of an effort to cut costs amid increased regulatory pressure.
What a year. Want to learn more about tech controversies? Head over to our Decade in Review series, where we cover all the biggest scandals of the 2010s. There were so many scandals, we split them into three parts.
CNET's Dara Kerr, Richard Nieva, Eli Blumenthal and Michael Sorrentino contributed to this report.
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