Monarch is a new platform from surgical robot pioneer Frederic Moll

Auris Health (née Auris Surgical Robots) has done a pretty good job flying under the radar, in spite of raising a massive amount of capital and listing one of the key people behind the da Vinci surgical robot among its founders. With FDA clearance finally out of the way, however, the Redwood City-based startup medical startup is ready to start talking.

This week, Auris revealed the Monarch Platform, which swaps the da Vinci’s surgical approach for something far less invasive. The system utilizes the common endoscopy procedure to a insert a flexible robot into hard to reach places inside the human body. A doctor trained on the system uses a video game-style controller to navigate inside, with help from 3D models.

Monarch’s first target is lung cancer, the which tops the list of deadliest cancers. More deaths could be stopped, if doctors were able to catch the disease in its early stages, but the lung’s complex structures, combined with current techniques, make the process difficult. According to the company,  “More than 90-percent of people diagnosed with lung cancer do not survive, in part because it is often found at an advanced stage.”

“A CT scan shows a mass or a lesion,” CEO Frederic Moll tells TechCrunch. “It doesn’t tell you what it is. Then you have to get a piece of lung, and if it’s a small lesion. It isn’t that easy — it can be quite a traumatic procedure. So you’d like to do it a very systematic and minimally invasive fashion. Currently it’s difficult with manual techniques and 40-percent of the time, there is no diagnosis. This is has been a problem for many years and [inhibits] the ability of a clinician to diagnose and treat early-stage cancer.

Auris was founded half a dozen years ago, in which time the company has managed to raise a jaw-dropping $500 million, courtesy of Mithril Capital Management, Lux Capital, Coatue Management and Highland Capital. The company says the large VC raise and long runway were necessary factors in building its robust platform.

“We are incredibly fortunate to have an investor base that is supportive of our vision and committed to us for the long-term,” CSO Josh DeFonzo tells TechCrunch. “The investments that have been made in Auris are to support both the development of a very robust product pipeline, as well as successful clinical adoption of our technology to improve patient outcomes.”

With that funding and FDA approval for Monarch out of the way, the company has an aggressive timeline. Moll says Auris is hoping to bring the system to hospitals and outpatient centers by the end of the year. And once it’s out in the wild, Monarch’s disease detecting capabilities will eventually extend beyond lung cancer.

“We have developed what we call a platform technology,” says Moll. “Bronchoscopy is the first application, but this platform will do other robotic endoscopies.”

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Facebook was warned about app permissions in 2011

Who’s to blame for the leaking of 50 million Facebook users’ data? Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg broke several days of silence in the face of a raging privacy storm to go on CNN this week to say he was sorry. He also admitted the company had made mistakes; said it had breached the trust of users; and said he regretted not telling Facebookers at the time their information had been misappropriated.

Meanwhile, shares in the company have been taking a battering. And Facebook is now facing multiple shareholder and user lawsuits.

Pressed on why he didn’t inform users, in 2015, when Facebook says it found out about this policy breach, Zuckerberg avoided a direct answer — instead fixing on what the company did (asked Cambridge Analytica and the developer whose app was used to suck out data to delete the data) — rather than explaining the thinking behind the thing it did not do (tell affected Facebook users their personal information had been misappropriated).

Essentially Facebook’s line is that it believed the data had been deleted — and presumably, therefore, it calculated (wrongly) that it didn’t need to inform users because it had made the leak problem go away via its own backchannels.

Except of course it hadn’t. Because people who want to do nefarious things with data rarely play exactly by your rules just because you ask them to.

There’s an interesting parallel here with Uber’s response to a 2016 data breach of its systems. In that case, instead of informing the ~57M affected users and drivers that their personal data had been compromised, Uber’s senior management also decided to try and make the problem go away — by asking (and in their case paying) hackers to delete the data.

Aka the trigger response for both tech companies to massive data protection fuck-ups was: Cover up; don’t disclose.

Facebook denies the Cambridge Analytica instance is a data breach — because, well, its systems were so laxly designed as to actively encourage vast amounts of data to be sucked out, via API, without the check and balance of those third parties having to gain individual level consent.

So in that sense Facebook is entirely right; technically what Cambridge Analytica did wasn’t a breach at all. It was a feature, not a bug.

Clearly that’s also the opposite of reassuring.

Yet Facebook and Uber are companies whose businesses rely entirely on users trusting them to safeguard personal data. The disconnect here is gapingly obvious.

What’s also crystal clear is that rules and systems designed to protect and control personal data, combined with active enforcement of those rules and robust security to safeguard systems, are absolutely essential to prevent people’s information being misused at scale in today’s hyperconnected era.

But before you say hindsight is 20/20 vision, the history of this epic Facebook privacy fail is even longer than the under-disclosed events of 2015 suggest — i.e. when Facebook claims it found out about the breach as a result of investigations by journalists.

What the company very clearly turned a blind eye to is the risk posed by its own system of loose app permissions that in turn enabled developers to suck out vast amounts of data without having to worry about pesky user consent. And, ultimately, for Cambridge Analytica to get its hands on the profiles of ~50M US Facebookers for dark ad political targeting purposes.

European privacy campaigner and lawyer Max Schrems — a long time critic of Facebook — was actually raising concerns about the Facebook’s lax attitude to data protection and app permissions as long ago as 2011.

Indeed, in August 2011 Schrems filed a complaint with the Irish Data Protection Commission exactly flagging the app permissions data sinkhole (Ireland being the focal point for the complaint because that’s where Facebook’s European HQ is based).

“[T]his means that not the data subject but “friends” of the data subject are consenting to the use of personal data,” wrote Schrems in the 2011 complaint, fleshing out consent concerns with Facebook’s friends’ data API. “Since an average facebook user has 130 friends, it is very likely that only one of the user’s friends is installing some kind of spam or phishing application and is consenting to the use of all data of the data subject. There are many applications that do not need to access the users’ friends personal data (e.g. games, quizzes, apps that only post things on the user’s page) but Facebook Ireland does not offer a more limited level of access than “all the basic information of all friends”.

“The data subject is not given an unambiguous consent to the processing of personal data by applications (no opt-in). Even if a data subject is aware of this entire process, the data subject cannot foresee which application of which developer will be using which personal data in the future. Any form of consent can therefore never be specific,” he added.

As a result of Schrems’ complaint, the Irish DPC audited and re-audited Facebook’s systems in 2011 and 2012. The result of those data audits included a recommendation that Facebook tighten app permissions on its platform, according to a spokesman for the Irish DPC, who we spoke to this week.

The spokesman said the DPC’s recommendation formed the basis of the major platform change Facebook announced in 2014 — aka shutting down the Friends data API — albeit too late to prevent Cambridge Analytica from being able to harvest millions of profiles’ worth of personal data via a survey app because Facebook only made the change gradually, finally closing the door in May 2015.

“Following the re-audit… one of the recommendations we made was in the area of the ability to use friends data through social media,” the DPC spokesman told us. “And that recommendation that we made in 2012, that was implemented by Facebook in 2014 as part of a wider platform change that they made. It’s that change that they made that means that the Cambridge Analytica thing cannot happen today.

“They made the platform change in 2014, their change was for anybody new coming onto the platform from 1st May 2014 they couldn’t do this. They gave a 12 month period for existing users to migrate across to their new platform… and it was in that period that… Cambridge Analytica’s use of the information for their data emerged.

“But from 2015 — for absolutely everybody — this issue with CA cannot happen now. And that was following our recommendation that we made in 2012.”

Given his 2011 complaint about Facebook’s expansive and abusive historical app permissions, Schrems has this week raised an eyebrow and expressed surprise at Zuckerberg’s claim to be “outraged” by the Cambridge Analytica revelations — now snowballing into a massive privacy scandal.

In a statement reflecting on developments he writes: “Facebook has millions of times illegally distributed data of its users to various dodgy apps — without the consent of those affected. In 2011 we sent a legal complaint to the Irish Data Protection Commissioner on this. Facebook argued that this data transfer is perfectly legal and no changes were made. Now after the outrage surrounding Cambridge Analytica the Internet giant suddenly feels betrayed seven years later. Our records show: Facebook knew about this betrayal for years and previously argues that these practices are perfectly legal.”

So why did it take Facebook from September 2012 — when the DPC made its recommendations — until May 2014 and May 2015 to implement the changes and tighten app permissions?

The regulator’s spokesman told us it was “engaging” with Facebook over that period of time “to ensure that the change was made”. But he also said Facebook spent some time pushing back — questioning why changes to app permissions were necessary and dragging its feet on shuttering the friends’ data API.

“I think the reality is Facebook had questions as to whether they felt there was a need for them to make the changes that we were recommending,” said the spokesman. “And that was, I suppose, the level of engagement that we had with them. Because we were relatively strong that we felt yes we made the recommendation because we felt the change needed to be made. And that was the nature of the discussion. And as I say ultimately, ultimately the reality is that the change has been made. And it’s been made to an extent that such an issue couldn’t occur today.”

“That is a matter for Facebook themselves to answer as to why they took that period of time,” he added.

Of course we asked Facebook why it pushed back against the DPC’s recommendation in September 2012 — and whether it regrets not acting more swiftly to implement the changes to its APIs, given the crisis its business is now faced having breached user trust by failing to safeguard people’s data.

We also asked why Facebook users should trust Zuckerberg’s claim, also made in the CNN interview, that it’s now ‘open to being regulated’ — when its historical playbook is packed with examples of the polar opposite behavior, including ongoing attempts to circumvent existing EU privacy rules.

A Facebook spokeswoman acknowledged receipt of our questions this week — but the company has not responded to any of them.

The Irish DPC chief, Helen Dixon, also went on CNN this week to give her response to the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data misuse crisis — calling for assurances from Facebook that it will properly police its own data protection policies in future.

“Even where Facebook have terms and policies in place for app developers, it doesn’t necessarily give us the assurance that those app developers are abiding by the policies Facebook have set, and that Facebook is active in terms of overseeing that there’s no leakage of personal data. And that conditions, such as the prohibition on selling on data to further third parties is being adhered to by app developers,” said Dixon.

“So I suppose what we want to see change and what we want to oversee with Facebook now and what we’re demanding answers from Facebook in relation to, is first of all what pre-clearance and what pre-authorization do they do before permitting app developers onto their platform. And secondly, once those app developers are operative and have apps collecting personal data what kind of follow up and active oversight steps does Facebook take to give us all reassurance that the type of issue that appears to have occurred in relation to Cambridge Analytica won’t happen again.”

Firefighting the raging privacy crisis, Zuckerberg has committed to conducting a historical audit of every app that had access to “a large amount” of user data around the time that Cambridge Analytica was able to harvest so much data.

So it remains to be seen what other data misuses Facebook will unearth — and have to confess to now, long after the fact.

But any other embarrassing data leaks will sit within the same unfortunate context — which is to say that Facebook could have prevented these problems if it had listened to the very valid concerns data protection experts were raising more than six years ago.

Instead, it chose to drag its feet. And the list of awkward questions for the Facebook CEO keeps getting longer.

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JASK and the future of autonomous cybersecurity

There is a familiar trope in Hollywood cyberwarfare movies. A lone whiz kid hacker (often with blue, pink, or platinum hair) fights an evil government. Despite combatting dozens of cyber defenders, each of whom appears to be working around the clock and has very little need to use the facilities, the hacker is able to defeat all security and gain access to the secret weapon plans or whatever have you. The weapon stopped, the hacker becomes a hero.

The real world of security operations centers (SOCs) couldn’t be further from this silver screen fiction. Today’s hackers (who are the bad guys, by the way) don’t have the time to custom hack a system and play cat-and-mouse with security professionals. Instead, they increasingly build a toolbox of automated scripts and simultaneously hit hundreds of targets using, say, a newly discovered zero-day vulnerability and trying to take advantage of it as much as possible before it is patched.

Security analysts working in a SOC are increasingly overburdened and overwhelmed by the sheer number of attacks they have to process. Yet, despite the promises of automation, they are often still using manual processes to counter these attacks. Fighting automated attacks with manual actions is like fighting mechanized armor with horses: futile.

Nonetheless, that’s the current state of things in the security operations world, but as V.Jay LaRosa, the VP of Global Security Architecture of payroll and HR company ADP explained to me, “The industry, in general from a SOC operations perspective, it is about to go through a massive revolution.”

That revolution is automation. Many companies have claimed that they are bringing machine learning and artificial intelligence to security operations, and the buzzword has been a mainstay of security startup pitch decks for some times. Results in many cases have been nothing short of lackluster at best. But a new generation of startups is now replacing soaring claims with hard science, and focusing on the time-consuming low-hanging fruit of the security analyst’s work.

One of those companies, as we will learn shortly, is JASK. The company, which is based in San Francisco and Austin, wants to create a new market for what it calls the “autonomous security operations center.” Our goal is to understand the current terrain for SOCs, and how such a platform might fit into the future of cybersecurity.

Data wrangling and the challenge of automating security

The security operations center is the central nervous system of corporate security departments today. Borrowing concepts from military organizational design, the modern SOC is designed to fuse streams of data into one place, giving security analysts a comprehensive overview of a company’s systems. Those data sources typically include network logs, an incident detection and response system, web application firewall data, internal reports, antivirus, and many more. Large companies can easily have dozens of data sources.

Once all of that information has been ingested, it is up to a team of security analysts to evaluate that data and start to “connect the dots.” These professionals are often overworked since the growth of the security team is generally reactive to the threat environment. Startups might start with a single security professional, and slowly expand that team as new threats to the business are discovered.

Given the scale and complexity of the data, investigating a single security alert can take significant time. An analyst might spend 50 minutes just pulling and cleaning the necessary data to be able to evaluate the likelihood of a threat to the company. Worse, alerts are sufficiently variable that the analyst often has to repeatedly perform this cleanup work for every alert.

Data wrangling is one of the most fundamental problems that every SOC faces. All of those streams of data need to be constantly managed to ensure that they are processed properly. As LaRosa from ADP explained, “The biggest challenge we deal with in this space is that [data] is transformed at the time of collection, and when it is transformed, you lose the raw information.” The challenge then is that “If you don’t transform that data properly, then … all that information becomes garbage.”

The challenges of data wrangling aren’t unique to security — teams across the enterprise struggle to design automated solutions. Nonetheless, just getting the right data to the right person is an incredible challenge. Many security teams still manually monitor data streams, and may even write their own ad-hoc batch processing scripts to get data ready for analysis.

Managing that data inside the SOC is the job of a security information and event management system (SIEM), which acts as a system of record for the activities and data flowing through security operations. Originally focused on compliance, these systems allow analysts to access the data they need, and also log the outcome of any alert investigation. Products like ArcSight and Splunk and many others here have owned this space for years, and the market is not going anywhere.

Due to their compliance focus though, security management systems often lack the kinds of automated features that would make analysts more efficient. One early response to this challenge was a market known as user entity behavior analytics (UEBA). These products, which include companies like Exabeam, analyze typical user behavior and search for anomalies. In this way, they are meant to integrate raw data together to highlight activities for security analysts, saving them time and attention. This market was originally standalone, but as Gartner has pointed out, these analytics products are increasingly migrating into the security information management space itself as a sort of “smarter SIEM.”

These analytics products added value, but they didn’t solve the comprehensive challenge of data wrangling. Ideally, a system would ingest all of the security data and start to automatically detect correlations, grouping disparate data together into a cohesive security alert that could be rapidly evaluated by a security analyst. This sort of autonomous security has been a dream of security analysts for years, but that dream increasingly looks like it could become reality quite soon.

LaRosa of ADP told me that “Organizationally, we have got to figure out how we help our humans to work smarter.” David Tsao, Global Information Security Officer of Veeva Systems, was more specific, asking “So how do you organize data in a way so that a security engineer … can see how these various events make sense?”

JASK and the future of “autonomous security”

That’s where a company like JASK comes in. Its goal, simply put, is to take all the disparate data streams entering the security operations center and automatically group them into attacks. From there, analysts can then evaluate each threat holistically, saving them time and allowing them to focus on the sophisticated analytical part of their work, instead of on monotonous data wrangling.

The startup was founded by Greg Martin, a security veteran who perviously founded threat intelligence platform ThreatStream (now branded Anomali). Before that, he worked as an executive at ArcSight, a company that is one of the incumbent behemoths in security information management.

Martin explained to me that “we are now far and away past what we can do with just human-led SOCs.” The challenge is that every single security alert coming in has to go through manual review. “I really feel like the state of the art in security operations is really how we manufactured cars in the 1950s — hand-painting every car,” Martin said. “JASK was founded to just clean up the mess.”

Machine learning is one of these abused terms in the startup world, and certainly that is no exception in cybersecurity. Visionary security professionals wax poetic about automated systems that instantly detect a hacker as they attempt to gain access to the system and immediately respond with tested actions designed to thwart them. The reality is much less exciting: just connecting data from disparate sources is a major hurdle for AI researchers in the security space.

Martin’s philosophy with JASK is that the industry should walk before it runs. “We actually look to the autonomous car industry,” he said to me. “They broke the development roadmap into phases.” For JASK, “Phase one would be to collect all the data and prepare and identify it for machine learning,” he said. LaRosa of ADP, talking about the potential of this sort of automation, said that “you are taking forty to fifty minutes of busy work out of that process and allow [the security analysts] to get right to the root cause.”

This doesn’t mean that security analysts are suddenly out of a job, indeed far from it. Analysts still have to interpret the information that has been compiled, and even more importantly, they have to decide on what is the best course of action. Today’s companies are moving from “runbooks” of static response procedures to automated security orchestration systems. Machine learning realistically is far from being able to accomplish the full lifecycle of an alert today, although Martin is hopeful that such automation is coming in later phases of the roadmap.

Martin tells me that the technology is being used by twenty customers today. The company’s stack is built on technologies like Hadoop, allowing it to process significantly higher volumes of data compared to legacy security products.

JASK is essentially carving out a unique niche in the security market today, and the company is currently in beta. The company raised a $2m seed from Battery in early 2016, and a $12m series A led by Dell Technologies Capital, which saw its investment in security startup Zscaler IPO last week.

There are thousands of security products in the market, as any visit to the RSA conference will quickly convince you. Unfortunately though, SOCs can’t just be built with tech off the shelf. Every company has unique systems, processes, and threat concerns that security operations need to adapt to, and of course, hackers are not standing still. Products need to constantly change to adapt to those needs, which is why machine learning and its flexibility is so important.

Martin said that “we have to bias our algorithms so that you never trust any one individual or any one team. It is a careful controlled dance to build these types of systems to produce general purpose, general results that applies across organizations.” The nuance around artificial intelligence is refreshing in a space that can see incredible hype. Now the hard part is to keep moving that roadmap forward. Maybe that blue-haired silver screen hacker needs some employment.

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Hip hop finds its beat in the startup scene

Hip hop stars are taking their reputations to Wall Street and Sand Hill road.

Unlike their rock star brethren, who’ve historically been disinterested in dabbling with startups, quite a few hip hop artists have amassed good-sized portfolios. They’ve seen a few big hits too, most recently including a massive up round for zero-commission stock trading platform Robinhood, which counted Jay-Z, Nas and Snoop Dogg among its earlier backers.

But just how deep does the hip hop-startup relationship go and where is it headed? To shed some light on that question, we put together a review of Crunchbase data on the startup investment activity of famous musicians. We looked at both hip hop and pop stars, culling a list of 21 artists who are either active investors or have joined one or more rounds in recent years.

The general conclusion: Artists are doing more deals, raising more funds and backing more companies that graduate to up rounds and exits. Here are a few examples:

• Besides getting a slice of Robinhood, Jay-Z and his entertainment company, Roc Nation, also saw an early portfolio company, flight club startup JetSmarter, go on to raise financing a year ago at a reported valuation more than $1.5 billion. Roc Nation also made headlines this week for investing in Promise, a startup providing alternatives to incarceration for people who can’t afford bail.
• QueensBridge Venture Partners, the investment fund co-founded by Nas, was an early-stage investor in video doorbell maker Ring, which Amazon just bought for $1.1 billion. The firm could also see some paper gains this week in the much-anticipated market debut of Dropbox, which it backed in a 2014 Series C round. In addition, QueensBridge participated in a $25 million Series B round for cryptocurrency trading platform Coinbase back in 2013. Coinbase’s last reported valuation was around $1.6 billion.
• Casa Verde Capital, a cannabis-focused venture fund co-founded by Snoop Dogg, has closed its debut fund with $45 million. Just this week it backed a $3.5 million round for vape manufacturer Green Tank.

That’s not to say everything a star touches turns multi-platinum. We found quite a few flops in their portfolios and assembled a list here of 10 startups now shuttered that counted a hip hop or pop star among their backers.

Becoming and remaining famous requires many of the same skills and qualities as running an entrepreneurial venture, including an exceptional degree of tenacity.

Of course, flops are part of life for early-stage investors, so there’s no reason we’d expect celebrities to be an exception. Moreover, most of the now-shuttered companies were not heavily capitalized by venture standards.

However, there are some higher-profile or more heavily funded companies on the flop list. One is Washio, a laundry delivery service, which raised $17 million from Nas and 20 other investors before hanging itself out to dry in 2016. Another is Viddy, an app for shooting and sharing video clips backed by Roc Nation.

Why the rich, hip and famous like startups

A number of venture pundits and pop culture mavens have previously pontificated why celebrities, and hip hop stars in particular, are drawn to startups.

One possibility is that rap music and startups resemble each other at the earliest stages, postulates Cam Houser, CEO of the 3 Day Startup Program. Rap music starts with a rapper and a producer. This duality, he says, is similar to the beginning stages of a startup, which commonly also brings together two people, a business and a technical co-founder.

Rap and startup entrepreneurship are also both longshot career tracks that celebrate raw ambition and unabashed self-promotion. To make it, however, both require an excellent grasp of what sells in the real world.

Branding is perhaps the most common rationale provided for the celebrity-startup connection. With their massive fan bases, swooning coverage and millions of social media followers, celebrities can certainly help get the word out about a new product or app. That said, the attention usually works only if said product also has compelling attributes of its own.

One of the less controversial explanations is that becoming and remaining famous requires many of the same skills and qualities as running an entrepreneurial venture, including an exceptional degree of tenacity.

It’s also true that in venture capital and the music business, it’s the hits that matter. It helps that we’re seeing plenty of those. 

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Cambridge Analytica raided by UK data watchdog

The UK’s data watchdog, the ICO, finally obtained a warrant to enter and search the offices of Cambridge Analytica late Friday — carrying out an evidence gathering sweep of the company into the small hours of Saturday morning.

Cambridge Analytica is at the centre of a data misuse storm that’s wiped billions off the value of Facebook since newspaper revelations late last week revealed the extent of data swiped by the UK political consultancy which intended to use the information for the Trump campaign.

In a statement on its website today, the ICO said:

The warrant to inspect the premises of Cambridge Analytica was executed at 20.00 on 23 March 2018. Our investigators left the premises at about 03.00.

We will now need to assess and consider the evidence before deciding the next steps and coming to any conclusions.

This is one part of a larger investigation by the ICO into the use of personal data and analytics by political campaigns, parties, social media companies and other commercial actors.

ICO commissioner Elizabeth Denham has confirmed previously that complaints related to Cambridge Analytica’s use of Facebook data for political ad targeting form part of that larger, ongoing investigation.

It opened its formal investigation into the use of data analytics for political purposes in May 2017.

This week, after saying it had failed to obtain information it had requested from CA, the regulator applied for a warrant to enter and search CA’s offices — in the wake of reports by the New York Times and Observer of London based on interviews with former CA employee, Chris Wylie.

According to Wylie, CA used a survey app created by a Cambridge University academic to suck up data on 50M Facebook users. The intent was to use the information for political targeting purposes for the benefit of the Trump campaign.

Earlier this month Denham told a UK parliamentary committee that’s also running an investigation into fake news that she hoped to publish her review of digital political ad targeting this May. Although that was before the ICO decided it needed to apply for a warrant to raid CA’s offices.

The regulator has now said it will need time to sift through the evidence it gathered overnight — so it remains to be seen whether its wider review of political ad targeting will be delayed as a result.

ICO granted warrant: We’re pleased with the decision of the judge and we plan to execute the warrant shortly. This is just one part of a larger investigation into the use of personal data for political purposes and we will now need time to collect and consider the evidence

— ICO (@ICOnews) March 23, 2018

In an online statement published yesterday, the acting CEO of CA, Alexander Taylor, apologized for Facebook “data and derivatives” having been obtained without consent “from most respondents”.

But he also claimed the company believed it was acting within Facebook’s policies and UK data protection law when it licensed the data from professor Aleksandr Kogan whose survey app was the Trojan horse used to gather 270,000 Facebook users’ data and their friends’ data — resulting in some 50M profiles being harvested in all.

“[CA] believed that the data had been obtained in line with Facebook’s terms of service and data protection laws,” writes Taylor.

He also claims that in October 2015 CA deleted the data from its file server after Facebook asked it to. But he seems less certain whether other copies might not have existed as he says the company “began the process of searching for and removing any of its derivatives in our system”.

“When Facebook sought further assurances a year ago, we carried out an internal audit to make sure that all the data, all derivatives and backups had been deleted, and gave Facebook a certificate to this effect. Please can I be absolutely clear: we did not use any GSR data in the work we did in the 2016 US presidential election,” he further claims.

“We are now undertaking an independent third-party audit to verify that we do not hold any GSR data,” Taylor adds. “We have been in touch with the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) since February 2017, when ​we hosted its team in our London office to provide total transparency on the data we hold, how we process it, and the legal basis for us processing it. I want to make sure we remain committed to helping the ICO in their investigations.”

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House and Senate put Zuckerberg on notice: “You are the right person to testify before Congress”

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been rather scarce lately, despite a host of woes besetting his company — but Wednesday he emerged from his cocoon to offer a limp apology, admit they had no control over data like that used by Cambridge Analytica, and that he “will happily” testify before Congress if he’s the right person to do so.

Well, Congress has taken him at his word. “You are the right person to testify before Congress,” wrote the leaders of the House Energy and Commerce Committee in a letter detailed early this morning. His capacity as CEO and “the employee who has been the leader of Facebook through all the key strategic decisions since its launch” make him the best person to testify.

Earlier this week Senators Klobuchar (D-MN) and Kennedy (R-LA) from the Senate Judiciary Committee specifically asked for Zuckerberg as well.

Senator Kennedy had sharp words (in a CNN interview) for Facebook and other tech companies that sent along some smooth operators to talk to them back in November: “We had one hearing — they all sent their lawyers. I don’t know what they paid them but they got their money’s worth, cause their lawyers didn’t say a damn thing.”

He and others are asking that the man himself come along.

Kennedy said FB lawyers won't do: "They didn't say a damn thing, which was what they were paid to do," he said about Nov. Russia hearings "I'd encourage Mr. Zuckerberg to do the common sense thing and roll up his sleeves and take a meaningful amount of time talking to us"

— CeciliaKang (@ceciliakang) March 23, 2018

The Senate Commerce Committee also desires his presence.

At this point it would be pretty dangerous for Zuckerberg not to heed the call. Lawmakers don’t take kindly to captains of industry who send underlings instead of tackling major issues like this personally.

As the Open Markets Institute’s Matt Stolller points out in an insightful tweet storm, however, the shortcomings of Facebook’s privacy rules are only part of the story. Once Congress has Zuckerberg in the hot seat, they might consider taking on the idea that Facebook has been playing news organizations and publishers like a fiddle.

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How Raya’s $8/month dating app turned exclusivity into trust

The swipe is where the similarity ends. Raya is less like Tinder and more like a secret society. You need a member’s recommendations or a lot of friends inside to join, and you have to apply with an essay question. It costs a flat $7.99 for everyone, women and celebrities included. You show yourself off with a video slideshow set to music of your choice. And it’s for professional networking as well as dating, with parallel profiles for each.

Launched in March 2015, Raya has purposefully flown under the radar. No interviews. Little info about the founders. Not even a profile on Crunchbase’s startup index. In fact, in late 2016 it quietly acquired video messaging startup Chime, led by early Facebooker Jared Morgenstern, without anyone noticing. He’d become Raya’s first investor a year earlier. But Chime was fizzling out after raising $1.2 million. “I learned the not everyone who leaves Facebook, their next thing turns to gold” Morgenstern laughs. So he sold it to Raya for equity and brought four of his employees to build new experiences for the app.

Now the startup’s COO, Morgenstern has agreed to give TechCrunch the deepest look yet at Raya, where the pretty, popular, and powerful meet each other.

Temptation Via Trust

Raya COO Jared Morgenstern

“Raya is a utility for introducing you to people who can change your life. Soho House uses physical space, we’re trying to use software” says Morgenstern, referencing the global network of members-only venues.

We’re chatting in a coffee shop in San Francisco. It’s an odd place to discuss Raya, given the company has largely shunned Silicon Valley in favor of building a less nerdy community in LA, New York, London, and Paris. The exclusivity might feel discriminatory for some, even if you’re chosen based on your connections rather than your wealth or race. Though people already self-segregate based on where they go to socialize. You could argue Raya just does the same digitally

Morgenstern refuses to tell me how much Raya has raised, how it started, or anything about its co-founder Mike McGuiness who owns LA public relations company the Co-Op Agency beyond that the team is a “Humble, focused group that prefers not to be part of the story.” But he did reveal some of the core tenets that have reportedly attracted celebrities like DJs Diplo and Skrillex, actors Elijah Wood and Amy Schumer, and musicians Demi Lovato and John Mayer, plus scores of Instagram models and tattooed creative directors.

Raya’s iOS-only app isn’t a swiping game for fun and personal validation. Its interface and curated community are designed to get you from discovering someone to texting if you’re both interested to actually meeting in person as soon as possible. Like at a top-tier university or night club, there’s supposed to be an in-group sense of camaraderie that makes people more open to each other.

Then there are the rules.

“This is an intimate community with zero-tolerance for disrespect or mean-spirited behavior. Be nice to each other. Say hello like adults” says an interstitial screen that blocks use until you confirm you understand and agree every time you open the app. That means no sleazy pick-up lines or objectifying language. You’re also not allowed to screenshot, and you’ll be chastized with a numbered and filed warning if you do.

It all makes Raya feel consequential. You’re not swiping through infinite anybodies and sorting through reams of annoying messages. People act right because they don’t want to lose access. Raya recreates the feel of dating or networking in a small town, where your reputation follows you. And that sense of trust has opened a big opportunity where competitors like Tinder or LinkedIn can’t follow.

Self-Expression To First Impression

Until now, Raya showed you people in your city as well as around the world — which is a bit weird since it would be hard to ever run into each other. But to achieve its mission of getting you offline to meet people in-person, it’s now letting you see nearby people on a map when GPS says they’re at hotspots like bars, dancehalls, and cafes. The idea is that if you both swipe right, you could skip the texting and just walk up to each other.

“I’m not sure why Tinder and the other big meeting people apps aren’t doing this” says Morgenstern. But the answer seems obvious. It would be creepy on a big public dating app. Even other exclusive dating apps like The League that induct people due to their resume more than their personality might feel too unsavory for a map, since having gone to an Ivy League college doesn’t mean you’re not a jerk. Hell, it might make that more likely.

But this startup is betting that its vetted, interconnected, “cool” community will be excited to pick fellow Raya members out of the crowd to see if they have a spark or business synergy.

That brings Raya closer to the holy grail of networking apps where you can discover who you’re compatible with in the same room without risking the crash-and-burn failed come-ons. You can filter by age and gender when browsing social connections, or by “Entertainment & Culture”, “Art & Design”, and “Business & Tech” buckets for work. And through their bio and extended slideshows of photos set to their favorite song, you get a better understanding of someone than from just a few profile pics on other apps.

Users can always report people they’ve connected with if they act sketchy, though with the new map feature I was dismayed to learn they can’t yet report people they haven’t seen or rejected in the app. That could lower the consequences for finding someone you want to meet, learning a bit about them, but then approaching without prior consent. However, Morgenstern insists.”The real risk is the density challenge”.

Finding Your Tribe

Raya’s map doesn’t help much if there are no other members for 100 miles. The company doesn’t restrict the app to certain cities, or schools like Facebook originally did to beat the density problem. Instead it relies on the fact that if you’re in the middle of nowhere you probably don’t have friends on it to pull you in. Still, that makes it tough for Raya to break into new locales.

But the beauty of the business is that since all users pay $7.99 per month, it doesn’t need that many to earn plenty of money. And at less than the price of a cocktail, the subscription deters trolls without being unaffordable. Morgenstern says “The most common reason to stop your subscription: I found somebody.” That ‘success = churn’ equation drags on most dating apps. Since Raya has professional networking as well though, he says some people still continue the subscription even after they find their sweetheart.

“I’m happily in a relationship and I’m excited to use maps” Morgenstern declares. In that sense, Raya wants to expand those moments in life when you’re eager and open to meet people, like the first days of college. “At Raya we don’t think that’s something that should only happen when you’re single or when you’re twenty or when you move to a new city.”

The bottomless pits of Tinder and LinkedIn can make meeting people online feel haphazard to the point of exhaustion. We’re tribal creatures who haven’t evolved ways to deal with the decision paralysis and the anxiety caused by the paradox of choice. When there’s infinite people to choose from, we freeze up, or always wonder if the next one would have been better than the one we picked. Maybe we need Raya-like apps for all sorts of different subcultures beyond the hipsters that dominate its community, as I wrote in my 2015’s piece “Rise Of The Micro-Tinders”. But if Raya’s price and exclusivity lets people be both vulnerable and accountable, it could forge a more civil way to make a connection.

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2GmOZGt How Raya’s $8/month dating app turned exclusivity into trust Josh Constine https://ift.tt/2G2sZ4c
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How Raya’s $8/month dating app turned exclusivity into trust

{rss:content:encoded} How Raya’s $8/month dating app turned exclusivity into trust https://ift.tt/2G2sZ4c https://ift.tt/2GmOZGt March 23, 2018 at 08:50PM

The swipe is where the similarity ends. Raya is less like Tinder and more like a secret society. You need a member’s recommendations or a lot of friends inside to join, and you have to apply with an essay question. It costs a flat $7.99 for everyone, women and celebrities included. You show yourself off with a video slideshow set to music of your choice. And it’s for professional networking as well as dating, with parallel profiles for each.

Launched in March 2015, Raya has purposefully flown under the radar. No interviews. Little info about the founders. Not even a profile on Crunchbase’s startup index. In fact, in late 2016 it quietly acquired video messaging startup Chime, led by early Facebooker Jared Morgenstern, without anyone noticing. He’d become Raya’s first investor a year earlier. But Chime was fizzling out after raising $1.2 million. “I learned the not everyone who leaves Facebook, their next thing turns to gold” Morgenstern laughs. So he sold it to Raya for equity and brought four of his employees to build new experiences for the app.

Now the startup’s COO, Morgenstern has agreed to give TechCrunch the deepest look yet at Raya, where the pretty, popular, and powerful meet each other.

 

Temptation Via Trust

Raya COO Jared Morgenstern

“Raya is a utility for introducing you to people who can change your life. Soho House uses physical space, we’re trying to use software” says Morgenstern, referencing the global network of members-only venues.

We’re chatting in a coffee shop in San Francisco. It’s an odd place to discuss Raya, given the company has largely shunned Silicon Valley in favor of building a less nerdy community in LA, New York, London, and Paris. The exclusivity might feel discriminatory for some, even if you’re chosen based on your connections rather than your wealth or race. Though people already self-segregate based on where they go to socialize. You could argue Raya just does the same digitally

Morgenstern refuses to tell me how much Raya has raised, how it started, or anything about its co-founder Mike McGuiness who owns LA public relations company the Co-Op Agency beyond that the team is a “Humble, focused group that prefers not to be part of the story.” But he did reveal some of the core tenets that have reportedly attracted celebrities like DJs Diplo and Skrillex, actors Elijah Wood and Amy Schumer, and musicians Demi Lovato and John Mayer, plus scores of Instagram models and tattooed creative directors.

Raya’s iOS-only app isn’t a swiping game for fun and personal validation. Its interface and curated community are designed to get you from discovering someone to texting if you’re both interested to actually meeting in person as soon as possible. Like at a top-tier university or night club, there’s supposed to be an in-group sense of comraderie that makes people more open to each other.

Then there are the rules.

“This is an intimate community with zero-tolerance for disrespect or mean-spirited behavior. Be nice to each other. Say hello like adults” says an interstitial screen that blocks use until you confirm you understand and agree every time you open the app. That means no sleazy pick-up lines or objectifying language. You’re also not allowed to screenshot, and you’ll be chastized with a numbered and filed warning if you do.

It all makes Raya feel consequential. You’re not swiping through infinite anybodies and sorting through reams of annoying messages. People act right because they don’t want to lose access. Raya recreates the feel of dating or networking in a small town, where your reputation follows you. And that sense of trust has opened a big opportunity where competitors like Tinder or LinkedIn can’t follow.

Self-Expression To First Impression

Until now, Raya showed you people in your city as well as around the world — which is a bit weird since it would be hard to ever run into each other. But to achieve its mission of getting you offline to meet people in-person, it’s now letting you see nearby people on a map when GPS says they’re at hotspots like bars, dancehalls, and cafes. The idea is that if you both swipe right, you could skip the texting and just walk up to each other.

“I’m not sure why Tinder and the other big meeting people apps aren’t doing this” says Morgenstern. But the answer seems obvious. It would be creepy on a big public dating app. Even other exclusive dating apps like The League that induct people due to their resume more than their personality might feel too unsavory for a map, since having gone to an Ivy League college doesn’t mean you’re not a jerk. Hell, it might make that more likely.

But this startup is betting that its vetted, interconnected, “cool” community will be excited to pick fellow Raya members out of the crowd to see if they have a spark or business synergy.

That brings Raya closer to the holy grail of networking apps where you can discover who you’re compatible with in the same room without risking the crash-and-burn failed come-ons. You can filter by age and gender when browsing social connections, or by “Entertainment & Culture”, “Art & Design”, and “Business & Tech” buckets for work. And through their bio and extended slideshows of photos set to their favorite song, you get a better understanding of someone than from just a few profile pics on other apps.

Users can always report people they’ve connected with if they act sketchy, though with the new map feature I was dismayed to learn they can’t yet report people they haven’t seen or rejected in the app. That could lower the consequences for finding someone you want to meet, learning a bit about them, but then approaching without prior consent. However, Morgenstern insists.”The real risk is the density challenge”.

Finding Your Tribe

Raya’s map doesn’t help much if there are no other members for 100 miles. The company doesn’t restrict the app to certain cities, or schools like Facebook originally did to beat the density problem. Instead it relies on the fact that if you’re in the middle of nowhere you probably don’t have friends on it to pull you in. Still, that makes it tough for Raya to break into new locales.

But the beauty of the business is that since all users pay $7.99 per month, it doesn’t need that many to earn plenty of money. And at less than the price of a cocktail, the subscription deters trolls without being unaffordable. Morgenstern says “The most common reason to stop your subscription: I found somebody.” That ‘success = churn’ equation drags on most dating apps. Since Raya has professional networking as well though, he says some people still continue the subscription even after they find their sweetheart.

“I’m happily in a relationship and I’m excited to use maps” Morgenstern declares. In that sense, Raya wants to expand those moments in life when you’re eager and open to meet people, like the first days of college. “At Raya we don’t think that’s something that should only happen when you’re single or when you’re twenty or when you move to a new city.”

The bottomless pits of Tinder and LinkedIn can make meeting people online feel haphazard to the point of exhaustion. We’re tribal creatures who haven’t evolved ways to deal with the decision paralysis and the anxiety caused by the paradox of choice. When there’s infinite people to choose from, we freeze up, or always wonder if the next one would have been better than the one we picked. Maybe we need Raya-like apps for all sorts of different subcultures beyond the hipsters that dominate its community, as I wrote in my 2015’s piece “Rise Of The Micro-Tinders”. But if Raya’s price and exclusivity lets people be both vulnerable and accountable, it could forge a more civil way to make a connection.

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How Raya’s $8/month dating app turned exclusivity into trust

The swipe is where the similarity ends. Raya is less like Tinder and more like a secret society. You need a member’s recommendations or a lot of friends inside to join, and you have to apply with an essay question. It costs a flat $7.99 for everyone, women and celebrities included. You show yourself off with a video slideshow set to music of your choice. And it’s for professional networking as well as dating, with parallel profiles for each.

Launched in March 2015, Raya has purposefully flown under the radar. No interviews. Little info about the founders. Not even a profile on Crunchbase’s startup index. In fact, in late 2016 it quietly acquired video messaging startup Chime, led by early Facebooker Jared Morgenstern, without anyone noticing. He’d become Raya’s first investor a year earlier. But Chime was fizzling out after raising $1.2 million. “I learned the not everyone who leaves Facebook, their next thing turns to gold” Morgenstern laughs. So he sold it to Raya for equity and brought four of his employees to build new experiences for the app.

Now the startup’s COO, Morgenstern has agreed to give TechCrunch the deepest look yet at Raya, where the pretty, popular, and powerful meet each other.

 

Temptation Via Trust

Raya COO Jared Morgenstern

“Raya is a utility for introducing you to people who can change your life. Soho House uses physical space, we’re trying to use software” says Morgenstern, referencing the global network of members-only venues.

We’re chatting in a coffee shop in San Francisco. It’s an odd place to discuss Raya, given the company has largely shunned Silicon Valley in favor of building a less nerdy community in LA, New York, London, and Paris. The exclusivity might feel discriminatory for some, even if you’re chosen based on your connections rather than your wealth or race. Though people already self-segregate based on where they go to socialize. You could argue Raya just does the same digitally

Morgenstern refuses to tell me how much Raya has raised, how it started, or anything about its co-founder Mike McGuiness who owns LA public relations company the Co-Op Agency beyond that the team is a “Humble, focused group that prefers not to be part of the story.” But he did reveal some of the core tenets that have reportedly attracted celebrities like DJs Diplo and Skrillex, actors Elijah Wood and Amy Schumer, and musicians Demi Lovato and John Mayer, plus scores of Instagram models and tattooed creative directors.

Raya’s iOS-only app isn’t a swiping game for fun and personal validation. Its interface and curated community are designed to get you from discovering someone to texting if you’re both interested to actually meeting in person as soon as possible. Like at a top-tier university or night club, there’s supposed to be an in-group sense of comraderie that makes people more open to each other.

Then there are the rules.

“This is an intimate community with zero-tolerance for disrespect or mean-spirited behavior. Be nice to each other. Say hello like adults” says an interstitial screen that blocks use until you confirm you understand and agree every time you open the app. That means no sleazy pick-up lines or objectifying language. You’re also not allowed to screenshot, and you’ll be chastized with a numbered and filed warning if you do.

It all makes Raya feel consequential. You’re not swiping through infinite anybodies and sorting through reams of annoying messages. People act right because they don’t want to lose access. Raya recreates the feel of dating or networking in a small town, where your reputation follows you. And that sense of trust has opened a big opportunity where competitors like Tinder or LinkedIn can’t follow.

Self-Expression To First Impression

Until now, Raya showed you people in your city as well as around the world — which is a bit weird since it would be hard to ever run into each other. But to achieve its mission of getting you offline to meet people in-person, it’s now letting you see nearby people on a map when GPS says they’re at hotspots like bars, dancehalls, and cafes. The idea is that if you both swipe right, you could skip the texting and just walk up to each other.

“I’m not sure why Tinder and the other big meeting people apps aren’t doing this” says Morgenstern. But the answer seems obvious. It would be creepy on a big public dating app. Even other exclusive dating apps like The League that induct people due to their resume more than their personality might feel too unsavory for a map, since having gone to an Ivy League college doesn’t mean you’re not a jerk. Hell, it might make that more likely.

But this startup is betting that its vetted, interconnected, “cool” community will be excited to pick fellow Raya members out of the crowd to see if they have a spark or business synergy.

That brings Raya closer to the holy grail of networking apps where you can discover who you’re compatible with in the same room without risking the crash-and-burn failed come-ons. You can filter by age and gender when browsing social connections, or by “Entertainment & Culture”, “Art & Design”, and “Business & Tech” buckets for work. And through their bio and extended slideshows of photos set to their favorite song, you get a better understanding of someone than from just a few profile pics on other apps.

Users can always report people they’ve connected with if they act sketchy, though with the new map feature I was dismayed to learn they can’t yet report people they haven’t seen or rejected in the app. That could lower the consequences for finding someone you want to meet, learning a bit about them, but then approaching without prior consent. However, Morgenstern insists.”The real risk is the density challenge”.

Finding Your Tribe

Raya’s map doesn’t help much if there are no other members for 100 miles. The company doesn’t restrict the app to certain cities, or schools like Facebook originally did to beat the density problem. Instead it relies on the fact that if you’re in the middle of nowhere you probably don’t have friends on it to pull you in. Still, that makes it tough for Raya to break into new locales.

But the beauty of the business is that since all users pay $7.99 per month, it doesn’t need that many to earn plenty of money. And at less than the price of a cocktail, the subscription deters trolls without being unaffordable. Morgenstern says “The most common reason to stop your subscription: I found somebody.” That ‘success = churn’ equation drags on most dating apps. Since Raya has professional networking as well though, he says some people still continue the subscription even after they find their sweetheart.

“I’m happily in a relationship and I’m excited to use maps” Morgenstern declares. In that sense, Raya wants to expand those moments in life when you’re eager and open to meet people, like the first days of college. “At Raya we don’t think that’s something that should only happen when you’re single or when you’re twenty or when you move to a new city.”

The bottomless pits of Tinder and LinkedIn can make meeting people online feel haphazard to the point of exhaustion. We’re tribal creatures who haven’t evolved ways to deal with the decision paralysis and the anxiety caused by the paradox of choice. When there’s infinite people to choose from, we freeze up, or always wonder if the next one would have been better than the one we picked. Maybe we need Raya-like apps for all sorts of different subcultures beyond the hipsters that dominate its community, as I wrote in my 2015’s piece “Rise Of The Micro-Tinders”. But if Raya’s price and exclusivity lets people be both vulnerable and accountable, it could forge a more civil way to make a connection.

https://ift.tt/2GmOZGt How Raya’s $8/month dating app turned exclusivity into trust https://ift.tt/2G2sZ4c

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Rainforest Connection enlists machine learning to listen for loggers and jaguars in the Amazon

{rss:content:encoded} Rainforest Connection enlists machine learning to listen for loggers and jaguars in the Amazon https://ift.tt/2IMwp8I https://ift.tt/2IP9QjR March 23, 2018 at 08:40PM

The vastness that makes the Amazon rainforest so diverse and fertile also makes it extremely difficult to protect. Rainforest Connection is a project started back in 2014 that used solar powered second-hand phones as listening stations that could alert authorities to sounds of illegal logging. And applying machine learning has supercharged the network’s capabilities.

The original idea is still in play: modern smartphones are powerful and versatile tools, and work well as wireless sound detectors. But as founder Topher White explained in an interview, the approach is limited to what you can get the phones to detect.

Originally, he said, the phones just listened for certain harmonics indicating, for example, a chainsaw. But bringing machine learning into the mix wrings much more out of the audio stream.

“Now we’re talking about detecting species, gunshots, voices, things that are more subtle,” he said. “And these models can improve over time. We can go back into years of recordings to figure out what patterns we can pull out of this. We’re turning this into a big data problem.”

White said he realized early on that the phones couldn’t do that kind of calculation, though — even if their efficiency-focused CPUs could do it, the effort would probably drain the battery. So he began working with Google’s TensorFlow platform to perform the training and integration of new data in the cloud.

Google also helped produce a nice little documentary about one situation where Guardians could help native populations deter loggers and poachers:

That’s in the Amazon, obviously, but Rainforest Connection has also set up stations in Cameroon and Sumatra, with others on the way.

Machine learning models are particularly good at finding patterns in noisy data that sound logical but defy easy identification through other means.

For instance, White said, “We should be able to detect animals that don’t make sounds. Jaguars might not always be vocalizing, but the animals around them are, birds and things.” The presence of a big cat then, might be easier to detect by listening for alarmed bird calls than for its near-silent movement through the forest.

The listening stations can be placed as far as 25 kilometers (about 15 miles) from the nearest cell tower. And since a device can detect chainsaws a kilometer away and some species half a kilometer away, it’s not like they need to be on every tree.

But, as you may know, the Amazon is rather a big forest. He wants more people to get involved, especially students. White partnered with Google to launch a pilot program where kids can build their own “Guardian,” as the augmented phone kits are called. When I talked with him it was moments before one such workshop in LA.

Topher White and students at one of the Guardian building workshops.

“We’ve already done three schools and I think a couple hundred students, plus three more in about half an hour,” he told me. “And all these devices will be deployed in the Amazon over the next three weeks. On Earth day they’ll be able to see them, and download to app to stream the sounds. It’s to show these kids that what they do can have an immediate effect.”

“An important part is making it inclusive, proving these things can be built by anyone in the world, and showing how anyone can access the data and do something cool with it. You don’t need to be a data scientist to do it,” he continued.

Getting more people involved is the key to the project, and to that end Rainforest Connection is working on a few new tricks. One is an app you’ll be able to download this summer “where people can put their phone on their windowsill and get alerts when there’s a species in the back yard.”

The other is a more public API; currently only partners like companies and researchers can access it. But with a little help all the streams from the many online Guardians will be available for anyone to listen to, monitor, and analyze. But that’s all contingent on having money.

“If we want to keep this program going, we need to find some funding,” White said. “We’re looking at grants and at corporate sponsorship — it’s a great way to get kids involved too, in both technology and ecology.”

Donations help, but partnerships with hardware makers and local businesses are more valuable. Want to join up? You can get at Rainforest Connection here.

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Dropbox and Box were never competitors

As Dropbox had its IPO moment this morning, more than 10 years after launching, we can finally put one myth to rest. Dropbox and Box were never targeting the same customers.

As Anshu Sharma, founder at Prekari, a stealth startup and former partner at Storm Venture tweeted earlier today:

If you are a VC and still don't get why Box and Dropbox are fundamentally different businesses, maybe stay away from SaaS. https://t.co/4O7Xks8Dbb

— Anshu Sharma (@anshublog) March 23, 2018

Same goes for investors, analysts and journalists. If you don’t believe they’re different, consider that in Dropbox’s S-1 paperwork they filed with SEC, you will note they didn’t even list Box as a primary competitor: “We compete with Box on a more limited basis in the cloud storage market for deployments by large enterprises,” the company wrote.

They had something in common, of course, but Dropbox has always been about purely about managing files in the cloud, while Box has been focused on enterprise content use case cases in the cloud — and that’s a very different approach.

As Shria Ovide pointed out in her analysis on Bloomberg after the filing, the S-1 also proved that Dropbox has always been a “a consumer software company with a side hustle.” That side hustle was the enterprise business. (She also pointed out on Twitter that they may be the first company to use a cupcake emoji in their S-1, which is actually kind of cool).

Consumer with a dash of enterprise

It turns out that vast majority of Dropbox’s revenue came from consumers. It added up to over $1 billion in combined business and consumer revenue, which isn’t too shabby, but it’s still a completely different approach. Dropbox has always offered an attractive consumer storage tool. It’s well integrated into desktop OSs and it has a nice mobile tool.

I use it and for $10 a month I get a terabyte of storage. I can back up my life there and it incorporates neatly into Finder on my Mac. When I capture screens they go automatically to Dropbox. It provides a place to backup my photos from my phone. It’s convenient and easy and it works.

It seemed that such a tool would translate nicely to business, but Alan Pelz-Sharpe, founder and principal analyst at Deep Analysis, who has been following this space for years, says Dropbox has always primarily been confined to teams on the business side. “Dropbox is primarily a consumer company with 500 million users, [with] only about 300,000 teams using their business offering,” he told TechCrunch.

That’s not to say they aren’t trying to capture more of the enterprise. In the weeks prior to the IPO, they made a pair of announcements designed to increase their enterprise credibility including one with Google to store G Suite documents natively in Dropbox and one with Salesforce to embed Dropbox folders in Salesforce Sales and Marketing clouds.

For now though, even with this business push, Pelz-Sharpe points out that most of Dropbox’s business customers are small teams of 3 or more people with a dash of larger implementations. “Nor are people building much on top of Dropbox in the way of business applications – it remains primarily a very efficient file sharing system,” he explained.

Differences with Box

This in contrast to Box, which has been working primarily with large enterprise companies for years to solve much more complex problems around content. Aaron Levie from Box said he’s absolutely rooting for Dropbox, but they have always been going after different markets, since Box decide to go enterprise about two years into its existence.

“We are fundamentally building two very different companies. Both are large markets. While there is no limit to the scale they could become, we have built a very different business around how do you serve [large companies] and deal with unstructured company data — and it’s a very different product set [from Dropbox],” Levie told TechCrunch.

Dropbox was off to a great start today with stock soaring, up nearly 40 percent in early trading, but however Dropbox ends up doing in the days and months ahead, they will do it having made their mark mostly as a consumer company — and that’s fine. If they continue to build their enterprise business over time, it will be all the better for them, but it turns out up until now, the only thing Box and Dropbox had in common was both had “box” in their names.

https://ift.tt/2IP9ABp Dropbox and Box were never competitors https://ift.tt/2pygEdI

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Facebook knows literally everything about you

Cambridge Analytica may have used Facebook’s data to influence your political opinions. But why does least-liked tech company Facebook have all this data about its users in the first place?

Let’s put aside Instagram, WhatsApp and other Facebook products for a minute. Facebook has built the world’s biggest social network. But that’s not what they sell. You’ve probably heard the internet saying “if a product is free, it means that you are the product.”

And it’s particularly true in that case because Facebook is the world’s second biggest advertising company in the world behind Google. During the last quarter of 2017, Facebook reported $12.97 billion in revenue, including $12.78 billion from ads.

That’s 98.5 percent of Facebook’s revenue coming from ads.

Ads aren’t necessarily a bad thing. But Facebook has reached ad saturation in the newsfeed. So the company has two options — creating new products and ad formats, or optimizing those sponsored posts.

Facebook has reached ad saturation in the newsfeed

This isn’t a zero-sum game — Facebook has been doing both at the same time. That’s why you’re seeing more ads on Instagram and Messenger. And that’s also why ads on Facebook seem more relevant than ever.

If Facebook can show you relevant ads and you end up clicking more often on those ads, then advertisers will pay Facebook more money.

So Facebook has been collecting as much personal data about you as possible — it’s all about showing you the best ad. The company knows your interests, what you buy, where you go and who you’re sleeping with.

You can’t hide from Facebook

Facebook’s terms and conditions are a giant lie. They are purposely misleading, too long and too broad. So you can’t just read the company’s terms of service and understand what it knows about you.

That’s why some people have been downloading their Facebook data. You can do it too, it’s quite easy. Just head over to your Facebook settings and click the tiny link that says “Download a copy of your Facebook data.”

In that archive file, you’ll find your photos, your posts, your events, etc. But if you keep digging, you’ll also find your private messages on Messenger (by default, nothing is encrypted).

And if you keep digging a bit more, chances are you’ll also find your entire address book and even metadata about your SMS messages and phone calls.

Downloaded my facebook data as a ZIP file

Somehow it has my entire call history with my partner's mum pic.twitter.com/CIRUguf4vD

— Dylan McKay (@dylanmckaynz) March 21, 2018

All of this is by design and you agreed to it. Facebook has unified terms of service and share user data across all its apps and services (except WhatsApp data in Europe for now). So if you follow a clothing brand on Instagram, you could see an ad from this brand on Facebook.com.

Messaging apps are privacy traps

But Facebook has also been using this trick quite a lot with Messenger. You might not remember, but the on-boarding experience on Messenger is really aggressive.

On iOS, the app shows you a fake permission popup to access your address book that says “Ok” or “Learn More”. The company is using a fake popup because you can’t ask for permission twice.

There’s a blinking arrow below the OK button.

If you click on “Learn More”, you get a giant blue button that says “Turn On”. Everything about this screen is misleading and Messenger tries to manipulate your emotions.

“Messenger only works when you have people to talk to,” it says. Nobody wants to be lonely, that’s why Facebook implies that turning on this option will give you friends.

Even worse, it says “if you skip this step, you’ll need to add each contact one-by-one to message them.” This is simply a lie as you can automatically talk to your Facebook friends using Messenger without adding them one-by-one.

The next time you pay for a burrito with your credit card, Facebook will learn about this transaction and match this credit card number with the one you added in Messenger

If you tap on “Not Now”, Messenger will show you a fake notification every now and then to push you to enable contact syncing. If you tap on yes and disable it later, Facebook still keeps all your contacts on its servers.

On Android, you can let Messenger manage your SMS messages. Of course, you guessed it, Facebook uploads all your metadata. Facebook knows who you’re texting, when, how often.

Even if you disable it later, Facebook will keep this data for later reference.

But Facebook doesn’t stop there. The company knows a lot more about you than what you can find in your downloaded archive. The company asks you to share your location with your friends. The company tracks your web history on nearly every website on earth using embedded Javascript.

But my favorite thing is probably peer-to-peer payments. In some countries, you can pay back your friends using Messenger. It’s free! You just have to add your card to the app.

It turns out that Facebook also buys data about your offline purchases. The next time you pay for a burrito with your credit card, Facebook will learn about this transaction and match this credit card number with the one you added in Messenger.

In other words, Messenger is a great Trojan horse to learn everything about you.

And the next time an app asks you to share your address book, there’s a 99-percent chance that this app is going to mine your address book to get new users, spam your friends, improve ad targeting and sell email addresses to marketing companies.

I could say the same thing about all the other permission popups on your phone. Be careful when you install an app from the Play Store or open an app for the first time on iOS. It’s easier to enable something if a feature doesn’t work without it than to find out that Facebook knows everything about you.

GDPR to the rescue

There’s one last hope. And that hope is GDPR. I encourage you to read TechCrunch’s Natasha Lomas excellent explanation of GDPR to understand what the European regulation is all about.

Many of the misleading things that are currently happening at Facebook will have to change. You can’t force people to opt in like in Messenger. Data collection should be minimized to essential features. And Facebook will have to explain why it needs all this data to its users.

If Facebook doesn’t comply, the company will have to pay up to 4 percent of its global annual turnover. But that doesn’t stop you from actively reclaiming your online privacy right now.

You can’t be invisible on the internet, but you have to be conscious about what’s happening behind your back. Every time a company asks you to tap OK, think about what’s behind this popup. You can’t say that nobody told you.

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2pzEeXt Facebook knows literally everything about you Romain Dillet https://ift.tt/2ud1Aaj
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Facebook knows literally everything about you

{rss:content:encoded} Facebook knows literally everything about you https://ift.tt/2ud1Aaj https://ift.tt/2pzEeXt March 23, 2018 at 07:59PM

Cambridge Analytica may have used Facebook’s data to influence your political opinions. But why does least-liked tech company Facebook have all this data about its users in the first place?

Let’s put aside Instagram, WhatsApp and other Facebook products for a minute. Facebook has built the world’s biggest social network. But that’s not what they sell. You’ve probably heard the internet saying “if a product is free, it means that you are the product.”

And it’s particularly true in that case because Facebook is the world’s second biggest advertising company in the world behind Google. During the last quarter of 2017, Facebook reported $12.97 billion in revenue, including $12.78 billion from ads.

That’s 98.5 percent of Facebook’s revenue coming from ads.

Ads aren’t necessarily a bad thing. But Facebook has reached ad saturation in the newsfeed. So the company has two options — creating new products and ad formats, or optimizing those sponsored posts.

Facebook has reached ad saturation in the newsfeed

This isn’t a zero-sum game — Facebook has been doing both at the same time. That’s why you’re seeing more ads on Instagram and Messenger. And that’s also why ads on Facebook seem more relevant than ever.

If Facebook can show you relevant ads and you end up clicking more often on those ads, then advertisers will pay Facebook more money.

So Facebook has been collecting as much personal data about you as possible — it’s all about showing you the best ad. The company knows your interests, what you buy, where you go and who you’re sleeping with.

You can’t hide from Facebook

Facebook’s terms and conditions are a giant lie. They are purposely misleading, too long and too broad. So you can’t just read the company’s terms of service and understand what it knows about you.

That’s why some people have been downloading their Facebook data. You can do it too, it’s quite easy. Just head over to your Facebook settings and click the tiny link that says “Download a copy of your Facebook data.”

In that archive file, you’ll find your photos, your posts, your events, etc. But if you keep digging, you’ll also find your private messages on Messenger (by default, nothing is encrypted).

And if you keep digging a bit more, chances are you’ll also find your entire address book and even metadata about your SMS messages and phone calls.

Downloaded my facebook data as a ZIP file

Somehow it has my entire call history with my partner's mum pic.twitter.com/CIRUguf4vD

— Dylan McKay (@dylanmckaynz) March 21, 2018

All of this is by design and you agreed to it. Facebook has unified terms of service and share user data across all its apps and services (except WhatsApp data in Europe for now). So if you follow a clothing brand on Instagram, you could see an ad from this brand on Facebook.com.

Messaging apps are privacy traps

But Facebook has also been using this trick quite a lot with Messenger. You might not remember, but the on-boarding experience on Messenger is really aggressive.

On iOS, the app shows you a fake permission popup to access your address book that says “Ok” or “Learn More”. The company is using a fake popup because you can’t ask for permission twice.

There’s a blinking arrow below the OK button.

If you click on “Learn More”, you get a giant blue button that says “Turn On”. Everything about this screen is misleading and Messenger tries to manipulate your emotions.

“Messenger only works when you have people to talk to,” it says. Nobody wants to be lonely, that’s why Facebook implies that turning on this option will give you friends.

Even worse, it says “if you skip this step, you’ll need to add each contact one-by-one to message them.” This is simply a lie as you can automatically talk to your Facebook friends using Messenger without adding them one-by-one.

The next time you pay for a burrito with your credit card, Facebook will learn about this transaction and match this credit card number with the one you added in Messenger

If you tap on “Not Now”, Messenger will show you a fake notification every now and then to push you to enable contact syncing. If you tap on yes and disable it later, Facebook still keeps all your contacts on its servers.

On Android, you can let Messenger manage your SMS messages. Of course, you guessed it, Facebook uploads all your metadata. Facebook knows who you’re texting, when, how often.

Even if you disable it later, Facebook will keep this data for later reference.

But Facebook doesn’t stop there. The company knows a lot more about you than what you can find in your downloaded archive. The company asks you to share your location with your friends. The company tracks your web history on nearly every website on earth using embedded Javascript.

But my favorite thing is probably peer-to-peer payments. In some countries, you can pay back your friends using Messenger. It’s free! You just have to add your card to the app.

It turns out that Facebook also buys data about your offline purchases. The next time you pay for a burrito with your credit card, Facebook will learn about this transaction and match this credit card number with the one you added in Messenger.

In other words, Messenger is a great Trojan horse to learn everything about you.

And the next time an app asks you to share your address book, there’s a 99-percent chance that this app is going to mine your address book to get new users, spam your friends, improve ad targeting and sell email addresses to marketing companies.

I could say the same thing about all the other permission popups on your phone. Be careful when you install an app from the Play Store or open an app for the first time on iOS. It’s easier to enable something if a feature doesn’t work without it than to find out that Facebook knows everything about you.

GDPR to the rescue

There’s one last hope. And that hope is GDPR. I encourage you to read TechCrunch’s Natasha Lomas excellent explanation of GDPR to understand what the European regulation is all about.

Many of the misleading things that are currently happening at Facebook will have to change. You can’t force people to opt in like in Messenger. Data collection should be minimized to essential features. And Facebook will have to explain why it needs all this data to its users.

If Facebook doesn’t comply, the company will have to pay up to 4 percent of its global annual turnover. But that doesn’t stop you from actively reclaiming your online privacy right now.

You can’t be invisible on the internet, but you have to be conscious about what’s happening behind your back. Every time a company asks you to tap OK, think about what’s behind this popup. You can’t say that nobody told you.

Read More