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Europe puts out advice on fixing international data transfers that’s cold comfort for Facebook

Following the landmark CJEU ‘Schrems II’ ruling in July, which invalidated the four-year-old EU-US Privacy Shield, European data protection regulators have today published 38-pages of guidance for businesses stuck trying to navigate the uncertainty around how to (legally) transfer personal data out of the European Union.

The European Data Protection Board’s (EDPB) recommendations focus on measures data controllers might be able to put in place to supplement the use of another transfer mechanism: so-called Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs) to ensure they are complying with the bloc’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) .

The Recommendations on measures that supplement transfer tools to ensure compliance with the EU level of protection of personal data are now available here: https://t.co/agY2BHZVku For a quick overview of the different steps data exporters need to take, check out the infographic: pic.twitter.com/sYTMdNgBkn

— EDPB (@EU_EDPB) November 11, 2020

Unlike Privacy Shield, SCCs were not struck down by the court but their use remains clouded with legal uncertainty. The court made it clear SCCs can only be relied upon for international transfers if the safety of EU citizens’ data can be guaranteed. It also said EU regulators have a duty to intervene when they suspect data is flowing to a location where it will not be safe — meaning options for data transfers out of the EU have both reduced in number and increased in complexity.

One company that’s said it’s waiting for the EDPB guidance is Facebook. It’s already faced a preliminary order to stop transferring EU users data to the US. It petitioned the Irish courts to obtain a stay as it seeks a judicial review of its data protection regulator’s process. It has also brought out its lobbying big guns — former UK deputy PM and ex-MEP Nick Clegg — to try to pressure EU lawmakers over the issue.

Facebook denies it will pull service in Europe over data transfer ban

Most likely the tech giant is hoping for a ‘Privacy Shield 2.0‘ to be cobbled together and slapped into place to paper over the gap between EU fundamental rights and US surveillance law.

But the Commission has warned there won’t be a quick fix this time.

Changes to US surveillance law are slated as necessary — which means zero chance of anything happening before the Biden administration takes the reins next year. So the legal uncertainty around EU-US transfers is set to stretch well into next year at a minimum. (Politico suggests a new data deal isn’t likely in the first half of 2021.)

In the meanwhile, legal challenges to ongoing EU-US transfers are stacking up — at the same time as EU regulators know they have a legal duty to intervene when data is at risk.

“Standard contractual clauses and other transfer tools mentioned under Article 46 GDPR do not operate in a vacuum,” the EDPB warns in an executive summary. “The Court states that controllers or processors, acting as exporters, are responsible for verifying, on a case-by-case basis and, where appropriate, in collaboration with the importer in the third country, if the law or practice of the third country impinges on the effectiveness of the appropriate safeguards contained in the Article 46 GDPR transfer tools.

“In those cases, the Court still leaves open the possibility for exporters to implement supplementary measures that fill these gaps in the protection and bring it up to the level required by EU law. The Court does not specify which measures these could be. However, the Court underlines that exporters will need to identify them on a case-by-case basis. This is in line with the principle of accountability of Article 5.2 GDPR, which requires controllers to be responsible for, and be able to demonstrate compliance with the GDPR principles relating to processing of personal data.”

The EDPB’s recommendations set out a series of steps for data exporters to take as they go through the complex task of determining whether their particular transfer can play nice with EU data protection law.

Six steps but no one-size-fits-all fix

The basic overview of the process it’s advising is: Step 1) map all intended international transfers; step 2) verify the transfer tools you want to use; step 3) assess whether there’s anything in the law/practice of the destination third country which “may impinge on the effectiveness of the appropriate safeguards of the transfer tools you are relying on, in the context of your specific transfer”, as it puts it; step 4) identify and adopt supplementary measure/s to bring the level of protection up to ‘essential equivalent’ with EU law; step 5) take any formal procedural steps required to adopt the supplementary measure/s; step 6) periodically re-evaluate the level of data protection and monitor any relevant developments.

In short, this is going to involve both a lot of work — and ongoing work. tl;dr: Your duty to watch over the safety of European users’ data is never done.

Moreover, the EDPB makes it clear that there very well may not be any supplementary measures to cover a particular transfer in legal glory.

“You may ultimately find that no supplementary measure can ensure an essentially equivalent level of protection for your specific transfer,” it warns. “In those cases where no supplementary measure is suitable, you must avoid, suspend or terminate the transfer to avoid compromising the level of protection of the personal data. You should also conduct this assessment of supplementary measures with due diligence and document it.”

Legal clouds gather over US cloud services, after CJEU ruling

In instances where supplementary measures could suffice the EDPB says they may have “a contractual, technical or organisational nature” — or, indeed, a combination of some or all of those.

“Combining diverse measures in a way that they support and build on each other may enhance the level of protection and may therefore contribute to reaching EU standards,” it suggests.

However it also goes on to state fairly plainly that technical measures are likely to be the most robust tool against the threat posed by foreign surveillance. But that in turn means there are necessarily limits on the business models that can tap in — anyone wanting to decrypt and process data for themselves in the US, for instance, (hi Facebook!) isn’t going to find much comfort here.

The guidance goes on to include some sample scenarios where it suggests supplementary measures might suffice to render an international transfer legal.

Such as data storage in a third country where there’s no access to decrypted data at the destination and keys are held by the data exporter (or by a trusted entity in the EEA or in a third country that’s considered to have an adequate level of protection for data); or the transfer of pseudonymised data — so individuals can no longer be identified (which means ensuring data cannot be reidentified); or end-to-end encrypted data transiting third countries via encrypted transfer (again data must not be able to be decrypted in a jurisdiction that lacks adequate protection; the EDPB also specifies that the existence of any ‘backdoors’ in hardware or software must have been ruled out, although it’s not clear how that could be done).

Another section of the document discusses scenarios in which no effective supplementary measures could be found — such as transfers to cloud service providers (or similar) which require access to the data in the clear and where “the power granted to public authorities of the recipient country to access the transferred data goes beyond what is necessary and proportionate in a democratic society”.

Again, this is a bit of the document that looks very bad for Facebook.

“The EDPB is, considering the current state of the art, incapable of envisioning an effective technical measure to prevent that access from infringing on data subject rights,” it writes on that, adding that it “does not rule out that further technological development may offer measures that achieve the intended business purposes, without requiring access in the clear”.

“In the given scenarios, where unencrypted personal data is technically necessary for the provision of the service by the processor, transport encryption and data-at-rest encryption even taken together, do not constitute a supplementary measure that ensures an essentially equivalent level of protection if the data importer is in possession of the cryptographic keys,” the EDPB further notes.

It also makes it clear that supplementary contractual clauses aren’t any kind of get-out on this front — so, no, Facebook can’t stick a clause in its SCCs that defuses FISA 702 — with the EDPB writing: “Contractual measures will not be able to rule out the application of the legislation of a third country which does not meet the EDPB European Essential Guarantees standard in those cases in which the legislation obliges importers to comply with the orders to disclose data they receive from public authorities.”

The EDPB does discuss examples of potential clauses data exporters could use to supplement SCCs, depending on the specifics of their data flow situation — alongside specifying “conditions for effectiveness” (or ineffectiveness in many cases, really). And, again, there’s cold comfort here for those wanting to process personal data in the US (or another third country) while it remains at risk from state surveillance.

“The exporter could add annexes to the contract with information that the importer would provide, based on its best efforts, on the access to data by public authorities, including in the field of intelligence provided the legislation complies with the EDPB European Essential Guarantees, in the destination country. This might help the data exporter to meet its obligation to document its assessment of the level of protection in the third country,” the EDPB suggests in one example from a section of the guidance discussing transparency obligations.

However the point of such a clause would be for the data exporter to put up-front conditions on an importer to make it easier for them to avoid getting into a risky contract in the first place — or help them with suspending/terminating a contract if a risk is determined — rather than providing any kind of legal sticking plaster for mass surveillance. Aka: “This obligation can however neither justify the importer’s disclosure of personal data nor give rise to the expectation that there will be no further access requests,” as the EDPB warns.

Another example discussed in the document is the viability of adding clauses to try to get the importer to certify there’s no backdoors in their systems which could put the data at risk.

However the EDPB warns this may just be useless, writing: “The existence of legislation or government policies preventing importers from disclosing this information may render this clause ineffective.” So the example could just be being included to try to kneecap dodgy legal advice that suggests contract clauses are a panacea for US surveillance overreach.

The EDPB’s full guidance can be found here.

We’ve also reached out to Facebook to ask what next steps it’ll be taking over its EU-US data transfers in light of the EDPB guidance and will update this report with any response. Update: Facebook has now sent this statement: “The CJEU ruled that Standard Contractual Clauses are a valid legal mechanism for the transfer of data from the EU, including to the US. We note that new guidelines on supplementary measures have been submitted for consultation and, like many other companies, will be reviewing them carefully.”

Max Schrems on the EU court ruling that could cut Facebook in two

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Data audit of UK political parties finds laundry list of failings

In a finding that should surprise no one, an audit of how UK political parties are handling voter information has surfaced a damning lack of compliance with data protection rules across the political spectrum — with parties failing to come clean with voters about how individuals are being invisibly profiled and targeted by parties’ digital campaigning machines.

“Political parties may legitimately hold personal data belonging to millions of people to help them campaign effectively. But developments in the use of data analytics and social media by political parties mean that many voters are unaware of how their data is being used,” the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) warned today.

“All political parties must be clear and transparent with people about how their personal data is used and there should be improved governance and accountability,” it goes on to say in the report.

“Political parties have always wanted to use data to understand voters’ interests and priorities, and respond by explaining the right policies to the right people. Technology now makes that possible on a much more granular level. This can be positive: engaging people on topics that interest them contributes to greater turnout at elections. But engagement must be lawful, especially where there are risks of significant privacy intrusion – for instance around invisible profiling activities, use of sensitive categories of data and unwanted and intrusive marketing. The risk to democracy if elections are driven by unfair or opaque digital targeting is too great for us to shift our focus from this area.”

Despite flagging risks to democratic trust and engagement the regulator has chosen not to take enforcement action.

Instead it has issued a series of recommendations — almost a third of which are rated ‘urgent’ — saying it will carry out a further review later this year and could still take action if enough progress isn’t made. 

“Should our follow-up reviews indicate parties have failed to take appropriate steps to comply, we reserve the right to take further regulatory action in line with our Regulatory Action Policy,” it notes in the report which also includes  warm words for how “positively” parties have engaged with it on the issues. 

The ICO also says it will update its existing guidance on political campaigning later this year — which it notes will have wider relevance for (non-political) campaigners, pressure groups, data brokers and data analytic companies.

It has previously put out guidance for the direct marketing data broking sector as part of its follow up to the Cambridge Analytica Facebook data misuse scandal.

Facebook admits Cambridge Analytica hijacked data on up to 87M users

From Cambridge Analytica to ‘must do better’

The data audit of UK political parties was instigated by the ICO after the Cambridge Analytica scandal drew global attention to the role of social media and big data in digital campaigning.

In an earlier report on the topic, in July 2018, the ICO called for an ‘ethical pause’ around the use of microtargeting ad tools for political campaigning — warning there’s a risk of trust in democracy being undermined by a lack of transparency around the data-fuelled targeting techniques being applied to voters.

But there was no let up in the use of social media targeting before or during the 2019 UK general election, when concerns about how Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party was using Facebook ads to harvest voter data were among the issues raised.

UK watchdog eyeing PM Boris Johnson’s Facebook ads data grab

The ICO report is determined to spare parties’ individual blushes, however — it’s only summarized ‘aggregated’ learnings from its deep dive into wtaf the Conservative Party; the Labour Party; the Liberal Democrats; the Scottish National Party (SNP); the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP); Plaid Cymru; and United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) are doing with people’s data.

Nor is the regulator handing out the marching orders, exactly.

“We recommended the following actions must be taken by the parties”, is the ICO’s preferred oxymoronic construction as it seeks to avoid putting any political noses out of joint. (Not least those belonging to people in government.) So it’s opting for a softly, softly ‘recommend and review’ approach to trying to clean up parties’ dubious data habits

Among its key findings are that political parties’ privacy notices are falling short of required levels of transparency and clarity; don’t have appropriate lawful bases for the data they’re processing in all cases, and where they’re claiming consent may not be obtaining this legally; aren’t being up front about how they’re combining data to profile voters, nor are they carrying out enough checks on data suppliers to ensure those third parties have legally obtained people’s data; aren’t putting proper contractual controls in place when using social media platforms to target voters; and are not staying on top of their obligations so as to be in a position to demonstrate accountability.

So quite the laundry list of data protection failings.

The ICO’s recommendations to political parties are also hilariously basic — saying they must:

undertake an information audit or data-mapping exercise to help find out what personal data they hold and where it is;

conduct a review to find out why they are using personal data, who they share it with and how long it is kept, by distributing questionnaires to relevant areas, meeting directly with key business functions and reviewing policies, procedures, contracts and agreements;

document their findings in writing, in a detailed and meaningful way.

Insert your own face-palm emoji as you imagine the chaotic evil underlying those bullet points.

“We recognise that achieving effective transparency to the UK adult population is challenging,” the ICO notes in a section of the report on transparency requirements, adding that its earlier report recommended “wider, joined-up approaches should be also taken to raising awareness of how data is used in campaigning”.

It adds that it will continue to work with the Electoral Commission on this recommendation.

The explosive growth of digital ads for UK political campaigning is quantified by a line in the report citing Electoral Commission data showing 42.8% of advertising spending by campaigners was on digital advertising in 2017, compared to just 1.7% in 2014.

So the use of social media platforms — which the report notes were used by all parties for political campaigning — is chain-linked to the troubling lack of transparency being called out by the regulator.

“Social media was used by all parties to promote their work to people who may be interested in their values. The majority was delivered via Facebook — including their Instagram platform — and Twitter. Where political parties were using audience choice tools, we had concerns with the lack of transparency of this practice,” the ICO writes. “Privacy information did not make it clear that personal data of voters collected or processed by the party would then be profiled and used to target marketing to them via social media platforms.

“A key recommendation made following our audits was that parties must inform individuals and be transparent about this processing, so that voters fully understand their personal data will be used in this way to comply with Article 13(1)(e) of the GDPR. For example, parties should tell voters that their email addresses will be used to match them on social media for the purposes of showing them political messaging.”

“Due diligence should be undertaken before any campaign begins so that parties can assure themselves that the social media company has: appropriate privacy information and tools in place; and the data processing they will be doing on the party’s behalf is lawful and transparent, and upholds the rights of individuals under data protection law,” it adds.

The report also discusses the need for political parties to fully understand the legal implications of using specific data-fuelled ad-targeting platforms/tools (i.e. before they rush in and upload people’s data to Facebook/Twitter) — so they can properly fulfil their obligations.

To wit:

When parties look to use a platform’s targeting tools, both the party and the platform itself should clearly identify the circumstances where joint controllership exists and put measures in place to fulfil those obligations. They must assess this on a case-by-case basis, irrespective of the content of any controller or processor arrangement. Joint controllership may exist in practice, if the platform exercises a significant degree of control over the tools and techniques they use to target individual users of their service with political messages on behalf of the party.

Article 26 of the GDPR specifies the requirements for joint controller situations. Parties should agree and fully understand who is responsible for what. This means they must work with any social media platform they use to make sure there are no gaps in compliance, and ensure they have appropriate contracts or agreements in place. They should also undertake in-life contract monitoring to ensure that the platforms are adhering to these contracts.

In the report, the ICO describes the data protection implications involved in joint controller situations as “complex”, adding: “We recognise that the solutions to the issues… may take more time to resolve and will require more guidance for all the actors involved.”

“Since our audits, we understand that some steps have been taken by social media companies within their revised terms and conditions of service for digital advertising,” it adds. 

The report also includes a passing nod to regulatory scrutiny of Facebook’s ad platform in Ireland under EU law — focused on concerns that the use of Facebook’s ‘lookalike audiences’ for targeting voters may not comply with the bloc’s GDPR framework. Information commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, has previously suggested the tech giant will have to change its business model to maintain user trust. But Ireland’s data protection agency has not yet issued any GDPR decisions related to Facebook’s business.

“In the wider ecosystem, the ICO also recognises that there are still other matters that need to be addressed about the use of personal data in the political context,” the regulator writes now. “These include some of the issues set out in the report it made to the Irish Data Protection Commission (IDPC), as the lead authority under GDPR, about targeted advertising on Facebook and other issuing [sp] including where the platform could be used in political contexts. The ICO will continue to liaise with the technology platforms to consider what, if any, further steps might be required to address the issues raised by our Democracy Disrupted report. This will be of relevance to the parties’ use of social media platforms in future elections.”

Facebook is facing an EU data probe over fake ads

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Nana nabs $6M for an online academy and marketplace dedicated to appliance repair

A lot of the focus in online education — and, let’s face it, education overall — has been about professional development for knowledge workers, education for K-12 and how best to deliver cost-effective, engaging higher learning to those in college and beyond. But in what might be a sign of the times, today a startup that’s focused on e-learning and the subsequent job market for a completely different end of the spectrum — home services — is announcing some funding to continue building out its business in earnest.

Nana, which runs a free academy to teach people how to fix appliances, and then gives students the option of becoming a part of its own marketplace to connect them to people needing repairs — has picked up $6 million.

The seed round is being led by Shripriya Mahesh of Spero Ventures, and Next Play Ventures (ex-LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner’s new fund), Lachy Groom, Scott Belsky, Geoff Donaker of Burst Capital, and Michael Staton of Learn Capital are among those also participating.

Nana has now raised $10.7 million, with past backers including Alpha Bridge Ventures, Bob Lee, and the Uber Syndicate, an investment vehicle to back Uber alums in new ventures. Founder and CEO David Zamir is not actually an Uber alum, but one of his first employees, VP of Engineering Oliver Nicholas, is an early Uber engineer, and the company has also found a lot of traction of Uber drivers this year, after many found themselves out of work after the chilling effect that the pandemic had on ridesharing.

Nana — full name Nana Technologies (and not to be confused with Nana Technology, tech built for older adults) — is partly a labor/future of work play, partly an educational play, partly a tech/IoT play, and partly an ecological play, in the eyes of Zamir, who himself trained as an appliance repairperson, running his own successful business in the Bay Area before pivoting it into a training platform and marketplace.

“There are 5.9 million tons of municipal solid waste [which includes lots of electronics like washing machines, blenders and everything in between] in the U.S.,” he said in an interview, “and only 50% of that is capable of getting recycled. We’re in a vicious cycle with appliances, and it’s partly because there aren’t enough people with the knowledge to repair them. But what if you had the liquidity to do that? We’re talking about creating jobs, but also saving the environment.”

Nana’s proposition starts with free lessons to fix a range of appliances — currently, dishwashers, refrigerators, ovens, stoves, washers and dryers — and their typical breakdown/poor performance issues to anyone who wants to know how to repair them. These classes are available to anyone — an individual simply interested in learning how to fix a machine, but more likely someone looking to pick up a skill and then use it to make some money.

Once you take and pass a course — currently remote — you have the option (but not requirement) to register on Nana’s platform to become a repair person who picks up jobs through it to get jobs fixing that particular issue. Nana already has partnerships with major appliance and warranty companies including GE, Miele, Samsung, Assurant, Cinch and First American Home Warranty, so this is how it gets most of its work in, but it also accepts direct requests from consumers for repair of dishwashers, refrigerators, ovens, stoves, washers and dryers.

Over time, Zamir said, the plan is not just to take in jobs and send out technicians to fix things in an Uber-style dispatch service — but to expand it to fit the kinds of next-generation appliances that are being built today, with IoT diagnostic monitoring and helping also to integrate these appliances into connected homes. It also seems to be slowly expanding into other home services too, alongside appliance repair (which remains its main business).

Nana has to date registered hundreds of technicians in 12 markets across the U.S. and said it expects to expand to 20 markets by the end of 2021.

Nana has an unlikely founder story that speaks to how so much of the tech world is still about hustle and finding opportunities in the margins.

Founder and CEO David Zamir hails from Israel, but unlike many of the transplants you may come across from there to the Bay Area tech world, he’s not a tech guy by education, training or work experience. He used to run clothing stores in Tel Aviv and vaguely liked the idea of being involved in a tech business at some point — Israel loves to call itself “startup nation” and so that bug is bound to bite even those who don’t study computer science or engineering — but he didn’t know what to do or where to begin.

“The clothing business didn’t make much money,” he said. So after a period Zamir and his American wife decided to move to the U.S. and try their luck there.

While initially based on the east coast near her family and wondering about what kind of job to pursue, Zamir spoke with a friend of his in Toronto who was an working as an independent tradesperson fixing appliances, and the friend suggested this as an option, at least for a while.

“So I hopped on an airplane to shadow my friend,” he recalled. “The lightbulb went off. I thought, I should do this in San Francisco,” where he had been wanting to move to crack in to the tech world, somehow. “I thought that I’d start with fixing appliances while I figured out how to find my way into tech.”

That turned into more than a temporary income stopgap, of course. After finding that his business taking off, Zamir saw that technology would be the avenue to growing it.

He was helped in part to build the idea and the business through his grit. Josh Elman, the famous tech investor, complained about a broken dryer back in April, and asked the Twitter hive mind whether he should get a new one or go through the pain of fixing it. Someone flagged the question to Zamir, who reached out and connected Elman with one of Nana’s online teaching technicians. Twelve hours later, Elman’s drier was diagnosed (by Elman), on its way to getting fixed, and Elman signed on as an advisor to the company.

Move fast and fix things

The world of tech is all about building new things and solving problems, with “breaking” being more synonymous with disruption (=”good”) and fearlessness (see: Facebook’s old mantra to its early employees to move fast and break things). But behind that, there is an interesting disconnect between the tech version of “broken” and objects that are actually “broken” in the real world.

Many of us these days find using apps and other digital interfaces second-nature, but most of us would have no idea how to repair or work with much more basic electronic systems. And nor do most of us want to. More often than not, we give up on it, decide it’s not worth fixing, and click on Amazon et al. to get a new shiny object.

Looked at on a wider scale, this is actually a big problem.

Electronics can be recycled, but in reality only about half the materials can be usefully reused. Meanwhile, Nana estimates that the appliance repair market is a $4 billion opportunity, with some 80 million appliances in need to being serviced annually in the US. But currently there are only some 31,000 trained technicians in the market. Nana estimates that to meet the demand of growing numbers, an additional 28,000 new technicians will be needed by 2025.

At the same time, the move to automation in many skilled labor jobs is putting people out of work: research from the Brookings Institution estimates that some 30 million people will lose their jobs in coming years because of it.

The idea here is that a platform like Nana can help some of those people retrain to fill the gap for appliance technicians, while at the same time extending the life of people’s appliances in a less painful way — putting less stuff into landfill — while at the same time expanding knowledge for anyone who cares for it.

Zamir said that Nana was named after his mother, who raised David as a single parent after his father passed away, a reference to working hard and being practical.

That sentimentality seems to motivate him in a bigger way, too: Zamir himself is a guy with a lot of heart and emotion vested into the concept of his startup. When I told him an anecdote of how our dishwasher broke down earlier this year and both a customer service rep from the maker (Siemens) and a separate repair person advised me to replace it, he got visibly agitated over our video call, as if the subject was something political or significantly more graver than a story about a dishwasher.

“I am not a supporter of what they told you,” he said in an angry voice. “It’s really upsetting me.” (I calmed him down a little, I think, when I told him that myself I uninstalled the broken dishwasher and installed the new one myself, because Covid.)

Zamir said that there are no plans to charge for its academy courses, nor to tie people into signing up with Nana to work once they take the courses. The fact that it provides a lot of inbound jobs attracts enough turnover — between 40% and 60% of those taking courses stay on to work when they took in-person classes, and for now the online figures are between 15% and 35%.

“It’s still early days,” he said, “but we’re finding the take up impressive… Most want to participate in the marketplace.” He says that there are other call-out services where they could register but the tech that Nana has built makes its system more efficient, and that means better returns.

All of this has played well with those who have become Nana’s investors. People like Jeff Weiner — who in his time as CEO of LinkedIn led the company to acquire Lynda as part of a bigger emphasis on the importance of skills training and education — see the opportunity and need to provide an equivalent platform not just for knowledge workers but those who have more manual jobs, too.

“We are excited by Nana’s vision of providing training, access and opportunity for rewarding, satisfying work while also filling a critical gap in our economy,” said Shripriya Mahesh of Spero Ventures, in a statement. “Nana has created a new, scalable approach to giving people the agency, tools and support systems they need to build new skills and pursue fulfilling work opportunities.”

The round was oversubscribed in the end, and Nana shouldn’t find it too hard to raise again if it sticks to its plan and the market continues to grow as it has. That does not seem to be the motivation for Zamir, though.

“We just think it’s super important to build Nana for the people,” he said.

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Facebook’s Snapchat-like ‘Vanish Mode’ feature arrives on Messenger and Instagram

Facebook today announced its new Snapchat-like feature for disappearing messaging, Vanish Mode, is arriving on Messenger and Instagram. The feature, meant for more casual conversations, allows users to set chats to automatically delete after the message is seen and the chat is closed.

In Vanish Mode, Messenger and Instagram users can send text chats, emoji, pictures, GIFs, voice messages, and stickers, which will disappear after they’ve been seen and users leave the chat, Facebook explains.

Image Credits: Facebook

However, unlike on Snapchat, Vanish Mode is not a default setting. Instead, users are meant to enable it from within an existing chat by swiping up on their mobile device’s screen while in the chat.

Upon first launch, a screen will appear explaining how Vanish Mode works. It also notes that users will be alerted if someone takes a screenshot of the conversation — as Snapchat does.

For safety purposes, Facebook supports blocking and reporting in Vanish Mode. If a user in the conversation reports a chat, the disappearing messages will be included for up to 1 hour after they disappear, the company explains. This allows Facebook to review the reported conversation and take action, if need be.

Image Credits: Facebook

Vanish Mode is also an opt in experience — meaning you can can choose whether to enter a Vanish Mode chat. And it only works with people you’re connected to, Facebook says.

Once in Vanish Mode, the screen goes dark to signal the change. To exit Vanish Mode, you tap on the “Turn Off Vanish Mode” button at the top of the screen.

Facebook’s plans for Vanish mode were announced earlier as part of its overhaul of the Instagram messaging experience in September. This update had included the ability for Instagram and Messenger users to communicate across apps, along with other “fun” features.

As a part of that update, Instagram received many Messenger-inspired additions — like the ability to change the chat color or react with any emoji, for example. But though announced, the Vanish Mode feature was then said to be coming “soon.”

Image Credits: Facebook

To be clear, Vanish Mode is not meant for secure chats. For that, Facebook already offers an end-to-end encrypted conversations feature, Secret Conversations. Instead, Vanish Mode meant to chip away at yet another advantage held by rival Snapchat.

That’s part for the course for Facebook these days. The company already copied the Stories format popularlized Snapchat, and now that product alone on each of its platforms is used by more people (500M+) than all of Snapchat. (249M).

To get Vanish Mode, and other recent updates to the Instagram messaging experience, users have to opt-in to the upgrade. Essentially, these new features are being used as lures to get Instagram users to agree to the upgrade.

The upgrade then locks them further inside the Facebook universe as they then also receive the ability to communicate cross-platform with users on Facebook. Eventually, WhatsApp may become a part of this cross-platform communication strategy, as well.

Once upgraded, people can use just one messaging apps to reach friends and family on two of the largest social networks in the world. And with additions like Vanish Mode, they won’t miss out on things found on competitors’ apps. Meanwhile, with Reels on Instagram, Facebook aims to retain TikTok users, too.

Facebook says Vanish Mode is launching starting today on Messenger in the U.S. Canada, Mexico, Peru and Bangladesh, and on Instagram in Canada, Argentina, Chile, Peru and a few other countries. It will soon roll out to other countries across both platforms, the company says.

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Facebook loses final appeal in defamation takedown case, must remove same and similar hate posts globally

Austria’s Supreme Court has dismissed Facebook’s appeal in a long running speech takedown case — ruling it must remove references to defamatory comments made about a local politician worldwide for as long as the injunction lasts.

The Austrian Supreme Court has now delivered its final judgment in the #Glawischnig-Piesczek case. #Facebook has to remove the defamatory comment and any comments that are identical or equivalent in meaning worldwide.https://t.co/zhbYRr4DnG https://t.co/Y2W5SWRgO6

— Clara Rauchegger (@ClaraRauchegger) November 12, 2020

We’ve reached out to Facebook for comment on the ruling.

Green Party politician, Eva Glawischnig, successfully sued the social media giant seeking removal of defamatory comments made about her by a user of its platform after Facebook had refused to take down the abusive postings — which referred to her as a “lousy traitor”, a “corrupt tramp” and a member of a “fascist party”. 

After a preliminary injunction in 2016 Glawischnig won local removal of the defamatory postings the next year but continued her legal fight — pushing for similar postings to be removed and take downs to also be global.

Questions were referred up to the EU’s Court of Justice. And in a key judgement last year the CJEU decided platforms can be instructed to hunt for and remove illegal speech worldwide without falling foul of European rules that preclude platforms from being saddled with a “general content monitoring obligation”. Today’s Austrian Supreme Court ruling flows naturally from that.

Europe’s top court sets new line on policing illegal speech online

Austrian newspaper Der Standard reports that the court confirmed the injunction applies worldwide, both to identical postings or those that carry the same essential meaning as the original defamatory posting.

It said the Austrian court argues that EU Member States and civil courts can require platforms like Facebook to monitor content in “specific cases” — such as when a court has identified user content as unlawful and “specific information” about it — in order to prevent content that’s been judged to be illegal from being reproduced and shared by another user of the network at a later point in time with the overarching aim of preventing future violations.

The case has important implications for the limitations of online speech.

Regional lawmakers are also working on updating digital liability regulations. Commission lawmakers have said they want to force platforms to take more responsibility for the content they fence and monetize — fuelled by concerns about the impact of online hate speech, terrorist content and divisive disinformation.

A long-standing EU rule, prohibiting Member States from putting a general content monitoring obligation on platforms, limits how they can be forced to censor speech. But the CJEU ruling has opened the door to bounded monitoring of speech — in instances where it’s been judged to be illegal — and that in turn may influence the policy substance of the Digital Services Act which the Commission is due to publish in draft early next month.

In a reaction to last year’s CJEU ruling, Facebook argued it “opens the door to obligations being imposed on internet companies to proactively monitor content and then interpret if it is ‘equivalent’ to content that has been found to be illegal”.

“In order to get this right national courts will have to set out very clear definitions on what ‘identical’ and ‘equivalent’ means in practice. We hope the courts take a proportionate and measured approach, to avoid having a chilling effect on freedom of expression,” it added.

How will EC plans to reboot rules for digital services impact startups?

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To own an AR future, Niantic wants to build a smarter map of the world

Niantic is continuing to bet heavily on the idea that it knows where consumer computing is headed, namely towards augmented reality.

The game development startup behind Pokémon Go has some good company with companies like Apple, Facebook and Snap making similar bets, but stakes are high for the studio which hopes it can build an early advantage in foundational AR infrastructure and bring third-party developers on board, edging out efforts from companies that are quite a bit larger.

Niantic’s experiments are still being bankrolled by their 2016 first-party hit Pokémon Go, which SensorTower estimates is having its best year ever in 2020. A report from the firm suggests that the title has pulled in more than $1 billion in revenue since the start of the year, a marked increase since 2019 that might be surprising given the social effects of a global pandemic. Those revenues have allowed Niantic to be one of the more active acquirers in the AR infrastructure space, buying up small buzzy AR startups like Escher Reality, Matrix Mill and, most recently, 6D.ai.

That latest purchase in particular has acted as a signal for what the company’s next plans are for its augmented reality platform. 6D.ai was building cloud AR mapping software with companies like Airbnb among its early customers. The tech allowed users to quickly gather 3D information of a space just by holding up their phone to the world. Since the acquisition, Niantic has been integrating the tech into their developer platform and have been aiming to juice the technology with their own advances in semantic understanding so that they can not only quickly gather what the geometry of a space looks like, but also peer into the context of what the objects are that makes up that 3D mesh.

“We ultimately have this vision that for an AR experience, everything has to come together for it to be really magical,” Joel Hesch, Niantic’s Senior Director of Engineering, told TechCrunch. “You want precise location information so that you can see content in the right location and experience things together with others who are in the same location. You want the geometric information for things like occlusion or physics interactions. And you want to know about what things mean from a semantic perspective so that your characters can interact with the world in an intelligible way.”

Niantic squares up against Apple and Facebook with acquisition of AR startup 6D.ai

While they’ve been building out the tech, they’ve also been pushing users to try it out. Niantic has been urging Pokémon Go players to actively capture videos of certain landmarks and destinations, visual data from which is fed back into bulking up models and improving experiences for subsequent users. As users gain access to more advanced tech like the LiDAR sensor inside the new iPhone 12 Pro, it’s likely that Niantic will gain access to more quality data themselves.

The ultimate goal of this data collection, the startup says, is to build an ever-updating 3D map of the world. Their latest tech allows them to peer into this map and distinguish what types of objects and scenes are in these scans, distinguishing buildings from water from the sky. The real question is how useful all of this data will actually prove to be in practice, compared to more high-level geographic insights like the Google Maps API .

Though the company has been talking about their Real World Platform since 2018, they’ve been slow to officially expand it as the enthusiasm behind phone-based AR has seemed to recede since Apple’s initial unveil of ARKit in 2017 prompted a groundswell of attention in the space. “We’ve primarily been focused on first party games and applications, but we are very excited about extending the platform to be something that more people can use,” Hesch says.

For Niantic and other companies that are bullish on an AR future, their best bet seem to be quietly building and hoping that their R&D will give them a years-long advantage when the technology potentially starts landing more consumer hits.

The Niantic EC-1

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Facebook extends its temporary ban on political ads for another month

The election is settled, but the nation is far from it.

Before Election Day in the U.S., Facebook hit pause on all political and social issue ads. At the time, the company made it clear that the precautionary measure designed to turn off one potential faucet of misinformation would be temporary, but it couldn’t say how long the policy would remain in effect.

Now, Facebook says the temporary ban will continue for at least another month. The decision to extend the special policy was implemented Wednesday, four days after Joe Biden’s election victory — and four days after it became clear that Trump had no intention of conceding a lost election.

“The temporary pause for ads about politics and social issues in the US continues to be in place as part of our ongoing efforts to protect the election,” the company wrote in an update to its previous announcement. “Advertisers can expect this to last another month, though there may be an opportunity to resume these ads sooner.”

Facebook’s ongoing political ad pause throws a wrench into things in Georgia, where two January runoff elections will decide which party will control the Senate heading into President-Elect Biden’s administration. A friendly Senate is essential for many of Biden’s biggest proposals, including a $2 trillion climate package that could reshape the American economy and push the country toward an electrified future that doesn’t rely on fossil fuels.

Over the last few days, a shocking number of Republicans have “humored” the president’s refusal to transfer power in spite of an unambiguous election call and Biden’s decisive win in Pennsylvania, which cut off any potential paths to victory for his opponent. The Trump campaign’s last-ditch flurry of legal challenges have presented little of substance so far, and they might ultimately be more about dividing a nation and sowing doubt than prevailing in court.

Close US election results plunge social media into nightmare misinformation scenario

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India approves Google’s $4.5 billion deal with Reliance’s Jio Platforms

India’s antitrust watchdog has approved Google’s proposed investment of $4.5 billion in the nation’s largest telecom platform Jio Platforms, it said in a tweet on Wednesday.

Google announced in July that it would be investing $4.5 billion for a 7.73% stake in the top Indian telecom network. As part of the deal, Google and Jio Platforms plan to collaborate on developing a customized-version of Android mobile operating system to build low-cost, entry-level smartphones to serve the next hundreds of millions of users, the two companies said.

The announcement today comes days after the Indian watchdog, Competition Commission of India (CCI), said it had directed an in-depth investigation into Google to verify the claims of whether the Android-maker promotes its payments service during the installation of an Android smartphone (and whether phone vendors have a choice to avoid this); and if Google Play Store’s billing system is designed “to the disadvantage of both i.e. apps facilitating payment through UPI, as well as users.”

The call for this in-depth investigation was prompted after the CCI concluded in its initial review that requiring Google Pay to be used buy apps or make in-app payments was an “imposition of unfair and discriminatory condition, denial of market access for competing apps of Google Pay and leveraging on the part of Google,” the watchdog said.

Jio Platforms, which has amassed over 400 million subscribers, has this year raised over $20 billion from 13 high-profile investors including Facebook, which alone invested $5.7 billion into the Indian firm. That deal has also been approved by the CCI. Jio Platforms is a subsidiary of Reliance Industries, India’s most valued firm. It is run by Mukesh Ambani, Asia’s richest man.

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New forecast pegs TikTok to top 1.2B monthly active users in 2021

TikTok’s upward trajectory is expected to continue in 2021, according to a new forecast from mobile data and analytics firm App Annie, which estimates the short-form video app will surpass the 1 billion monthly active user mark next year. The expanded forecast also looked into future trends around mobile ad spending and the growth in “at-home” activities fueled by mobile, like e-commerce and online meetings, for example.

TikTok’s growth numbers, however, were the standout estimate from the new report. The video app has grown in popularity, having nearly tripled in size since 2018, App Annie noted. And, as of the third quarter this year, TikTok became the No. 2 non-gaming app by consumer spending, due to its use of a combination of revenue streams, including advertising and sales of virtual gifts used for tipping streamers.

In 2021, App Annie expects TikTok to not only join the 1 billion monthly active user (MAU) club alongside Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, YouTube and WeChat — it predicts TikTok will actually sail past the 1 billion MAU milestone to reach 1.2 billion average monthly active users.

Image Credits: App Annie

This is remarkable growth, given that TikTok still remains banned in one of the world’s largest mobile markets, India.

And, of course, the fate of the social video app in the U.S. will have to do with how the incoming Biden administration handles the Trump TikTok ban. (And there are some signals his view doesn’t differ that much from Trump on this front.)

App Annie also predicted 2021 will see continued growth for “at-home” activities, fueled by mobile. Though there is promising news about a potential COVID vaccine, it’s not likely that everything will simply shift back to the way it was before the pandemic upon its release. The pandemic just accelerated trends that were already underway.

The report estimates that time spent in key “at-home” categories — like remote business and education apps, e-commerce, mobile finance apps and at-home fitness apps — will top 1.3 trillion hours on Android phones in 2021, for example.

Specifically, remote business apps (e.g Zoom) are expected to see a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 57% and remote learning apps will see 62% growth. Total time in mobile banking and finance apps will surpass 31 billion hours annually in 2021, representing a 4-year CAGR of 35%. Fitness and e-commerce will grow as well, at +23% and +40%, respectively.

Image Credits: App Annie

In addition, the firm predicts consumers will install up to 85% more video streaming apps in 2021 in the U.S., compared with pre-COVID levels.

And it expects mobile ad spend to reach $290 billion in 2021, in part thanks to strong mobile commerce growth and a further shift from offline advertising to digital.

“While the U.S. presidential election has helped fuel mobile ad spend in the latter part of 2020, App Annie expects ad dollars to continue to flow to smartphones in 2021,” the firm said. “Particularly given the consumer shift to mobile is not an isolated trend — COVID-19 catalysed the habits we were already forming,” the company added.

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This Week in Apps: Elections’ impact on the app store, new app privacy requirements, iOS 14.2 arrives

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the TechCrunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support and the money that flows through it all.

The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 204 billion downloads and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019. People are now spending three hours and 40 minutes per day using apps, rivaling TV. Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours — they’re a big business. In 2019, mobile-first companies had a combined $544 billion valuation, 6.5x higher than those without a mobile focus.

Top Stories

Apps and the Elections

The tight, nail-biting U.S. elections this week had a number of impacts on the app market.

Image Credits: Sensor Tower

The apps Americans chose to watch the elections on their iPhone were reflective of the nation’s divisions. Instead of a more neutral news source, like a broadcast network, the top 2 apps were CNN and Fox News — cable news channels that lean left and right, respectively.

On the day after Election Day, the Fox News app hit No. 2 among the top free iPhone apps on the U.S. App Store. This is the highest it has ever ranked. The second-highest ranking it reached was No. 9 on November 9, 2016.

Meanwhile, the CNN app hit No. 3 on the same — its highest rank since it hit No. 2 back on Jan. 20, 2017, the date of Trump’s inauguration. This was also the 3rd highest ever rank. (The app previously reached No, 1 on Nov. 9, 2016).

As of Nov. 5, CNN maintained a top ranking at No. 4 but Fox News slipped to No. 14.

Other news apps didn’t do as well, barely cracking the top 50 at best

Android users showed less interest in the elections, where Fox News only got as high as No. 12 on Nov. 5 and CNN reached No. 16.

Image Credits: Sensor Tower

Image Credits: Sensor Tower

In lighter news from this stressful week, Calm’s meditation app made headlines for its hilarious ad campaign that saw it sponsoring CNN’s coverage of the presidential election. The app popped up on the screen during CNN’s “Key Race Alert.” The move seemed to benefit the app in terms of downloads and rankings. 

On social media apps, companies had to react quickly to clamp down on the rapid-fire spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories, and other violating content. Facebook and Instagram ran notifications to inform users that votes were still being counted after Trump falsely claimed he had won.

Facebook also removed conspiracy groups and hashtags associated with election misinformation, as did TikTok. In Facebook’s case, a hashtag block is not a full removal — content will still be returned if you search for a blocked phrase, even if it’s largely from news organizations reporting on the trend. On TikTok, however, a blocked terms returns nothing. TikTok also took more decisive action to fully remove videos spreading election misinformation.

Facebook blocks hashtags for #sharpiegate, #stopthesteal election conspiracies

However, for those in the market for misinformation, it’s still fairly easy to find across TikTok, as many other hashtags and terms where misinfo is shared remained untouched.

YouTube, however, took a more controversial stance on its handling of misinformation. The platform this week demonstrated how it’s complicit in the spread of false and dangerous information, when it refused to remove a video that falsely claimed Trump won the election and worked to undermine Americans’ trust in democratic elections. YouTube believes demonetization and warning labels are the solution, but by keeping this content online, it retains users. And then those people do, in fact, watch ads elsewhere, allowing YouTube to profit.

The company did draw the line, at least, at a video from Steve Bannon, that called for violence against and deaths of Anthony Fauci and FBI director Christopher Wray.

According to Sensor Tower, the top social media apps in the U.S. including TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter saw their combined iOS and Android installs from November 3 to November 5 decline 8% week-over-week when compared to the installs from October 27 to October 29.

Right-wing social app Parler, meanwhile, ranked at No. 1,023 on iOS on November 2. On November 5, it had climbed to No. 241. As of Friday, it was No. 29.

Steve Bannon’s show pulled off Twitter and YouTube over calls for violence

Apple rolls out a big update to iOS 14

Apple this week released iOS 14.2, which brings a number of new features in addition to the usual bug fixes and security updates.

Of note to consumers, the update brings 117 new emojis.

Every new emoji in iOS 14.2 https://t.co/qMqdhe4Kff pic.twitter.com/X14PbaFMat

— Emojipedia (@Emojipedia) November 5, 2020

Among the new emoji is a tweaked version of the “Face with Medical Mask,” which changes the face so the eyes are smiling. Other notable additions include the transgender flag, pinched fingers, people hugging, a smiling face with tear, a man bottle-feeding a baby and a more inclusive set of tuxedo-wearing people and people wearing a veil. There’s also a gender-inclusive alternative to Santa and Mrs. Claus, which offers a gender neutral option of a person in a Santa hat.

The updated iOS also offers eight new wallpapers in both light and dark version; new AirPlay controls; the ability to connect the HomePod to Apple TV for stereo, surround sound and Dolby Atmos audio; support for iPhone 12 Leather Sleeve with MagSafe; optimized battery charging for AirPods; headphone audio level notifications; and more.

iPhones can now tell blind users where and how far away people are

One of the more interesting new features, however, is an accessibility upgrade for blind users that takes advantage of the lidar support in iPhone 12, 12 Pro Max and iPad Pro.

The “People Detection” features leverages lidar to detect how close people are to the device owner, as a way to help blind users better navigate the world. 

Get ready for Apple’s new “app privacy” labels

Image Credits: Apple

Apple this week announced a deadline of December 8, 2020 for app developers to submit their app’s privacy information to the App Store. This information will be required to submit new apps and app updates, and will give consumers a better understanding of how apps are accessing their data.

On each app’s product page following the deadline, users will be able to see what data an app collects and how that data is used to track them, Apple says. This doesn’t only include data the app developers collect themselves, but also data that’s transmitted off the device for later use by the developer or a third-party partner. That means app developers will have to disclose how data is being handed over to analytics tools, ad networks and other third-party SDKs and other vendors.

With this pro-consumer privacy change, Apple customers will know how developers are tracking and/or sharing their personal info, health data, financial information, location, contacts data, user content, browsing and search histories, purchases, app usage, diagnostic and more.

While it’s hard to argue that this is a change for the better, in terms of consumer benefits, Apple’s reasons may not be just about serving their customer base.

By cutting off the ad analytics industry with its upcoming crippling of IDFA and making it more obvious which apps track user data, Apple is putting its own ad tech in a more favored position. Its framework SKAdNetwork hugely benefits from these changes — effectively giving Apple a seat at the table in the multi-billion-dollar ad industry. So, let’s stop pretending this is all about how much Apple cares for its users. This is business.

Weekly News Round-Up

Platforms

Fortnite finds a way to skirt App Store ban. The game, banned by Apple in a battle over App Store fees, may have another way to reach the iPhone user base by way of Nvidia’s GeForce cloud gaming service that runs on the mobile web.

WhatsApp rolls out a payments service in India. The Facebook-owned messaging app began testing the service in 2018, but struggled to get government approval. The service, which is built on UPI, offers a challenge to Google and Walmart which currently dominate the mobile payments market in India.

WhatsApp adds disappearing messages. The new ephemeral messages disappear after seven days and rolled out across iOS and Android. It also made it easier for users to delete large files and manage storage.

Apple announces a new event. The expectation is that this one will be Mac-focused.

Apple warns investors that reduced App Store revenues would hurt its financial results. The warning comes amidst increasing regulatory pressure on the App Store, which today requires developers to distribute through its platform to reach iOS users, and requires IAPs through Apple Pay.

Services

Google Stadia, the cloud gaming service, rolls out Stadia Family Sharing. The feature lets families of up to six share games.

All the U.K. contact tracing apps are now compatible and work across borders. The separate apps address England & Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland markets, and use the Apple/Google API.

Politics

PUBG Mobile plots a way to return to the Indian market, after a ban over cybersecurity concerns due to its connections with Chinese giant Tencent. The company is looking for a local publisher.

Facebook and Instagram added notifications during the tight U.S. election this week to alert users that votes were still being counted. The move follows Trump’s spread of conspiracies that elections were rigged and his lies saying he had won before all votes had been counted.

Security & Privacy

Google Screenwise is dead. The tracking app, which records users’ web usage, had been in the news last year for improperly using an iOS enterprise certificate for distribution.

Apps in the News

Spotify adds standalone streaming support to its Apple Watch app. That means users can leave their iPhone behind and stream directly from their Watch over Wi-Fi or cellular.

Facebook tests “dark mode” on Android. The new dark mode option had been tested earlier on desktop.

Triller names Daniel Gillick its Global Head of Partnerships. The exec was previously senior manager of music content and industry relations at Triller rival TikTok.

TikTok signed a new, longer-term agreement with Sony Music. The deal allows the app to continue to offer music from Sony artists in its app.

TikTok tests iOS 14 “App Clips.” The test was spotted in beta, and would allow users a full-screen preview with a download prompt.

NBC News launched an iOS 14 widget for putting election news and results on your home screen.

Pokémon GO reaches $1 billion in 2020; lifetime revenue tops $4 billion, says Sensor Tower.

Tencent claims record 100 million daily users on mobile game, Honor of Kings. The game consistently ranks among the world’s top-grossing games, as well.

Match Group reported Tinder subscriber growth despite a pandemic where people are supposed to be social distancing. Tinder had 6.6 million subscribers in the quarter, up from 6.2 million in the prior quarter. Tinder revenue rose 15%, but ARPU slipped 1%.

Trends

App Store revenue grew 30% year-over-year during the month of October, according to Sensor Tower preliminary data.

Apple IAPs rose 54% during Q2 according to research from mCommerce agency JMango360.

56% of marketers said iOS 14 updates will negatively impact their businesses, due to how Apple’s new consumer privacy protections offer users more ways to block tracking.

TikTok still tops worldwide downloads in October 2020.

Image Credits: Sensor Tower

Funding and M&A (and IPOs)

Delivery startup goPuff, whose app lets you order convenience store items and alcohol for same-day delivery, acquires alcoholic beverage chain BevMo for $350 million. 

TikTok parent company ByteDance looking to raise $2 billion before its IPO on the Hong Kong StockExchange.

Kuaishou Technology, the world’s second-largest short term video app and TikTok rival, filed for IPO in Hong Kong. 

European challenger banking app Vivid Money raises $17.6 million. The bank offers a metal debit card controlled by an app, and other tech-forward features.

Downloads

The Roku Channel app

The recently released app lets anyone, including non-Roku users, stream from Roku’s catalog of free, live and premium movie and TV content on their iOS or Android device. The app also offers more than 115 live channels including live news, weather, sports, food & home, reality TV, science fiction, true crime, kids’ entertainment and Spanish language content.

The Collage Atlas

Looking to wind-down from a week of stress and anxiety? The Apple Arcade game, The Collage Atlas, may help. This unique hand-drawn game created by developer John William Evelyn is a work of art where players are invited to journey through a pen-and-ink dream world, accompanied by a soundtrack shaped by your gameplay. The title, which was in development for more than four years, is more of something to experience than something to more actively “play” — and that may be just what’s needed right now.

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Daily Crunch: DOJ files suit to stop Plaid acquisition

The DOJ challenges Visa’s acquisition of a fintech startup, Apple releases the latest version of iOS and goPuff acquires an iconic alcohol retailer. This is your Daily Crunch for November 5, 2020.

The big story: DOJ files suit to stop Plaid acquisition

The Department of Justice is challenging Visa’s $5.3 billion acquisition of financial services startup Plaid. There were reports last month that the DOJ was investigating the acquisition, but now the department has actually filed suit.

“By acquiring Plaid, Visa would eliminate a nascent competitive threat that would likely result in substantial savings and more innovative online debit services for merchants and consumers,” DOJ argued.

Visa responded in a statement arguing that the suit shows “a lack of understanding of Plaid’s business and the highly competitive payments landscape in which Visa operates.”

The tech giants

Facebook takes down ‘Stop the Steal 2020’ group organizing around false claims of election chicanery — Facebook has taken down a group that had amassed more than 300,000 members while sharing misinformation and organizing around false allegations of impropriety during the 2020 elections.

Apple releases iOS 14.2 with new emojis and an accessibility feature that locates people with lidar — Among other things, this release introduces more than 100 new emojis.

Review: Microsoft’s Xbox Series X is ahead of its time — This thing has a lot of specs behind it.

Startups, funding and venture capital

Delivery startup goPuff acquires BevMo for $350M — This comes less than a month after goPuff announced a $380 million round that valued the startup at $3.9 billion.

Proctorio used DMCA to take down a student’s critical tweets — A series of tweets by one Miami University student that were critical of a proctoring software company have been hidden by Twitter after the company filed a copyright takedown notice.

Vivid Money raises $17.6M for its European challenger bank — Vivid Money is a challenger bank with a few nifty features.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

Three tips for SaaS founders hoping to join the $1 million ARR club — Building a SaaS company is much, much more difficult if you approach it without a tried and true process.

Implementing a data-driven approach to guarantee fair, equitable and transparent employee pay — The lack of clarity can lead to confusion and negative feelings that affect our productivity and relationships with our employers.

Inside fintech startup Upstart’s IPO filing — The fintech startup facilitates loans between consumers and partner banks, an operation that attracted around $144 million in capital prior to its IPO.

(Reminder: Extra Crunch is our membership program, which aims to democratize information about startups. You can sign up here.)

Everything else

DOJ says it seized over $1 billion in bitcoin from the Silk Road drugs marketplace — In a statement today, the Justice Department confirmed it seized the 70,000 bitcoins generated in revenue from drug sales on the Silk Web marketplace.

NASA wants new and innovative storytelling tech to document its Artemis moon missions — NASA has issued a new request for proposals from partners that would be able to help it supplement its own storytelling in new and innovative ways.

Mixtape podcast: Wellness in the time of the struggle — Shine co-founder and co-CEO Marah Lidey discusses mental health, venture capital, portfolio diversity and connecting with other founders.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.

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Europe urges e-commerce platforms to share data in fight against coronavirus scams

European lawmakers are pressing major e-commerce and media platforms to share more data with each other as a tool to fight rogue traders who are targeting consumers with coronavirus scams.

After the pandemic spread to the West, internet platforms were flooded with local ads for PPE of unknown and/or dubious quality and other dubious coronavirus offers — even after some of the firms banned such advertising.

The concern here is not only consumers being ripped off but the real risk of harm if people buy a product that does not offer the protection claimed against exposure to the virus or even get sold a bogus coronavirus “cure” when none in fact exists.

In a statement today, Didier Reynders, the EU commissioner for justice, said: “We know from our earlier experience that fraudsters see this pandemic as an opportunity to trick European consumers. We also know that working with the major online platforms is vital to protect consumers from their illegal practices. Today I encouraged the platforms to join forces and engage in a peer-to-peer exchange to further strengthen their response. We need to be even more agile during the second wave currently hitting Europe.”

The Commission said Reynders met with 11 online platforms today — including Amazon, Alibaba/AliExpress, eBay, Facebook, Google, Microsoft/Bing, Rakuten and (TechCrunch’s parent entity) Verizon Media/Yahoo — to discuss new trends and business practices linked to the pandemic and push the tech companies to do more to head off a new wave of COVID-19 scams.

In March this year EU Member States’ consumer protection authorities adopted a common position on the issue. The Commission and a pan-EU network of consumer protection enforcers has been in regular contact with the 11 platforms since then to push for a coordinated response to the threat posed by coronavirus scams.

The Commission claims the action has resulted in the platforms reporting the removal of “hundreds of millions” of illegal offers and ads. It also says they have confirmed what it describes as “a steady decline” in new coronavirus-related listings, without offering more detailed data.

In Europe, tighter regulations over what e-commerce platforms sell are coming down the pipe.

Next month regional lawmakers are set to unveil a package of legislation that will propose updates to existing e-commerce rules and aim to increase their legal responsibilities, including around illegal content and dangerous products.

Europe to limit how big tech can push its own services and use third-party data

In a speech last week, Commission EVP Margrethe Vestager, who heads up the bloc’s digital policy, said the Digital Services Act (DSA) will require platforms to take more responsibility for dealing with illegal content and dangerous products, including by standardizing processes for reporting illegal content and dealing with reports and complaints related to content.

A second legislative package that’s also due next month — the Digital Markets Act — will introduce additional rules for a sub-set of platforms considered to hold a dominant market position. This could include requirements that they make data available to rivals, with the aim of fostering competition in digital markets.

MEPs have also pushed for a “know your business customer” principle to be included in the DSA.

Simultaneously, the Commission has been pressing for social media platforms to open up about what it described in June as a coronavirus “infodemic” — in a bid to crack down on COVID-19-related disinformation.

Today the Commission gave an update on actions taken in the month of September by Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter and TikTok to combat coronavirus disinformation — publishing its third set of monitoring reports. Thierry Breton, commissioner for the internal market, said more needs to be done there too.

“Viral spreading of disinformation related to the pandemic puts our citizens’ health and safety at risk. We need even stronger collaboration with online platforms in the coming weeks to fight disinformation effectively,” he said in a statement. 

The platforms are signatories of the EU’s (non-legally binding) Code of Practice on disinformation.

Legally binding transparency rules for platforms on tackling content such as illegal hate speech look set to be part of the DSA package. Though it remains to be seen how the fuzzier issue of “harmful content” (such as disinformation attached to a public health crisis) will be tackled.

A European Democracy Action Plan to address the disinformation issue is also slated before the end of the year.

In a pointed remark accompanying the Commission’s latest monitoring reports today, Vera Jourová, VP for values and transparency, said: “Platforms must step up their efforts to become more transparent and accountable. We need a better framework to help them do the right thing.”

Tech giants must open up about the coronavirus ‘infodemic’, say EU lawmakers

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[workfromhom]

Facebook takes down “Stop the Steal 2020” group organizing around false claims of election chicanery

Facebook has taken down a group that had amassed over 300,000 members and was sharing misinformation and organizing around false allegations of impropriety during the 2020 elections.

The group, called “Stop the Steal 2020” was organizing protests targeting the election officials currently counting ballots cast in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Phoenix, and Las Vegas.

“In line with the exceptional measures that we are taking during this period of heightened tension, we have removed the Group ‘Stop the Steal,’ which was creating real-world events,” said a Facebook spokesperson in a statement emailed to TechCrunch. “The group was organized around the delegitimization of the election process, and we saw worrying calls for violence from some members of the group.”

Facebook’s action was first noticed by Ryan Mac of Buzzfeed who reported the move in a tweet.

Facebook statement: “In line with the exceptional measures that we are taking during this period of heightened tension, we have removed the Group 'Stop the Steal,' which was creating real-world events…

— Ryan Mac

(@RMac18) November 5, 2020

Protestors advocating for votes to be counted and for vote counting to cease are cropping up across the country as Republican party organizers and campaign officials try to derail the count of mail-in ballots and absentee votes cast in the 2020 race and Democratic supporters organize counter-protests.

While the organizers may be tapping supporters of President Trump across the country, their messaging is different depending on the state.

In Phoenix, protestors are calling for all votes to be counted, as Presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden hangs on to a slim lead in Arizona.

Meanwhile, the messaging is the opposite in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Nevada where President Donald Trump is trying to preserve the slim margins that have him ahead or reverse the counts that had put him behind in the polls. In Detroit, for instance, Trump supporters held up signs that said “stop the steal” and “stop the cheat” according to news reports.

Conservative advocates across the Twittersphere have had their tweets amended by the company to indicate that they were sharing election misinformation.

Facebook has also added “labels” to election posts that break the rules, though they are designed to mostly point users to contextual, factual information rather than to offer explicit warnings about false claims.

In fact, as a direct response to Trump’s premature claims of victory, Facebook also rolled out an eye-catching set of messages across Facebook and Instagram reminding users that votes were still being counted.

Once President Trump began making premature claims of victory, we started running notifications on Facebook and Instagram that votes are still being counted and a winner is not projected. We're also automatically applying labels to both candidates’ posts with this information. pic.twitter.com/tuGGLJkwcy

— Facebook Newsroom (@fbnewsroom) November 4, 2020

Facebook has also instituted changes to its policies about groups that organize real-world events in the wake of 2016’s election disinformation campaign carried out by Russian agents and the recent shooting in Kenosha, Wis. in which two men were killed after a local self-declared militia group organized a response to pprotests against the killing of Kenosha resident, Jacob Blake.

Facebook removes ‘Kenosha Guard’ militia account after shooter kills two at protest

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Facebook blocks hashtags for #sharpiegate, #stopthesteal election conspiracies

Facebook today began to block select hashtags which were being used to share misinformation related to the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

Now, searches for the hashtags #SharpieGate is being blocked on the social network. Another election conspiracy hashtag #stopthesteal is also blocked on Facebook, with a note saying some of its content goes against the platform’s community standards. The #stopthesteal hashtag has been promoted by Donald Trump Jr. and other Trump campaign associates on Twitter.

Instead of taking users to search results for the hashtag in question, Facebook presents a page where it explains that posts with the hashtag are being “temporarily hidden.” This message also explains that “some content in those posts goes against our Community Standards,” and offers to direct users to its guidelines under a “Learn More” link.

Image Credits: Facebook screenshot via TechCrunch

Though TechCrunch found select election misinformation hashtags had been banned, there were still many others that would direct users to content that pushed conspiracies disputing the election results or outright calling them fraudulent.

For example, hashtags like #RiggedElection, #Rigged, #ElectionFraud, #ElectionMeddling and others still worked, and even directed users to content associated with QAnon conspiracies, at times — despite Facebook’s earlier ban on QAnon content, which extended to many associated hashtags.

Given that Facebook allowed QAnon content to spread for years, it’s notable that the company moved to block election misinformation hashtags in a matter of days. That indicates Facebook is capable of addressing viral misinformation somewhat quickly — it just has historically chosen not to do so.

As for the hashtags themselves, Sharpiegate had already been thoroughly debunked, both by news outlets and election officials. In a letter posted to Twitter, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors debunked the claims that the use of sharpies would invalidate ballots. Because the ballots are printed with offset columns, the use of sharpies is allowed and would not cause bleed-through or other issues.

Transparency and security is of the utmost importance to us. We provided Sharpies to be used for in person voters at all @maricopacounty Vote Centers. After multiple tests, we found Sharpie to have the fastest-drying ink and best suited for our Vote Center tabulators. https://t.co/B8vmwSTK3f

— Maricopa County Elections Department (@MaricopaVote) November 5, 2020

The claim was first made Tuesday in a video posted to Facebook in which a woman claims poll workers were encouraging some voters to use sharpies in order to invalidate their ballots. That video is now flagged on Facebook with a “false information” label and requires users to click through to watch it.

In addition to its hashtag bans, Facebook today also removed a group, “Stop the Steal 2020,” BuzzFeed’s Ryan Mac first reported. The group was tied to real-world protests, which have erupted around the country as key states continue to tally votes.

“In line with the exceptional measures that we are taking during this period of heightened tension, we have removed the Group ‘Stop the Steal,’ which was creating real-world events,” Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone told TechCrunch. “The group was organized around the delegitimization of the election process, and we saw worrying calls for violence from some members of the group.”

As he has signaled he would for months, President Trump is leaning heavily into a false narrative that suspicious polling place behavior and late-arriving ballots are part of a Democratic plot to thwart his reelection chances. In a speech from the White House early Wednesday morning, Trump declared premature victory, raising baseless concerns that mail-in ballots, which were expected to lean heavily Democratic, were somehow improper as they erased some of his early gains. “We were getting ready to win this election,” Trump said. “Frankly, we did win this election.”

On Twitter, many of Trump’s recent tweets promoting unfounded election conspiracies have been hidden from view and placed behind a misinformation warning. Those hidden tweets also have likes, retweets and comments restricted in order to limit their ability to spread in a viral way. On Facebook, the president’s posts alleging fraud at voting sites are not called out directly as misinformation. Instead, Facebook pairs them with informational labels reminding users that vote-by-mail ballots are trustworthy or noting that election officials follow “strict rules” around processing and counting ballots.

Facebook so far has not responded to a request for comment about its new hashtag bans, but they’re observable within the Facebook app on both the desktop and mobile app as of the time of writing.

Close US election results plunge social media into nightmare misinformation scenario

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[workfromhom]

WhatsApp receives approval to expand its payments service in India

WhatsApp, which began testing its payments service in India with 1 million users in early 2018, can finally start to expand the feature to more users in the world’s second largest internet market.

National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), the body that operates the widely popular UPI payments infrastructure, said on Thursday evening that it has granted approval to WhatsApp to roll out UPI-powered payments in India.

Like Google, Samsung, and a number of other firms, WhatsApp has built its payments service atop UPI, a payments infrastructure built by a coalition of large banks in India. NPCI said WhatsApp, which has amassed over 400 million users in India, can expand payments to its users in a “graded manner” and to start with, it can only roll out the payments service to 20 million users and has to work with multiple banking partners.

A WhatsApp spokesperson in India did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Google and Walmart currently dominate the mobile payments market in India with roughly 40% of the UPI market share. UPI has emerged as the most popular digital payments method in India, thanks in part to New Delhi’s abrupt move to invalidate more than 85% of the paper cash circulation in the nation in late 2016.

More to follow…

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[workfromhom]

WhatsApp now lets you post ephemeral messages, which disappear after 7 days

Facebook recently announced that WhatsApp passed the whopping milestone of 100 billion messages sent per day, but not everyone wants those chats to stick around forever. Now, Facebook’s wildly popular messaging app with 2 billion users is adding a feature to give people more control on how their words and pictures live within the app. From today, messages — including photos and videos — can now be marked to disappear after 7 days.

The feature is being rolled out globally across Android and iOS starting today, WhatsApp said. While it’s starting with a 7 day lifespan, it is already looking at playing around with the time limits.

“We will keep an eye on feedback about how people are using it and liking it and see if it needs adjusting in the future,” a spokesperson said. “For now we are starting with seven days, because it feels like a nice balance between the utility you need for global text based conversations and the feeling of things not sticking around forever.”

And just to be clear, the 7-day limit will exist regardless of whether the message gets read or not. (The clock starts counting when the message is sent, as it does on other apps like Telegram.)

“The way it’s currently designed is to give the sender confidence that after 7 days their message is gone. The messages have no concept of being seen, for them to disappear, so they will disappear regardless of read status,” said the spokesperson.

Users can turn on the feature for direct messages, but in groups it’s the admin that has to enable disappearing messages for it to work.

Although today is the “official” announcement, eagle-eyed WhatsApp watchers had spotted the company posting FAQs on the feature some days ago. And tests of the feature actually first started to appear — and,  fittingly, disappear — as early as March of this year.

This isn’t WhatsApp’s first rodeo with disappearing content.

In 2017, the company first dabbled in the idea with the launch of Status — an encrypted clone of Snapchat’s Stories feature, which let people set up short updates on themselves — in the form of some text and/or a GIF — as essentially a “profile” for all of their contacts to see for a set period of 24 hours, with the Statuses existing in their own tab in the app separate from your chats.

It’s not clear how popular the Status feature is these days: we’ve reached out to ask. Anecdotally, I’ve seen younger people using it a lot, where it lives as a proxy, pared-down version of updating your status on Facebook or Snapchat, older people less so.

WhatsApp said that one of the reasons it’s taken its developers so long to bring the ephemeral feature to the wider chat experience is in part because of the encrypted aspect of the app:

“[End-to-end encryption] was partly why it took us so long to implement this feature, because we wanted to retain the e2e capabilities that WhatsApp users expect and love,” the spokesperson said.

But in any case it’s a very long time in coming.

Ephemerality has been one of the most radical and sticky features in messaging in years — it has now been around for close to a decade. And it has arguably been the defining feature for one of the runaway, viral hits of the genre, Snapchat — so much so that clones of the feature have popped up in a number of other apps, from those focused first and foremost on privacy like Signal and Telegram, through to those that are aimed at more casual consumer audiences, like WhatsApp today.

And there could be signs that Facebook is may be looking to roll this out in other apps in its stable, too. Earlier this year it tested disappearing messages in Instagram, which now works officially. However in Messenger the most recent tests for disappearing text seem to be from 2015, but it does have a “secret” messaging feature that lets the sender control how long a message remains.

The new disappearing messaging feature is coming amid some other notable additions in the app that appear to be in aid of the general purpose of giving more control to users.

Earlier this week, WhatsApp announced that it would enable a new storage feature in the app: specifically, an easier way to control how and where photos and other media that you are sent live. This is especially important for active (but perhaps not deep) users of the app, who find their storage is getting gobbled up by innocuous GIFs, photos and videos sent over the app by friends and acquaintances. At the same time, it has also been beefing up the services it offers to businesses, and testing out business models for charging them, one way to stick to their commitment not to put ads into the service.

As with the storage changes, the new disappearing feature will not be switched on for users by default: you have to proactively change the settings.

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[workfromhom]

A QAnon supporter is headed to Congress

Marjorie Taylor Greene’s win in a Georgia House race means that QAnon is headed to Capitol Hill.

Greene openly supports the complex, outlandish conspiracy theory, which posits that President Trump is waging a secret war against a shadowy group of elites who engage in child sex trafficking, among other far-fetched claims. The FBI identified QAnon as a potential inspiration for “conspiracy theory-driven domestic extremists” last year.

Greene’s win is a startling moment of legitimacy for the dangerous conspiracy, though it wasn’t unexpected: her Democratic opponent dropped out of the race for personal reasons in September, clearing her path to the House seat.

Greene’s support for the constellation of conspiracy theories isn’t particularly quiet — nor are her other beliefs. Called a “future Republican star” by President Trump, Greene has been vocal in expressing racist and Islamophobic views. Greene has also espoused September 11 “truther” theories and criticized the use of masks, a scientifically supported measure that reduces transmission of the novel coronavirus.

QAnon, once a belief only at the far-right fringes of the internet, has inspired followers to engage in real-world criminal acts, including fatally shooting a mob boss in Staten Island and blocking the Hoover Dam bridge in an armed standoff.

The conspiracy’s adherents have also hijacked the hashtag #savethechildren, interfering with legitimate child safety efforts and exporting their extreme ideas into mainstream conversation under the guise of helping children. Facebook, which previously banned QAnon, limited the hashtag’s reach last month in light of the phenomenon.

Facebook is limiting distribution of ‘save our children’ hashtag over QAnon ties

Other QAnon believers are on the ballot in 2020, including in Oregon, where Jo Rae Perkins is projected to lose her race against incumbent Senate Democrat Jeff Merkley. Perkins was very open about her beliefs and in June tweeted a video pledging her allegiance as a “digital soldier” for QAnon along with a popular hashtag associated with the conspiracy movement.

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