Year: 2018

A coalition of twenty-two consumer and public health advocacy groups, led by Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC) and Center for Digital Democracy (CDD), have today filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission asking them to investigate and sanction Google for how its Google Play Store markets apps to children. The complaint states that Google features apps designed for very young children in its Play Store’s “Family” section, many of which are violating federal children’s privacy law, exposing kids to inappropriate content, and disregarding Google’s own policies by luring kids into making in-app purchases and watching ads.

Google Play ‘Family’ Section

Google first introduced its “Designed for Families” program back in 2015, which gives developers of kid-friendly apps meeting certain guidelines additional visibility in the Play Store. This includes a placement in the Family section, where apps are organized by age appropriateness.

To qualify, “Family” apps must abide by specific content policies, Google’s Developer Distribution Agreement, and the Designed for Families DDA Addendum. The apps must also meet the Designed for Families program requirements. Legal compliance with federal privacy laws, including COPPA (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule), are among the requirements.

COPPA is designed to protect children under the age of 13 by giving parents control over what information sites and apps can collect from their kids.

Above: Google Play store showcases children’s content in its own dedicated sections

COPPA Violations

But the new FTC complaint claims that Google is not verifying COPPA compliance when it accepts these apps and, as a result, many are in continual violation of the law.

“Our research revealed a surprising number of privacy violations on Android apps for children, including sharing geolocation with third parties,” said Serge Egelman, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, in a statement shared by the group. “Given Google’s assertion that Designed for Families apps must be COPPA compliant, it’s disappointing these violations still abound, even after Google was alerted to the scale of the problem,” he added.

TechCrunch asked the coalition if it had some idea about how many apps were in violation of COPPA, and were told the groups don’t know an exact number.

“From our survey – and more comprehensive analyses like the PET Study – it seems fairly prevalent,” Lindsey Barrett, Staff Attorney at Georgetown’s Institute for Public Representation, told us.

“The PET Study found that 73% of the kids apps in the Play store transmitted sensitive data over the internet, and we saw apps sending geolocation without notice and verifiable parental consent, and sending personal information unencrypted,” Barrett said. “Further, under COPPA, children’s PII cannot be used for behavioral advertising. Yet, many of the children’s apps we looked at were sending information to ad networks which say their services should not be used with children’s apps,” she added.

Other Harms

The apps also engage in other bad behaviors like regularly showing ads that are difficult to exit or showing those that require viewing in order to continue the current game, according to the complaint. Some apps pressure kids into making in-app purchases – in one example, the game characters were crying if the kids didn’t buy the locked items, it notes. Others show ads for alcohol and gambling, despite those being barred by Google’s Ad Policy.

Above: disturbing images from TabTale apps

The coalition additionally called out some apps for containing “graphic, sexualized images” like TutoTOONS Sweet Baby Girl Daycare 4 – Babysitting Fun, which has over 10 million downloads. (The game has a part where kids change a baby’s diaper, wipe their diaper area, then rub powder all over the baby’s body.) Others model harmful behavior, like TabTale’s Crazy Eye Clinic, which teaches children to clean their eyes with a sharp instrument, and has over one million downloads. (The game is currently not available on Google Play and its webpage is down.)

The complaint also broadly takes issue with apps that use common SDKs like those from Unity or Flurry (disclosure: Flurry and TechCrunch share a corporate parent) to collect device identifiers from the children’s apps.

“Nearly three-quarters of the apps in the Family section transmit device identifiers to third parties,” reads the complaint. “There is no way for us to know for sure what the device identifiers are used for. Since many of the apps send device identifiers to third parties that specialize in monetizing apps and/or engaging in interest-based (behavioral) advertising, it seems unlikely that this information is being used solely to support internal operations,” it says.

Above: Strawberry Shortcake Puppy Palace was called out for aggressive monetization efforts. Strawberry tells kids to buy things to keep the puppy happy – the implication is if you don’t pay, you’re making puppies sad.

The groups say that Google has been aware of all these problems for some time, but hasn’t taken adequate steps to enforce its criteria for developers. As a result, the consumer advocacy groups are urging the FTC to investigate the Play Store’s practices.

The coalition had previously asked the FTC to investigate developers of children’s apps aimed a preschoolers who were using manipulative advertising. But today’s complaint is focused on Google.

“Google (Alphabet, Inc.) has long engaged in unethical and harmful business practices, especially when it comes to children,” explained Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy. “And the Federal Trade Commission has for too long ignored this problem, placing both children and their parents at risk over their loss of privacy, and exposing them to a powerful and manipulative marketing apparatus. As one of the world’s leading providers of content for kids online, Google continues to put the enormous profits they make from kids ahead of any concern for their welfare,” Chester said.

Apple was not similarly called out because a similar analysis has not yet been done on its app marketplace, Josh Golin, Executive Director at CCFC told us. In Google’s case, he explained, two major studies found widespread issues with the Play Store apps for kids. One from Berkeley researchers found widespread COPPA non-compliance; the other, by University of Michigan researchers, found children’s play experience was often completely interrupted and undermine by aggressive marketing tactics.

The complaint comes at a time where there is increased scrutiny as to how tech companies are misusing and abusing consumer data and violating privacy. Kids game have already been the subject of some of some concern. And this morning, an NYT investigation into Facebook revealed it had shared more of users’ personal data than disclosed with major tech companies, following a year of data scandals.

The issue of data privacy is an industry-wide problem. Tech companies’ failures on this front will likely lead to increased regulation going forward.

The named developers were not immediately available to comment this morning. We’ll update if comments are provided.

Google says it’s taking the complaint seriously. It has removed thousands of apps from its Designed for Families program this year, and rejects a third of applications.

“Parents want their children to be safe online and we work hard to protect them. Apps in our Designed for Families program have to comply with strict policies on content, privacy and advertising, and we take action on any policy violations that we find,” a Google spokesperson says. “We take these issues very seriously and continue to work hard to remove any content that is inappropriately aimed at children from our platform,” they added.

The full complaint is below.

Sprout Social, a social media monitoring, marketing and analytics service with 25,000 business customers that helps these organizations manage their public profiles and interact with customers across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Google+ (soon to RIP), has raised $40.5 million in funding in order expand its business internationally and add more functionality to its platform.

The money — a Series B led by Future Fund with participation from Goldman Sachs and New Enterprise Associates — brings the total raised by Sprout to $103.5 million to date. We’ve asked the company about its valuation, and we’ll update as we learn more. For some context, Sprout last raised in 2016 — $42 million also from Goldman Sachs and NEA — and at the time it had a post-money valuation of $253 million, according to PitchBook.

That cold mean that the valuation now is just shy of $300 million. But between then and now, there have been some interesting developments that could have shifted that price in either direction.

On one side, multiple sources have told us that Sprout was being courted by Microsoft for acquisition at one point (both companies declined to comment on this for us at the time we were looking into it). One reason, one source told us, that the deal didn’t go through was because they couldn’t reach a deal on pricing.

On the other, one of Sprout’s biggest competitors, Hootsuite (with 15 million users, paid and free), has been rumored to be shopping itself for about $750 million, or potentially going public, while smaller competitors have moved in on some consolidation to bulk up their own presence in the field.

In the meantime, Sprout itself has been growing. The company’s 25,000 customers are up from 16,000 two years ago, with current users including Microsoft, NBCUniversal, the Denver Nuggets and Grubhub and MTV.

One of the reasons for the growth is the larger shift we’ve seen in how businesses interact with the outside world. Social media is today perhaps the most important platform for businesses to communicate with their users: not only has social media helped customers circumvent the often frustrating spaghetti that lies behind the deceptive phrase “contact us” on websites, but social media has become a spotlight, which businesses have to watch lest a sticky situation snowballs into a public relations disaster.

Platforms like Twitter and Facebook, to grow their revenues, have ramped up their efforts to work on social media campaigns and interactions directly with organizations. But there is still a place for third parties like Sprout Social to manage work that goes across a number of social sites, and to address services that the social platforms themselves do not necessarily want to invest in building directly.

“I think there are a bunch of reasons why we don’t build bot experience ourselves,” Jeff Lesser, who heads up product marketing for Twitter Business Messaging, told me when Sprout launched a “bot builder” to be used on Twitter, and I asked him why Sprout shouldn’t worry about Twitter cannibalizing its product. “There are millions of types of businesses that can use our platform, so we’re letting the ecosystem build the solutions that they need. We are focusing on building the canvas for them to do that.”

In other words, while Sprout (and competitors) should always be a little wary of platform players who may decide to simply kick them off in the name of business, there are always going to be opportunities if they have the resources double down on more tech to solve a different problem, or simply execute on fixing an existing problem better.

“Social marketing and social data have become mission-critical to virtually all aspects of business. Sprout’s relentless focus on quality and customer success have made us the top customer-rated platform in every category and segment,” said Justyn Howard, CEO of Sprout, in a statement. “In many ways, social is still in its infancy, and we’re fortunate to help so many great customers navigate this evolving set of challenges.”

Uber has lost another appeal against a landmark 2016 UK employment tribunal ruling that found a group of drivers to be workers, rather than self-employed, meaning they’re entitled to benefits such as holiday pay and the National Minimum Wage.

The court of appeal today upheld previous decisions classifying the drivers as workers.

Although the ruling was not unanimous and Uber has been granted permission to appeal direct to the Supreme Court.

Commenting on the ruling in a statement Uber said:

This decision was not unanimous and does not reflect the reasons why the vast majority of drivers choose to use the Uber app. We have been granted permission to appeal to the Supreme Court and will do so.

Almost all taxi and private hire drivers have been self-employed for decades, long before our app existed. Drivers who use the Uber app make more than the London Living Wage and want to keep the freedom to choose if, when and where they drive. If drivers were classified as workers they would inevitably lose some of the freedom and flexibility that comes with being their own boss.

The original tribunal dismissed Uber’s argument that its platform merely supplies drivers with “business opportunities” — calling it a “pure fiction which bears no relation to the real dealings and relationships between the parties”.

But Uber points out that one of the appeals court judges, Lord Justice Underhill, expressed the view that the relationship it argued for “is neither unrealistic nor artificial”, accepting it being “in accordance with a well-recognised model for relationships in the private hire car business”.

The company also points to a number of changes to its business since the 2016 ruling, such as offering insurance cover for drivers.

“Over the last two years we’ve made many changes to give drivers even more control over how they use the app, alongside more security through sickness, maternity and paternity protections. We’ll keep listening to drivers and introduce further improvements,” its statement adds.

On the other side, co-lead claimant James Farrar, a former Uber driver who is now chair of the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain (IWGB), welcomed the ruling — but also criticized Uber for “delaying inevitable changes to its business model”

In a statement Farrar said:

I am delighted today’s ruling brings us closer to the ending Uber’s abuse of precarious workers made possible by tactics of contract trickery, psychological manipulation and old-fashioned bullying. However, I am dismayed that implementation of worker status for drivers is further delayed while Uber seeks yet another appeal. This is nothing more than a cynical ploy to delay inevitable changes to its business model while it pursues a record breaking $120 billion stock market flotation. It’s time for Uber to come clean with all its stakeholders and abide by the decision of the courts.

Fellow co-lead claimant, and secretary of the IWGB’s United Private Hire Drivers branch, Yaseen Aslam, also expressed frustration at the protracted legal fight — writing:

I’m delighted with today’s ruling, but frustrated that the process has dragged on for over three years. It cannot be left to precarious workers like us to bring companies like Uber to account and despite the personal price we have had to pay, we are the lucky ones. We know of many that are under such hardship, that it would be unimaginable for them to take a multi-billion pound company to court. It is now time for the government and the Mayor of London to act and stop letting companies like Uber take them for a ride.

Uber lost its first appeal against the 2016 tribunal ruling a year ago but vowed to keep on appealing.

At the same time unions are keeping up the pressure on the ride-hailing giant, calling a drivers strike two months ago and urging Uber to immediately apply the tribunal judgement — and implement “employment conditions that respect worker rights for drivers, including the payment of at least the minimum wage and paid holidays”.

Uber has previously told policymakers that if it was required to pay such benefits to the circa 50,000 drivers operating on its platform in the UK it would cost its business “tens of millions” of pounds.

Commenting on today’s decision, Rachel Farr, a senior professional support lawyer in the employment, pensions & mobility group at Taylor Wessing, suggested the judgement could have ramifications for other gig economy platforms, bolstering those that argue such workers “deserve a better deal”.

Though she also emphasized the case-by-case nature of employment classification decisions.

“This decision will have an impact both across the gig economy and in more traditional sectors and will give encouragement to claimants in other cases which are awaiting a hearing or stayed pending the outcome,” she said in a statement. “But just because Uber lost, it doesn’t mean that others will: Each case will be considered on its specific facts, including the contractual terms between the parties and what actually happens in practice.”

Food delivery startup Deliveroo, for example, has so far prevailing in UK courts against union-backed attempts to gain collective bargaining rights by challenging its classification of couriers as independent contractors.

Last year a UK employment tribunal judged that Deliveroo riders could not be considered workers because they had a genuine right to find a substitute to do their job for them.

At the same time the government has been consulting on updating employment law to take account of tech-fuelled changes to working patterns. And earlier this week it set out a labor market reform package — billing it as a major upgrade to workplace rights.

Although unions dubbed the plan heavy on spin and weak on substance, reiterating accusations that gig economy giants are getting fat by exploiting workers.

Nor are unions the sole critics of pay and conditions in the gig economy.

Reacting to the Uber decision today, Frank Field MP — who has conducted an inquiry into gig economy pay and conditions (and whose report on Deliveroo likened its asymmetrical model to 20th century dockyards) — dubbed it “another stunning victory for workers against the exploitation and poverty wages that stem from bogus self-employment in the gig economy”.

“The Government’s job now is to ensure justice is delivered for workers all year round, not just at Christmas,” he added.

This week the government said it’s committed to legislate to improve the clarity of the employment status tests — to “reflect the reality of the modern working relationships” — which could have major implications for platform giants like Uber.

Although at this stage it’s not clear what the reformed employment tests will look like, nor how its approach might end up redrawing the line for workers. So there’s much tbc there.

“The long-drawn history of the Uber case shows that the current law is not easy for businesses and those who work for them to understand. Clarifying such a complex area of law is easier said than done and it remains to be seen what this promise will actually mean,” noted TaylorWessing’s Farr.

“However, what is certain is that there is an evolving consciousness around the nature of work within an increasingly flexible and digitalised economy. The future of work will change and employers sticking to arguably outdated relationships with their employees are likely to be left behind.”

Congestion charge looming

In other news today that’s also likely to impact Uber’s business, London’s mayor and transport regulator, TfL, have announced they will lift the congestion charge exemption for private hire vehicles (PHVs), as part of a strategy to tackle pollution and congestion in the city.

From April 8 only zero emission-capable vehicles will be exempt from the charge in London.

PHVs that are not wheelchair accessible will also have their exemption removed. So even Uber drivers using Prius (or similar) electric hybrid vehicles will still have to pay the charge from early next year.

The change of policy, which follows a public consultation, is expected to reduce the number of PHVs circulating in London’s Congestion Charging Zone by up to 8,000 per day.

The mayor’s target is a 65% reduction in taxi emissions by 2025 with the stated aim of protecting the health of Londoners.

Air toxicity in the UK capital has been exceeding legal limits for years, coinciding with a big rise in the number of PHVs on London’s streets after Uber’s 2012 launch kicked off the ride-hailing craze.

The European Commission has finally given the U.S. a deadline related to the much criticized data transfer mechanism known as the EU-US Privacy Shield .

But it’s only asking for the U.S. to nominate a permanent ombudsperson — to handle any EU citizens’ complaints — by February 28, 2019.

If a permanent ombudsperson is not appointed by then the Commission says it will “consider taking appropriate measures, in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation”.

So not an out-and-out threat to suspend the mechanism — which is what critics and MEPs have been calling for.

But still a fixed deadline at last.

“We now expect our American partners to nominate the Ombudsperson on a permanent basis, so we can make sure that our EU-US relations in data protection are fully trustworthy,” said Andrus Ansip, Commission VP for the Digital Single Market, in a statement.

“All elements of the Shield must be working at full speed, including the Ombudsperson,” added Věra Jourová, the commissioner for justice and consumers.

It’s the first sign the Commission is losing patience with its U.S. counterparts.

Although there’s no doubt the EC remains fully committed to the survival of the business-friendly mechanism which it spent years negotiating after the prior arrangement, Safe Harbor, was struck down by Europe’s top court following NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s disclosures of US government surveillance programs.

Its problem is it has to contend with Trump administration priorities — which naturally don’t align with privacy protection for non-US citizens.

While the EU-US Privacy Shield is over two years’ old at this point, president Trump has failed to nominate a permanent ombudsperson to a key oversight role.

The acting civil servant (Judith Garber, principal deputy assistant secretary for the Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs) was also nominated as U.S. ambassador to Cyprus this summer, suggesting a hard limit to her already divided attention on EU citizens’ data privacy.

Despite this problematic wrinkle, the EU’s executive today professed itself otherwise satisfied that the mechanism is ensuring “an adequate level of protection for personal data”, announcing the conclusion of its second annual Privacy Shield review.

The data transfer mechanism is now used by more than 4,000 companies to simplify flows of EU citizens’ personal data to the US.

And the Commission clearly wants to avoid a repeat of the scramble that kicked off when, three years ago, Safe Harbor was struck down and businesses had to find alternative legal means for authorizing essential data flows.

But at the same time Privacy Shield has been under growing pressure. This summer the EU parliament called for the mechanism to be suspended until the U.S. comes into compliance.

The parliament’s Libe committee also called for better monitoring of data transfers was clearly required in light of the Cambridge Analytica Facebook data misuse scandal. (Both companies having been signed up to Privacy Shield.)

The mechanism has also been looped into a separate legal challenge to another data transfer tool after the Irish High Court referred a series of questions to the European Court of Justice — setting the stage for another high stakes legal drama if fundamental European privacy rights are again deemed incompatible with U.S. national security practices.

A decision on that referral remains for the future. But in the meanwhile the Commission looks to be doing everything it can to claim it’s ‘business as usual’ for EU-US data flows.

In a press release today, it lauds steps taken by the U.S. authorities to implement recommendations it made in last year’s Privacy Shield review — saying they have “improved the functioning of the framework”.

Albeit, the detail of these slated ‘improvements’ shows how very low its starting bar was set — with the Commission listing, for e.g.:

• the strengthening by the Department of Commerce of the certification process and of its proactive oversight over the framework — including setting up mechanisms such as a system of spot checks (it says that 100 companies have been checked; and 21 had “issues that have now been solved” — suggesting a fifth of claimed compliance was, er, not actually compliance)
• additional “compliance review procedures” such as analysis of Privacy Shield participants’ websites “to ensure that links to privacy policies are correct”; so previously we must assume no one in the U.S. was bothering to check
• the Department of Commerce put in place a system to identify false claims which the Commission now claims “prevents companies from claiming their compliance with the Privacy Shield, when they have not been certified”; so again, prior to this system being set up certifications weren’t necessary worth the pixels they were painted in

The Commission also claims the Federal Trade Commission has shown “a more proactive approach” to enforcement by monitoring the principles of the Privacy Shield — noting that, for example, it has issued subpoenas to request information from participating companies.

Another change it commends — related to the sticky issue of access to personal data by U.S. public authorities for national security purposes (which is what did for Safe Harbor) — is the appointment of new members of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) — to restore the Board’s quorum.

The denuded PCLOB has been a long running bone of contention for Privacy Shield critics.

“The Board’s report on the implementation of Presidential Policy-Directive No. 28 (PPD-28, which provides for privacy protections for non-Americans) has been made publicly available,” the Commission writes, referring to a key Obama era directive that it has previously said the Shield depends upon. “It confirms that these privacy protections for non-Americans are implemented across the U.S. intelligence community.”

It says it also took into account relevant developments in the U.S. legal system in the area of privacy during the review, noting that: “The Department of Commerce launched a consultation on a federal approach to data privacy to which the Commission contributed and the US Federal Trade Commission is reflecting on its current powers in this area.”

“In the context of the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal, the Commission noted the Federal Trade Commission’s confirmation that its investigation of this case is ongoing,” it adds, kicking the can down the road on that particular data scandal.

Meanwhile, as you’d expect, business groups have welcomed another green light for data to keep being passed.

In a statement responding to the conclusion of the review, the Computer & Communications Industry Association said: “We commend the European Commission for its thorough review. Privacy Shield is a robust framework, with strong data protections, that allows for the daily transfers of commercial data between the world’s two biggest trading partners.”

Google announced today it’s now using mobile-first indexing for over half the web pages shown in its search results globally – a significant milestone in Google’s move to favor mobile sites over desktop sites in its search results.

The plans for the project have been in the works for years.

The company had first detailed its efforts around mobile-first indexing back in 2016, where it explained the impacts to how its search index operates. It said it would shift over to using the mobile version of a website’s content to index its pages, as well as to understand its structured data and show snippets from the site in Google’s search results.

Its reasoning behind the change is simple: most people today search Google from a mobile device, not a desktop computer. But Google’s ranking systems for the web were originally built for the desktop era. They still typically look at the desktop version of the page’s content to determine its relevance to the user.

This, obviously, causes problems when the desktop site and the mobile site are not in sync.

Before responsive web design became more commonplace, many site owners built a separate, simpler and sometimes less informative version of their site for their mobile web visitors. These users may have been guided to the site because of Google Search. But once there, they couldn’t find what they were looking for because it was only available on the desktop version of the web page.

In December 2017, Google said it had begun to transition a small handful of sites to mobile-first indexing.

Earlier this year, Google announced it had begun to officially roll out its “mobile-first” indexing of the web, following a year and a half of testing and experimentation. At the time, it said it would first move over the sites already following the best practices for mobile-first indexing. It also noted it would favor the site’s own mobile version of its webpage over Google’s fast-loading AMP pages.

Sites who are shifted are notified through a message in Search Console and then see increased visits from the smartphone version of Googlebot, which crawls the mobile version of their site. Site owners can also check their server logs, where they can track the increased requests from Googlebot Smartphone.

Google additionally offers a URL inspection tool, which site owners can use to check how a URL from their site – like the homepage – was last crawled and indexed.

Google today notes that sites that don’t use responsive web design are seeing two common problems when Google tries to move them over to mobile-first indexing.

Some don’t use structured data on their mobile sites, even though they use it on the desktop. This is important because it helps Google to understand the website’s content and allows it to highlight pages’ content in its search results, through its “fancier” features like rich results, Knowledge Graph results, enhanced search results, carousels and more – basically any time you see more engaging search results that offer more than just a list of blue links.

The company also said that some mobile sites were missing alt-text for images, which makes it harder for Google to understand the images’ content.

At the time of the initial wave of sites being shifted over, Google had said that the mobile-friendly index wouldn’t directly impact how content is ranked, but it did say that a site’s mobile-friendly content will help it “perform better” in mobile search results. Mobile-friendliness has also long been one of many factors in determining how a site is ranked, but it’s not the only one.

Google didn’t say what it will do to sites that are never properly updated for the mobile web, but it seems that – at some point – their ranking could be impacted.

Dataiku wants to turn buzzwords into an actual service. The company has been focused on data tools for many years, before everybody started talking about big data, data science and machine learning.

And the company just raised $101 million in a round led by Iconiq Capital with Alven Capital, Battery Ventures, Dawn Capital and FirstMark Capital also participating.

If you’re generating a lot of data, Dataiku helps you find a meaning behind data sets. First, you import your data by connecting Dataiku to your storage system. The platform supports dozens of database formats and sources — Hadoop, NoSQL, images, you name it.

You can then use Dataiku to visualize your data, clean your data set, run some algorithms on your data in order to build a machine learning model, deploy it and more. Dataiku has a visual coding tool, or you can use your own code.

But Dataiku isn’t just a tool for data scientists. Even if you’re a business analyst, you can visualize and extract data from Dataiku directly. And because of its software-as-a-service approach, your entire team of data scientists and data analysts can collaborate on Dataiku.

Clients use it to track churn, detect fraud, forecast demand, optimize lifetime values and more. Customers include General Electric, Sephora, Unilever, KUKA, FOX and BNP Paribas.

With today’s funding round, the company plans to double its staff. The company currently works with 200 people in New York, Paris and London. It plans to open offices in Singapore and Sydney as well.

The latest revelations about Facebook’s handling of user data — an investigation by the New York Timesfound that Facebook had been providing special data access to large companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Spotify and others — has landed the social network once more in hot water in Europe, and specifically the United Kingdom.

Today, Damian Collins MP, Chair of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, issued a statement in which he called on competition authorities to open an investigation into abusive market dominance, and also for Facebook to once again appear before his committee to “explain how their policies work on access to user data, and whether policies are a breach of data privacy law, as it would appear that user data was made available to firms without the informed consent of the user having been given.”

Specifically, Collins is focusing on the fact that the report published early today appears to contradict Facebook’s previous testimony.

“I feel that we have been given misleading responses by the company when we have asked these questions during previous evidence sessions,” Collins said in the statement. The full statement is below.

The DCMS has hauled Facebook in for questioning multiple times now over to its ongoing investigation into how Facebook provides access to and safeguards (or doesn’t as the case may be) user data. Previous requests (hereand here) have also specifically asked for Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder, chairman and CEO of Facebook, to appear, although he has yet to do so.

While the statement from Collins doesn’t make mention of it, there are other angles to be explored as well. Earlier this month, LinkedIn was singled out for how it leveraged Facebook’s ad platform to gather information about users’ friends for LinkedIn marketing and networking purposes, and a report in Gizmodoalso published yesterday highlights how that this kind of cross-pollination is/was rife among several other players too. This is likely also to come up in subsequent investigations.

The bottom line is that while these may not be API loopholes along the lines of those exploited by Cambridge Analytica, they all point to just how tangled and intentionally confusing a lot of these relationships are, obscuring just how much information about us is known and used.

The competition authority reference, meanwhile, is linked with the fact that Facebook appeared to give preferential access to user data to larger companies over smaller ones — in fact, cutting smaller companies out of the equation altogether.

Irrespective of whether it was appropriate data access or not (Facebook, of course, argues that each specific dealhad a purpose that did not violate user privacy), there are questions here about whether Facebook abused its market-dominating position in social media by favoring large companies over smaller ones in forging partnerships or providing access to services.

To be clear, Facebook has not been deemed a monopoly by any authorities — although there are investigations underway both in Washingtonand Germanythat are considering whether Facebook could and should be investigated as such. In that context, Collins appeal to competition authorities appears to be a step in the long process of determining whether there are grounds for investigating on that front, and my suspicion is that this is not the last you will year of this.

“The Competition authorities should also investigate how Facebook decides which companies have access to user data and which don’t,” Collins said. “Given the dominant market position they enjoy in social media, this gives real concerns about whether they are behaving as a monopoly, exercising their considerable power to further dominate the commercial environment in which they trade; making some businesses, and breaking others in the process.”

All in all, this is a damning development for the social network — which has over 2 billion users and is fighting fires on other fronts— in its relations with authorities and regulators, one that will continue to erode the company’s reputation with them and users alike.

The full text of Collins’ statement is below:

“This latest investigation adds to the evidence published earlier this month by the DCMS select Committee, from documents we received from the American app developer, Six4Three.

“The investigation shows that Facebook offers preferential access to user data to some of its major corporate partners. The scale of the business these companies do with Facebook underpins the value their relationship. Facebook rewards these firms with data privileges that other organisations to not enjoy.

“We have to seriously challenge the claim by Facebook that they are not selling user data. They may not be letting people take it away by the bucket load, but they do reward companies with access to data that others are denied, if they place a high value on the business they do together. This is just another form of selling. We remain concerned as well about Facebook’s ability to police what happens to user data when it is shared with developers, as was highlighted by the Cambridge Analytica data breach.

“Facebook should come back in front of the Committee to explain how their policies work on access to user data, and whether policies are a breach of data privacy law, as it would appear that user data was made available to firms without the informed consent of the user having been given. I feel that we have been given misleading responses by the company when we have asked these questions during previous evidence sessions.

“The Competition authorities should also investigate how Facebook decides which companies have access to user data and which don’t. Given the dominant market position they enjoy in social media, this gives real concerns about whether they are behaving as a monopoly, exercising their considerable power to further dominate the commercial environment in which they trade; making some businesses, and breaking others in the process.”

Amid all the discussion today about online threats, from censorship to surveillance to cyberwar, we often spend more time on the symptoms than on the underlying chronic conditions. If we want to make people around the world safer from an oppressive, weaponized Internet, we need to get a bit nerdy and talk about Internet standards.

Most Internet censorship today is only possible because the Internet wasn’t designed to protect the privacy of your connections. It wasn’t private by design, so when censors came along, they pushed on an open door. Making Internet connections truly private and secure means updating the fundamental technical standards that govern the global internet.

Fortunately, the first step toward making global internet standards safer and more censorship-resistant is neither controversial nor particularly complicated. Put simply, we should make Internet protocols—the who, what, where of internet addresses—more private. Everyone from regulators to users has been asking for more privacy protections, and improving Internet standards is one foundational way of providing that.

Privacy makes selective censorship harder because censors no longer know the blow-by-blow details of what everyone is doing, so they can’t micromanage a person’s access to the Internet. Improving standards doesn’t take magic — just prototyping, debating, consensus-building, and implementing. The standards that govern the Internet are driven through organizations like the Internet Engineering Task Force.

Since 2015, technologists, facilitated by the IETF, have been considering proposals to enhance privacy for a key element of the Internet: the Domain Name System (DNS). It’s often described as the “address book of the Internet” and it was not designed to use encryption.

Unfortunately, every time you visit a website, your computer first consults the DNS system without any encryption, allowing censors and snoopers to know the name of every website you visit. A new standard is emerging to encrypt DNS lookups.

The standardization of encrypted DNS is just one way Internet standards could be improved. Another example can be seen at CloudFlare, one of the largest content delivery networks in the world. They recently announced support for an evolving standard — “encrypted SNI” — that would close another subtle privacy hole that often occurs when users visit websites hosted on cloud providers.

As a final example, the W3C (another Internet standards body) has been establishing a draft standard for Network Error Logging. This potentially helps address one of the trickiest challenges in tackling network interference: figuring out when interference is even happening. After all, if someone attempts to load a website but cannot access it, any number of things could have gone wrong, from a network glitch to network interference. Because no connection was ever established, the website owner may never even know that someone tried and failed to reach their site. Network Error Logging allows the user’s device to report a failed lookup to a neutral third party that is not blocked. Think of it as enabling ombudsmen when sites are blocked.

The standards we define for the Internet today will determine how the next generation of technologists and technology companies build the tools of the future.

If we don’t approach internet standards with a strong set of values that promote user privacy and freedom of expression, the standards will be set by people who do not share those values, and the overall integrity of the global open internet will inevitably suffer.

The internet may not have been initially designed to prevent censorship by protecting user privacy, but the protection of individual privacy ought to be the North Star guiding how we navigate the challenges of an evolving, global internet. If we’re serious about addressing those challenges, we need to start with improving standards.

Elementary Robotics has raised $3.6 million in seed funding to begin building a manufacturing facility and expand its presence in Los Angeles as the city continues to grow as a hub for robotics and automation. 

Earlier this year, Embodied announced a $22 million round for its personal robotics platform focused on healthcare and wellness, while InVia Robotics collected $20 million for its own take on the robotics industry.

With lead investors like Fika Ventures and Fathom Capital and co-investors including Toyota AI Ventures, Ubiquity Ventures, Riot.vc, Osage University Partners and Stage Venture Partners, Elementary Robotics is readying itself for commercial pilots with a few undisclosed customers as it proves out its technology.

Co-founded by Bill Gross, the brains behind an increasingly resurgent Idealab incubator, and Arye Barnehama, a former head of design at the augmented reality startup DAQRI.

Gross and Barnehama met through a mutual friend in the robotics industry in Los Angeles, the chief executive of Embodied, Paolo Pirjanian, Barnehama wrote in an email. That was around 2017 when the two first began brainstorming how they would build their company. After about a year of research the company launched with an initial investment of $1.2 million.

At the time, Barnehama had taken time off from DAQRI and had begun thinking about how to use the technologies he’d developed around computer vision and visualization to have more of an impact on human lives. 

“After working in AR on work process automation and making that information useful to humans, I became excited about the idea of designing robots that could leverage these new technologies to actually work alongside humans and the positive impact that could have on the world,” Barnehama wrote in an email.

That thinking became the seeds for Elementary Robotics and was one of the aspects of the company that attracted Toyota AI Ventures as a co-investor.

According to a statement from Jim Adler, the founding managing director of Toyota AI Ventures, “Arye and the Elementary Robotics team share our commitment to improve the quality of human life through AI and robotics. They have the talent, expertise, and vision to deliver on that commitment.” 

The investment is part of the corporate investment arm’s call for innovation through its Toyota Research Institute (TRI). “We launched the first call with TRI’s mobile manipulation team to give talented entrepreneurs a nudge in both direction and capital to make assistive robots more useful, safe, and affordable” said Adler.

Barnehama was tight-lipped about the specifics of the technology that Elementary is using for its robotic stack. “Nothing is final because we are still quite early, but we’re using 3D depth sensing cameras along with proprietary custom hardware elements. Beyond that I can’t comment further right now,” the chief executive said.

And Barnehama was equally vague about the company’s mission. “We are building our robots to augment current human output and performance, and enable existing workforces to have greater throughput as well as focus on more complex, human judgment-centered decisions. We look to automate high-repetition tasks and processes while avoiding large upfront capital expenditures and complex multi-year custom builds,” he wrote in an email.

In a separate email, Gross laid out exactly what he found so promising about Elementary’s combination of machine learning and image recognition tools software and robotics.

“Up until now, robotic actuation was mostly about super rigid, super stiff, super strong, repeatable actuation, mostly for manufacturing.  But with the recent advances in computer vision, machine learning, and adaptive learning, now you can have a robot that is gentler, less stiff, but MORE (sic) accurate using vision as your feedback system,” Gross wrote. “In other words, to get to the right place, you don’t have to rely on precise repeatability – instead you can FIND (sic) the right place dynamically with cameras and depth sensors, cheaply, and in real time.This is a game-changer, and opens up a new frontier of lower cost, easier to program, easier to use robotics for more mainstream operations.”

As a result of the investment, Fika Ventures co-founder and managing partner, Eva Ho will take a seat on the company’s board of directors.

Elementary is only Fika’s second investment in a hardware company, and Ho said that the commitment was driven by Arye himself.

“I met Arye almost a year before we wrote the check — and he really articulated a very clear vision of where he saw the gaps were in the robotics industry,” according to Ho. “During his customer research, he was pained by how difficult it was for companies to get robots into production environments – that the investment not only in the expensive robots but the type of talent you needed… to make them work, was so prohibitive… Arye and Bill felt there had to be a better way to introduce automation of repeatable tasks into a multitude of environments in a way that consumers have been trained by Google and Apple.”

In addition, the proximity to some of the world’s best public sector robotics labs makes a compelling case for Los Angeles as a burgeoning hub for the robotics industry.

“Los Angeles is a great place for this, because we have a close relationship with Caltech and JPL,” according to Gross. “JPL is the forerunner in the world of distant robotic missions that have to be failsafe, and amazing research is going on at Caltech on the mechanics and systems.  And LA is great for all the design resources as well, with Art Center, and all the great studios with people who are great at human interaction and story-telling.  So we’re excited to be building this company in LA.”

On the back of Disney increasing its shareholding in Oslo-based Kahoot to four percent last week, Kahoot today announced a new initiative that helps to position the popular startup — which already has 60 million games and has seen over 1 billion players engage on its platform over the last year — as the “Netflix for education apps.”

It’s launching Kahoot! Ignite, a new accelerator for like-minded startups that are pushing the boundaries of education through gaming and other means.

In addition to that, Kahoot today also said it would move stock exchanges in its home market of Norway, going from the smaller OTC exchange to the Merkur Market, which CEO and co-founder Åsmund Furuseth explained in an interview is also an exchange for private companies, but one that will be able to provide more transparency to the startup’s bigger investors en route to an eventual full public listing. As of last week’s Disney news, the startup is now valued at $376 million.

Participating in the Ignite accelerator, Furuseth said, will give Kahoot the option to invest in startups in each cohort, and if it makes sense for the startup in question, they will build content that will be usable on the Kahoot platform.

“We have close to $30 million in the bank and are in a financial market where we can get more capital,” he said. “We don’t need to invest, but if we want to, we can.” 

The startup today has some 60 million games on its platform, with a good portion of those created by users themselves (making it more like a YouTube than a Netflix). The idea is that bringing in outside developers (in this case, by way of the accelerator) could inject more innovation and interesting takes on the concept of “educational gaming” — not unlike how Netflix and Amazon engage outside studios to develop originals for its platform, alongside what they develop themselves or buy in through deals with rights holders.

In addition to the carrots of investment and distribution on the Kahoot platform — which is likely to hit 100 million monthly active users this month (Furuseth said he was confident of the number today) — Kahoot is offering mentorship to potential cohorts in areas like monetization and product development. Given the fact that educational aides can come in all shapes and sizes, that might not take the form of a piece of content for the Kahoot platform.

“Putting something on Kahoot could be an outcome, but we’re also interested in ‘network products,’ which have the same desire to enable learning,” Furuseth said.

The company today has a double focus, with games for K-12 students as well as for enterprise environments. “Learning is the main topic,” he added. “We like to have the mix.”