Year: 2018

An interesting ruling by Europe’s top court could have some major implications for data mining tech giants like Facebook and Google, along with anyone who administers pages that allow platforms to collect and process their visitors’ personal data — such as a Facebook fan page or even potentially a site running Google Analytics.

Passing judgement on a series of legal questions referred to it, the CJEU has held that the administrator of a fan page on Facebook is jointly responsible with Facebook for the processing of the data of visitors to the page — aligning with the the Advocate General’s opinion to the court, which we covered back in October.

In practical terms the ruling means tech giants could face more challenges from European data protection authorities. While anyone piggybacking on or plugging into platform services in Europe shouldn’t imagine they can just pass responsibility to the platforms for ensuring they are compliant with privacy rules.

The CJEU deems both parties to be responsible (aka, ‘data controllers’ in the legal jargon), though the court also emphasizes that “the existence of joint responsibility does not necessarily imply equal responsibility of the various operators involved in the processing of personal data”, adding: “On the contrary, those operators may be involved at different stages of that processing of personal data and to different degrees, so that the level of responsibility of each of them must be assessed with regard to all the relevant circumstances of the particular case.”

The original case dates back to 2011, when a German education and training company with a fan page on Facebook was ordered by a local data protection authority to deactivate the page because neither it nor Facebook had informed users their personal data was being collected. The education company challenged the DPA’s order and, after much legal back and forth, questions were referred to Europe’s top court for a preliminary ruling.

“The fact that an administrator of a fan page uses the platform provided by Facebook in order to benefit from the associated services cannot exempt it from compliance with its obligations concerning the protection of personal data,” the court writes today, handing down its judgement.

“It must be emphasised, moreover, that fan pages hosted on Facebook can also be visited by persons who are not Facebook users and so do not have a user account on that social network. In that case, the fan page administrator’s responsibility for the processing of the personal data of those persons appears to be even greater, as the mere consultation of the home page by visitors automatically starts the processing of their personal data.

“In those circumstances, the recognition of joint responsibility of the operator of the social network and the administrator of a fan page hosted on that network in relation to the processing of the personal data of visitors to that page contributes to ensuring more complete protection of the rights of persons visiting a fan page, in accordance with the requirements of Directive 95/46.”

Facebook unsurprisingly expressed disappointment at the CJEU’s decision when contacted for a response.

“We are disappointed by this ruling. Businesses of all sizes across Europe use internet services like Facebook to reach new customers and grow,” a spokesperson told us via emailed statement. “While there will be no immediate impact on the people and businesses who use Facebook services, we will work to help our partners understand its implications. We are compliant with applicable European law and as part of our preparations for GDPR, we have further improved our privacy policies, controls and tools to make them clearer.”

The company’s go-to legal strategy to defend against data protection challenges in Europe has been to claim it’s only bound by the jurisdiction of the Irish Data Protection Commissioner, given its international HQ is based in Ireland. So it’s essentially relied upon a cosy relationship with a local, pro-business DPA to shield it from complaints filed in other less friendly European jurisdictions.

But as we wrote last fall that strategy looks to be on borrowed time, as courts in Member States are increasing showing a willingness to assert jurisdiction over tech giants whose digital services freely cross EU borders and are entirely capable of impacting citizens’ rights everywhere.

“I do think it is becoming harder and harder for any tech company to evade the law,” Jef Ausloos, a researcher at the Centre for IT and IP Law in Belgium, tells us. “We see it in almost every CJEU ruling since GoogleSpain (delisting/rtbf) — the Court wants to ensure complete and effective protection.”

“From now onwards you can go through fan pages (that are in same jurisdiction and/or in a jurisdiction with strong DPA) by proxy to attack Facebook — regardless of one-stop-shop — so great for user-empowerment,” he adds.

“(Co-)responsibilising fan-pages will put massive pressure on Facebook but also Google -Analytics, for example, to enable better control to fan page-administrators and data subjects.”

While today’s CJEU ruling could pave the way for more enforcement of EU data protection rules at a Member State level, there are some caveats as the judgement relates to the bloc’s prior Data Protection Directive — which has now been replaced with an updated privacy framework, in the form of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

And Facebook is clearly attempting to promote a self-serving interpretation of GDPR that seeks to concentrate jurisdictional elements around a lead data protection authority — under the regulation’s so-called ‘one-stop shop’ principle. So once again it’s trying to lean towards only having to be answerable to the Irish DPA.

However that looks like wishful thinking. The GDPR’s OSS mechanism was not intended to limit the participation of other DPAs where complaints cross Member State borders — but rather to allow for co-ordination between multiple agencies.

And, well, Europe’s top court is making its view on the local competence of data watchdogs increasingly clear…

“[The CJEU ruling] continues the trend set in Google Spain that challenges can be brought across the Union,” agrees Michael Veale, a technology policy researcher at University College London. “However that aspect of the case is specifically about interpretation of the Data Protection Directive.

“The GDPR has a separate system to deal with cross-border processing, with mechanisms present such as the EDPB [European Data Protection Board], and voting systems for particular types of co-ordinated action, and the idea that a ‘lead supervisory authority’ can act but not control an entire process. Now we will see how fragmented that will end up as in practice.”

Playing down the potential impact of the ruling, Facebook — somewhat ironically — points to GDPR’s tightening of rules around the consent basis for processing persona data, meaning there’s more onus on data handlers to clearly and cleanly communicate choices to users, at least assuming consent is the legal basis they’re relying on to process people’s data.

So, in theory, that means any entities handling EU citizens’ personal data should already be thinking far more carefully about their responsibilities vis-a-vis users’ personal data — more than was perhaps the case all the way back in 2011 (when the penalties for ignoring Europe’s privacy rules were all too easily ignored).

The GDPR’s biggest change to the EU’s privacy regime is not so much new rules as an increase in the maximum penalties for data protection violations, giving enforcement the teeth that have always been lacking and thereby concentrating minds on compliance.

Though the irony here comes because in Facebook’s own case it’s already facing legal challenges to the consent flows it’s designed for GDPR — with early complaints filed against the eponymous Facebook platform and two other Facebook-owned services, Instagram and WhatsApp, alleging they are subverting the rules by coercing consent from users. (Another early consent-related complaint has also been lodged against Google’s Android.)

In terms of damage limitation as a result of the CJEU ruling, Facebook says it will work with partners and regulators in Europe to limit the potential impact on its services and on those that use them, suggesting — for example — that it could provide guidance to Page owners on how they can comply with their obligations.

At the start of this year it also announced a series of data protection workshops in Europe, set to run throughout this year, and aimed at small and medium businesses — with a stated focus on GDPR compliance.

So it’s already busy on that front — and only now likely to get busier.

But given the sheer volume of fan pages that exist on Facebook there’s no doubt the CJEU judgement greatly increases the company’s surface area for legal liabilities.

While the court’s backing for local DPAs’ jurisdiction sets the weather going into GDPR, and looks like a vital check against any overbearing corporate attempts to reshape the new rules to fit their own ends — at the expense of users’ fundamental rights.

It’s scooters all the way down this morning, with Lime also reportedly raising $250 million in a funding this morning after a new Delaware filing this morning indicated that competitor Bird authorized the sale of up to $200 million in shares.

GV (formerly Google Ventures) is leading this round, according to the report by Axios, as the massive land grab for a stake in the scooter wars continues to heat up — whether that’s funding or actual scooters piling up on the sidewalk. Both companies have faced pushback from some city regulators (probably on the basis of tripping over them and falling on your face), but it still means the venture community is still salivating over potentially the next major mode of metropolitan transportation. Most venture investors in the Valley argue scooters make sense for short trips throughout areas that are just too far to be considered a trek, but too close that it would be a waste of time and money to call a ride share like Uber or Lyft.

Given that Uber exposed a massive hole for easier transportation in major metropolitan areas — and potentially replacing cars in those areas — getting into the next big transportation revolution is more than tempting enough for firms like GV (which is also an investor in Uber). Lime was previously reported to be seeking up to $500 million in funding and was taking meetings with some major firms in Silicon Valley over the past few weeks. It might not get that, but a $250 million influx might be plenty to try to continue to ramp up its business and get more rides on board. Axios is reporting that Lime has told investors users have taken 4.2 million rides and each scooter gets 8 to 12 rides per day.

Still, while it’s not $500 million, there’s plenty of interest in the on-demand scooter business — challenges of keeping them charged and intact included — that Bird has authorized the sale of up to $200 million in new shares at a $1 billion valuation just months after its previous round. So it might not be surprising if this, too, ends up as kind of a rolling process where Lime eventually gets all the capital it sought.

The goal of subscription-based companies is to not just land the customer, but to keep them and expand over time. Zuroa, which has always had the goal of helping companies manage subscriptions announced a new tool called Zuroa Orders today, designed to help customers process renewals and more complex deals.

Zuora is hitting its 10-year mark as a company. Tien Tzuo who founded the company after leaving Salesforce as its first Chief Marketing Officer, saw a world coming a decade ago, where cloud companies (and others) would be selling subscriptions. He predicted correctly this world would require a new way of tracking and declaring this revenue, and he began a 10-year journey of building out a platform of subscription management services, which culminated in the company’s IPO in April.

Today, they announced a new product as they set out on the next 10 years, which builds on that platform.”We have a brand new product, Zuora Orders, which will sit side by side with billing and revenue recognition, and really power those two things to enable companies to focus on expanding and driving more revenue from their customer base,” he explained.

They are not creating this new service out of the blue. They have found through research that there has been a significant shift from growth related to acquiring new customers to growth from existing customers. In fact, Tzuo said that 70 percent of the revenue flowing through the Zuora system today is coming from existing customers, a number that has doubled over the last several years.

As though to prove this point, in its most recent earnings report, Box CEO Aaron Levie talked about how his company was using a strategy of expanding inside existing customers to grow their revenue. “As we discussed last quarter, our focus is on driving deeper, more strategic relationships with our customers, resulting in higher growth and bigger deals,” he told analysts in the earnings call.

By expanding the services it is offering on the Box platform over the last several years, it has created opportunities to increase business with existing customers — and it seems to be working. “Importantly, our new products continue to drive growth with new products attached to two-thirds of our 6-figure deals,” Levie said.

Zuroa made the announcement at their Subscribed Conference taking place in San Francisco this week.

Bird, the scooter startup whose scooters you might have seen fallen over on the sidewalk in a major metro area, has authorized a new $200 million round of funding that could value the startup at around $1 billion post-money, according to a certificate of incorporation filed in Delaware.

The latest Bird round has been pretty widely reported, suggesting that the company is raising $150 million at a $1 billion valuation. That, too, comes amid a big effort by competitor Lime to raise a big funding round. These documents indicate that the company has authorized the sale of those shares, though it may not fully fill out the round. The certificate of incorporation document was provided be Lagniappe Labs, creator of the Prime Unicorn Index.

The document indicates that Bird has authorized the sale of 31.5 million new shares in its financing round at a value of $6.15 per share, which if fully sold could net the startup as much as $200 million in this round. This round would value the company at just over $1 billion, a new financing round that follows up a $100 million round announced in March.

These kinds of rolling rounds are not completely uncommon. Instead of bundling everything together in a single round, startups may sometimes have a process that includes follow-on investment rounds, of which this may be a component. The last funding round in March valued the company at around $300 million.

Needless to say, scooters are a hot market right now even if they are facing a lot of friction when it comes to dealing with leaving their scooters everywhere around cities. But running startups that are hardware-focused — especially on-demand ones that have to manage a network of scooters that need to have enough of a charge to get someone from point A to point be, lest they have a bad experience and switch to an alternative, can be an expensive proposition. The hardware component itself, too, can be a tough business.

There is now a free app that lets Android and iOS users virtually tour the White House and surrounding area. Developed by Cuseum and the White House Historical Association, the app provides three separate tour experiences. Users can walk through the various rooms of the White House, from the Oval Office, Lincoln Bedroom, to the Press Office, without the peer pressure to wear a MAGA hat.

The White House Historical Association released this statement credited to Melania Trump.

“I am so pleased that the White House Historical Association has taken these forward-thinking steps to offer more opportunities for the American people to visit the People’s House. Thank you to the White House Historical Association, Amazon Web Services, and Cuseum for their creative and innovative collaboration in designing this app. Whether people are visiting in-person or virtually, this new feature offers a chance for everyone to see many of the mansion’s wonderful and historic rooms – including the residence, the East Wing, and the West Wing.”

Cuseum has been at this for some time. The company developed similar experiences for over 100 different partners including SFMOMA, MF Houston, ICA Boston and others.

The White House app has another feature, too, which has users take selfies to determine which president or first lady they most resemble. This is done by matching the selfie to portraits of the presidents and first ladies in the White House Collection. There’s no word if the app matches hand sizes, though.

Mozilla’s Firefox is back in the browser game, thanks to its recent updates which now allow it to once again challenge the likes of Google’s Chrome browser. One thing that always made Firefox stand out was its willingness to experiment. In recent years, the organization channeled many of these experiments through its Test Pilot program and today, it’s launching two new projects through this project: Firefox Color and Side View.

Firefox Color does pretty much what you probably expect it to do. It’s essentially a theme editor that allows you to pick the colors in your browser and even set textures for things like your background, for example.

It’s nothing all that fancy, but if Firefox has always been about customization and this takes it to the next level. Having played with plenty of Firefox themes in my days, I know that I always just go back to the default sooner or later, but if that’s not you, then Firefox Color is for you.

The second new experiment strikes me as really useful, though. With Side View, you can use your widescreen monitor and display two tabs side-by-side inside the browser without having to open a second Firefox window. You simply click on the new Side View button, select the tab you want to open in the second viewport and off you go. I would love it if you could simply drag a currently open tab to that icon, but it’s a good start.

Not every Test Pilot experiment makes it into Firefox, but some of the recent experiments that did include the browser’s screenshot tool, containers and activity stream. I don’t think I care of Color makes it, but Side View would be nice to have available by default.

Both of these new experiments are now available here.

When we last left Packhelp they had raised €350,000 to build a business out of custom packaging. Their original hunch – that companies wanted cool, custom packaging for their products – was correct and now they’ve gone back to the VC trough for €2 million.

The round, raised from Speedinvest x, PROFounders, and Market One Capital, will go to growing the Polish business internationally. It is run by Wojciech Sadowski, Konrad Kwiatkowski, Maciek Woźniczko, and Maciej Zając.

“Before Packhelp, four of us were running a digital agency,” said Sadowski. “One of our clients asked us to order custom boxes for his product. We did some research and it turned out that it is almost impossible to place an order for small quantity of boxes. Why? Because normal printing houses require high minimum orders (>500 pieces) and a lot of technical knowledge, they offer very long turn around (30-45 days) and very high personalization cost with poor quality and even worse customer service. We’ve decided to change that.”

The company has 5,000 customers from 29 countries and sees about 600 orders a day.

For the longest time, chips were a little bit boring. But the revolution in deep learning has now opened the market for startups that build specialty chips to accelerate deep learning and model evaluation. Among those is Israel-based Hailo, which is building deep learning chips for embedded devices. The company today announced that it has raised a $12 million Series A round.

Investors include Israeli crowdfunding platform Ourcrowd, Maniv Mobility, Next Gear, and a number of angel investors, including Hailo’s own chairman Zohar Zisapel and Delek Motors’ Gil Agmon.

Hailo tells me that it will use the new round, which brings its total funding to $16 million, to further develop its deep learning processors. The company expects samples to reach the market in the first half of 2019. Those chips will be able to run embedded AI applications in a wide range of settings, including drones and cars, as well as smart home appliances and cameras.

The key market for Hailo is the car industry, though. In that respect, it’s following in the footstep of other Israeli startups like Mobileye, which Intel eventually acquired.

“The 70-year old architecture of existing processors is inadequate to meet today’s deep learning and AI processing needs,” says Orr Danon, Hailo CEO. “Hailo is revolutionizing the underlying architecture of the processor to boost deep learning processing by several orders of magnitude. We have completely redesigned the pillars of computer architecture – memory, control and compute – and the relations between them.”

Casper is launching a new product today — the Casper Nap Pillow, a small pillow that you can carry in your bag.

While the startup remains best-known for its mattresses, it’s expanded to offer not just pillows and sheets but also dog beds. It also partnered with American Airlines to provide sleep products to higher-end flyers.

“The long-term vision of the brand [is] to help people sleep better, whether in your bedroom, in the air, wherever that may be,” said co-founder and Chief Operating Officer Neil Parikh.

But sometimes it can be hard to get the recommended eight hours of sleep at home. As Parikh put it, “I don’t even sleep eight hours and I run a sleep company.” So the Nap Pillow can help you get some extra sleep on “trains, buses, airplanes, the subway, the beach” — or even at your desk at work.

Parikh said the travel pillow was created by the company’s research division Casper Labs. It’s basically a shrunk-down version (10.25 inches by 15 inches) of the regular Casper pillow, deploying what the company calls its “pillow-in-a-pillow design” — namely, combining a supportive inner layer with a fluffier outer layer.

The Nap Pillow comes with a pillowcase and a travel bag. In fact, Veanne took the pillow with her to Tel Aviv, and she said it’s well-made and provides decent support, but feels more like a child-sized Casper pillow for the office or home, not the travel pillow that she’d hoped for.

But don’t worry, she has suggestions for improvement! Like: A suction cup to stop the pillow from slipping into the gap between the airplane wall and window seat, a detachable hoodie for privacy (seriously) and a pocket to hold iPhones and wallets.

The Casper Nap Pillow costs $35 and is currently available for purchase.

From advancements in AR to Memojis to group FaceTime, there is plenty to be excited about with iOS 12. But one of the more practical updates to Apple’s mobile operating system, coming this fall, went unmentioned during the keynote at WWDC.

According to 9to5Mac, iOS 12 will allow for two different faces to be registered to Face ID.

Up until now, Face ID has only allowed a single appearance to be registered to the iPhone X. 9to5Mac first noticed the update when combing through the iOS 12 beta, where one can find new settings for Face ID that allow users to “Set Up an Alternative Appearance.”

Here’s what the description says:

In addition to continuously learning how you look, Face ID can recognize an alternative appearance.

While that’s about as unclear as a description might be, 9to5Mac tested and confirmed the update, with the following caveat. Users who choose to register two faces to Face ID will not be able to remove that face without starting over from scratch with their own FaceID registration. In other words, if you choose to reset the alternate appearance, you’ll also have to clear out all existing data around your own face, too.

That small inconvenience aside, the ability to add a second face to Face ID makes total sense. Couples often pass their phones back and forth as a matter of practicality, and parents often let their children use their phones to play games and check out apps.

Plus, this may hint at Face ID on the next generation of iPads, which tend to be shared amongst multiple users more often than phones.