Year: 2018

Facebook has once again eschewed a direct request from the UK parliament for its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, to testify to a committee investigating online disinformation — without rustling up so much as a fig-leaf-sized excuse to explain why the founder of one of the world’s most used technology platforms can’t squeeze a video call into his busy schedule and spare UK politicians’ blushes.

Which tells you pretty much all you need to know about where the balance of power lies in the global game of (essentially unregulated) U.S. tech platforms giants vs (essentially powerless) foreign political jurisdictions.

At the end of an 18-page letter sent to the DCMS committee yesterday — in which Facebook’s UK head of public policy, Rebecca Stimson, provides a point-by-point response to the almost 40 questions the committee said had not been adequately addressed by CTO Mike Schroepfer in a prior hearing last month — Facebook professes itself disappointed that the CTO’s grilling was not deemed sufficient by the committee.

“While Mark Zuckerberg has no plans to meet with the Committee or travel to the UK at the present time, we fully recognize the seriousness of these issues and remain committed to providing any additional information required for their enquiry into fake news,” she adds.

So, in other words, Facebook has served up another big fat ‘no’ to the renewed request for Zuckerberg to testify — after also denying a request for him to appear before it in March, when it instead sent Schroepfer to claim to be unable to answer MPs’ questions.

At the start of this month committee chair Damian Collins wrote to Facebook saying he hoped Zuckerberg would voluntarily agree to answer questions. But the MP also took the unprecedented step of warning that if the Facebook founder did not do so the committee would issue a formal summons for him to appear the next time Zuckerberg steps foot in the UK.

Hence, presumably, that addendum line in Stimson’s letter — saying the Facebook CEO has no plans to travel to the UK “at the present time”.

The committee of course has zero powers to comply testimony from a non-UK national who is resident outside the UK — even though the platform he controls does plenty of business within the UK.

Last month Schroepfer faced five hours of close and at times angry questions from the committee, with members accusing his employer of lacking integrity and displaying a pattern of intentionally deceptive behavior.

The committee has been specifically asking Facebook to provide it with information related to the UK’s 2016 EU referendum for months — and complaining the company has narrowly interpreted its requests to sidestep a thorough investigation.

More recently research carried out by the Tow Center unearthed Russian-bought UK targeted immigration ads relevant to the Brexit referendum among a cache Facebook had provided to Congress — which the company had not disclosed to the UK committee.

At the end of the CTO’s evidence session last month the committee expressed immediate dissatisfaction — claiming there were almost 40 outstanding questions the CTO had failed to answer, and calling again for Zuckerberg to testify.

It possibly overplayed its hand slightly, though, giving Facebook the chance to serve up a detailed (if not entirely comprehensive) point-by-point reply now — and use that to sidestep the latest request for its CEO to testify.

Still, Collins expressed fresh dissatisfaction today, saying Facebook’s answers “do not fully answer each point with sufficient detail or data evidence”, and adding the committee would be writing to the company in the coming days to ask it to address “significant gaps” in its answers. So this game of political question and self-serving answer is set to continue.

In a statement, Collins also criticized Facebook’s response at length, writing:

It is disappointing that a company with the resources of Facebook chooses not to provide a sufficient level of detail and transparency on various points including on Cambridge Analytica, dark ads, Facebook Connect, the amount spent by Russia on UK ads on the platform, data collection across the web, budgets for investigations, and that shows general discrepancies between Schroepfer and Zuckerberg’s respective testimonies. Given that these were follow up questions to questions Mr Schroepfer previously failed to answer, we expected both detail and data, and in a number of cases got excuses.

If Mark Zuckerberg truly recognises the ‘seriousness’ of these issues as they say they do, we would expect that he would want to appear in front of the Committee and answer questions that are of concern not only to Parliament, but Facebook’s tens of millions of users in this country. Although Facebook says Mr Zuckerberg has no plans to travel to the UK, we would also be open to taking his evidence by video link, if that would be the only way to do this during the period of our inquiry.

For too long these companies have gone unchallenged in their business practices, and only under public pressure from this Committee and others have they begun to fully cooperate with our requests. We plan to write to Facebook in the coming days with further follow up questions.

In terms of the answers Facebook provides to the committee in its letter (plus some supporting documents related to the Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal) there’s certainly plenty of padding on show. And deploying self-serving PR to fuzz the signal is a strategy Facebook has mastered in recent more challenging political times (just look at its ‘Hard Questions’ series to see this tactic at work).

At times Facebook’s response to political attacks certainly looks like an attempt to drown out critical points by deploying self-serving but selective data points — so, for instance, it talks at length in the letter about the work it’s doing in Myanmar, where its platform has been accused by the UN of accelerating ethnic violence as a result of systematic content moderation failures, but declines to state how many fake accounts it’s identified and removed in the market; nor will it disclose how much revenue it generates from the market.

Asked by the committee what the average time to respond to content flagged for review in the region, Facebook also responds in the letter with the vaguest of generalized global data points — saying: “The vast majority of the content reported to us is reviewed within 24 hours.” Nor does it specify if that global average refers to human review — or just an AI parsing the content.

Another of the committee’s questions is: ‘Who was the person at Facebook responsible for the decision not to tell users affected in 2015 by the Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal?’ On this Facebook provides three full paragraphs of response but does not provide a direct answer specifying who decided not to tell users at that point — so either the company is concealing the identity of the person responsible or there simply was no one in charge of that kind of consideration at that time because user privacy was so low a priority for the company that it had no responsibility structures in place to enforce it.

Another question — ‘who at Facebook heads up the investigation into Cambridge Analytica?’ — does get a straight and short response, with Facebook saying its legal team, led by general counsel Colin Stretch, is the lead there.

It also claims that Zuckerberg himself only become aware of the allegations that Cambridge Analytica may not have deleted Facebook user data in March 2018 following press reports.

Asked what data it holds on dark ads, Facebook provides some information but it’s also being a bit vague here too — saying: “In general, Facebook maintains for paid advertisers data such as name, address and banking details”, and: “We also maintain information about advertiser’s accounts on the Facebook platform and information about their ad campaigns (most advertising content, run dates, spend, etc).”

It does also confirms it can retain the aforementioned data even if a page has been deleted — responding to another of the committee’s questions about how the company would be able to audit advertisers who set up to target political ads during a campaign and immediately deleted their presence once the election was over.

Though, given it’s said it only generally retains data, we must assume there are instances where it might not retain data and the purveyors of dark ads are essentially untraceable via its platform — unless it puts in place a more robust and comprehensive advertiser audit framework.

The committee also asked Facebook’s CTO whether it retains money from fraudulent ads running on its platform, such as the ads at the center of a defamation lawsuit by consumer finance personality Martin Lewis. On this Facebook says it does not “generally” return money to an advertiser when it discovers a policy violation — claiming this “would seem perverse” given the attempt to deceive users. Instead it says it makes “investments in areas to improve security on Facebook and beyond”.

Asked by the committee for copies of the Brexit ads that a Cambridge Analytica linked data company, AIQ, ran on its platform, Facebook says it’s in the process of compiling the content and notifying the advertisers that the committee wants to see the content.

Though it does break out AIQ ad spending related to different vote leave campaigns, and says the individual campaigns would have had to grant the Canadian company admin access to their pages in order for AIQ to run ads on their behalf.

The full letter containing all Facebook’s responses can be read here.

MemSQL, a company best known for the real-time capabilities of its eponymous in-memory database, today announced that it has raised a $30 million Series D round, bringing the company’s overall funding to $110 million. The round was led by GV (the firm you probably still refer to as Google Ventures) and Glynn Capital. Existing investors Accell, Caffeinated Capital, Data Collective and IA Ventures also participated.

The MemSQL database offers a distributed, relational database that uses standard SQL drivers and queries for transactions and analytics. Its defining feature is the combination of its data ingestions technology that allows users to push millions of events per day into the service while its users can query the records in real time. The company recently showed that its tools can deliver a scan rate of over a trillion rows per second on a cluster with 12 servers.

The database is available for deployments on the major public clouds and on-premises.

MemSQL recently announced that it saw its fourth-quarter commercial booking hit 200 percent year-over-year growth — and that’s typically the kind of growth that investors like to see, even as MemSQL plays in a very competitive market with plenty of incumbents, startups and even open-source projects. Current MemSQL users include the likes of Uber, Akamai, Pinterest, Dell EMC and Comcast.

“MemSQL has achieved strong enterprise traction by delivering a database that enables operational analysis at unique speed and scale, allowing customers to create dynamic, intelligent applications,” said Adam Ghobarah, general partner at GV, in today’s announcement. “The company has demonstrated measurable success with its growing enterprise customer base and we’re excited to invest in the team as they continue to scale.”

One of the more popular desktop clients for Twitter, Tweetbot, is today launching a completely rewritten version of its software, Tweetbot 3 for Mac. The updated app introduces new features like timeline filters, a new notifications view, an upgraded navigation sidebar, and more. At the same time, the company is also detailing what impact to its app could occur with regard to the API changes Twitter announced.

Twitter’s API changes around data streams have been impacting third-party developers. They recently led to the upcoming shutdown of Favstar, for example, while other Twitter app makers, Tweetbot included, co-signed a letter to Twitter asking for help resolving the issues those changes would introduce to their apps.

Apparently, the pushback has been working. The API deprecations scheduled for June 19, 2018 have been delayed indefinitely, Tweetbot creator Paul Haddad tells TechCrunch. When and if those deprecations occur, he adds, Tweetbot will continue to work, he says, but a few features may be slower or removed.

“Twitter has a replacement API that – if we’re given access to – we’ll be able to use to replace almost all of the functionality that they are deprecating,” he explains. “On Mac, the worst case scenario is that we won’t be able to show notifications for Likes and Retweets. Notifications for Tweets, Mentions, Quotes, DMs and Follows will be delayed one to two minutes,” Haddad adds.

He also says that Tweets wouldn’t stream in as they get posted, but instead would come in one to two minutes later as the app would automatically poll for them. (This is the same as how the iOS app works now when connected to LTE – it uses the polling API.)

This should give some comfort to heavy Tweetbot users who prefer this app over official clients, especially given Twitter’s ending of support for its Mac desktop client, announced earlier this year, with the intention of pushing desktop users to the web.

However, a lot is still up in the air. Twitter hasn’t provided Tweetbot with details or pricing for the Enterprise Account Activity API – which is the replacement API Tweetbot would want to switch to when and if the older API is deprecated.

In addition, Tweetbot 3 is introducing a series of changes to its experience as part of the upgrade.

Users can now set media to autoplay or disable this, filter their timeline, and take advantage of a new Notifications view that now merges Mentions and Quotes along with other account activity, like Follows and Retweets.

Columns are also now easier to manage, there’s a dark theme, and the sidebar had been upgraded so you can go to any list or DM conversation with a click.

Tweetbot 3 is a $9.99 paid upgrade from Tweetbot 1 and 2, which initially debuted back in 2012, then offered users a free upgrade to Tweetbot 2 in 2015. (New users paid $12.99).

The new Tweetbot is here on the Mac App Store.

In an effort to tie the top gamers and streamers more directly with their fans, a new company called Quarterback has just raised $2.5 million to create and manage fan-based leagues for the superstars of the esports and streaming world.

The company raked in its seed round from investors led by Bitkraft Esports, which is quickly building one of the most complete portfolios of gaming-related startups in the industry. Additional investors include Crest Capital Ventures, Deep Space Ventures, UpWest Labs and angel investors.

Essentially, it’s a platform for creating gaming leagues and content driven not by game publishers, leagues, or existing streaming sites like Twitch, but by the gamers themselves. It gives streamers and players a new way to reach their audience, the company claims.

Founded by serial entrepreneur Jonathan Weinberg, who acted as the chief executive for Round Robin and held a leadership role in the mobile game studio Spartonix, Quarterback is the latest attempt to get more revenue into the hands of gamers. 

Leagues created on Quarterback can host daily challenges, give away prizes and compete against fan clubs devoted to other top players.

Esports streamers and gamers are among the most bankable influencers, pitching to a new generation of consumers that don’t track traditional media sources. The ability to host and own their own channels gives these streamers an ability to create their own game libraries, cultivate a next generation of talent and encourage one-to-one interactions on platforms they control.

“Most streamers and pros struggle to monetize their fan-base and lose touch with their audience when the fans break away to play their own games,” says Jens Hilgers, a founding partner of Bitkraft Esports Ventures. “Quarterback solves this problem in a unique way by helping streamers become an integral part of their fan’s game-play.”

Exactuals, a software service offering payments management for the music industry, is debuting R.AI, a new tool that it’s dubbed the “Palantir for music”. It’s a service that can track songwriting information and rights across different platforms to ensure attribution for music distributors.

As companies like Apple and Spotify demand better information from labels about the songs they’re pushing to streaming services, companies are scrambling to clean up their data and provide proper attribution.

According to Exactuals, that’s where the r.ai service comes in.

The company is tracking 59 million songs for their “Interested Party Identifiers” (IPIs), International Standard Work Codes (ISWCs), and International Standard Recording Codes (ISRCs) — all of which are vital to ensuring that songwriters and musicians are properly paid for their work every time a song is streamed, downloaded, covered, or viewed on a distribution platform.

Chris McMurtry, the head of music product at Exactuals explained it like this. In the music business, songwriters have the equivalent of a social security number which is attached to any song they write so they can receive credit and payment. That’s the ISI. Performers of songs have their own identifier, which is the ISWC. Then the song itself gets its own code, called the ISRC which is used to track a song as it’s performed by other artists through various covers, samples and remixes.

“There’s only one ISWC, but there might be 300 ISRCs,” says Exactuals chief executive, Mike Hurst.

Publishing technology companies will pay writers and performers based on these identifiers, but they’re struggling to identify and track all of the 700,000 disparate places where the data could be, says McMurtry. Hence the need for r.ai.

 

The technology is “an open api based on machine learning that matches disparate data sources to clean and enhance it so rights holders can get paid and attribution happens,” says McMurtry.

For publishers, Exactuals argues that r.ai is the best way to track rights across a huge catalog of music and for labels it’s an easy way to provide services like Apple and Spotify with the information they’re now demanding, Hurst said.

Auth0, a startup based in Seattle, has been helping developers with a set of APIs to build authentication into their applications for the last five years. It’s raised a fair bit of money along the way to help extend that mission, and today the company announced a $55 million Series D.

This round was led by led by Sapphire Ventures with help from World Innovation Lab, and existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Trinity Ventures, Meritech Capital and K9 Ventures. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $110 million. The company did not want to share its valuation.

CEO Eugenio Pace said the investment should help them expand further internationally. In fact, one of the investors, World Innovation Lab, is based in Japan and should help with their presence there. “Japan is an important market for us and they should help explain to us how the market works there,” he said.

The company offers an easy way for developers to build in authentication services into their applications, also known as Identification as a Service (IDaaS). It’s a lot like Stripe for payments or Twilio for messaging. Instead of building the authentication layer from scratch, they simply add a few lines of code and can take advantage of the services available on the Auth0 platform.

That platform includes a range of service such as single-sign on, two-factor identification, passwordless log-on and breached password detection.

They have a free tier, which doesn’t even require a credit card, and pay tiers based on the types of users — regular versus enterprise — along with the number of users. They also charge based on machine-to-machine authentication. Pace reports they have 3500 paying customers and tens of thousands of users on the free tier.

All of that has added up to a pretty decent business. While Pace would not share specific numbers, he did indicate the company doubled its revenue last year and expected to do so again this year.

With a cadence of getting funding every year for the last three years, Pace says this round may mark the end of that fundraising cycle for a time. He wasn’t ready to commit to the idea of an IPO, saying that is likely a couple of years away, but he says the company is close to profitability.

With the new influx of money, the company does plan to expand its workforce as moves into markets across the world . They currently have 300 employees, but within a year he expects to be between 400 and 450 worldwide.

The company’s last round was a $30 million Series C last June led by Meritech Capital Partners.

Facebook this morning released its latest Transparency report, where the social network shares information on government requests for user data, noting that these requests had increased globally by around 4 percent compared to the first half of 2017, though U.S. government-initiated requests stayed roughly the same. In addition, the company added a new report to accompany the usual Transparency report, focused on detailing how and why Facebook takes action on enforcing its Community Standards, specifically in the areas of graphic violence, adult nudity and sexual activity, terrorist propaganda, hate speech, spam and fake accounts.

In terms of government requests for user data, the global increase led to 82,341 requests in the second half of 2017, up from 78,890 during the first half of the year. U.S. requests stayed roughly the same at 32,742; though 62 percent included a non-disclosure clause that prohibited Facebook from alerting the user – that’s up from 57 percent in the earlier part of the year, and up from 50 percent from the report before that. This points to use of the NDA becoming far more common among law enforcement agencies.

The number of pieces of content Facebook restricted based on local laws declined during the second half of the year, going from 28,036 to 14,294. But this is not surprising – the last report had an unusual spike in these sort of requests due to a school shooting in Mexico, which led to the government asking for content to be removed.

There were also 46 46 disruptions of Facebook services in 12 countries in the second half of 2017, compared to 52 disruptions in nine countries in the first half.

And Facebook and Instagram took down 2,776,665 pieces of content based on 373,934 copyright reports, 222,226 pieces of content based on 61,172 trademark reports and 459,176 pieces of content based on 28,680 counterfeit reports.

However, the more interesting data this time around comes from a new report Facebook is appending to its Transparency report, called the Community Standards Enforcement Report which focuses on the actions of Facebook’s review team. This is the first time Facebook has released its numbers related to its enforcement efforts, and follows its recent publication of its internal guidelines three weeks ago.

In 25 pages, Facebook in April explained how it moderates content on its platform, specifically around areas like graphic violence, adult nudity and sexual activity, terrorist propaganda, hate speech, spam and fake accounts. These are areas where Facebook is often criticized when it screws up – like when it took down the newsworthy “Napalm Girl” historical photo because it contained child nudity, before realizing the mistake and restoring it. It has also been more recently criticized for contributing to Myanmar violence, as extremists’ hate speech-filled posts incited violence. This is something Facebook also today addressed through an update for Messenger, which now allows users to report conversations that violate community standards.

Today’s Community Standards report details the number of takedowns across the various categories it enforces.

Facebook says that spam and fake account takedowns are the largest category, with 837 million pieces of spam removed in Q1 – almost all proactively removed before users reported it. Facebook also disabled 583 million fake accounts, the majority within minutes of registration. During this time, around 3-4 percent of Facebook accounts on the site were fake.

The company is likely hoping the scale of these metrics makes it seem like it’s doing a great job, when in reality, it didn’t take that many Russian accounts to throw Facebook’s entire operation into disarray, leading to CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifying before a Congress that’s now considering regulations.

In addition, Facebook says it took down the following in Q1 2018:

• Adult Nudity and Sexual Activity: 21 million pieces of content; 96 percent was found and flagged by technology, not people
• Graphic violence: took down or added warning labels to 3.5 million pieces of content; 86 percent found and flagged by technology
• Hate speech: 2.5 million pieces of content, 38 percent found and flagged by technology

You may notice that one of those areas is lagging in terms of enforcement and automation.

Facebook, in fact, admits that its system for identifying hate speech “still doesn’t work that well,” so it needs to be checked by review teams.

“…we have a lot of work still to do to prevent abuse,” writes Guy Rosen, VP of Product Management, on the Facebook blog. “It’s partly that technology like artificial intelligence, while promising, is still years away from being effective for most bad content because context is so important.”

In other words, A.I. can be useful at automatically flagging things like nudity and violence, but policing hate speech requires more nuance than the machines can yet handle. The problem is that people may be discussing sensitive topics, but they’re doing it to share news, or in a respectful manner, or even describing something that happened to them. It’s not always a threat or hate speech, but a system only parsing words without understanding the full discussion doesn’t know this.

To get an A.I. system up to par in this area, it requires a ton of training data. And Facebook says it doesn’t have that for some of the less widely-used languages.

(This is also a likely response to the Myanmar situation, where the company belatedly – after six civil society organizations, criticized Mr. Zuckerberg in a letter – said it had hired “dozens” of human moderators. Critics say that’s not enough – in Germany, for example, which has strict laws around hate speech – Facebook hired about 1,200 moderators, The NYT said.)

It seems the obvious solution is staffing up moderation teams everywhere, until A.I. technology can do as good of a job as it can on other aspects of content policy enforcement. This costs money, but it’s also clearly critical when people are dying as a result of Facebook’s lacking ability to enforce its own policies.

Facebook claims it’s hiring as a result, but doesn’t share the details of how many, where or when.

“…we’re investing heavily in more people and better technology to make Facebook safer for everyone” wrote Rosen.

But Facebook’s main focus, it seems, is on improving technology.

“Facebook is investing heavily in more people to review content that is flagged. But as Guy Rosen explained two weeks ago, new technology like machine learning, computer vision and artificial intelligence helps us find more bad content, more quickly – far more quickly, and at a far greater scale, than people ever can,” said Alex Schultz, Vice President of Analytics, in a related post on Facebook’s methodology.

He touts A.I. in particular as being a tool that could get content off Facebook before it’s even reported.

But A.I. isn’t ready to police all hate speech yet, so Facebook needs a stop gap solution – even if it costs.

Crypto wallets can’t remain crypto wallets for long. There is so much competition and so many scammers that value-added features like financial services are de rigueur. BRD knows this quite well and is putting $32 million behind the platform to grow out the features and cryptocurrencies supported on their popular app.

Founded by Aaron Voisine, Adam Traidman, and Aaron Lasher, the company started out as a side product called Bread Wallet. BRD, say the founders, was the first iOS bitcoin wallet in the App Store.

The team has 1.1 million users in 170 countries and 76% of those are iOS. They’ve received 71% of their customers in the past year, a fact that attests to the recent popularity of cryptocurrencies. They have $6 billion of crypto assets under protection.

The team has also partnered with Changelly to help transfer more tokens than Bitcoin and Ethereum – including their own BRD token.

How did they raise the money? By token sale, of course. They ran a $12 million presale and a $20 million crowd sale, resulting in a combine Seed and A round that would make most fintech orgs blush.

The team is most proud of their focus on decentralization.

“We’ve made our name around security, first and foremost. That’s what most the miners and dev crowd know us for, as the most secure way to hold and protect all their cryptoassets,” said Voisine. “The assets themselves are not stored in any centralized system within BRD. A transaction on BRD connects directly to the blockchain and are synced in real-time. There is literally nothing to steal from BRD, since we’re not holding a single asset ourselves… even though we have over $6B USD under protection.”

Further, they are offering BRD Rewards that will let BRD users get discounts and other benefits. This is an effort to “bring a much better balance between fees and utilization.”

“We want to be the service for first-time buyers of crypto. We want to be the most popular onramp for consumers into the crypto economy,” he said.

Lasher feels that his mission is far more interesting than just making an iOS wallet. He sees this as a philosophical change that will bring new understanding of the importance of crypto.

“If sending money globally as easily as an email doesn’t impress you, how about the ability to store your life savings in your head, then walking your family across a war-torn border to safety?” he said.

Facebook just installed its VP of Internet.org as the new head of WhatsApp after its CEO Jan Koum left the company. And now Facebook is expanding its mission to get people into “meaningful” groups to WhatsApp. Today, WhatsApp launched a slew of new features for Groups on iOS and Android that let admins set a description for their community and decide who can change the Groups settings. Meanwhile, users will be able to get a Group catch up that shows messages they were mentioned in, and search for people in the group.

Group improvements will help WhatsApp better compete with Telegram, which has recently emerged as an insanely popular platform for chat groups, especially around cryptocurrency. Telegram has plenty of admin controls of its own, but the two apps will be competing over who can make it easiest to digest these fast-moving chat forums.

“These are features are based on user requests. We develop the product based on what our users want and need” a WhatsApp spokesperson told me when asked why it’s making this update. “There are also people coming together in groups on WhatsApp like new parents looking for support, students organizing study sessions, and even city leaders coordinating relief efforts after natural disasters.”

Facebook is on a quest to get 1 billion users into “meaningful” Groups and recently said it now has hit the 200 million user milestone. Groups could help people strengthen their ties with their city or niche interests, which can make them feel less alone.

With Group descriptions, admins can explain the purpose and rules of a group. They show up when people check out the group and appear atop the chat window when they join. New admin controls let them restrict who is allowed to alter a group’s subject, icon, and description. WhatsApp is also making it tougher to re-add someone to a group they left so you can’t “Group-add-spam people”. Together, these could make sure people find relevant groups, naturally acclimate to their culture, and don’t troll everyone.

As for users, the new Group catch up feature offers a new @ button in the bottom right of the chat window that when tapped, surfaces all your replies and mentions since you last checked. And if you want to find someone specific in the Group, the new participant search on the Info page could let you turn a group chat into a private convo with someone you meet.

Now that WhatsApp has a stunning 1.5 billion users compared to 200 million on Telegram, its next phase of growth may come from deepening engagement instead of just adding more accounts. Many people already do most of their one-on-one chatting with friends on WhatsApp, but Groups could invite tons of time spent as users participate in communities of strangers around their interests.

Earlier this year, the Arch Mission Foundation managed to include a quartz storage device containing Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy on the Tesla Roadster that SpaceX launched towards the sun. At the time, co-founder Nova Spivack said this wasn’t a one-off stunt, but the first step in a bigger plan.

Today, the foundation is revealing more details about those plans, specifically a partnership with commercial space company Astrobotic, which intends to send a mission to the moon in 2020. Once again, Arch Mission (pronounced “ark”) plans to have one of its storage devices, called Arch Libraries, on-board.

This time, the contents won’t be limited to classic science fiction. The foundation said the library will include Wikipedia, as well as the Long Now Foundation’s Rosetta Project, and more.

All of the content will be stored on “nickel microfiche” — the text and images will be etched by laser onto thin sheets of nickel. Spivack told me that nickel should be able to endure the harsh conditions of the moon (“it’s essentially indestructible”), while the microfiche format won’t require a computer to read, just a really powerful optical microscope: “We don’t want to assume in the distant future that somebody has our operating system.”

This lunar library will be stored on the surface of the moon, courtesy of Astrobotic’s Peregrine Lunar Lander. Spivack said the library can also be extended and updated in the future with more storage devices.

The ultimate goal, he said, is “putting these archives of human knowledge around the solar system.”

“In a very long time frame — millions of years — it’s guaranteed that at least some of them will still be there,” he added. “Even if an entire planet has been destroyed, there’s still going to be other planets with other [libraries] on them.”

Spivack said he’d been thinking about “major civilizations that were lost, that we don’t know much about,” and he wanted to leave these libraries as “a great gift to archeologists in the future from people today.”

But he argued that the Arch Libraries will have more immediate benefits as well. For one thing, there’s the inspirational potential: “If you want to be a spacefaring civilization, your civilization is not just your rocket … We want people to be able to look up at the moon and have an Apollo moment, a kind of, ‘Wow, human civilization is now on the moon.'”

Plus, the foundation is working with a number of companies to develop “technologies that can send big data into space.” Those technologies will be important because you can’t rely on Earth for critical information — for example, even at the speed of light, roundtrip messages between Earth and Mars could take nearly an hour.

Of course, one of the assumptions behind Spivack and the Arch Mission Foundation’s work is that we are actually on the cusp of establishing a human presence on Mars and elsewhere in the Solar System.

Asked whether he expects this to happen, Spivack said, “As long as we don’t do something stupid, we should have a permanent base on the moon and on Mars in our lifetime. Things are really starting to inflect, especially because the commercial space industry, the new space movement, is really starting to get its wings — thanks to Elon Musk, Blue Origin and Jeff Bezos, but also others that you might not know about yet.”