Year: 2019

The Ethereum community is hard at work on Ethereum 2.0, the next major upgrade of its blockchain. It is an incredibly challenging task, and the Ethereum Foundation has been completely transparent about its roadmap and progress. That’s why I’m excited to announce that Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake is joining us at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin.

Justin Drake will give us an update on Ethereum 2.0. He’s been working on sharding and scalability in order to better support the Ethereum ecosystem and enable new use cases.

The current version of Ethereum can only handle a dozen transactions per second. With sharding, the computing load will be partitioned, which should lead to a drastic increase in performance.

And the most fascinating part of Ethereum 2.0 is that it’s a moving target. The Ethereum community has put years of research and development in the update in order to refine how it’s going to work and how it’s going to be rolled out. It’s a large scale experiment of distributed development.

Ethereum 2.0 will be rolled out in multiple phases in order to ensure the finality of a transaction, construct shard chains and make sure smart contracts run properly. If that sounds complicated, Justin Drake can tell you in simple words why Ethereum is such an interesting project.

Ethereum 2.0 could transform the Ethereum blockchain into a sort of “world computer” that can execute instructions across a network of servers all around the world. And that’s what so exciting about it.

And that’s not all. In addition to an interview on Ethereum, Justin Drake will also talk about building a blockchain startup on the Extra Crunch stage with other blockchain experts.

He knows how important it is to build a community of developers and researchers around your blockchain project. And he can tell you about the best strategies to communicate and iterate on complicated blockchain projects.

Buy your ticket to Disrupt Berlin to listen to those discussions — and many others. The conference will take place December 11-12.

In addition to panels and fireside chats, like this one, new startups will participate in the Startup Battlefield to compete for the highly coveted Battlefield Cup.

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Justin lives in Cambridge, UK where he studied mathematics. He founded the Cambridge Bitcoin Meetup group in 2013, and in 2014 left his job as a programmer and FPGA engineer to study the blockchain space. In 2015 he operated a Bitcoin ATM and started a company providing a web interface for OpenBazaar. He is now a researcher for the Ethereum Foundation focusing on sharding.

In yet another letter seeking to pry accountability from Facebook, the chair of a British parliamentary committee has pressed the company over its decision to adopt a policy on political ad that supports flagrant lying.

In the letter Damian Collins, chair of the DCMS committee, asks the company to explain why it recently took the decision to change its policy regarding political ads — “given the heavy constraint this will place on Facebook’s ability to combat online disinformation in the run-up to elections around the world”.

“The change in policy will absolve Facebook from the responsibility of identifying and tackling the widespread content of bad actors, such as Russia’s Internet Research Agency,” he warns, before going on to cite a recent tweet by the former chief of Facebook’s global efforts around political ads transparency and election integrity  who has claimed that senior management ignored calls from lower down for ads to be scanned for misinformation.

“I also note that Facebook’s former head of global elections integrity ops, Yael Eisenstat, has described that when she advocated for the scanning of adverts to detect misinformation efforts, despite engineers’ enthusiasm she faced opposition from upper management,” writes Collins.

 

In a further question, Collins asks what specific proposals Eisenstat’s team made; to what extent Facebook determined them to be feasible; and on what grounds were they not progressed.

He also asks what plans Facebook has to formalize a working relationship with fact-checkers over the long run.

A Facebook spokesperson declined to comment on the DCMS letter, saying the company would respond in due course.

In a naked display of its platform’s power and political muscle, Facebook deployed a former politician to endorse its ‘fake ads are fine’ position last month — when head of global policy and communication, Nick Clegg, who used to be the deputy prime minister of the UK, said: ” We do not submit speech by politicians to our independent fact-checkers, and we generally allow it on the platform even when it would otherwise breach our normal content rules.”

So, in other words, if you’re a politician you get a green light to run lying ads on Facebook.

Clegg was giving a speech on the company’s plans to prevent interference in the 2020 US presidential election. The only line he said Facebook would be willing to draw was if a politician’s speech “can lead to real world violence and harm”. But from a company that abjectly failed to prevent its platform from being misappropriated to accelerate genocide in Myanmar that’s the opposite of reassuring.

“At Facebook, our role is to make sure there is a level playing field, not to be a political participant ourselves,” said Clegg. “We have a responsibility to protect the platform from outside interference, and to make sure that when people pay us for political ads we make it as transparent as possible. But it is not our role to intervene when politicians speak.”

In truth Facebook roundly fails to protect its platform from outside interference too. Inauthentic behavior and fake content is a ceaseless firefight that Facebook is nowhere close to being on top of, let alone winning. But on political ads it’s not even going to try — giving politicians around the world carte blanche to use outrage-fuelling disinformation and racist dogwhistles as a low budget, broad reach campaign strategy.

We’ve seen this before on Facebook of course, during the UK’s Brexit referendum — when scores of dark ads sought to whip up anti-immigrant sentiment and drive a wedge between voters and the European Union.

And indeed Collins’ crusade against Facebook as a conduit for disinformation began in the wake of that 2016 EU referendum.

Since then the company has faced major political scrutiny over how it accelerates disinformation — and has responded by creating a degree of transparency on political ads, launching an archive where this type of advert can be searched. But that appears as far as Facebook is willing to go on tackling the malicious propaganda problem its platform accelerates.

In the US, senator Elizabeth Warren has been duking it out publicly with Facebook on the same point as Collins rather more directly — by running ads on Facebook saying it’s endorsing Trump by supporting his lies.

There’s no sign of Facebook backing down, though. On the contrary. A recent leak from an internal meeting saw founder Mark Zuckerberg attacking Warren as an “existential” threat to the company. While, this week, Bloomberg reports that Facebook’s executive has been quietly advising a Warren rival for the Democratic nomination, Pete Buttigieg, on campaign hires.

So a company that hires politicians to senior roles, advises high profile politicians on election campaigns, tweaks its policy on political ads after a closed door meeting with the current holder of the office of US president, Donald Trump, and ignores internal calls to robustly police political ads, is rapidly sloughing off any residual claims to be ‘just a technology company’. (Though, really, we knew that already.)

In the letter Collins also presses Facebook on its plan to rollout end-to-end encryption across its messaging app suite, asking why it can’t limit the tech to WhatsApp only — something the UK government has also been pressing it on this month.

He also raises questions about Facebook’s access to metadata — asking whether it will use inferences gleaned from the who, when and where of e2e encrypted comms (even though it can’t access the what) to target users with ads.

Facebook’s self-proclaimed ‘pivot to privacy‘ — when it announced earlier this year a plan to unify its separate messaging platforms onto a single e2e encrypted backend — has been widely interpreted as an attempt to make it harder for antitrust regulators to break up its business empire, as well as a strategy to shirk responsibility for content moderation by shielding itself from much of the substance that flows across its platform while retaining access to richer cross-platform metadata so it can continue to target users with ads…

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk used an internet connection provided by his company’s Starlink constellation of broadband satellites early on Tuesday AM. Musk used the network in place with the Starlink satellites already in orbit to send a simple tweet, declaring that he’d done just that.

Starlink is SpaceX’s ambitious project to launch and operate its own network of broadband satellites, which will then provide broadband connectivity on a global level, including to areas which did not previously have reliable access to a high-speed internet connection.

This month, SpaceX signalled its intent to put as many as 30,000 more Starlink satellites into orbit, on top of a previously planned 12,000. The company is making the preparations it requires to address very strong demand, it says, and so it’s looking down the road at how large the network of small satellites potentially has to grow in order to serve all potential customers reliably.

In May 2019, SpaceX sent up its first 60 operational satellites  after launching a couple of prototypes last year. The satellites will work in tandem with ground stations that receive and convert the signal, which will be roughly the size of a pizza box, based on previously comments made by Musk.

How funding rounds are classified these days has much more to do with positioning than any VC definitions, but it’s still true that nothing has quite the pizazz as the “strategic investment” celebrity party round.

Sandbox VR, a location-based virtual reality startup that capped off a huge $68 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz at the beginning of the year, is bringing on some new investors in a $11 million “strategic” round, let’s call this one the Series A-listers round.

Yeah, there were a couple Silicon Valley folks, David Sacks and the Andreessen Horowitz Cultural Leadership Fund led the round, but they joined the much glitzier names of celebs including Justin Timberlake, Katy Perry, Orlando Bloom and Will Smith. Other investors include Michale Ovitz, Honda Keisuke and Kevin Durant.  Some of the investors in this latest round don’t have much in common beyond being LPs in the Andreessen Horowitz Cultural Leadership Fund, which seems to be the glue holding these stars together.

Sandbox VR operates physical spaces, generally in retail locations, that users can play multiplayer virtual reality games inside with friends. It’s a next-generation arcade of sorts that’s relying on expensive new technology to attract customers, but that formula hasn’t been a slam dunk for plenty of other VR startups, and it’s forced the leadership to get creative.

“It’s a difficult space to be in, because it’s one of those spaces where you have to be three startups in one,” Sandbox VR exec Siqi Chen told TechCrunch in an interview. “You have to build your own content, build your own technology and construct and operate retail locations.”

While most virtual reality startups that have raised substantial amounts of capital have had to dump it into R&D, Sandbox’s business is more focused on pinning virtual reality experiences to physical real estate giving the curious a hub to try out the technology.

Sandbox has plenty of obstacles ahead, the most dire of which will be building a content ecosystem that’s exclusive to the system. Even Facebook’s Oculus has struggled to court established studios to the system without bankrolling development, a process that could get very expensive very quickly for Sandbox. Consumer expectations are also quite high given the steep $48 ticket prices for the 30 minute experience. Sandbox recently partnered with CBS Interactive Studios to create a title based on Star Trek IP.

Sandbox will have to compete with consumer headsets like the Oculus Quest that are far cheaper and simpler than previous-generation at-home headsets. The startup will also have to find ways to deepen experiences while still relying on plenty of off-the-shelf consumer hardware. Sandbox’s success relies at least a bit on consumer VR headset adoption growing at a sluggish pace, something Facebook is still spending billions to accelerate.

Generating venture-sized returns will undoubtedly involve more than jacking up ticket prices for more immersive games, though we haven’t heard much of a grand vision from the young startup yet. Whatever Sandbox does, the team is going to have to walk in the same footsteps of many VR companies before it all while improving perceptions of the technology, something the company’s executives hope their new celebrity investor friends can help with.

For Sandbox, gathering attention from celebrities like Kanye West has already been part of the strategy. “Part of it is brand, in that VR is not perceived as a cool thing to do,” Chen says. “So having influential people onboard helps with that perception a bit.”

Sandbox has 16 locations planned by the end of 2020. The company has now raised a whopping $82 million.

Google has hired Microsoft’s former Cortana and Outlook VP, Javier Soltero, to head up its productivity and collaboration bundle, G Suite — which includes consumer and business tools such as Gmail, Hangouts, Drive, Google Docs and Sheets.

He tweeted the news yesterday, writing: “The opportunity to work with this team on products that have such a profound impact on the lives of people around the world is a real and rare privilege.”

 

Soltero joined Microsoft five years ago, after the company shelling out $200M to acquire his mobile email application, Acompli — staying until late last year.

His LinkedIn profile now lists him as vice president of G Suite, starting October 2019.

Soltero will report to Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian — who replaced Dianne Green when she stepped down from the role last year — per a company email reported by CNBC.

Previously, Google’s Prabhakar Raghavan — now SVP for its Advertising and Commerce products — was in charge of the productivity bundle, as VP of Google Apps and Google Cloud. But Mountain View has created a dedicated VP role for G Suite. Presumably to woo Soltero into his next major industry move — and into competing directly with his former employer.

The move looks intended to dial up focus on the Office giant, in response to Microsoft’s ongoing push to shift users from single purchase versions of flagship productivity products to subscription-based cloud versions, like Office 365.

This summer Google CEO, Sundar Pichai, announced that its cloud business unit had an $8 billion annual revenue run rate, up from $4BN reported in early 2018, though still lagging Microsoft’s Azure cloud.

He added that Google planned to triple the size of its cloud sales force over the next few years.

The early-stage startup community knows that the Disrupt Main Stage is the place to hear and learn from iconic founders, technologists and investment leaders. And the speakers you’ll hear at Disrupt Berlin 2019 on 11-12 December will follow that grand tradition.

Hold up a sec. Don’t have a ticket yet? Buy your early bird pass today and save up to €500.

Okay, back to the point at hand. “Always leave them wanting more” — a phrase often attributed to P.T. Barnum — also applies to the Disrupt Main Stage. “More” is what Disrupt attendees frequently tell us they want after hearing our featured guests speak. More time to engage, to ask questions, to take a deeper dive into critical issues and emerging trends.

And that’s where the Q&A sessions come into play. They’re a series of smaller, moderated panel discussions — and a place where audience members can interact and ask their top-of-mind questions. Panels consist of a TechCrunch editor to moderate and subject experts, many of whom are the very people who held forth on Main Stage.

Each Q&A Session takes place on the Extra Crunch Stage and, while the topics vary, they focus primarily on these tracks — Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning, Biotech/Healthtech, Blockchain, Fintech, Gaming, Investor Topics, Media, Mobility, Privacy/Security, Retail/E-commerce, Robotics/IoT/Hardware, SaaS, Space and Social Impact & Education.

If you’re not familiar with our new Extra Crunch Stage, that’s the place to find fireside chats, panel discussions and to learn all kinds of actionable, how-to tips from successful founders and investors. You know, things you can actually use in your business once the show ends.

Here’s an important aspect you need to understand about our Q&A sessions. The only way to experience a session is to be there in the flesh. We do not record or livestream the content for these sessions. Keep in mind that seating is limited in this smaller, more intimate setting, and it’s strictly first come, first served. Bottom line: get there early if you want a seat.

Whether you want the 40,000-foot view of the Main Stage or the up-close-and-personal take of the Q&A sessions, you find it — and everything in between — at Disrupt Berlin 2019 on 11-12 December. Get your early bird passes now and save up to €500. We can’t wait to see you in Berlin!

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt Berlin 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

Uber said on Tuesday that it has won a bid to work with subway system in India’s capital in one of its rare announcements in India, a key overseas market where it is facing an upheaval battle with local giant Ola.

The ride-hailing giant said it has partnered with Delhi Metro Rail Corporation to deploy parking spots and introduce new products at 210 subway stations in Delhi, Gurgaon, and Noida. Neither of the parties offered a clarification on how many years it would take for these deployments to materialize.

The company has also started to roll out a software update to its app to include real-time public transportation options from within the Uber app. It’s the same feature — which is limited to offering details such as navigation data — that Uber introduced in several markets in recent months as it attempts to make Uber app “an operating system” for a user’s every transportation need.

But the company, which has retreated some of its businesses in India, had nothing more concrete to say. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said onstage that Uber was “here to stay in India” — a familiar promise that he made in Southeast Asia early last year before selling the local business to Grab a month later — but avoided a question about future of UberEats, the ride-hailing firm’s food delivery option.

In recent months, many restaurants have ceased their tie-up with UberEats, and the company has lowered the discounts it was bandying out to compete with local rivals Swiggy and Zomato .

UberEats has lost more than a third of its business in India in recent months, industry sources told TechCrunch. Last year, Uber held talks with both Swiggy and Zomato to sell its UberEats business in the country but failed to attract any meaningful offer, people familiar with the talks said.

Bhavik Rathod, UberEats’ India and Southeast Asia head, Deepak Reddy, head of central operations for UberEats in India, and several more executives have resigned in recent weeks, people familiar with the matter said. Uber’s spokespeople have not returned TechCrunch’s emails since last month.

At the event today, Uber executives miserably escaped questions surrounding UberEats’ future in India. Uber’s local rival Ola, which leads the market, is increasingly expanding its footprint in the nation. In an interview in 2017, Khosrowshahi said India was one of the key regions where the company planned to invest heavily.

Supermercato24, the Italian same-day grocery delivery service, has acquired Szopi.pl, an on-demand grocery delivery service in Poland.

Terms of the deal remain undisclosed, although I understand it is a mixture of cash and stock. Szopi had raised €1.7M from various investors, including Impera Alfa.

The acquisition sees the two companies join forces to speed up the growth of Supermercato24’s expansion in Poland. Full integration of the respective platforms will be completed at the beginning of 2020. Szopi’s founders are joining Supermercato24 where they’ll be focusing on Business Development and Operations.

Similar to Instacart in the U.S. and claiming to be the leader in Italy, Supermercato24 lets customers order from local supermarkets for delivery. The startup uses gig economy-styled personal shoppers who go into the store and ‘pick’ the products ordered and then deliver them same-day, or for an added cost within an hour. It’s live in 31 Italian cities.

The company raised €13 million in Series B funding in June 2018. Leading that round was FII Tech Growth, with participation from new investor Endeavor Catalyst, and current investors 360 Capital Partners, and Innogest.

Meanwhile, I’m told that one of the key assets being acquired is the network of partnerships that Szopi has been able to develop with retailers such as Auchan and Carrefour. In Italy, Supermercato24 has partnered with +20 retailers such as LIDL and Carrefour.

“The acquisition marks the first step for the international expansion of the company, aiming to lead the way and expand into Europe,” a spokesperson for Supermercato24 tells TechCrunch.

Lilium, the Munich-based startup developing an on-demand “air taxi” service, has released its latest flight video — this time demonstrating a successful transition from vertical flight (liftoff) to horizontal flight.

The company is also announcing the completion of its first manufacturing facility and plans for a much larger second factory in preparation for a 2025 commercial launch.

In the flight footage (embedded below), the five-seater all-electric Lilium Jet can be seen taking off and then transitioning to vertical flight, where it functions along broadly similar lines to conventional airplane.

Describing this type of transition as one of “aerospace’s greatest challenges,” Lilium claims this is what gives the Lilium Jet a range advantage over some other all-electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) competitors, with its two sets of wings contributing to much higher levels of efficiency than in aircraft lifted solely by rotors.

“Powered by 36 all-electric jet engines, the aircraft has zero operating emissions and requires less than 10% of its maximum 2000 horsepower during horizontal cruise flight thanks to the lift generated by having two sets of wings,” explains Lilium.

The company — which we reported is currently raising a large round of funding, thought to be between $400 million and $500 million — is also disclosing that its jet has now been flown at speeds exceeding 100 km/h and undergone “increasingly complex” manoeuvres. It says it is still on track to be able to complete journeys of up to 300 km in one hour and on a single charge.

In a call with Remo Gerber, Lilium’s chief commercial officer (CCO), he reiterated the company’s plans for a “meaningful” 2025 launch and talked up the 300 kilometre target range. Specifically, he explained that this means Lilium will be able to operate an air taxi service that connects cities and country regions, rather than simply speeding up travel time across a single city.

“We’re actually quite clear in our mind what our goal is,” Gerber told me when asked to elaborate on Lilium’s 2025 ambitions. “We want to be live and a real meaningful part of transportation ecosystems in several cities around the world. So what does that mean? We’re having talks around the world with a number of different cities and governments and then entire regions to look at how we best connect them”.

Describing England in the U.K. as one example of an ecosystem, where the main hubs are reachable within a 300 kilometre range, he says we could imagine services between London-Manchester, Manchester-Birmingham, Birmingham-London, “or maybe down to Brighton and several other places”.

“So that is really a meaningful new addition to transportation opportunities for customers and for people to use every day,” says Gerber. “And that wouldn’t be just something that will be useful for Londoners, but it would be just as useful for people living in the other larger towns but also – and that’s where the timeline is [hard to predict] – how quickly other smaller cities jump on the opportunity”.

The upside for building the landing pads, which will need to be close to other transport links, is that it will require a “manageable investment” compared to much larger and more capital intensive infrastructure projects. The smallest and most affordable sizes of a pad will cost as little as half a million pounds to build, says Gerber.

“I can all of a sudden make one investment into a pad the size of a football field and be connected to all of these other 10 different pads in the country. And that’s where we’re coming in,” he explains, revealing that Lilium is already having conversations with various different parties who are interested in creating a landing site.

“We are developing the blueprints for people and we will be advising people what they need to build. Of course, we cannot go and build all around the world all of these landing sites, but where we will come in is to work with these cities to say ‘how do we connect you in a meaningful way into the network, into the Lilium service’. That’s how you have to imagine it”.

It won’t all be tax payer-funded or public money, but private companies will also be courted. These could be shopping malls that want additional footfall or large businesses that want their business parks to be connected in different ways or want a 10 minute transfer to a specific airport.

However, Gerber says Lilium will remain “ultra-cautious” with regards to where Lilium landing pads are created so that there is “no negative impact” on communities.

“We see the landing infrastructure to a very large extent is the public good,” he tells me. “We see it a bit like on the scale of a train station, because it should have a use to the community that it serves and that’s where really our whole philosophy comes in”.

Meanwhile, Lilium’s first manufacturing facility is a 3,000 square meter space located at the company’s headquarters in Southern Germany. It will soon be complemented by a second, much larger, facility which is already under construction at the same site. The plan is to be capable of producing hundreds of Lilium aircraft per year by the time commercial services begin in 2025.

“There’s a tremendous opportunity when you have the manufacturing sitting next to the engineers because they can work together…,” says Gerber. “Now we know the performance is right, how do we tweak it so that it’s actually also easy to make, so that we can get that scale? We’re building the first manufacturing line to really produce this aircraft at scale”.

Media monitoring — where news sources and other public information outlets are scanned regularly for mentions of specific organizations — is a well established service used by companies for market intelligence and to measure sentiment around their businesses. Today, London-based Signal AI, which has built a substantial operation in the area, has raised $25 million funding to expand to newer frontiers: applying AI to that public data to also spot themes, risks and opportunities to make better decisions; and continuing to take that business to new markets.

The Series C is being led by Redline Capital, with previous VCs MMC Ventures, GMG Ventures (an investment firm linked to the Guardian Media Group) and Hearst Ventures also participating. The startup, which has now raised around $53 million, is not disclosing its valuation but CEO and found David Benigson said that it is “significantly higher” than before (it last raised $16 million a year ago), after growing revenues at well over 100% each year for the last two.

The presence of not one but two media-linked investors in the round points to the startup’s roots: Signal AI had previously been called Signal Media and worked mainly around the task of media monitoring in the more traditional sense: tracking how companies were being mentioned in the press.

Benigson said that the reason for the rebrand was to “signal” to the world how the startup was widening its remit, both in terms of its sources of data and also in terms of its customers and how they now utilize Signal’s technology.

The challenge and opportunity that Signal AI is tackling is the fact that the world is awash in information, much of it unstructured and usually bombarding us from many angles, but tantalising all the same for hinting at the insights that it might hold if it could be looked at in a more comprehensive way.

“When we started six years ago, it was by aggregating news data and tapping the repository of global, traditional media,” Benigson said. “We have since broadened into social media, broadcast and radio, and regulatory information and started to apply more machine learning to structure that data.” The company also, in addition to selling services directly, now partners with third parties to build analytics around more targeted subjects such as a changing regulatory climate in a specific area, which in turn sold on by the third parties to other clients.

The company, for example, works with Deloitte’s tax division to monitor how tax codes are evolving and likely to move over time: the firm used to keep its own clients up to date verbally on these details, and now it sends alerts automatically with insights — a switch that Benigson said has saved the company $100 million a year in human and overhead costs.

Signal AI sits in a relatively new, not clearly defined area of business. It can be comparable with the likes of Meltwater, Cision (Gorkana) and even Dataminr when it comes to reading media in real time. But it also works a little like business intelligence or market analytics in its predictive analysis. The company refers to its specific area as “augmented intelligence”:

“There is a trend / emerging category that is far less crowded and defined than business intelligence or analytics,” Benigson said. “For me, it’s around taking those same values of BI and applying them to the world of data that sits outside the organization. There are very few companies that use augmented intelligence, although we are seeing management consultancy firms and others we potentially compete with convening around this space.”

It’s that open water that has attracted investors to the company.

“In this new digital era of news and content, having an adaptive platform to help the world’s leading organizations see around the corner is invaluable,” said Nicolas Giuli, Partner at Redline Capital, in a statement. “Signal AI’s team of data scientists and engineers have been at the forefront of the AI revolution and we are excited to take this journey with them as they continue to scale across the world.”

In this day and age, data is indeed very much a hot commodity, but I’d argue that it’s also a hot potato. By that, I’m referring to the rise of security breaches, people’s growing awareness of how their personal information is being used (and too often misused), and regulation that now draws lines on how data can be used, after organizations failed to draw those lines themselves. All of these have made concepts like data analytics and data mining, even around supposedly anonymised information, feel more nefarious and unclear in their target purposes and ends. That potentially spells out trouble ahead for companies that dabble in this space.

Benigson, for his part, was unequivocal on where Signal AI stands on any kind of anonymised or other potentially personal data:

“We purposefully avoid those data sets because we feel that the challenges are not being met,” he said. The exception, he noted, was in cases where a company uses its own internal data for its own purposes, but this does not feed into Signal’s AI engine, which focuses only on publicly-available third-party content. “We have no plans to incorporate that kind of data ourselves. We have an opportunity to do this in an ethical manner.”