Year: 2020

Motional, the Aptiv-Hyundai $4 billion joint venture aimed at commercializing autonomous vehicles, plans to launch in 2023 fully driverless robotaxi services in major U.S. cities using the Lyft ride-hailing network.

This is the first time Motional has specified a target date for its robotaxi service. And while Lyft has been a partner with Motional in Las Vegas, this is the first indication that the ride-hailing company will be autonomous vehicle company’s primary partner in its commercialization plans.

The announcement follows Nevada’s approval last month to allow Motional to test fully driverless vehicles — without a human safety driver behind the wheel — on public roads in the state.

Motional and Lyft have been partners for three years, a relationship that kicked off with what was supposed to be a weeklong pilot program to offer rides in autonomous vehicles on the Lyft network in Las Vegas during the 2018 CES tech trade show.

This partnership predates the joint venture with Hyundai. At the time, Motional was known as Aptiv Autonomous Mobility Group. That temporary experiment, which has always included a human safety driver, was extended and still exists today. As of February 2020, the program had given more than 100,000 paid self-driving rides in Aptiv’s — now Motional’s — self-driving vehicles per the Lyft app.

Aptiv’s investment in Las Vegas expanded as those ridership numbers grew. The company opened in December 2018 a 130,000-square-foot technical center in the city to house its fleet of autonomous vehicles, as well as an engineering team dedicated to research and development of software and hardware systems, validation and mapping.

Motional describes today’s announcement as a “quantum leap” for the partnership. The robotaxi services will use next-generation vehicles based on a Hyundai vehicle platform. The vehicles will be integrated with sensors, computers and software to enable fully-driverless operation and remote vehicle assistance. Motional, which today uses BMW 5 Series and Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivans, said the fleet will also grow “significantly.”

The companies didn’t provide details on which cities it will offer service in or just how big these fleets will be. Motional has testing operations in Boston, Las Vegas and Pittsburgh. Motional did indicate that this robotaxi service partnership with Lyft will extend beyond the initial launch cities. That doesn’t mean Lyft will be it’s only partner. Earlier this year, Motional struck a deal with on-demand shuttle company Via to launch a shared robotaxi service for the public in a U.S. city in the first half of 2021. The companies said the aim is to develop a “blueprint” for on-demand shared robotaxis and learn how these driverless vehicles can be integrated into mass transit.

“This agreement is a testament to our global leadership in driverless technology. We’re at the frontier of transportation innovation, moving robotaxis from research to road,” Motional President and CEO Karl Iagnemma, said in a statement. “Our aim is to not only build safe, reliable, and accessible driverless vehicles, but to deliver them at significant scale. We’re partnering with Lyft to do exactly that.”

Technical manuals and other product content may not be the first things that come to mind when you are thinking of software. But if you’ve ever found yourself in a pickle or just need some help getting something to work correctly, you know how vital they can be, and also how frustrating it can be if you cannot find what you are looking for.

Today, a startup called Zoomin, which has built a platform that uses AI to help companies get their technical documentation in order, and natural language to help better understand what answers people are looking for, so that those content troves can be used better and across more environments, is announcing that it has raised $21 million, and picked up a strategic investor, as it comes out of stealth.

“We are focused on product content assets — manuals, guides, and so on — the most boring assets at every company,” Gal Oron, the CEO and co-founder, joked. “To us, it’s all gold because this is actually the information customers are looking for.”

Bessemer Venture Partners, strategic backer Salesforce Ventures and Viola Growth are leading the funding, which actually came in two parts while Zoomin — founded in Israel but now with operations and its CEO also in New York — was still under the radar.

“We have done no PR for the last four years,” said Gal Oron, who co-founded the company with Joe Gelb and Hannan Saltzman. “It’s because we’ve been very busy developing product and signing our first customers. Now, after having dozens of very big customers and nice traction, we felt like this was the time to go.”

The startup now counts Imperva, Dell, Automation Anywhere and McAfee among its customers, with the companies using the Zoomin platform to better organise their content into something that can be used by both customer service agents helping people with issues, and by customers themselves if they opt to try the DIY option, wherever they might be seeing information: be it on a website, in a customer forum, over email or chat, or in a piece of software or an app itself.

The challenge that Zoomin is going after goes a little something like this: technical content is a boring yet necessary component for using software and hardware, especially when a user comes up against any kind of hitch.

The issue is that a lot of it has been written in fits and spurts, and often in a way that might not be easy for the average user to access or understand, with no easy and quick way of drilling into the content to find what you are specifically looking for. And a lot of it exists in disparate places and these days, the entry points for where a user might be looking for that information might also be as fragmented as the places where the content lives.

“Dell has no way of controlling where you might engage with a product,” Oron explained. It might be on Dell’s site, in its software, on a forum, on social media, and so on.

Zoomin aims to provide what Oron describes as a personalised experience for users wherever they may be searching. By that, he means that Zoomin learns what a user is working with, and what that user typically searching for, in order to connect them more quickly with the right answers. In an app, this might take the form of a widget that appears for help. On a forum, it might more likely be by way of an agent who is participating, using Zoomin’s engine to find the right answers to respond to questions.

For Zoomin, this has so far applied primarily to the world of B2B customer service: its product is used to organise and “orchestrate” knowledge for its customers to in turn provide to business/enterprise customers. But Oron notes that it could be just as applicable, and may well see traction over time, with non-business consumers, too, since at the end of the day they are all consumers, he noted.

“We like to think of ourselves as consumerizing the experience,” he said. “We want to make it as easy as buying on Amazon or browsing Netflix.”

The wider area of “knowledge base management” or knowledge orchestration is often part of a larger customer service play, an unsurprisingly the companies that have products in a similar area include the likes of Zendesk and Hubspot. Other tech companies building solutions to help organise knowledge bases include companies like ProProfs, Helpjuice and Instrktiv.

Salesforce is an interesting strategic investor in that regard: it hasn’t build something like this itself in its community and service clouds, so Zoomin is a close partner to provide that option. (The startup also integrates with a number of other platforms like Oracle’s service cloud, Zendesk, Jira, SharePoint and more.)

“Salesforce Ventures supports bold ideas put forward by enterprise cloud companies, so we are thrilled to support Zoomin on their journey to improve how product content is experienced. We believe in the innovative team at Zoomin and their vision of increasing content accessibility,” added Alex Kayyal, partner and head of Salesforce Ventures International.

Investors are especially interested in the role that a company like Zoomin might be playing these days in particular: with customer service enquiries higher than ever before as more of us are working remotely, it puts a big strain on systems to triage and answer questions. This presents an opportunity.

“The era of digital transformation has clearly reached product content,” said Amit Karp, Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners in a statement. “As technical product content continues to grow exponentially, Zoomin allows enterprises to leverage this content as a strategic asset.”

Zoomin is not disclosing valuation at this stage.

SF-based small satellite startup Capella Space is now exclusively offering the most cutting-edge synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery available on the commercial market. The company has now made available 50cm x 50cm ‘Spot’ imagery – much higher resolution than the previous 1m x 25cm images that were the best available. SAR imagery offers advantages vs. other types of satellite-based observation, because it can operate regardless of cloud cover, air visibility, lighting (whether it’s day or night) and more.

Capella Space has designed, built and operated its SAR satellites entirely in-house, making it the first U.S. company to do so. Founded and led by former JPL engineer Payam Banazadeh, the company has so far launched one of its satellites to orbit, on a Rocket Lab launch that lifted off at the end of August. The company has plans to launch two more of its spacecraft on board a future SpaceX rideshare launch, potentially before year’s end.

Currently, Capella’s commercially available max resolution isn’t actually event technologically bound – it’s limited by a maximum set by U.S. regulators about how detailed SAR imagery can be when made available to private sector buyers. Cappella notes that it can sell even better imagery to U.S. government customers, and that it should be able to offer even 25cm x 25cm resolution imagery commercially once “regulations catch up to technologies.”

SAR imagery is poised to become a major disruptive shift for space-based Earth imaging, especially as the technology to achieve this level of detail becomes more generally accessible and affordable, enabling startups like Capella to provide it to commercial businesses. It’s also a rich platform upon which to layer analytics and other types of observation data for detailed insights that simply weren’t possible with the limitations of optical imaging alone. Obviously, the tech is also very much of interest to national security organizations, and Capella already has contracts in place to show that, aided by its all-American pedigree.

Banazadeh is joining us at our TC Sessions: Space event, which kicks off later today, so we’ll likely hear more about this new high-resolution imagery and its applications then.

Robotic dry cleaning startup Presso today announced that it has closed a $1.6 million pre-seed with investment from Pathbreaker, AME Cloud Ventures, SOSV, 1517 Fund and YETI Capital. The Atlanta-based startup has developed a kiosk capable of dry cleaning a garment in around five minutes.

Initially focused on business travelers, with plans to install machines in hotel hallways, the COVID-19 pandemic found the startup switching focus — a fairly common story in 2020. Instead, Presso has shifted much of its efforts to film and TV production. The company says the latest generation of its tech is capable of cleaning/disinfecting up to 150 costumes in a day — a key demand as many studios have begun to ramp up production, in spite of the continuing pandemic. Netflix, HBO, Apple TV, FOX, Disney and Hulu have all approached the company about its tech.

This latest round brings Presso’s full funding up to $2.2 million, money it plans to spend on scaling up manufacturing, while doubling its headcount over the course of the next six or so months. I’d expect the team will also refocus some of its efforts on earlier models — like hotel delivery — once travel ramps up again in the U.S.

Today, the acute asthma attack of primary school-aged girl in February 2013 was ruled by a UK court to be due to air pollution. It is thought to be the first ruling of its kind in the world. Only a year after Ella Kissi-Debrah died, another mother also became concerned about the effects of air quality on her daughter’s asthma and decided to do something about it.

Today, Yodit Stanton has secured $4m in seed funding for her air monitoring startup OpenSensors, in a Seed round led by Crane Venture Partners and other unnamed investors. The startup previously bootstrapped the company prior to the round, supported by customer revenues.

OpenSensors, uses sensors to monitor air quality and light intensity, but it’s the data platform that is the real ‘special source’. The startup’s technology works to reveal workplace and workforce conditions and patterns. It competes with companies like Condecco and Workplace Fabric, but takes a more ‘360 degree’ approach.

It now has more than 30 customers with complex real estate operations across North America, Ireland, UK and Europe, in industries such as Insurance, Finance, Tech and more.

Building costs are the 2nd highest expense for organizations, with office costs over £20bn per year in the UK, but even in normal, pre-pandemic times, half of that office space is unused at any point during the day and only reaches 55% peak utilization. Buildings also represent 36% of global energy usage & 39% of CO2 emissions. OpenSensors tracks humidity, CO2 levels, and more to guide on the optimal capacity to reduce viral transmission, thus enabling companies to return their workforces to offices safely.

Stanton commented: “How we work and live are changing faster than we could have ever anticipated. There is a real opportunity for humanity to rethink how we use the physical world with sustainability in mind as well as making the design of workplaces better for people using them.”

Scott Sage, Partner at Crane Venture Partners said: “With data insights, real-world usage and known customer references, OpenSensors has all the ingredients to become a trusted advisor and solutions provider throughout COVID-19 and the immediate recovery, as well as supporting the shift towards more flexible working that COVID-19 has accelerated.”

Speaking exclusively to TechCrunch, Stanton, who also founded and runs the UK’s Women In Data event, said: “Initially it just started as a fun hobby project. I was playing around with IoT as in my daughter has asthma, so I was monitoring air quality up in our neighborhood to try to see if I can correlate the particulates spikes and so forth with her asthma attacks. I released it as a project for my community to monitor air quality. But it became, I guess a real thing when people asked if I could manage their buildings.”

She said that low humidity encourages virus transmission: “So you really have to aim for around 40% humidity within an indoor environment and dry air also affects your immune system as an individual.”

This means that monitoring air quality has become a huge issue for companies. So it unsurprising that VCs are now backing air-quality startups like OpenSensors.

Pia d’Iribarne, formerly of Accel and Stride, is heading up a new European early stage venture capital firm co-founded with French entrepreneur and investor Xavier Niel, TechCrunch has learned.

Dubbed New Wave, its debut fund of $56 million was raised in just 3 months and has already begun making investments. It is said to be targeting seed and pre-seed startups across Europe but also European founders further afield.

Cheque sizes will be between €500,000 and €2 million, with New Wave both leading and co-investing in rounds in what I’ve been told will be a “collaborative” approach, investing alongside and playing nicely with Europe’s business angels and other seed firms.

I reached out to d’Iribarne and she confirmed the fund size and that New Wave is open for business but declined to comment further.

D’Iribarne is taking the role of managing partner of New Wave and is also a co-founder of the new firm. Working with her on investments is New Wave partner and co-founder Jean de La Rochebrochard, who will also continue running Kima Ventures, the angel investment vehicle of Xavier Niel.

D’Iribarne, who is half French and half Dutch and splits her time between London and Paris, was most recently a partner at Stride where she is said to have led the investments in Strapi, Impala, and Jow. Before that she was at Accel where she invested in Doctolib, Framer, Payfit, Selency and Shift Technology. She started her career at McKinsey & Company.

French-born De La Rochebrochard has been running Niel’s venture arm for five years and has invested in close to 500 companies at seed stage. He has also been involved through larger commitments in Zenly, Payfit, Dice, Ibanfirst, Nabla, Alan, Impala and Openclassrooms. He is a former partner at The Family.

In addition to Niel, d’Iribarne, and de La Rochebrochard, New Wave’s other co-founders are Antoine Martin (co-founder and CEO of Zenly, and a prolific angel investor), and Alex Yazdi (founder of Voodoo, and experienced angel investor).

Meanwhile, as well as Niel, the billionaire founder of French telecoms giant Iliad (Free) and most recently the founder of Station F, sources tell me that New Wave has attracted a number of other high profile LPs, including Yuri Milner of DST, Peter Fenton from Benchmark, Philippe Laffont from Coatue, and Tony Fadell of Nest and Apple fame.

StockX today announced its Series E funding led by Tiger Global. The $275 million funding round values the company at $2.8 billion at a post-money valuation. The company intends to use the cash to accelerate global expansion, product development, and to expand StockX’s categories. Rumors are swirling that this financing will allow the company to offer an initial public offering in 2021.

Tiger Global Management led the round with participation from Altimeter Capital, Sands Capital, and Whale Rock Capital Management.

“The quality of investors joining us is a clear signal that the market recognizes that there is incredible opportunity in e-commerce for current culture products and StockX is best positioned to meet consumer demand for those products,” said StockX CEO Scott Cutler in a released statement. “I’m thrilled to welcome our new partners to the team — their collective expertise will be invaluable as we continue to build on the momentum from the last year, and drive the growth to cement StockX’s position as the global marketplace leader.”

Headquartered in downtown Detroit, Michigan, the raise marks the largest VC funding round in Michigan history. This round brings StockX’s total amount raised to $490 million.

StockX is seeing blockbuster growth. Since launching in 2016, the company recorded sales in 200 countries through 13 million transactions — 50% of those coming within the last 12 months. In June the company surpassed $2.5 billion in lifetime gross merchandise value. International growth is quickly growing, too, with Q3 2020 non-US trades increasing 260% over 2019 levels.

During the most recent quarter, the company averaged 25 million visitors per month.

Just prior to the Covid-19 shutdown, CEO Cutler said the impending virus was looking to be great for his company. At the time he spoke about how having facilities in different regions would allow the company to better navigate shutdowns. In April, few weeks later, StockX laid off 100 people at the height of the shutdown. Shortly after the company’s outlook changed as the results speak for themselves.

The company opened new authentication facilities in 2020 resulting in a 50% increase of the company’s global footprint. Earlier in the year, the company opened an authentication facility in Portland, Oregon. Like other authentication centers, this location is a go-between buyers and sellers where StockX employees authenticate the products purchased and sold on the marketplace. Last month, the company opened similar facilities in Toronto and Hong Kong as it expands into key international markets.

StockX is targeting the Asian-Pacific market. The company opened an office in Tokyo in 2019 and a localized experience in 2020. Last month, StockX stated sell-side transactions across the region increased 500% over 2019 levels and up 1000% in Hong Kong.

StockX originally launched as a marketplace for sneakers where the value of the products are determined by supply and demand. Now, in 2020, the company offers the same pricing system but in more categories including streetwear, luxury good, collectables, and even hot electronics like the new PS5 and Xbox Series X. The company expects to keep expanding, too.

Inside StockX’s authentication center

Facebook is to follow Google’s lead and move millions of UK users out of the jurisdiction of EU privacy laws to the US (which has no such comprehensive data protection framework) next year under a looming Brexit-related change to its T&Cs, Reuters reported yesterday.

Confirming the switch, Facebook told the news agency: “Like other companies, Facebook has had to make changes to respond to Brexit and will be transferring legal responsibilities and obligations for UK users from Facebook Ireland to Facebook Inc.”

“There will be no change to the privacy controls or the services Facebook offers to people in the UK,” Facebook added, using phrasing that elides the fact that the switch from the EU to the US inevitably involves a radical downgrading in legal protection for data and privacy.

Per Reuters, Facebook will inform users of the switch within the next six months — giving them the ‘option’ to stop using Facebook’s services (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) if they’re unhappy with the legal switch.

As we reported in February when Google announced a similar legal migration for UK users, shifting them from its EU subsidiary to the US, the move is a consequence of the UK’s vote to leave the European Union — which moves it away from EU standards, including its long-standing data protection framework.

Now, with just days before the end of the brexit transition period, it’s still not clear whether the UK will get a trade deal with the EU or leave with no deal — the latter ramping up the possibility the UK will also not get a data adequacy agreement from the EU, arguably making future divergence on data protection standards more likely (since there will be no ‘carrot’ of continued friction-free EU-UK data flows to encourage continued alignment).

The UK has also signalled it wants a data-fuelled levelling up of the economic, publishing a National Data Strategy in September that talks about making pandemic levels of data-sharing the new normal.

The document threw shade at the entire concept of data protection — saying the government plans to “promote domestic best practice and work with international partners to ensure data is not inappropriately constrained by national borders and fragmented regulatory regimes so that it can be used to its full potential”.

Since then privacy experts have expressed concern that clauses in a UK-Japan (post-brexit) trade deal are weakening the UK’s existing data protection regime (which is, for now, based on transposed EU standards) — and could allow for flows of citizens’ data to nations with “weak or voluntary data protection arrangements”, as the Open Rights Group warned last month.

The US is one such nation that lacks a comprehensive framework for data protection. Though California has passed its own consumer privacy law and residents voted in November to strengthen the regime. But at the federal level there’s no GDPR equivalent — yet.

With so much uncertainty on where exactly the UK is headed on standards post-brexit, it’s little wonder tech giants like Google and Facebook are taking the opportunity to shrink their liability under EU privacy rules — by removing the 45M+ UK users from its Dublin subsidiary’s jurisdiction, in Facebook’s case.

The recent Schrems II judgement by Europe’s top court has ramped up legal risk and uncertainty over EU to US transfers of personal data, giving Facebook another potential reason to rework its UK T&Cs.

Of course it’s not so great for UK users, given the privacy protections they’re losing.

But this time that’s more on brexit than big tech. And in this case brexit means that from next year UK users are going to have to hope their own government doesn’t decide to junk national privacy standards in its bid to ink trade deals with countries like the US, while trusting that Facebook (er!) will look out for their privacy interests.

Yes UK data protection law will continue to apply. (Though good luck getting the ICO to stand up for your rights.)

But the overarching guarantee of standards provided for by EU law is going in 2021.

The US Cloud Act, which was passed in 2018, already makes it easier for data on Internet services users to be passed between UK and US agencies for investigative purposes, for example.

While the UK government has a worrying record on mass surveillance and attacks on encryption.

Its new ‘child-safety-focused‘ plan to regulate Internet services also looks set to apply pressure on digital services not to use strong encryption to allow for mandatory content monitoring and other types of identity checks. So, tl;dr, brexit is shaping up to mean the opposite of taking back control in the data sphere — with less privacy and reduce online freedom speeding down the pipe for Brits.

Back in 2018, Pinduoduo sent shock waves through the investor community when it raised $1.6 billion from a Nasdaq listing as a three-year-old company. Online shoppers in China were excited to see its rise as an alternative to long-time market dominators Alibaba and JD.com.

But the startup founded by former Google engineer Colin Huang has ambitions well beyond e-commerce. It’s answering the Chinese government’s call to modernize the country’s agriculture and bolster the rural economy.

Life in China has become highly digital in many facets, from retail and entertainment to education and healthcare. But agriculture remains an exception. A McKinsey report from late 2017 showed that agriculture was among the least digitized industries in China. Pinduoduo saw an opportunity in the gap and started life by selling fruits online. Over time it has grown into a comprehensive e-commerce platform rivaling Alibaba, but agriculture “has always been close to the heart of Pinduoduo since its inception,” said Pinduoduo’s senior vice president Andre Zhu.

“Investing in smart agriculture is an extension of what we do and guided by our goal of promoting digital inclusion.”

Instead of a standalone department, the firm’s agricultural endeavor is a company- and even society-wide effort. Its strategy and investment team takes the lead to identify solutions targeting all stages of agriculture that the company can help scale up. At the implementation stage, the team might then tap its operational colleagues for contacts at various local governments and traditional farms that want to try the technologies.

“At least on the downstream distribution side, on e-commerce marketplaces for agricultural products, I would say we are relatively ahead compared to the rest of the world,” Xin Yi Lim, executive director of sustainability and agriculture impact at Pinduoduo, told TechCrunch in an interview.

In 2019, nearly 600,000 merchants sold farm produce through Pinduoduo. That translated to some 12 million farmers who supplied their fruits and vegetables to the merchants. In August, Pinduoduo pledged to sell $145 billion worth of farm produce annually by 2025. The number was $21 billion in 2019.

“But it’s really the upstream portion that we’re hoping to encourage and drive further investment in,” Lim added.

As such, the e-commerce giant has been traveling up the agricultural lifecycle, from building logistics infrastructure for distribution to equipping farmers with marketing know-how. In 2019, it trained close to 500,000 farm operators through its online e-commerce business institute.

When it comes to production, Pinduoduo is able to track purchase behavior from its hundreds of millions of buyers and tell farmers what they should plant and how much they should price their products, an approach in line with the firm’s larger direct-to-consumer strategy to cut traditional middlemen costs.

The e-commerce firm is also hoping to gather agronomic expertise for its farm suppliers. It kickstarted a smart farming competition this year, calling teams from around the world to grow strawberries using artificial intelligence and connected devices. They were graded on criteria such as the fruit’s sweetness, energy and fertilizer use, and their AI strategy. The winner’s design would then be rolled out at one of the AI-powered Duo Duo Farms, a project jointly launched by Pinduoduo and the provincial government of Yunnan to let farmers sell directly on the e-commerce platform.

These examples are just the tip of the iceberg of Pinduoduo’s agricultural long game. The firm doesn’t disclose exactly how much it plans to invest in the field, though Lim said “compared to some of the other players in the industry, our involvement in agriculture is definitely more comprehensive.”

The company looks for investment opportunities outside China as well. While domestic players come with more affordable hardware applications, especially drones and sensors, more mature solutions around crop modeling and prediction are found in Western countries where large commercial farms prevail, Lim noted.

Agritech adoption among Pinduoduo farmers is still “relatively small” because the firm’s smart farming initiative is in the early stage. But the e-commerce upstart might be well-positioned to drive the development of agritech in China.

Different from the U.S. and Australia, China is dominated by small-scale farms that often can’t afford to buy advanced farming equipment. Lacking demand, agritech startups have had difficulty fundraising to subsequently invest in customer acquisition and lowering their price point, Lim explained.

“Pinduoduo can already connect [agritech startups] with a wide pool of potential customers. I think that helps to ease a little bit of the initial pain point,” said Lim.

Finally, injecting technologies into farming could help retain talent in China’s vast rural hinterland, which is losing young labor to bigger, more affluent cities.

“In the long term, we [could] make farming more efficient and easier. There could potentially be a transformation in the whole structure of the farming industry. We could see young people feel that ‘I can actually be an entrepreneur. There are these tools that can give me more control over the output,'” Lim suggested.

“There are potentially people who today are not farmers who could then start to see farming as a viable alternative.”

Yet more trouble brewing for Facebook: Australia’s Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) is suing the tech giant over its use, in 2016 and 2017, of the Onavo VPN app to spy on users for commercial purposes.

The ACCC’s case accuses Facebook of false, misleading or deceptive conduct toward thousands of Australian consumers, after it had promoted the Onavo Protect app — saying it would keep users personal activity data private, protected and secret and not use it for any other purpose, when it was being used to gather data to help Facebook’s business.

“Through Onavo Protect, Facebook was collecting and using the very detailed and valuable personal activity data of thousands of Australian consumers for its own commercial purposes, which we believe is completely contrary to the promise of protection, secrecy and privacy that was central to Facebook’s promotion of this app,” said ACCC chair Rod Sims in a statement.

“Consumers often use VPN services because they care about their online privacy, and that is what this Facebook product claimed to offer. In fact, Onavo Protect channelled significant volumes of their personal activity data straight back to Facebook.”

“We believe that the conduct deprived Australian consumers of the opportunity to make an informed choice about the collection and use of their personal activity data by Facebook and Onavo,” Sims added.

The ACCC alleges that between February 1, 2016 to October 2017, Facebook and its subsidiaries Facebook Israel Ltd and Onavo, Inc. misled Australian consumers by misrepresenting the function of the free-to-download Onavo Protect app.

The regulator says it’s seeking declarations and pecuniary penalties.

Reached for comment on the suit, a Facebook spokeswoman said: “When people downloaded Onavo Protect, we were always clear about the information we collect and how it is used.”

“We’ve cooperated with the ACCC’s investigation into this matter to date. We will review the recent filing by the ACCC and will continue to defend our position in response to this recent filing,” she added.

Facebook announced last year that it would shut the Onavo Protect app — after a backlash over how it had used the VPN app which it acquired back in 2013 to snoop on users.

Internal Facebook documents from a legal discovery process — made public in 2018 by the UK parliament after it seized them as part of an enquiry into online disinformation — show the tech giant using Onavo charts as a source of commercial intelligence to understand which third party apps its users were downloading and engaging with.

Data gleaned via Onavo revealed WhatsApp to be a competitive threat to Facebook’s Messenger app. Shortly after gaining this market insight Facebook shelled out $19BN to acquire the rival messaging app.

The tech giant is now facing a massive antitrust case on home soil, where earlier this month 46 states accused it of suppressing competition through monopolistic business practices — with the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp cited as prominent examples.

The FTC and US lawmakers are calling for the unwinding of those mergers and the breaking up of Facebook’s social empire as a necessity.

Elsewhere, Facebook is being sued in Germany — where the Federal Cartel Office (FCO) is pressing a case that could put limits on how it can combine data between difference services it owns.

This month the FCO also announced it’s investigating Facebook tying usage of its latest Oculus VR kit to having a Facebook account — after it said  new Oculus users must have a Facebook account to use the kit. This summer Facebook also said it would end support for existing Oculus accounts by 2023.