Year: 2020

As part of its response to the public health emergency triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, the European Commission has been leaning on Europe’s telcos to share aggregate location data on their users.

“The Commission kick-started a discussion with mobile phone operators about the provision of aggregated and anonymised mobile phone location data,” it said today.

“The idea is to analyse mobility patterns including the impact of confinement measures on the intensity of contacts, and hence the risks of contamination. This would be an important — and proportionate — input for tools that are modelling the spread of the virus, and would also allow to assess the current measures adopted to contain the pandemic.”

“We want to work with one operator per Member State to have a representative sample,” it added. “Having one operator per Member State also means the aggregated and anonymised data could not be used to track individual citizens, that is also not at all the intention. Simply because not all have the same operator.

“The data will only be kept as long as the crisis is ongoing. We will of course ensure the respect of the ePrivacy Directive and the GDPR.”

Earlier this week Politico reported that commissioner Thierry Breton held a conference with carriers, including Deutsche Telekom and Orange, asking for them to share data to help predict the spread of the novel coronavirus.

Europe has become a secondary hub for the disease, with high rates of infection in countries including Italy and Spain — where there have been thousands of deaths apiece.

The European Union’s executive is understandably keen to bolster national efforts to combat the virus. Although it’s less clear exactly how aggregated mobile location data can help — especially as more EU citizens are confined to their homes under national quarantine orders. (While police patrols and CCTV offer an existing means of confirming whether or not people are generally moving around.)

Nonetheless, EU telcos have already been sharing aggregate data with national governments.

Such as Orange in France which is sharing “aggregated and anonymized” mobile phone geolocation data with Inserm, a local health-focused research institute — to enable them to “better anticipate and better manage the spread of the epidemic”, as a spokeswoman put it.

“The idea is simply to identify where the populations are concentrated and how they move before and after the confinement in order to be able to verify that the emergency services and the health system are as well armed as possible, where necessary,” she added. “For instance, at the time of confinement, more than 1 million people left the Paris region and at the same time the population of Ile de Ré increased by 30%.

“Other uses of this data are possible and we are currently in discussions with the State on all of these points. But, it must be clear, we are extremely vigilant with regards to concerns and respect for privacy. Moreover, we are in contact with the CNIL [France’s data protection watchdog]… to verify that all of these points are addressed.”

Germany’s Deutsche Telekom is also providing what a spokesperson dubbed “anonymized swarm data” to national health authorities to combat the corona virus.

“European mobile operators are also to make such anonymized mass data available to the EU Commission at its request,” the spokesperson told us. “In fact, we will first provide the EU Commission with a description of data we have sent to German health authorities.”

It’s not entirely clear whether the Commission’s intention is to pool data from such existing local efforts — or whether it’s asking EU carriers for a different, universal data-set to be shared with it during the COVID-19 emergency.

When we asked about this it did not provide an answer. Although we understand discussions are ongoing with operators — and that it’s the Commission’s aim to work with one operator per Member State.

The Commission has said the metadata will be used for modelling the spread of the virus and for looking at mobility patterns to analyze and assess the impact of quarantine measures.

A spokesman emphasized that individual-level tracking of EU citizens is not on the cards.

“The Commission is in discussions with mobile operators’ associations about the provision of aggregated and anonymised mobile phone location data,” the spokesman for Breton told us.

“These data permit to analyse mobility patterns including the impact of confinement measures on the intensity of contacts and hence the risks of contamination. They are therefore an important and proportionate tool to feed modelling tools for the spread of the virus and also assess the current measures adopted to contain the Coronavrius pandemic are effective.”

“These data do not enable tracking of individual users,” he added. “The Commission is in close contact with the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) to ensure the respect of the ePrivacy Directive and the GDPR.”

At this point there’s no set date for the system to be up and running — although we understand the aim is to get data flowing asap. The intention is also to use datasets that go back to the start of the epidemic, with data-sharing ongoing until the pandemic is over — at which point we’re told the data will be deleted.

Breton hasn’t had to lean very hard on EU telcos to share data for a crisis cause.

Earlier this week Mats Granryd, director general of operator association the GSMA, tweeted that its members are “committed to working with the European Commission, national authorities and international groups to use data in the fight against COVID-19 crisis”.

Although he added an important qualifier: “while complying with European privacy standards”.

Europe’s data protection framework means there are limits on how people’s personal data can be used — even during a public health emergency. And while the legal frameworks do quite rightly bake in flexibility for a pressing public purpose, like the COVID-19 pandemic, it does not mean individuals’ privacy rights automatically go out the window.

Individual tracking of mobile users for contact tracing — such as Israel’s government is doing — is unimaginable at the pan-EU level. Certainly unless the regional situation deteriorates drastically.

One privacy lawyer we spoke to last week suggested such a level of tracking and monitoring across Europe would be akin to a “last resort”. Though individual EU countries are choosing to respond differently to the crisis — such as, for example, Poland giving quarantined people a choice between regular police checks up or uploading geotagged selfies to prove they’re not breaking lockdown.

While former EU Member, the UK, has reportedly chosen to invite in the controversial US surveillance-as-a-service tech firm, Palantir, to carry out resource tracking for its National Health Service during the coronavirus crisis.

Under pan-EU law (which the UK remains subject to, until the end of the Brexit transition period), the rule of thumb is that extraordinary data-sharing — such as the Commission asking telcos to share user location data during a pandemic — must be “temporary, necessary and proportionate”, as digital rights group Privacy International recently noted.

This explains why Breton’s request is for “anonymous and aggregated” location data. And why, in background comments to reporters, the claim is that any shared data sets will be deleted at the end of the pandemic.

Not every EU lawmaker appears entirely aware of all the legal limits, however.

Today the bloc’s lead privacy regulator, data protection supervisor (EDPS) Wojciech Wiewiórowski, could be seen tweeting cautionary advice at one former commissioner, Andrus Ansip (now an MEP) — after the latter publicly eyed up a Bluetooth-powered contacts tracing app deployed in Singapore.

“Please be cautious comparing Singapore examples with European situation. Remember Singapore has a very specific legal regime on identification of device holder,” wrote Wiewiórowski.

So it remains to be seen whether pressure will mount for more privacy-intrusive surveillance of EU citizens if regional rates of infection continue to grow.

As we reported earlier this week, governments or EU institutions seeking to make use of mobile phone data to help with the response to the coronavirus must comply with the EU’s ePrivacy Directive — which covers the processing of mobile location data.

The ePrivacy Directive allows for Member States to restrict the scope of the rights and obligations related to location metadata privacy, and retain such data for a limited time — when such restriction constitutes “a necessary, appropriate and proportionate measure within a democratic society to safeguard national security (i.e. State security), defence, public security, and the prevention, investigation, detection and prosecution of criminal offences or of unauthorised use of the electronic communication system” — and a pandemic seems a clear example of a public security issue.

Thing is, the ePrivacy Directive is an old framework. The previous college of commissioners had intended to replace it alongside an update to the EU’s broader personal data protection framework — the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) — but failed to reach agreement.

This means there’s some potential mismatch. For example the ePrivacy Directive does not include the same level of transparency requirements as the GDPR.

Perhaps understandably, then, since news of the Commission’s call for carrier metadata emerged concerns have been raised about the scope and limits of the data sharing. Earlier this week, for example, MEP Sophie in’t Veld wrote to Breton asking for more information on the data grab — including querying exactly how the data will be anonymized.

The EDPS confirmed to us that the Commission consulted it on the proposed use of telco metadata.

A spokesman for the regulator pointed to a letter sent by Wiewiórowski to the Commission, following the latter’s request for guidance on monitoring the “spread” of COVID-19.

In the letter the EDPS impresses on the Commission the importance of “effective” data anonymization — which means it’s in effect saying a technique that does genuinely block re-identification of the data must be used. (There are plenty of examples of ‘anonymized’ location data being shown by researchers to be trivially easy to reidentify, given how many individual tells such data typically contains, like home address and workplace address.)

“Effective anonymisation requires more than simply removing obvious identifiers such as phone numbers and IMEI numbers,” warns the EDPS, adding too that aggregated data “can provide an additional safeguard”.

We also asked the Commission for more details on how the data will be anonymized and the level of aggregation that would be used — but it told us it could not provide further information at this stage. 

So far we understand that the anonymization and aggregation process will be undertaken before data is transferred by operators to a Commission science and research advisory body, called the Joint Research Centre (JRC) — which will perform the data analytics and modelling.

The results — in the form of predictions of propagation and so on — will then be shared by the Commission with EU Member States authorities. The datasets feeding the models will be stored on secure JRC servers.

The EDPS is equally clear on the Commission’s commitments vis-a-vis securing the data.

“Information security obligations under Commission Decision 2017/464 still apply [to anonymized data], as do confidentiality obligations under the Staff Regulations for any Commission staff processing the information. Should the Commission rely on third parties to process the information, these third parties have to apply equivalent security measures and be bound by strict confidentiality obligations and prohibitions on further use as well,” writes Wiewiórowski.

“I would also like to stress the importance of applying adequate measures to ensure the secure transmission of data from the telecom providers. It would also be preferable to limit access to the data to authorised experts in spatial epidemiology, data protection and data science.”

Data retention — or rather the need for prompt destruction of data sets after the emergency is over — is another key piece of the guidance.

“I also welcome that the data obtained from mobile operators would be deleted as soon as the current emergency comes to an end,” writes Wiewiórowski. “It should be also clear that these special services are deployed because of this specific crisis and are of temporary character. The EDPS often stresses that such developments usually do not contain the possibility to step back when the emergency is gone. I would like to stress that such solution should be still recognised as extraordinary.”

teresting to note the EDPS is very clear on “full transparency” also being a requirement, both of purpose and “procedure”. So we should expect more details to be released about how the data is being effectively rendered unidentifiable.

“Allow me to recall the importance of full transparency to the public on the purpose and procedure of the measures to be enacted,” writes Wiewiórowski. “I would also encourage you to keep your Data Protection Officer involved throughout the entire process to provide assurance that the data processed had indeed been effectively anonymised.”

The EDPS has also requested to see a copy of the data model. At the time of writing the spokesman told us it’s still waiting to receive that.

“The Commission should clearly define the dataset it wants to obtain and ensure transparency towards the public, to avoid any possible misunderstandings,” Wiewiórowski added in the letter.

Tesla is reducing number of on-site workers at its Nevada gigafactory by 75% in response to the growing spread of COVID-19, according to an update from Storey County, where the massive plant is located.

The information, which was first reported by Bloomberg, was part of a larger update on the Tahoe Reno Industrial Center and its response to COVID-19, a disease caused by coronavirus. The privately owned privately owned 107,000-acre industrial park, known as TRIC, is home to the Tesla gigafactory, Google and Switch as well as a Walmart distribution center and Petsmart.

Tesla could not be reached for comment.

Companies in TRIC are taking COVID-19 serious and are regularly report measures being taken to adhere to the established guidelines while maintaining essential operations, Storey County Manager Austin Osborne said in the letter posted on the county’ website. Those measures include checking employee temperatures, creating central access, allowing remote work and creating distance between work stations.

Tesla’s decision to reduce staff follows a move by its gigafactory partner Panasonic to pull all 3,500 of its employees from the site over concerns about the spread of COVID-19. Panasonic said March 20 that it would ramp down operations this week and then close for 14 days. That move only affected Panasonic employees. Tesla also employs thousands of workers at the so-called Gigafactory 1 in Sparks, Nevada.

Gigafactory 1, which broke ground in June 2014, is a critical ingredient in Tesla’s goal to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy by expanding global battery capacity and reducing the cost of electric vehicles. And Panasonic has been its most important partner as a supplier and partner in that project.

The factory produces Model 3 electric motors and battery packs, in addition to Tesla’s energy storage products, Powerwall and Powerpack. Panasonic makes the cells, which Tesla then uses to make battery packs for its electric vehicles.

Tesla has several two factories in the U.S., including in Fremont, Calif., where it produces the Model X, Model S, Model 3 and now the Model Y. Tesla has reduced staff at the Fremont plant from more than 10,000 workers to about 2,500.

Earlier this week, the company sent out an email informing workers that two Tesla employees had tested positive for COVID-19. The internal email, which was viewed by TechCrunch, didn’t indicate where these employees worked.

Tesla employs more than 48,000 people at locations throughout the U.S. These two employees had been working at home for nearly two weeks, according to the email. The employees were not symptomatic in the office, and both are quarantined at home and recovering well, according to the email from Tesla’s EHS department head Laurie Shelby.

Consumers now have their first chance to sample the wares of a short-form streaming service — and it’s not Quibi.

Ficto, a streaming service without a paywall offering interactive dramas, film adaptations, comedies, documentaries, talk shows, game shows, and news, is now live on iOS and Android.

The company’s entertainment is designed to be interactive with live-streaming, geo-location, live chat, polling, choice-based narratives, 360 viewing, augmented reality, and click through e-commerce, the company said.

Their slate of thirty shows at launch is far more sparse than Quibi’s robust and star-studded lineup, and the average viewing times of five minutes per episode is a bit shorter than Quibi’s too. Series run anywhere from three to ten episodes and there area an additional twenty shows that are currently in production now.

Shows on the platform at launch include a gameplay-focused series built around the augmented reality game, Ingress, developed by Niantic, the game studio behind the massive AR hit Pokemon Go.

“Storytelling is incredibly important at Niantic and we are always looking for interesting ways to expand on the narrative of our real world mobile games,” said Ingress: The Series director Spencer McCall.

Other shows on the platform include the documentary series “Represent”, which follows women surfers looking to take the sport to the Olympic games (now scheduled for 2021); “East of La Brea”, a show from executive producer Paul Feig, which follows to Muslim women in Los Angeles; the dating show “Date & Switch”, which lets an audience decide who contestants should date; “Brothers From the Suburbs”, a comedy about three African American teens growing up in an affluent, white suburban community; and “Nothingman” about a resident of Los Angeles’ Skid Row.

Key to Ficto’s pitch to content creators is the company’s a smart contract system that automatically pays royalties to the show’s producers and talent based on how often their content is viewed. The pre-determined contracts and revenue shares are intended to draw in new talent with a more equitable — and longer term — revenue stream than the upfront payments that are a part of most streaming contract, according to Ficto co-founder and chief executive, Mike Esola.

The company also has a brand studio, Ficto Studio, which works with marketers and agencies to help them design promotions based on Ficto’s interactive capabilities. These promotions range from sponsorship opportunities to augmented reality, geo-location, click-to-purchase, product integration, launch events, creator collaborations and other promotions.

A coalition of grassroots UK tech initiatives has come together to co-ordinate the key groups of tech industry people supporting the UK’s response to the Coronavirus.

COVID19 Tech Response (CTR) aims to co-ordinate the supply of available tech talent; work on the problems that need solving and the matching of the two. So far, they have brought over 400 tech volunteers together, mostly from the UK, some of whom have been providing volunteer support to local Covid Mutual Aid groups which have sprung up across the country.

CTR will also aim to co-ordinate tech industry volunteers to coach and support UK citizens who are experiencing problems during the crisis, with any tech solutions available. 

The coalition is working closely with the CoronavirusTechHandbook, an initiative by political technology college Newspeak House which has quickly become a global resource. 

The four main “call to arms” of the group are:
1) Join the Code4COVID Slack as a volunteer or to source volunteers, or work on projects

2) Add your tech skills to the Covid-19 Tech Response Airtable form

3) Submit mainstream UK tech problems to Covid Tech Support

4) Contribute to and access the resources on the CoronavirusTechHandbook

CTR has been formed by many of those coming together to support anyone building solutions to the ongoing pandemic. These include:

• Covidmutualaid.org – Find your local mutual aid group and volunteer or seek help
• CoronavirusTechhandbook – A crowdsourced library of resources and organizations
• Code4Covid Slack community  and TechForUK – Slack groups for collecting tech volunteers
• Covid Tech Support – Collecting requests for technical support, for volunteers to work on
• Covid19-Response – A US-based moderated scientific ‘request for ideas’ 
• Helpwithcovid.com – International volunteer sign-ups and ideas board
• Catalyst – a UK charitable collective providing digital support for civil society organizations.
• TechForce19 – technology to combat self-isolation, particularly among the elderly and vulnerable

COVID19 Tech Response says its aim is not to build the individual solutions needed by those on the front line but instead be a steering group that provides the broad oversight that connects these individual efforts together. It also aims to put in place the system that enables new problems to be solved efficiently and effectively using technology. 

CTR hopes to create a “matching agency” where community volunteers are matched with technical problems. It will also be encouraging the tech community to talk to healthcare workers/public service workers they know and share tools and build tech teams who can be staged to solve problems.

The formation of the group was inspired by similar initiatives globally, including, Helpwithcovid.com and Covid19-response.

Commenting, Ed Saperia, co-founder of CoronavirusTechHandbook said: “Millions of knowledge workers are showing up to help. This is fantastic, and will change society, but it needs coordination. Often the hard part is not the tech, but understanding what you can do, and it’s here that you should apply your intelligence and creativity.”

Cinzia Ricciardone, co-founder of code4covid, said: “Formed on March 16th by a few technologist friends, code4covid now counts over 400 tech volunteers. Our mission is to find technology solutions and resources to help people during the COVID-19 crisis, and ensure energy gets directed to the right place in order to save lives.”

CTR Co-organiser Freddie Fforde said: “Like so many other groups across the country, people in tech are trying to play their part. We don’t know where this will lead but we have to start somewhere by helping people come together and seeing what they can build.

Josh Russell, co-founder of Tech For UK, said: “Our goal is for teams that emerge to have a good understanding of the problem space, so we’ll be forming a User Research (explainer) function that will feed insights to the community on a regular basis. User Research is the secret sauce, if you’re a User Researcher tick the right box when you register on code4covid.org.”

Marc Sloan, co-founder of Covid Tech Support, said: “Our aim is that no one should needlessly be put at risk because they didn’t have access to technology that a volunteer technologist could have helped with.”

Nathan Young, co-founder of CoronavirusTechHandbook said: “CoronavirusTechHandbook is a library of every project and resource, and working together with initiatives like CTR to illuminate problems and coordinate responses, we can achieve incredible things very quickly.”

Mike Butcher, co-founder of Tech For UK, said: “There are several UK tech communities responding to this crisis, but many are not co-ordinating or even aware each one exists. It’s our responsibility to get as many people into a broad group, where the UK can call on the greatest amount of tech talent at this time of need.”

A fundraising program that Yelp and GoFundMe put in place this week to help local businesses impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic has been paused after public outcry over how it was rolled out — specifically, controversy over how the two provided no easy and quick way to opt out of the fundraising.

The fundraising campaigns started to appear automatically with company profiles on Yelp after the announcement, and to get out of running the campaigns, Yelp and GoFundMe required more identification from business owners (for example drivers’ licenses or business ID verifications). One estimate put the number of fundraisers that had been created through the program at 144,000.

After a lot of pushback on social media (and likely directly too), the two companies are now working together to create a “more seamless” way to opt out of the fundraising feature and to opt in to use it in the first place, Yelp said in a statement. (You can read the full statement at the bottom of the article below.)

The lesson here is that while the Covid-19 pandemic has undoubtedly had a major impact on local retailers and other businesses that have been forced to close, or have lost business, due to shelter-in-place and other social distancing measures, this incident highlights the fact that this doesn’t mean that every business want to fundraise to offset their own specific predicaments.

And if they do, ultimately it is their own choice which companies they will choose to work with if they do so.

The original fundraising feature was launched by Yelp earlier this week as part of a bigger effort from both companies to provide assistance to businesses and individuals impacted by the coronavirus pandemic. (Yelp has also committed $25 million in waived fees for those who usually pay it for premium listing services; while GoFundMe is also working with other companies like Intuit QuickBooks to build fundraisers for its business customers.)

At the time, the companies noted that the feature would “automatically” appear under a business profile on Yelp.

It was only yesterday, however, that outcry began to emerge over how that integration was actually put in place, and how hard it was to remove, both for small businesses and for those that are part of larger chains.

At a time when we are seeing a huge groundswell of good works and charity to help our communities get through what is not just a public health crisis, but a social and economic one, the resulting feature left a bad taste in everyone’s mouth, and felt more like opportunistic profiteering (both GoFundMe and Yelp are businesses, after all) than altruism.

We’re still waiting to hear back from GoFundMe, but Yelp’s statement is below:

On Tuesday, Yelp announced a partnership with GoFundMe to provide a fast and easy way for people to support their favorite local businesses by donating to a GoFundMe fundraiser directly on the Yelp pages of eligible businesses. In an effort to get businesses help quickly and easily, a GoFundMe fundraiser was automatically added to the Yelp pages of an initial group of eligible businesses, with information provided on how to claim it or opt out should a business choose to do so. However, it has come to our attention that some businesses did not receive a notification with opt-out instructions, and some would have preferred to actively opt-in to the program. As such, we have paused the automatic rollout of this feature, and are working with GoFundMe to provide a seamless way for businesses to opt into the program moving forward, as we have received a great deal of interest and support for the program from both consumers and businesses alike.

All co-working isn’t WeWork . And not all entrepreneurs are 30-year-old guys.

I know this well, having built my first startup in the mid-1980s after a potential employer said women wouldn’t be accepted in technical sales. Within five years, their large computer manufacturing business was gone, but we were selling our products around the world.

About twelve years ago, my partner and I saw how the workplace was changing as laptops and WiFi allowed people to work anywhere. At the same time, endless commutes and long office hours were separating families, generating excess CO2 emissions and making work-life balance almost impossible.

We understood that enabling people to work close to home, rather than in their home, could address these issues while reducing isolation and distractions. We could apply our startup, manufacturing, building and operations backgrounds to this problem to develop automated, welcoming workspace centers in neighborhoods and small-town cores, and we could make this replicable.

This was 2008 — nearly a decade before Masayoshi Son plowed billions into WeWork with the directive to be crazier, go bigger. Our model was very different from WeWork’s model of large centers in large cities that primarily targeted large corporations. It was more than a real estate play and with an interesting problem to solve: community focused centers were valuable to regular people, but could these be created sustainably and profitably over the long term?

We thought it could. So we built it.

The crux of what we developed was smaller, replicable, technologically-enabled and automated centers, outside big cities, that could meet the needs of their members and do it profitably and with minimal staffing. We developed our co-working management software, Satellite Deskworks, along with our now patented tracking and automation, to run any type of shared use center, and to do it simply, intuitively, and comprehensively.

With the model proven, we began working on funding to scale the enterprise. The business plan, slide deck and pro forma were written. The pitches started, all the while running and growing the business from personal and generated funds. More pitches. And more pitches. Clearly we weren’t making it interesting enough. Or it was too early. Or the people with funds didn’t understand how important this was for the vast majority of workers and their local communities. Or perhaps there was just something wrong with us, since the business was already working.

Some of the pitch meetings felt like walking through the looking glass: One VC group provided us with an internal sponsor who advised us to only talk about software. Then his associate took over and said that advice was all wrong: our strength was in the combination of real-world and software.

On pitch day, before our presentation, a single-function app was pitched — just an idea, no product. It got funded. Subsequently, even though we had three profitable centers and several software clients, I was told that we weren’t far enough along to validate the market. Another group declined to fund us, then a year later asked me back as an expert on co-working to explain this emerging industry to them. But, again, no funds were forthcoming.

Over and over again, I’d be told that the presentation was spot-on, and yet, no funds.

I’m an older woman. I got my undergraduate degree at 43 years old and a masters at 46. I had started, run and sold my first startup to a large multinational by the time I was 40. I am good at what I do; I build and scale businesses.

But I do not get funded.

This is not a complaint. This is a fact. I understand what happened at those pitches. Despite our scalable, successful business model, the decision makers were trying to gauge what others at the table would do, how they would perceive me. And the double-whammy of being older and a woman was a bridge too far.

Like picking at a scab, I talk to people knowledgeable in venture who nod their heads at the idea that I’d have trouble getting funded, no matter how well the model worked or the software functioned.

Several guys — without cynicism — suggested that I get a 30-year-old front man. But instead, I focused on growing my business organically, perhaps missing the opportunity to truly scale something that communities of all sizes need.

There is a serious flaw in how businesses are funded, and it is the same discussion we had twenty and thirty years ago about who was at the table in managing businesses.

Vibrant, innovative concepts and businesses are frequently started by people who aren’t happy with their options inside the box of the corporate world. 45% of small business owners are from minority ethnic groups. Women start businesses at twice the rate of men, yet female founders got 2% of VC dollars in 2017. Black women are the most educated group in the U.S., yet they receive about 0.2% of VC funding.

Older founders are seen as less dynamic, less adventurous, while the reality is that half the startups in the U.S. are by people over 50 — and older entrepreneurs are actually more likely to succeed.

Despite the fact that many acknowledge this as a problem, the solutions seem elusive. But they shouldn’t be. Corporations are stronger because of bringing diversity to boards, and the VC model would be stronger by employing many of the same tactics. The likelihood that funded startups will succeed increases by appealing to a broader audience, and the best way to do that is to fund a broader segment of entrepreneurs. Although these shouldn’t be new concepts, let me propose a few ideas:

Set up and support funds at an intermediate level. There is a crying need for funding in the $1 million – $3 million range, particularly for women- and minority-owned businesses. We know how to successfully bootstrap, but however good we are, it takes investment to scale.

If you measure it, you get it. Set up metrics. 10% of your board will be women within a year, 30% within three years, and 50% within six years. Set up similar metrics for ethnic and racial diversity. Set a goal for the percentage of your portfolio that will be minority- and women-owned startups each year over the next five years. And measure the performance of these startups against the past portfolio.

Increase the diversity of VC management and boards. By including decision-makers at the table from a broad range of backgrounds, ethnicities, ages, and genders, the industry should get to a more diverse portfolio with a greater likelihood of overall success.

Get to critical mass. Token diversity accomplishes little. You need enough people to truly provide a voice and echo. It’s easy to ignore a single voice from a different perspective. Research has shown that for a group to even hear a woman’s voice in a meeting at least 30% of that group needs to be women.

So, yes, I walk into the VC pitch rooms, and I know I’m not walking out with funding. No one is going to wire me a generous seed round and tell me to go break things.

Because of who I am and how this particular world perceives me, I have to build a business that works, that stands on its own from the beginning. This is not the end of the world. Businesses should work.

But the VC model needs to work, too.

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.

We’re wrapping the week with Lime, scooters and the divergence between Uber and Lyft and their two-wheeled rivals. It’s been a hectic year for ride-hailing, but an even more turbulent time for the scooter unicorns that exploded into the venture capital scene in early 2018.

Scooter-focused startups were, at one point in time, among the hottest companies that money could chase. That’s no longer true. This week it was reported that at least one major player in the scooter world is pursuing a painful valuation cut so that it can raise the cash it needs to survive. Lime, according to The Information, may see its valuation fall to $400 million from $2.4 billion as it tries to “raise emergency funds.”

The scooter crisis has arrived as Uber and Lyft have come to something akin to a truce with public market investors, a feat that we’ve covered extensively. But perhaps most notable of all is the differing fortunes between Lime and friends, and Uber and Lyft. The two categories of on-demand transportation are diverging, and ironically, it’s the option that’s human-powered that appears set to come out in the best shape.

Let’s talk cash, profits, margins, and survival this morning as Uber and Lyft prepare to drive straight through the economic crisis, while scooters appear headed for a pothole at best.

The major American stock market indices are down sharply this morning at the open, with stocks falling after a multi-day rally helped shave some losses off their calendar-year results. So far, 2020 has proven to be a toxic year for publicly traded equity, as a decade-long bull market collided with a global pandemic and stark economic slowdown around the world.

This week it became known that around 3.3 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits this week, a record-setting figure that dwarfs tallies set in during the 2008-era economic meltdown. Shares rose in the wake of that news; today’s losses could point towards a less optimistic view of the layoffs, the global contagion, or, simply, some profit taking after the markets bounced off lows.

Whatever your read of the market’s Rorschach suite of results, here’s today’s damage just after the market open:

• Dow Jones Industrial Average: fell 3.73%, or 841.41 to 21,710.76
• S&P 500: slid 3.18%, or 83.69, to 2,546.38
• Nasdaq Composite: declined 2,87%, or 223.77, to 7,573.77

More like the Down Jones, right?

Shares of major technology companies were all down roughly 2% to 3% in early trading and the Bessemer Emerging Cloud Index was also off 3% for the day; while SaaS shares have recovered some from their lows, like other stocks they are still far from recovering all their lost ground. Today won’t help.

There’s still a chance for the market to turn around during this Friday session, but investors appear to be digesting a continued spate of bad news the U.S. has topped China for the most number of COVID-19 patients in the world. Perhaps the stimulus — once it passes through the House — will help the economy shake the weight the disease has put on the U.S. economy. However, the bill’s passing must already be priced into shares, so it’s unclear if anything that the House can do today will help.

If you’re tired of the market’s endless gyrations, get some rest. We’re not done yet.

A social media platform used to match advertisers with thousands of influencers has been hacked.

Social Bluebook, a Los Angeles-based company, allows advertisers to pay social media “influencers” for posts that promote their products and services. The company claims it has some 300,000 influencers on its books.

But at some point during October 2019, the company’s entire back-end database was taken in a data breach.

TechCrunch obtained the database, containing some 217,000 user accounts — including influencer names, email addresses, and passwords hashed, which had been scrambled using the strong SHA-2 hashing algorithm.

It’s not known how the database was exfiltrated from the company’s systems.

We contacted several users who, when presented with their information, confirmed it as accurate. We also provided a portion of the data to Social Bluebook co-founder Sam Michie, who confirmed the data breach.

“We have just now become aware of this data breach that occurred in October 2019,” he told TechCrunch in an email Thursday.

He said affected users will be informed of the breach by email. The company also informed the California attorney general’s office of the breach, per state law.

Social media influencers are a constant target for hackers, which target their accounts to hijack their online handles or follower count. Some influencers have relied on white-hat hackers to get their hijacked accounts back.

Last year, a social media firm left a database of Instagram influencers online, which included phone numbers and email addresses scraped from their profiles.

Got a tip? You can send tips securely over Signal and WhatsApp to +1 646-755–8849. 

NASA provided an official update about the status of its Commercial Crew program, the project it’s working on with partners SpaceX and Boeing to return astronaut launch capabilities to American soil via private launch partners. This week, SpaceX encountered an issue while testing the parachute system that will be used on its Crew Dragon spacecraft, but a new update from NASA indicates the the previously stated mid-to-late May window for its first ever launch with astronauts on board is still on the calendar.

The incident occurred on March 24, and SpaceX provided a statement detailing what happened at the time. Here’s their full statement:

During a planned parachute drop test today, the test article suspended underneath the helicopter became unstable. Out of an abundance of caution and to keep the helicopter crew safe, the pilot pulled the emergency release. As the helicopter was not yet at target conditions, the test article was not armed, and as such, the parachute system did not initiate the parachute deployment sequence. While the test article was lost, this was not a failure of the parachute system and most importantly no one was injured. NASA and SpaceX are working together to determine the testing plan going forward in advance of Crew Dragon’s second demonstration mission.

Per SpaceX, and NASA’s blog on Friday, the loss of the “spacecraft-like” testing device that was suspended underneath the helicopter does not reflect any problem on the part of the parachute system itself. NASA included a closing paragraph in its update that noted it’s “looking at the parachute testing plan now and all the data we already have to determine next steps,” but it does conclude that it’s doing so in the interest of “flying the upcoming Demo-2 flight test in the mid-to-late May timeframe.”

Meanwhile, SpaceX also encountered an early engine cut-off issue during its most recent Starlink launch, which flew using a Falcon 9 rocket on March 18. NASA confirmed that it is participating in an investigation into what went wrong with that engine issue (which, it should be noted, didn’t actually affect the successful outcome of the launch itself).

It’s possible that either of these could impact the plans for the Demo-2 mission, but right now, things still appear to be on track. NASA is also taking measure to reduce the spread of COVID-19 and enforcing remote work policies where applicable, but this also hasn’t had an effect on the Commercial Crew timelines to date.