Author: azeeadmin

Commonwealth Fusion Systems closed on its latest $84 million in new funding two weeks ago. The U.S. was still very much in the lockdown phase and getting a deal done, especially a multi-million dollar investment in a new technology aiming to make commercial nuclear fusion a reality after decades of hype, was “an interesting thing” in the words of Commonwealth’s chief executive, Bob Mumgaard. 

It was actually one time when the technical complexity of what Commonwealth Fusion is trying to achieve and the longterm horizon for the company’s first test technology was a benefit instead of an obstacle, Mumgaard said. 

“We’re in a unique position where it’s still something that’s far enough in the future that any of the recovery models are not going to affect the underlying needs that the world still has a giant climate problem,” he said. 

Commonwealth Fusion Systems purports to be one solution to that problem. The company is using technology developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to leapfrog the current generation of nuclear fusion reactors currently under development (there are, in fact, several nuclear fusion reactors currently under development) and bring a waste-free energy source to industrial customers within the next ten years.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems core innovation was the development of a high power superconducting magnet that could theoretically be used to create the conditions necessary for a sustained fusion reaction. The reactor uses hydrogen isotopes that are kept under conditions of extreme pressure using these superconducting magnets to sustain the reaction and contain the energy that’s generated from the reaction. Designs for reactors require their hydrogen fuel source to be heated to tens of millions of degrees.

The design that Commonwealth is pursuing is akin to the massive, multi-decade International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project that’s currently being completed in France. Begun under the Reagan Administration in the eighties, as a collaboration between the U.S., the Soviet Union, various European nations and Japan. Over the years, membership in the project expanded to include India, South Korea, and China.

While the ITER project also expects to flip the switch on its reactor in 2025, the cost has been dramatically higher — totaling well over $14 billion dollars. The project, which began construction in 2013, will also represent a much longer timeframe to completion compared with the schedule that Commonwealth has set for itself.

Picture taken on January 17, 2013 in Saint-Paul-les-Durance, southern France shows the model of the reactor of the future International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) . The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (Iter), based at the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) research center of Cadarache in Saint-Paul-lès-Durance, was set up by the EU, which has a 45 percent share, China, India, South Korea, Japan, Russia and the US to research a clean and limitless alternative to dwindling fossil fuel reserves. AFP PHOTO / GERARD JULIEN (Photo credit should read GERARD JULIEN/AFP via Getty Images)

“We have set off to build what has been our big goal all along, which is to build the full scale demonstration magnet… we’re in the act of building that,” said Mumgaard. “We’ll turn that on next year.”

Upon completion, Commonwealth Fusion Systems will have built a ten-ton magnet that has the magnetic force equivalent to twenty MRI machines, said Mumgaard. “After we get the magnet to work, we’ll be building a machine that will generate more power than it takes to run. We see that as the Kitty Hawk moment,” for fusion, he said.

Other startup companies are also racing to bring technologies to market and hit the 2025 timeline. They include the Canadian company General Fusion and the United Kingdom’s Tokamak Energy.

Within the next six to eight months, Commonwealth Energy hopes to have a site selected for its first demonstration reactor.

Financing the company’s most recent developments are a slew of investors new and old who have committed over $200 million to the company, which formally launched in 2018.

The round was led by Temasek with participation from new investors Equinor, a multinational energy company, and Devonshire Investors, the private equity group affiliated with FMR LLC, the parent company of Fidelity Investments.

Current investors including the Bill Gates-backed Breakthrough Energy Ventures; MIT’s affiliated investment fund, The Engine; the Italian energy firm ENI Next LLC; and venture investors like Future Ventures, Khosla Ventures; Moore Strategic Ventures, Safar Partners LLC, Schooner Capital, and Starlight Ventures also participated. 

“We are investing in fusion and CFS because we believe in the technology and the company, and we remain committed to providing energy to the world, now and in a low carbon future,” said Sophie Hildebrand, Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President for Research and Technology at Equinor, in a statement.

The company said it would use the new financing to continue developing its technology which would offer fusion power plants, fusion engineering services, and HTS magnets to customers. Funding will also be used to support business development initiatives for other applications of the company’s proprietary HTS magnets, the key component to its SPARC reactor, which also has various other commercial uses, the company said. 

Helping the cause, and potentially accelerating the timelines for many fusion players is a new initiative from the federal government that could see government dollars go to support construction of new facilities. The Department of Energy recently released a request for information (RFI) on potential cost share programs for the development of nuclear fusion reactors in the U.S.

Modeled after the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program which brought the world SpaceX, Blue Origin, and other U.S. private space companies, a cost-sharing program for fusion development could accelerate the development of low-cost, pollution free fusion reactors across the U.S.

“The COTS program transitioned the space industry from ‘Here’s a government dictated space sector’ to a vibrant commercial launch industry,” said Mumgaard.

One investor who’s seen the value of public private partnerships to spur commercial innovation is Steve Jurvetson, the founder of Future Ventures, and a backer of Commonwealth Fusion Systems. Jurvetson acknowledged the necessity of fusion investment for the future of the energy industry.

“Fusion energy is an investment in our future that offers an important path toward combating climate change. Our continued investment in CFS fits strongly within our mission as we seek long-term solutions to address the world’s energy challenges,” said Steve Jurvetson, Managing Director and Founder, Future Ventures.

Singapore-based fintech startup GoBear has raised $17 million from returning investors Walvis Participaties, a Dutch venture capital firm, and Aegon N.V., a life insurance and asset management provider. The funding brings GoBear’s total funding so far to $97 million, and will be used to expand its consumer financial services platform, which is available in seven Asian markets: Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

Founder and CEO Adrian Chng told TechCrunch that GoBear will focus on what it calls its “three growth pillars”: an online financial supermarket that evolved from the company’s financial products aggregator/comparison service; an online insurance brokerage; and its digital lending business, which it recently expanded by acquiring consumer lending platform AsiaKredit.

The company has also added three new executives over the past few months: chief information technology officer Valeriy Gasratov; chief strategy officer Jinnee Lim as Chief Strategy Officer; and Mike Singh from AsiaKredit as its new chief lending officer.

GoBear originally launched in 2015 as a metasearch engine, before transitioning into financial services. The company now works with over 100 financial partners, including banks and insurance providers, and says its platform has been used by over 55 million people to search for more than 2,000 personal financial products.

The startup serves consumers who don’t have credit cards or other access to traditional credit building tools. Similar to other fintech companies that focus on underbanked populations, GoBear aggregates and analyzes alternative sources of data to judge lending risk, including patterns in consumer behavior. For example, Chng said if a loan application is filled out in less than a minute, it is more likely to be fraudulent, and applications made between 8:30PM and midnight are less risky than ones made between 2AM to 5AM.

Data points from smartphones is also used to assess creditworthiness in markets like the Philippines, where the credit card penetration rate is less than 10%, but more than 40% of the population uses a smartphone.

Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, Chng said GoBear has been gross margin positive since the end of 2019. Interest in travel insurance has declined, but the company has continued to see demand for other insurance products and lending. Its online insurance brokerage has grown its average order by 52% over the last three months, and the company has seen 50% year-over-year growth from its loan products.

There are other fintech companies in Asia that overlap with some of the services that GoBear offers, like comparison platform MoneySmart, CompareAsiaGroup and Grab Financial Group. In terms of competition, Chng told TechCrunch that not only is the market opportunity in Asia huge (he said there are 400 million underbanked people across GoBear’s seven markets), but the company also differentiates with its three core services, which are all interconnected and draw on the same data sources to score credit.

Chng anticipates that the pandemic will spur more financial institutions to begin digitizing their products and looking for partners like GoBear to help them manage risk. In turn, that will make more financial institutions open to using non-traditional data to score credit, enabling underbanked markets to have increased access to financial products.

“The momentum is here. I think now is the time for tech and data to transform financial services,” he said. “As a platform, we are really looking for partners to come with us for the next phase of growth and investment. I feel positive even with COVID-19, because I think that we will have more acceleration, and the opportunity to change people’s lives and benefit them and investors by solving tough problems will only increase.”

Mercedes-Benz is now selling its EQV 300 all-electric premium van in Europe, the second EV to come out of the automaker’s initiative to produce a line of battery-powered models under its new EQ brand.

A concept version of the EQV was first shown in March 2019. But unlike so many concepts destined for nonexistence, this one was marked for series production. The EQV, which can seat up to eight people, is designed to appeal to customers seeking a more luxurious ride. The base price of €71,388 (about $78,359) provides a hint at who Mercedes is targeting.

Mercedes is marketing this toward families, upscaled adventurers and corporate clients who might be looking for a shuttle vehicle. The vehicle’s seating can be configured in numerous ways to meet various customers’ needs. It also can be customized for packages, not people.

The EQV comes with a compact electric drivetrain on the front axle that produces 150 kW, or 201 horsepower, as well as a 100 kWh battery pack, and can travel an estimated 418 km (260 miles) under Europe’s WLTP standards. The company is also showcasing its MBUX infotainment system in the EV, which has a number of tech-forward features, such as a self-learning voice control system with connectivity features.

Mercedes is selling the EQV 300 and a longer wheelbase version called AVANTGARDE. Both will be produced at the company’s plant in Vitoria in northern Spain, alongside the V-Class and the Mercedes-Benz Vito.

The van comes with a four-year maintenance plan that covers the battery up to 160,000 km, or eight years. Buyers also get the company’s navigation services for free for 36 months, as well as a membership to EV charger Ionity each for one year. Owners will also have one-year free access to Mercedes me Charge. The feature shows the charging infrastructure network in Europe and lets users start, stop and pay for charging via the Mercedes me app, a credit card or through the media display in the vehicle.

Mercedes announced its “EQ” technology brand in 2016. Since then the company has unveiled several EQ- related concepts as well as its first series-production vehicle, the EQC electric drive SUV. The company has previously said it plans to invest more than $12 billion to produce a line of battery-powered models under its new EQ brand and spend another $1.2 billion in global battery production.

As AI has grown from niche to mission-critical technology, the companies that enable it have multiplied and in many cases prospered. A good example of that success is DefinedCrowd, which has gone from the Disrupt stage to globe-spanning AI toolkit to the Fortune 500 in just a couple years. The company just raised a new $50.5M B round to further fuel its expansion.

DefinedCrowd doesn’t make AI, but rather supplies data used to create it, specializing in natural language processing. After all, someone has to vet the 500 different ways you could ask for the weather — otherwise it would be much more difficult for machine learning systems to tell what users mean. The same goes for computer vision, sentiment recognition, and other domains for which the company creates and sorts data. DefinedCrowd has a paid community hundreds of thousands strong doing this highly necessary but voluminous work.

As AI has worked its way into everything from creating and editing media to enterprise software, there’s been no shortage of companies in search of training data.

“The demand for data has consistently been growing over the last couple years — companies are more and more aware of the impact that data has on their systems, and have been looking for more languages and domains that weren’t considered 5 years ago,” co-founder and CEO Daniela Braga told TechCrunch.

She emphasized inclusivity, the potential for bias, and more multilingual deployments as drivers of that demand. New markets and applications are opening up constantly and entrants need high quality data to develop consumer-ready products.

“This puts us in a very good position, as our data is agnostic and we can work pretty much across all verticals,” Braga said.

As evidence this is not simply wishful thinking, the company reported a tremendous 656 percent increase in revenue year-over-year. They’ve also nearly tripled the size of their workforce in that time to more than 250 people.

It’s towards hiring that Braga expects a great deal of the $50M round to go: Got to have the developers to make the products to follow the roadmap. That means doubling the employee count — again.

I asked whether the present pandemic has had a major effect on DefinedCrowd’s operations or business. Braga noted that she hasn’t “noticed a significant downturn in the industry,” presumably because product development has continued in anticipation of consumer and enterprise needs returning to normal.

“We decided to make our business fully remote before lockdown measures were implemented,” she explained. “Transferring every employee to remote working in a short space of time was challenging, however, considering we were already a global company with four offices in three different countries, the adaptation phase was fairly smooth, and we were able to maintain full speed during the process.”

Semapa Next and Hermes GPE were added this round to the increasingly long list of investors, which now includes Evolution Equity Partners, Kibo Ventures, Portugal Ventures, Bynd Venture Capital, EDP Ventures, IronFire Ventures, Amazon Alexa Fund, Sony Innovation Fund, and Mastercard.

A growing number of tech companies is telling their employees they can work from anywhere, even after this pandemic has passed. A looming question, however, is how.

Last week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees that Facebook will adjust the pay of those who choose to move out of the Bay Area and work in different, presumably less expensive, geographies. But others figuring out their own remote-work strategies might also look to Automattic, the now 15-year-old, heavily venture-backed company that is parent to the publishing platform WordPress; the platform for discovering long-form writing content, Longreads; the comment-filtering service Akismet; and, as of last year, the former social media giant Tumblr; among other businesses.

Automattic, which now employs more than 1,000 employees, has been nearly fully distributed from its founding days, and became entirely so in 2017, when the company shut its San Francisco office and told employees they could work from wherever they choose. At the time, founder and CEO Matt Mullenweg told Quartz that most employees were already opting not to come into the co-working space it was providing, so it reasoned its money could be better spent elsewhere.

Because Automattic has always proudly shared its remote-work playbook — including giving employees a stipend to set up their home offices and paying for travel — we couldn’t help but wonder how it pays those employees and whether there might be lessons for companies now moving toward a more dispersed future, too. Here’s what we learned from Mullenweg, who answered our related questions via email over the weekend.

The biggest question, of course, is whether Automattic pays employees based on their geography and its related cost of living. In answering, Mullenweg didn’t give a blanket “yes” or “no, ” explaining that at Automattic, “[W]e aim to pay the same rates for the same roles, regardless of geography. Automattic currently has folks in over 75 countries. Sometimes this puts us above or below what may be the market rate for a role in a given area.”

He said it’s not so easy in practice. Among the biggest obstacles to keeping pay in sync is paying employees’ compensation in their local currency, which “can have wide swings, which creates imbalances,” said Mullenweg. Automattic also “generally only adjusts salaries up, so a positive currency swing may bring someone above a global norm for a year or two.”

He thinks that as more companies move in the direction of encouraging — or, at least, allowing — employees to work from anywhere, it may be difficult for them to “immediately switch to normalize salaries.” He says when Automattic started down its path, it “took several years to narrow the ranges people were in,” and that, even today, it’s never “perfectly even — more a direction you’re always heading in.”

We were also interested in Mullenweg’s thoughts about those companies that do adopt localized compensation. Specifically — based on what he has learned over time about employment regulations around the world — we wondered if tech companies that pay people different amounts for the same work might face consequences, legal or otherwise.

“Long term,” said Mullenweg, “I think market forces and the mobility of talent will force employers to stop discriminating on the basis of geography for geographically agnostic roles.” He also said that while he isn’t aware of location or geography currently being a protected class for pay discrimination suits — at least in the U.S. — he thinks that for “moral and competitive reasons, companies will move toward globally fair compensation over time with roles that can be done from anywhere.”

Indeed, Mullenweg suggested that companies have been paying based on local market norms in the past probably can’t get away with that much longer, even while it’s “difficult to fix that immediately” and may be something that needs to be adjusted “over several years, using more frequent or higher raises for the employees that are below your global market norm.” (Conversely, he added, “If you have people significantly above what the norm is across your company, I don’t think it’s fair to ask them to take a salary reduction because it’s a mistake the company made, but it may be unsustainable to bring everyone to that higher level.”)

In fact, the broader takeaway for companies that are moving toward this new future is largely to recognize that it takes time, along with an understanding of a whole lot of factors that don’t come into play with geographically homogenous groups of employees. Think “currency controls, geo-political instability, protectionism, security concerns, and even the impact of someone making 5 to 10 times what their friends and family may make in salary,” said Mullenweg.

It’s all worth it, suggested Mullenweg. Like Zuckerberg — who last week emphasized to employees that a dispersed workforce could “potentially spread more economic opportunity around the country more and potentially around the world more,” and, in turn, “hopefully a more sustainable social and political climate if opportunity can be shared more broadly” — Mullenweg seems to view more remote work as a kind of equalizing force.

As he told us over the weekend, “You get a lot of richness, access to a global talent pool, and I think a positive impact on the world by spreading economic opportunity more widely than it has been in the past.”

Simple: Amazon offers up the content free of charge. The company has been on the offensive in recent weeks, when it comes to how it’s handled the COVID-19 pandemic. Amazon’s offered all sorts of blog posts, public statements and made the subject a centerpiece of its recent shareholder letter and earnings report.

It also went ahead and uploaded a suggested news segment to BusinessWire, complete with warehouse footage and a script for news anchors. One Oklahoma City-based broadcaster even noted on Twitter that he received the script along with a pitch directly from the company itself.

As a spokesperson from the company noted in a message to TechCrunch, the nature of such a PR pitch isn’t out of the ordinary. Companies upload stuff to PR wires all of the time, in hopes of having their story told their way on local news outlets. Amazon suggests that sending out such a neatly wrapped package can give stations access to their fulfillment centers in a time when many aren’t traveling outside of the studio.

“We welcome reporters into our buildings and it’s misleading to suggest otherwise,” the company says in a statement. “This type of video was created to share an inside look into the health and safety measures we’ve rolled out in our buildings and was intended for reporters who for a variety of reasons weren’t able to come tour one of our sites themselves.”

What’s notable here, however, is how many stations more or less went with the straight script on this one. At least 11 appear to have followed suit. The below video from Courier edits the stories together into a handy package:

“Millions of Americans staying at home are relying on Amazon to deliver essentials like groceries and cleaning products during the COVID-19 outbreak,” the script opens. “For the first time, we’re getting a glimpse inside amazon’s fulfillment centers to see just how the company is keeping its employees safe and healthy…while still delivering packages to your doorstep.”

Tell me more.

Obviously gathering one’s own video is ideal, so as to avoid as much corporate influence as possible over a story — especially one with important consequences such as this. Still, it’s not unusual for local stations to rely on footage from companies for those places they’re otherwise unable to access. That seems to go double these days, when media resources can be inadequate for local stations. Keeping such a close read of material created for the sole purpose of placing a corporation in a good light, however, is more problematic when it comes to attempts at unbiased reporting.

Amazon’s handling of the pandemic among its “essential” workforce has come under fire of late. In addition to the firing of several workers who have voiced public criticism about the company’s policies, lawmakers have demanded the company be more transparent about the rate of infections and deaths among employees. Amazon still has not disclosed those figures, in spite of requests from attorneys general and Senators, but has continued to insist that its “rates of infection are at or below the rates of the communities where we operate.”

If only Facebook had been using the kind of technology that TechCrunch Startup Battlefield alumnus D-ID was pitching, it could have avoided exposing all of our faces to privacy destroying software services like Clearview AI.

At least, that’s the pitch that D-ID’s founder and chief executive, Gil Perry makes when he’s talking about the significance of his startup’s technology.

D-ID, which stands for de-identification, is a pretty straightforward service that’s masking some highly involved and very advanced technology to blur digital images so they can’t be cross-referenced to determine someone’s identity.

It’s a technology whose moment has come as governments and private companies around the world ramp up their use of surveillance technologies as the world adjusts to a new reality in the wake of the COVID-19 epidemic.

“Governments around the world and organizations have used this new reality basically as an excuse for mass surveillance,” says Perry. His own government has used a track and trace system that monitors interactions between Israeli citizens using cell phone location data to determine whether anyone had been in contact with a person who had COVID-19.

While awareness of the issue may be increasing among consumers and regulators alike, the damage has, in many cases, already been done. Social media companies have already had their troves of images scraped by companies like Clearview AI, ClearView, HighQ, and NTechLabs and much of our personal information is already circulating online.

D-ID is undeterred. Founded by Perry and two other members of the Israeli army’s cybersecurity and offensive cyber unit, 8200, Sella Blondheim and Eliran Kuta, D-ID thinks the need for anonymizing technologies will continue to expand — thanks to new privacy legislation in Europe and certain states in the U.S. 

Meanwhile the company is also exploring other applications for its technology. The services that D-ID uses to mask and blur faces can also be used to create deepfakes of images and video.

The market for these types of digital manipulations are still in their earliest days according to Perry. Still, the company’s pitch managed to persuade lead investor AXA Ventures, and backers including Pitango, Y-Combinator, AI Alliance, Hyundai, Omron, Maverick (U.S.), and Mindset to participate in the company’s $13 million round.

D-ID already sees demand coming from automakers who want to use the technology to anonymize their driving monitoring systems — enabling them to record drivers’ reactions, but not any public identifying information. Security technologies that monitor for threats are another potential customer, according to the company. While closed circuit television monitors a physical space, it doesn’t need to collect the identifying information of people entering and exiting buildings.

The technical wizardry that D-ID has mastered is impressive — and a necessary defensive tool to ensure privacy in the modern world, according to its founders. Consumers are demanding it, according to D-ID’s chief executive. “Privacy awareness and the importance of privacy enhancing technologies have increased,” Perry said.

South Korea has successfully slowed down the spread of coronavirus. Alongside widespread quarantine measures and testing, the country’s innovative use of technology is credited as a critical factor in combating the spread of the disease. As Europe and the United States struggle to cope, many governments are turning to AI tools to both advance the medical research and manage public health, now and in the long term: technical solutions for contact tracing, symptom tracking, immunity certificates and other applications are underway. These technologies are certainly promising, but they must be implemented in ways that do not undermine human rights.

Seoul has collected extensively and intrusively the personal data of its citizens, analyzing millions of data points from credit card transactions, CCTV footage and cellphone geolocation data. South Korea’s Ministry of the Interior and Safety even developed a smartphone app that shares with officials GPS data of self-quarantined individuals. If those in quarantine cross the “electronic fence” of their assigned area, the app alerts officials. The implications for privacy and security of such widespread surveillance are deeply concerning.

South Korea is not alone in leveraging personal data in containment efforts. China, Iran, Israel, Italy, Poland, Singapore, Taiwan and others have used location data from cellphones for various applications tasked with combating coronavirus. Supercharged with artificial intelligence and machine learning, this data cannot only be used for social control and monitoring, but also to predict travel patterns, pinpoint future outbreak hot spots, model chains of infection or project immunity.

Implications for human rights and data privacy reach far beyond the containment of COVID-19. Introduced as short-term fixes to the immediate threat of coronavirus, widespread data-sharing, monitoring and surveillance could become fixtures of modern public life. Under the guise of shielding citizens from future public health emergencies, temporary applications may become normalized. At the very least, government decisions to hastily introduce immature technologies — and in some cases to oblige citizens by law to use them — set a dangerous precedent.

Nevertheless, such data  and AI-driven applications could be useful advances in the fight against coronavirus, and personal data — anonymized and unidentifiable — offers valuable insights for governments navigating this unprecedented public health emergency. The White House is reportedly in active talks with a wide array of tech companies about how they can use anonymized aggregate-level location data from cellphones. The U.K. government is in discussion with cellphone operators about using location and usage data. And even Germany, which usually champions data rights, introduced a controversial app that uses data donations from fitness trackers and smartwatches to determine the geographical spread of the virus.

Big tech too is rushing to the rescue. Google makes available “Community Mobility Reports” for more than 140 countries, which offer insights into mobility trends in places such as retail and recreation, workplaces and residential areas. Apple and Google collaborate on a contact-tracing app and have just launched a developer toolkit including an API. Facebook is rolling out “local alerts” features that allow municipal governments, emergency response organizations and law enforcement agencies to communicate with citizens based on their location.

It is evident that data revealing the health and geolocation of citizens is as personal as it gets. The potential benefits weigh heavy, but so do concerns about the abuse and misuse of these applications. There are safeguards for data protection — perhaps, the most advanced one being the European GDPR — but during times of national emergency, governments hold rights to grant exceptions. And the frameworks for the lawful and ethical use of AI in democracy are much less developed — if at all.

There are many applications that could help governments enforce social controls, predict outbreaks and trace infections — some of them more promising than others. Contact-tracing apps are at the center of government interest in Europe and the U.S. at the moment. Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing, or “DP3T,” approaches that use Bluetooth may offer a secure and decentralized protocol for consenting users to share data with public health authorities. Already, the European Commission released a guidance for contact-tracing applications that favors such decentralized approaches. Whether centralized or not, evidently, EU member states will need to comply with the GDPR when implementing such tools.

Austria, Italy and Switzerland have announced they plan to use the decentralized frameworks developed by Apple and Google. Germany, after ongoing public debate, and stern warnings from privacy experts, recently ditched plans for a centralized app opting for a decentralized solution instead. But France and Norway are using centralized systems where sensitive personal data is stored on a central server.

The U.K. government, too, has been experimenting with an app that uses a centralized approach and that is currently being tested in the Isle of Wight: The NHSX of the National Health Service will allow health officials to reach out directly and personally to potentially infected people. To this point, it remains unclear how the data collected will be used and if it will be combined with other sources of data. Under current provisions, the U.K. is still bound to comply with the GDPR until the end of the Brexit transition period in December 2020.

Aside from government-led efforts, worryingly, a plethora of apps and websites for contact tracing and other forms of outbreak control are mushrooming, asking citizens to volunteer their personal data yet offering little — if any — privacy and security features, let alone functionality. Certainly well-intentioned, these tools often come from hobby developers and often originate from amateur hackathons.

Sorting the wheat from the chaff is not an easy task, and our governments are most likely not equipped to accomplish it. At this point, artificial intelligence, and especially its use in governance, is still new to public agencies. Put on the spot, regulators struggle to evaluate the legitimacy and wider-reaching implications of different AI systems for democratic values. In the absence of sufficient procurement guidelines and legal frameworks, governments are ill-prepared to make these decisions now, when they are most needed.

And worse yet, once AI-driven applications are let out of the box, it will be difficult to roll them back, not unlike increased safety measures at airports after 9/11. Governments may argue that they require data access to avoid a second wave of coronavirus or another looming pandemic.

Regulators are unlikely to generate special new terms for AI during the coronavirus crisis, so at the very least we need to proceed with a pact: all AI applications developed to tackle the public health crisis must end up as public applications, with the data, algorithms, inputs and outputs held for the public good by public health researchers and public science agencies. Invoking the coronavirus pandemic as a sop for breaking privacy norms and reason to fleece the public of valuable data can’t be allowed.

We all want sophisticated AI to assist in delivering a medical cure and managing the public health emergency. Arguably, the short-term risks to personal privacy and human rights of AI wane in light of the loss of human lives. But when coronavirus is under control, we’ll want our personal privacy back and our rights reinstated. If governments and firms in democracies are going to tackle this problem and keep institutions strong, we all need to see how the apps work, the public health data needs to end up with medical researchers and we must be able to audit and disable tracking systems. AI must, over the long term, support good governance.

The coronavirus pandemic is a public health emergency of most pressing concern that will deeply impact governance for decades to come. And it also sheds a powerful spotlight on gaping shortcomings in our current systems. AI is arriving now with some powerful applications in stock, but our governments are ill-prepared to ensure its democratic use. Faced with the exceptional impacts of a global pandemic, quick and dirty policymaking is insufficient to ensure good governance, but may be the best solution we have.

Audi fired Daniel Abt from its Formula E racing team after learning he had a professional sim driver race for him during a virtual competition called the “Race at Home Challenge” held over the weekend.

The automaker said in a statement via Formula E that Abt had been suspended from Audi Sport “with immediate effect.” However, it appears the consequences are more serious and final. Abt said in a video message published Tuesday on YouTube that Audi had dropped him from the team.

“Today I was informed in a conversation with Audi that our ways will split from now on,” Abt said, according to a translation of the video message. “We won’t be racing together in Formula E anymore and the cooperation has ended. It is a pain which I have never felt in this way in my life.”

The 14-minute video was meant to explain the incident that occurred May 23 during the virtual competition, Abt said. He claims that it was all meant as a joke, which he intended to publicize after the race.

Abt tapped 18-year-old pro sim driver Lorenz Hoerzing to take his spot in the fifth round of Formula E’s online sim racing series. Unlike the real Formula E race series, this was meant to entertain fans and raise funds for UNICEF.

Hoerzing came in third in the race. Questions were raised almost immediately following the virtual event when Abt didn’t appear on the post-race interview.

Abt explained, via translation of the video, the plan.

“We had a conversation and the idea came up that it would be a funny move if a Sim racer basically drove for me, to show the other, real drivers, what he is capable of and use the chance to drive against them,” Abt said. “We wanted to document it and create a funny story for the fans with it.”

Abt later added that it was never his intention to “get a result and keep quiet about it later on just to make me look better.”

Abt has also been fined €10,000, which will be sent to the charity.

You can watch the entire statement here.

On the heels of a furor over his tweets accusing MSNBC host Joe Scarborough of murder, Twitter has quietly begun to fact-check the president.

A new warning label encouraging Twitter users to “Get the facts about mail-in ballots” appeared on a series of tweets in which the president baselessly claimed ballots received through mail-in voting methods are “fraudulent.”

In a statement to TechCrunch, a Twitter spokesperson said the pair of tweets from the president “contain potentially misleading information about voting processes and have been labeled to provide additional context around mail-in ballots.”

“This decision is in line with the approach we shared earlier this month,” the spokesperson said, linking to the company’s recent blog post on its misinformation policies.

Trump has railed against vote-by-mail efforts in recent weeks, in spite of the consensus view by experts that voting through the mail is a safe process—so safe that it’s already widely used for absentee ballots and relied upon in five states that use mail-in ballots as their primary method for voting.

Clicking through the new prompt from Twitter brings users to a fact-checking page highlighting a CNN story debunking the president’s false claims. The page also offers a summary with bullet points providing useful context for the misleading tweets, including the fact that vote-by-mail is already widely in use around the country.