Author: azeeadmin

The coronavirus is proving to have an unexpected upside for the adtech industry.

The UK’s data protection agency has paused an investigation into the industry’s processing of Internet users’ personal data, saying targeted suspension of privacy oversight is merited because of disruption to businesses as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The investigation into adtech industry practices by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is linked to a 2018 complaint it received about systematic, massive scale, high velocity personal data trading associated with the real-time bidding component of programmatic advertising.

A series of complaints have since been filed over the issue across the EU that assert it amounts to “the most massive leakage of personal data recorded so far”.

The first of these complaints was lodged in the UK with the ICO but the complainants are still waiting for any relief.

And now their wait goes on…

One of the complainants, Brave’s Dr Johnny Ryan, described the regulatory inaction over a period of some two years since he sounded the alarm to the watchdog as “astounding”.

“They’ve failed to use any of their powers. Even their powers of investigation,” Ryan told TechCrunch. “We’re not even talking about enforcement. They’ve failed to ask their questions using their strong voice. The lack of action — it’s actually really hard to remember just how little action there is — it’s quite astounding, just how vacuous this vacuum is. How much of a pause this was a pause of.

“That’s astounding,” he added. “I claim it’s the biggest data breach the UK has ever had — but I’ve never had anyone contradict that. It’s almost indisputable because the figures are so big. So we’ve got this enormous breach, and… it’s continuing — so it’s not some discrete thing that’s now over… The harm accumulates. So this is a problem. It’s a breach pandemic!”

We also contacted the ICO with questions about the decision to suspend the adtech investigation — including asking how UK citizens can be confident their data rights are being defended against abuse by powerful industry platforms.

The regulator did not engage with what we asked — instead sending this generic statement:

The ICO recently set out its regulatory approach during the COVID-19 pandemic, where we spoke about reassessing our priorities and resources.

Taking this into account we have made the decision to pause our investigation into real time bidding and the Adtech industry.

It is not our intention to put undue pressure on any industry at this time but our concerns about Adtech remain and we aim to restart our work in the coming months, when the time is right.

This is by no means the first ‘breather’ the regulator has offered the adtech industry vis-a-vis this complaint.

In fact there have been a series of ‘warnings’ — followed by a series of periods of, er, mildly worded blog posts. (See here, here and here.) Enforcement? Not a sniff.

Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), meanwhile, will turn two later later this month — meaning it’ll be two years since the updated framework was supposed to start to apply.

Many privacy experts and campaigners are questioning the quality and quantity of enforcement set along alongside the flagship update to legal safeguards for citizens’ data — which actually date all the way back to 1995.

Brave Ryan said the ICO’s regulatory abdication does not reflect well on the success of the wider EU data protection regime — pointing out that the UK watchdog is the best resourced of the bloc’s (post-Brexit) 27 Member States (the UK remains in the EU until the end of the Brexit transition period, so is still technically a member right now).

“If the EU’s biggest regulator in this domain — which is one of the jewels in the EU’s regulatory crown — its biggest and most well resourced, in terms of cash, regulators is unable to enforce against the biggest data protection infringement that the country it regulates for has ever experienced is the GDPR just a kind of collective hallucination?” he said. “Or is that something that is limited to the UK?”

A bigger issue he points to is that the UK, post-Brexit, will need to request a data protection ‘adequacy agreement’ from the European Commission if it wishes for its businesses to be able to freely exchange data with EU businesses as they can now.

“When the UK requests that the European Commission consider the UK as a safe and adequate third country where personal data from the EU can freely flow, one of the questions to be considered is do you have a regulator that can protect this personal data? And the answer today is no,” said Ryan. “No, you do not have a regulator that is able to protect personal data of European citizens.”

“This [ICO inaction] should have a post-Brexit implication — which will affect so many sectors of the UK economy,” he warned.

Ryan’s employer, Brave — which makes a pro-privacy web browser — recently lodged a complaint with the European Commission against EU Member States, producing a report and accusing governments of under-resourcing their data protection agencies. It has asked the Commission to launch an infringement procedure.

“How is only 3% of the [ICO] staff mainly focused on digital issues?” Ryan added. “Clearly more than 3% of infringement is digital and more than 3% of life is — so unless the ICO is labouring under the misapprehension that we are at the beginning of this digital transition they are the wrong regulator for this decade. This is last century’s regulator. So there’s a huge management problem inside the ICO. It seems they are unwilling or unable to regulate digital issues… They need to get fit for purpose.

“They are still living in a print based world. And we are confronting them urgently with problems that are not print based — but that affect every aspect of our lives. Including, apparently, the last election. And presumably the next one too… So this is shocking on many, many levels.”

As a consequence of Brexit, UK citizens should expect the ICO to be their sole data protection rights enforcer, rather than — as can be the case now — other EU regulators being involved in defending their rights, such as in the case of major tech platforms which often locate themselves under a legal jurisdiction elsewhere in the EU.

Google, for example, has said it will relocate UK users to a US jurisdiction in response to Brexit.

When Zoom started having security issues in March, they turned to former Facebook and Yahoo! Security executive Alex Stamos, who signed on as a consultant to work directly with CEO Eric Yuan.

The goal was to build a more cohesive security strategy for the fast-growing company. One of the recommendations that came out of those meetings was building end-to-end encryption into the paid tier of the product. Those discussions led to the company buying Keybase this morning.

Stamos says in the big build versus buy debate that companies tend to go through when they are evaluating options, this fell somewhere in the middle. While they bought a company with a lot of expertise, it will still require Keybase engineers working with counterparts from Zoom and consultants like Stamos to build a final encrypted product.

“The truth is that what Zoom wants to do with end-to-end encryption, nobody’s really done, so there’s no product that you could just slap onto Zoom to turn it into key encryption. That’s going to have to be thought out from the beginning for the specific needs of an enterprise,” Stamos told TechCrunch.

But what they liked about Keybase in particular is that they have already thought through similar problems with file encryption and encrypted chat, and they want to turn the Keybase engineers loose on this problem.

“The design is going to be something that’s totally new. The great thing about Keybase is that they have already been through this process of thinking through and then crafting a design that is usable by normal people and that provides functionality while being somewhat invisible,” he said.

Because it’s a work in progress, it’s not possible to say when that final integration will happen, but Stamos did say that the company intends to publish a paper on May 22nd outlining its cryptographic plan moving forward, and then will have a period of public discussion before finalizing the design and moving into the integration phase.

He says that the first goal is to come up with a more highly secure version of Zoom meetings with end-to-end encryption enabled. At least initially, this will only be available for people using the Zoom client or Zoom-enabled hardware. You won’t be able to encrypt someone calling in, for instance.

As for folks who may be worried about Keybase being owned by Zoom, Stamos says, “The whole point of the Keybase design is that you don’t have to trust who owns their servers.”

Historians interested in the way events and people were chronicled in the old days once had to sort through card catalogs for old papers, then microfiche scans, then digital listings — but modern advances can index them down to each individual word and photo. A new effort from the Library of Congress has digitized and organized photos and illustrations from centuries of news using state of the art machine learning.

Led by Ben Lee, a researcher from the University of Washington occupying the Library’s “Innovator in Residence” position, the Newspaper Navigator collects and surfaces data from images from some 16 million pages of newspapers throughout American history.

Lee and his colleagues were inspired by work already being done in Chronicling America, an ongoing digitization effort for old newspapers and other such print materials. While that work used optical character recognition to scan the contents of all the papers, there was also a crowd-sourced project in which people identified and outlined images for further analysis. Volunteers drew boxes around images relating to World War I, then transcribed the captions and categorized the picture.

This limited effort set the team thinking.

“I loved it because it emphasized the visual nature of the pages — seeing the visual diversity of the content coming out of the project, I just thought it was so cool, and I wondered what it would be like to chronicle content like this from all over America,” Lee told TechCrunch.

He also realized that what the volunteers had created was in fact an ideal set of training data for a machine learning system. “The question was, could we use this stuff to create an object detection model to go through every newspaper, to throw open the treasure chest?”

The answer, happily, was yes. Using the initial human-powered work of outlining images and captions as training data, they built an AI agent that could do so on its own. After the usual tweaking and optimizing, they set it loose on the full Chronicling America database of newspaper scans.

“It ran for 19 days nonstop — definitely the largest computing job I’ve ever run,” said Lee. But the results are remarkable: millions of images spanning three centuries (from 1789 to 1963) and organized with metadata pulled from their own captions. The team describes their work in a paper you can read here.

Assuming the captions are at all accurate, these images — until recently only accessible by trudging through the archives date by date and document by document — can be searched for their contents like any other corpus.

Looking for pictures of the president in 1870? No need to browse dozens of papers looking for potential hits and double-checking the contents in the caption — just search Newspaper Navigator for “president 1870.” Or if you want editorial cartoons from the World War II era, you can just get all illustrations from a date range. (The team has already zipped up the photos into yearly packages and plans other collections.)

Here are a few examples of newspaper pages with the machine learning system’s determinations overlaid on them (warning: plenty of hat ads and racism):

[gallery ids="1985834,1985828,1985829,1985830,1985833"]

That’s fun for a few minutes for casual browsers, but the key thing is what it opens up for researchers — and other sets of documents. The team is throwing a data jam today to celebrate the release of the dataset and tools, during which they hope to both discover and enable new applications.

“Hopefully it will be a great way to get people together to think of creative ways the dataset can be used,” said Lee. “The idea I’m really excited by from a machine learning perspective, is trying to build out a user interface where people can build their own dataset. Political cartoons or fashion ads, just let users define users they’re interested in and train a classifier based on that.”

In other words, Newspaper Navigator’s AI agent could be the parent for a whole brood of more specific ones that could be used to scan and digitize other collections. That’s actually the plan within the Library of Congress, where the digital collections team has been delighted by the possibilities brought up by Newspaper Navigator and machine learning in general.

“One of the things we’re interested in is how computation can expand the way we’re enabling search and discovery,” said Kate Zwaard. “Because we have OCR, you can find things it would have taken months or weeks to find. The Library’s book collection has all these beautiful plates and illustrations. But if you want to know like, what pictures are there of the Madonna and child, some are categorized, but others are inside books that aren’t catalogued.”

That could change in a hurry with an image-and-caption AI systematically poring over them.

Newspaper Navigator, the code behind it, and all the images and results from it are completely public domain, free to use or modify for any purpose. You can dive into the code at the project’s GitHub.

Deskless workers make up 80% of the global workforce, but to Desmond Lim, that job title is his entire world.

Lim grew up in Singapore and saw his father wake up every morning, six days a week, at 5 a.m. to start his job as a driver. Lim and his mom, who worked as a cleaner, joined his father from time to time in the van. Lim realized there needed to be an easier way for hourly, or deskless, workers to find jobs quickly.

Lim is the founder of Workstream, an end-to-end software solution to help small-and-medium businesses fill open positions. Today, the startup announced it has raised a $10 million Series A round, bringing its total known financing to $12.5 million.

The Bay Area-based company’s core customer is hiring managers in industries that have large turnover, like hospitality, restaurant, supermarket and delivery businesses.

Workstream automates a lot of the processes that usually take place over the span of a few weeks. The company says its technology can help businesses save 70% time on hiring. It also adds transparency, so instead of a job-seeker walking into a Target, filling out an application and hoping for the best, it provides a platform to make conversation between seekers and employers more accessible.

There are two parts to Workstream’s product. First, job-seekers can turn to the platform for the entire job searching process, from open gigs to onboarding once they secure the job. A free one-stop shop to look for reliable jobs tackles the challenges Lim’s father faced back in Singapore. The job seeker dashboard also has built-in reminders to make sure users can stay on top of interviewing.

The other part of Workstream’s business tackles the employer side. Businesses with high employee churn struggle to find reliable talent that doesn’t ghost on them. An employer can post to as many as 24 local job boards with one click, as they are integrated with Workstream. Workstream helps employers communicate more directly with potential hires through real-time messaging, video conference integration and text message reminders about topics like interview timing and paperwork.

A critical feature of Workstream is that it focuses on communication with workers through text messages instead of e-mails. Front-line and deskless workers are often the most disconnected members of the global job force due to a lack of access to company-issued e-mail addresses, and to be frank, time on their hands. Individuals who are spending long stretches of time on the go need to give real-time updates in a low-tech and inclusive way. The digital divide is real, and Workstream’s focus on mobile-based text messages can get employees hired within the same day.

An example of this in action is that anytime an applicant applies for a job, they get a text message from the employer that has additional information. The text might include background in culture or additional questions in the form of multiple choice. Questions are tailored specifically for the busy and often stacked lives of hourly workers, focusing on metrics like distance from work and ability to access reliable transportation.

The company charges employers a fee based on how many hires they make per year and what features they choose to enroll in.

While Workstream is entering the crowded space of recruiting platforms, it might be able to win simply because of its focus: local businesses. The company noted that many hiring platforms coming out of Silicon Valley are built for knowledge workers, like Lever or X. In contrast, Workstream’s focus on local businesses is tailored an inch wide and a mile deep. Ethos-wise, it is a nod to Lim’s childhood spending hours in his father’s van.

Local businesses are not dealing with as many customers right now due to shelter-in-place orders due to COVID-19. Because small and medium-sized businesses have more time on their hands, Lim says they have been more open during client calls to try new software, contactless hiring and video messaging. The startup currently has 5,000 hiring managers it works with, including franchise businesses like Jamba Juice and Dunkin’ Donuts. The company is finding inbound interest from medical and manufacturing companies, too.

“We’re getting a lot fewer people saying that they don’t know how to use video conferencing,” Lim said. “They’re rethinking their systems.”

These factors helped the company, which landed an impressive group of investors and closed the round before the pandemic slowed funding.

The latest round was led by Founders Fund and Basis Set Ventures. Other investors include Affirm CEO Max Levchin, DoorDash CEO Tony Xu, Lattice CEO Jack Altman and Lucidchart CEO Karl Sun. Workstream also attracted dollars from a number of former and current leaders at companies like Slack, Brex, Airbnb, Instacart, Pinterest and more.

While stacked rounds have their ups and downs, an all-star group of firms is a helpful credit to have for founders who don’t necessarily come from traditional Silicon Valley networks, like Lim.

The company did not disclose valuation, revenue or profitability with this new financing round, but said investors have been telling the startup to spend more money and reinvest in growth.

The advice is a stark contrast to what we’ve been hearing from investors these days amid market turbulence and pleas to extend the runway. And perhaps that means that Workstream’s business can afford to bet on itself, the market be damned.

Founders hunting down capital in the middle of this pandemic may feel like they’re on a fool’s errand, but some investors are still offering financing, even if the terms might not be as good as they once were. One avenue that appears to remain open: corporate venture capital.

The corporate route offers its own set of unique challenges, depending on the philosophy of the organization’s investment arm. Some are looking strictly for companies that fit neatly into their platform, while others believe a solid investment is more important than a perfect fit.

Regardless of style, these firms want their investment targets to succeed on their own merits, rather than as part of the organization the funding arm represents. To get the lay of the land, we spoke to a couple of firms that take very different approaches to their investments: Dell Technologies Capital and Salesforce Ventures.

Corporate venture is a different animal

Corporate venture funds aren’t typically as large as private ones, but they have a lot to offer, such as global sales and marketing support and a depth of knowledge that offers direct benefits to a young upstart. This can help founders avoid mistakes, but there is danger in becoming too dependent on the company.

The good news is that these companies are often not leading the round, but are instead providing some cash and guidance, which leaves entrepreneurs to develop and grow on their own. While the pandemic is forcing many changes in approaches to investment, the two corporate venture capital firms we spoke to said they will continue to invest, and their theses remains pretty much the same.

If you have an enterprise focus and you can convince these firms to take a chance, they offer some interesting perks a private firm might not be able to, or at the very least provide a piece of your funding puzzle in these difficult times.

Target, which already owns on-demand delivery service Shipt, is in talks to buy assets from Deliv, NBC News first reported.

“Deliv is in the process of completing a deal to sell technology assets to Target and Deliv’s CEO along with a subset of the team will be moving over to Target,” a Deliv spokesperson told TechCrunch. “Target is not involved in the wind-down. We are working with our retail partners to transition delivery services to other providers during the next 90 days.”

If the deal goes through, Target will reportedly bring on Deliv CEO Daphne Carmeli and some of Deliv’s employees. This comes just one day after The Wall Street Journal reported Deliv would be ceasing its on-demand delivery operations on or before August 4.

Deliv, founded in 2012, has raised $80.4 million in venture capital and currently operates same-day delivery of things like groceries and prescriptions in 35 markets. Deliv has partnerships in place with companies like Best Buy, Walgreens and Macy’s, but those are not expected to remain intact.

Deliv previously had a partnership with Walmart, but that ended in February 2019. At the time, Deliv said the Walmart partnership did not make up a large chunk of its operations.

If this deal goes through, this would mark Target’s second acquisition in the delivery space. In December 2017, Target bought same-day delivery service Shipt for $550 million. Since then, Target has launched a dedicated shopping site for same-delivery service, powered by Shipt. But as of late, Target has been under fire for its practices toward Shipt workers, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. In early April, Shipt shoppers walked off work to demand an extended sick pay policy, hazard pay and personal protective equipment.

TechCrunch has reached out to Target and will update this if we hear back.

Todd Chaffee has long been one of the most senior members of the late-stage venture firm Institutional Venture Partners. Chaffee joined IVP in 2000 after logging six years at Visa, and went on to lead rounds in numerous prominent later-stage companies, many (but not all) of which have gone public, including Coinbase, Compass, Klarna, Kayak, Omniture, Pandora and Twitter.

It’s a good business to be in, particularly when companies are going public at that clip. Given that the IPO window is now shut indefinitely, we wondered what that might mean for the firm’s model.

Chaffee — who, like contemporary Bill Gurley, won’t be making new investments out of his firm’s next fund — talked with us about that question and what else the pandemic means to the venture industry and to him personally. Our chat has been edited for length and clarity.

TechCrunch: IVP last announced a fund in 2017. I assume one is coming soon that you cannot talk about — unless you can talk about it?

Todd Chaffee: Yeah, we’re currently investing Fund 16. That’s all I can tell you right now.

Do you think it’s time to bulk up even more, or size down? There’s maybe more opportunity but also check sizes are going to get smaller, seemingly.