Author: azeeadmin

Google Cloud today announced the official opening of its Las Vegas data center region. With this, Google Cloud now operates four regions in the western U.S., with Las Vegas complementing Google Cloud’s existing data centers in Los Angeles, California; The Dalles, Oregon and its recently opened Salt Lake City, Utah region.

In total, Google now offers its customers the option to host their applications in 23 regions globally and with the opening of this new region, it now has seven U.S. regions.

Like all of Google’s new regions, Las Vegas will offer three availability zones and access to most of Google Cloud’s services. In Vegas, though, developers won’t be able to use relatively new services like Cloud Functions and Cloud Run yet. Some other features, including Cloud HSM and Secret Manager, are also not available yet either.

The company first announced the Vegas expansion in July 2019. And while it’s eerily quiet in Las Vegas right now, the idea behind these new regions is always to give companies the option to be close to their customers and offer them low-latency access to their applications, as well as the ability to distribute workloads across a wider geographic region.

Earlier this year, Google also announced that it would open its regions in Jakarta, Seoul and Warsaw over the course of 2020. So far, it doesn’t look like the COVID-19 pandemic is slowing these plans down.

For Las Vegas, Google’s launch partner is Aristocrat, which fittingly offers digital products for the gambling industry.

“Cloud technologies enable two important outcomes for us,” said James Alverez, CIO of Aristocrat. “First the ability to securely, consistently and immediately enable and disable game development platforms; and second, our ability to expand and contract our infrastructure based on demand. Both of these capabilities allow us to flex our technology to fully support the demands of our customers and our business. The Las Vegas region gives us the opportunity to more directly engage Google Cloud services and take advantage of an entry point into the network.”

The makers of the world’s most ethical smartphone, the Fairphone 3, have teamed up for a version of the device with even less big tech on board.

The Netherlands-based device maker has partnered with France’s /e/OS to offer a ‘de-Googled’ version of its latest handset, running an Android AOSP fork out of the box that’s itself built atop a fork of CyanogenMod (remember them?) — called LineageOS (via Engadget).

“The deGoogled Fairphone 3 is most likely the first privacy conscious and sustainable phone,” runs the blurb on /e/OS’ website. “It combines a phone that cares for people and planet and an OS and apps that care for your privacy.”

A pithy explainer of its “privacy by design ecosystem” — and the point of “Android without Google” — further notes: “We have removed many pieces of code that send your personal data to remote servers without your consent. We don’t scan your data in your phone or in your cloud space, and we don’t track your location hundred times a day or collect what you’re doing with your apps.”

When the Fairphone 3 launched last September it came with Android 9 preloaded. But the company touted a post-launch update that would make it easy for buyers to wipe Google services off their slate and install the Android Open Source Project, which it recommended for advanced users.

The new /e/OS flavor offers a third OS option.

Per Engadget, Fairphone said it polled members of its community asking which alternative OS to offer and /e/OS got more votes than a number of others. The company also highlighted /e/OS’ privacy by design as a factor in the choice, lauding how it shuts down “unwanted data flows”, meaning users have more control over what their phone is doing.

The e/OS flavor of the Fairphone 3 ships from May 6, priced at just under €480 — a €30 premium on the Googley flavor of Android you get on the standard Fairphone 3.

Existing owners of Fairphone’s third gen handset can manually install /e/OS gratis via an installer on its website.

When the Fairphone 3 launched last year the company told us only around 5% of Fairphone users opt to go full open source — which suggests the /e/OS Fairphone 3 will be a niche choice for even these discerning buyers.

Chinese electric vehicle startup Nio has secured a $1 billion investment from several state-owned companies in Hefei in return for agreeing to establish headquarters in the city’s economic development hotspot and giving up a stake in one of its business units.

The injection of capital comes from several investors, including Hefei City Construction and Investment Holding Group, CMG-SDIC Capital and Anhui Provincial Emerging Industry Investment Co.

Nio’s factory is already in Hefei, which it operates with Anhui Jianghuai Automobile Group. However, the company’s headquarters and other operations are in Shanghai about 300 miles from the Anhui provincial city. Under this agreement, Nio will locate all of its Chinese operations, including R&D, sales, service and supply chain, in the Hefei Economic and Technological Development Area.

The investment is another important milestone of NIO for its long-term growth, Nio said in a statement Wednesday.

“After receiving the investments from the strategic investors, Nio will have more sufficient funds to support its business development, to enhance its leadership in the products and technologies of smart electric vehicles and to offer services exceeding users’ expectation,” the company said, adding that the launch of Nio China headquarters in Hefei enables NIO to improve its operational efficiency and to sustain its growth and competitiveness in the long run.

Despite the new capital, Nio faces a series of challenges, including a downturn in the Chinese automotive market. Electric vehicle sales in China declined 4% to 1.21 million vehicles in 2019 from the previous year. The company’s ES8 and ES6 vehicles haven’t generated the same demand as Tesla’s Model 3. Meanwhile, the COVID-19 pandemic is dampening demand further as customers stayed home.

Structuring the deal requires some asset shuffling. The investment is targeted towards Nio China, a recently established business unit under Nio Inc.

Investors will put 7 billion yuan, or $1 billion, into Nio’s holding company. Nio will put its core China businesses and assets — which include vehicle research and development, supply chain and its power division — into Nio China, a subsidiary of the holding company. Nio’s parent company will also invest into Nio China.

At the end, investors will hold a 24.1% stake in Nio China while Nio will have a 75.9% controlling equity interesting into the unit.

The company expects the closing of the investments to take place in the second quarter of 2020, subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions.

Spotify’s podcast business is booming despite — or perhaps, because of — the COVID-19 pandemic. The company says it has now grown its podcast catalog to over a million shows, up from the 700,000-plus podcasts it was reporting just this March. Podcaster listeners are also “more engaged overall” and “listen to more music,” the company noted, which may have helped boost Spotify’s overall listener and subscriber increases in the first quarter. In addition, podcast consumption was up by “triple digits” in Q1 2020 compared with the same quarter last year, Spotify said.

The streaming music service reported its monthly active user base is now at 286 million, with more users joining the ad-supported free service amid the coronavirus pandemic. It also beat on both earnings and revenue in Q1 2020, with -$0.20 earnings per share on a diluted basis and revenue of roughly $2 billion (€1.848 billion.)

Podcasts have now become a key part to Spotify’s business in recent years, and were addressed several times during Spotify’s call with investors on Wednesday.

The company has now made several investments in creator tools, podcast services, and original content and media studios related to its interests in podcasts. Spotify said it plans to continue its acquisitions in the future, as well, if the current environment means “there will be more advantageous deals to be done” — which, of course, it does.

Spotify also said Q1 2020 was its biggest-ever quarter for organic podcast creation.

Podcasters stuck at home were busy creating new shows and increasing their output on existing shows, it seems. Notably, 70% of the new podcasts in the quarter were created within Spotify’s own ecosystem via the Anchor podcast creation platform, the company said.

Spotify had acquired Anchor, a service that aims to make it easier to create podcasts, for an estimated $140 million in 2019. In the months that followed, the platform has continued to innovate on features designed to ease users into becoming podcasters — like its simple “record with friends” option for remote podcasting that’s now become particularly handy amid the quarantine. Yesterday, Anchor released a new feature to turn video chats into audio podcasts, as well.

These help to populate Spotify with a longer tail of content beyond the 800,000-some shows you’ll find on mainstream platforms, like Apple Podcasts.

Spotify, to some extent, addressed concerns that its podcast business had suffered due to the coronavirus outbreak. As more users have shifted their listening from cars and commutes to the home, podcast listening had declined industry-wide over the past several weeks. (Recent reports indicate a turnaround is starting to shape up, however.)

Spotify, however, said podcast consumption grew in the quarter.

The company said podcast consumption grew by triple digits in Q1 2020 compared with the same quarter last year. While that’s not as relevant a metric as a quarter-over-quarter increase would have been, it at least indicates that overall, the podcast side of the business is still growing.

In addition, one of Spotify’s own shows — a daily news podcast in Germany — has already become the second-largest show in the country, and a top 20 show worldwide. Plus, this week Spotify was finally able to add “This American Life,” the No. 5 show in the U.S., to its lineup as an exclusive streaming deal with Pandora lapsed.

The company admitted it was still trying to figure out how to market its own shows, though. It said it would continue experimenting with decisions like which to make exclusive to its service or which to offer in windowing deals, and so on.

And while Spotify has planned to grow ad revenue by way of podcasts, it stressed that the economic downturn which had resulted in ad sales declines has had a minimal effect on this business. Only 10% of Spotify’s overall revenue today comes from ads, so it’s able to weather a drop in ad sales better than some others in the media and entertainment business.

“With so many unknowns, there are some questions we simply can’t answer at this point,” noted Spotify CEO Daniel Ek as to how the COVID-19 pandemic will continue to impact the business. “But I can say that I’m confident that we will continue to be in a position of strength when this is behind us. And that’s because of our models, our scale, and our superior user experience. And, of course, our content pipeline,” he added.

Machine learning has quickly gone from niche field to crucial component of innumerable software stacks, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. The tools needed to create and manage it are enterprise-grade and often enterprise-only — but Determined AI aims to make them more accessible than ever by open-sourcing its entire AI infrastructure product.

The company created its Determined Training Platform for developing AI in an organized, reliable way — the kind of thing that large companies have created (and kept) for themselves, the team explained when they raised a $11 million Series A last year.

“Machine learning is going to be a big part of how software is developed going forward. But in order for companies like Google and Amazon to be productive, they had to build all this software infrastructure,” said CEO Evan Sparks. “One company we worked for had 70 people building their internal tools for AI. There just aren’t that many companies on the planet that can withstand an effort like that.”

At smaller companies, ML is being experimented with by small teams using tools intended for academic work and individual research. To scale that up to dozens of engineers developing a real product… there aren’t a lot of options.

“They’re using things like TensorFlow and Pytorch,” said Chief Scientist Ameet Talwalkar. “A lot of the way that work is done is just conventions: how do the models get trained? Where do I write down the data on which is best? How do I transform data to a good format? All these are bread and butter tasks. There’s tech to do it, but it’s really the wild west. And the amount of work you have to do to get it set up… there’s a reason big tech companies build out these internal infrastructures.”

Determined AI, whose founders started out at UC Berkeley’s AmpLab (home of Apache Spark), has been developing its platform for a few years, with feedback and validation from some paying customers. Now, they say, it’s ready for its open source debut — with an Apache 2.0 license, of course.

“We have confidence people can pick it up and use it on their own without a lot of hand holding,” said Sparks.

You can spin up your own self-hosted installation of the platform using local or cloud hardware, but the easiest way to go about it is probably the cloud-managed version that automatically provisions resources from AWS or wherever you prefer and tears them down when they’re no longer needed.

The hope is that the Determined AI platform becomes something of a base layer that lots of small companies can agree on, providing portability to results and standards so you’re not starting from scratch at every company or project.

With machine learning development expected to expand by orders of magnitude in the coming years, even a small piece of the pie is worth claiming, but with luck Determined AI may grow to be the new de facto standard for AI development in small and medium businesses.

You can check out the platform on GitHub or at Determined AI’s developer site.

If you want to get a structural engineer excited, ask them what they could build in space. Freed from the constraints of gravity and aerodynamics, a single human could move skyscrapers like LEGO bricks. A fraction of the rocket fuel needed to escape earth’s pull could move mountainous objects. You could build mind-bending machines, like a Dyson sphere, in a vacuum.

The problem is, should you ever want to bring them back to earth, they would disintegrate on entry and collapse under their own weight on landing.

Which is what came to mind when I read Marc Andreessen’s energetic rallying cry to build. Marc, one of the most impressive entrepreneurs and investors of his generation, called for the technology community to pick up arms and start building solutions to the hard challenges, from clean energy to better education and effective healthcare. This is the right call. But if, during the financial crisis of 2008, a senior banker had looked at the global situation and wrote a thought piece entitled ‘it’s time to finance!’ they would have been rightly pilloried. Calling for more of the same won’t work now either.

Software businesses didn’t cause this crisis. It is thanks in part to our software infrastructure, the deep foundations of code and the endless hours of engineers’ effort, that we are able to continue to function as an economy at all. But just as much as it’s time to build, it’s also a time to listen and understand why these hard challenges haven’t been solved already, because we can’t continue to build in a vacuum.

There is undeniably a culture in many technology businesses and entrepreneurs that considers politicians, policy, civic institutions — in fact, anyone who isn’t a potential user or customer — as a distraction from the focus needed for a business to thrive. This is the vacuum in which much of the world’s most successful modern technology companies have been built.

But building new energy systems requires deep engagement with both politics and policy. Solving persistent healthcare challenges means solving for every edge case. Expanding education and skills demands an understanding of the structural challenges in society that prevent many communities from accessing these services in the first place. All of these challenges require a different mindset, a willingness to engage with government, an engineering culture that considers the second order consequences of what they are building and boards that think beyond their fiduciary and legal responsibilities to their social responsibilities as well.

If we want to learn how to build in times of crises, it’s worth looking at the innovators and entrepreneurs that tackled such complex problems before us. Which brings me to Florence Nightingale.

May 12, 2020 will be the 200th anniversary of Florence Nightingale’s birth. Nightingale is famous for many reasons, but above all for the impact she had on the welfare of soldiers in the Crimean War.

Seeing the appalling condition injured soldiers lived in after returning from the front line, she researched the causes of death, advocated for and created new methods for capturing and presenting data and worked with other great innovators of her time, Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Dr. Edmund Parkes, to design and deploy entirely new ways of caring, including a new type of hospital in Renkioi. She broke the rules of war, healthcare and being a woman in the process. She came at every problem not as a weary practitioner, but as an entrepreneur anxious for change. By some estimates, Renkioi hospital improved the fatality rate by 90%.

But this is not where Nightingale had her greatest impact. On returning to England, she found that the biggest challenges in healthcare then were not huge, technical problems, but behavioral and political ones. So she looked to change the institution of nursing itself, while bringing people along with her. She set up the Nightingale fund to train nurses who would go out and practice her new approach in American, India and Japan. She worked with multiple governments to change the laws around home sanitation. She wrote extensively, simplifying her language to make it more accessible and creating texts that served as the foundation for modern nursing. Two hundred years later, the British government managed to build a fully equipped ICU hospital in central London in just nine days, which we now call the Nightingale Hospital.

In this crisis, rules are being broken. And as we emerge from it, it won’t be business as usual. If we want to, and we should, build things that make us more resilient, have more impact and change more lives, then we have to approach these problems differently, as well. As Florence Nightingale found, the most complex challenges are not technical problems that can be solved by engineers alone, they are societal ones.

What this looks like in practice is complex. You can start by thinking about your internal culture, with tools like consequence scanning from Dot.Everyone, to consider the impact of what you’re building beyond your first users. You can start by looking at how a new generation of companies are engaging with policy problems through the work of funds like the Govtech Fund or Public.io. You can start by engaging with projects to tackle some of the fundamental weaknesses in the web that have been exposed during this crisis, such as Demos’ The Good Web Project. And if you’re interested in improving how your board works, you can get in touch with us to be part of Balderton’s Good Governance projectg, as well.

As Marc rightly said, it is time to build — but it’s time to build sustainably, too.

Atlassian is about as ubiquitous to software engineers as Google is to the rest of us. The Sydney-based company, which launched in 2002, develops tools and services for enterprise collaboration and marched efficiently to a public offering in 2015.

So it goes without saying that we’re thrilled to have Atlassian cofounder and co-CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes join us at Disrupt SF 2020, which runs September 14 to September 16.

As far as entrepreneurship goes, Cannon-Brookes is on a very short list of founders who have led a company from founding to public offering, and all the steps in between.

Atlassian was one of the early players in enterprise collaboration, particularly for engineering and development teams, and has over the years introduced a robust product suite including Jira, Confluence, and Hipchat.

Cannon-Brookes has been at the helm for the entire journey, from raising early funding to product development to acquisitions (including Trello) to public offering and beyond. All the while, Cannon-Brookes kept the company’s HQ, and all invoicing, in its home country of Australia, becoming the most successful tech startup to ever launch out of the nation down under.

One of the more interesting features of the company? Unlike Microsoft and IBM and other big enterprise software companies, Atlassian has always operated without a proper sales team, using a fraction of spend on sales and marketing compared to other enterprise software giants.

“We had a hunch early on that salespeople break software companies,” Cannon-Brookes told the Australian Financial Review in 2015. “But convincing people this model would work has probably been the biggest struggle we’ve had. We’ve had a lot of smart people who wouldn’t join the company or give us money or advise us because it made no sense to them.”

The company developed an enormously successful distribution flywheel built on the back of one necessary ingredient: remarkable products. Great products at low prices mean that you can sell to everyone, and if you sell to everyone you have to do it online and with transparent pricing and a great free trial. But if you offer a free trial, you better have a remarkable product, and the flywheel spins on and on.

It’s worked.

Atlassian products are used by more than 160,000 large and small organizations across the globe, including Spotify, NASA, Sotheby’s and Visa.

Cannon-Brookes is also a tech investor across sectors like software, fintech, agriculture and energy, with a seat on the board of Zoox.

We’re excited to sit down with Cannon-Brookes and hear more about the company’s trajectory over the last two decades and hear what comes next for the behemoth.

Disrupt SF 2020 runs September 14 to September 16 at the Moscone Center right in the heart of San Francisco. For folks who can’t make it in person, we have several Digital Pass options to be part of the action or to exhibit virtually which you can check out here.

We’ll be announcing more speakers over the coming weeks so stay tuned.

(Editor’s Note: We’re watching the developing situation around the novel coronavirus very closely and will adapt as we go. You can find out the latest on our event schedule plans here.)

23andMe. MongoDB. Eventbrite. Evernote. Bird. Square . Tumblr. Unity. YouTube. Xoom.

Roelof Botha has had a board seat in each of these companies, but his list of investments is much, much longer.

The Sequoia partner and managing director is legendary in Silicon Valley and the broader tech world, and we’re very excited that he’s joining us for an upcoming episode of Extra Crunch Live that will air on Wednesday, May 6th at 2pm ET/11am PT. Extra Crunch members may join the Zoom call or view the broadcast live (or on demand) on YouTube. If you’re not already a member, you can join here.

Before Botha graduated from Stanford, he had joined the ranks of the PayPal mafia, serving as the fintech startup’s director of corporate development. He climbed the ranks to vice president of finance and was eventually named CFO in 2001. He was just 28 went PayPal went public in 2002.

Following PayPal’s sale to eBay, Botha left the company to join Sequoia Capital in January of 2003; since then, he has been investing in some of the world’s fastest-rising startups.

Botha has been on Forbes’ Midas List every year since 2008 and was ranked third in 2020. He led Sequoia’s investments in companies like Instagram, YouTube and Square and is one of the most respected voices in tech and venture capital alike.

With the coronavirus thrashing the economy and forcing quick adaptation from the tech sector and beyond, Botha can provide a unique look at what comes next for tech and offer advice to startups that are trying to chart a course through a storm that has no end in sight.

We’ll ask Botha how he’s advising his own portfolio companies, any decision-making frameworks he suggests for business leaders who find themselves between a rock and a hard place and his general outlook on VC appetite over the next six to twelve months. There will also be plenty of time for questions from the audience, so come prepared.

You can find the Zoom info below.

Botha joins an incredible list of speakers joining us on Extra Crunch Live, including Kirsten Green, Mark Cuban and Hunter Walk. We’ll be announcing new speakers soon, so stay tuned!

Continuing our week’s coverage of new venture funds, this morning let’s dig into Kickstart’s latest capital pool.

Kickstart Seed Fund, based in Utah’s Salt Lake City, has raised a $110 million Fund V it announced this morning, its largest to date. The firm’s rise to investing prominence has largely coincided with Utah’s own emergence as a technology hub, with the pair’s success intertwined since the financial crisis when the fund was put together.

Founded in 2008, when Utah was far from known as a technology hub—let alone a printing press for billion-dollar startups—the firm has invested in over 100 companies and has seen 20 exits, Kickstart told TechCrunch in an interview.

The seed fund has backed firms like Podium, which recently raised $125 million at a unicorn valuation, and Lucid, which recently raised a $52 round itself and is also a unicorn. Those rounds come to mind as they were both announced this year, and each saw the firm in question announce that it had crested $100 million ARR.

Utah, COVID-19 and the future

Any idea that the mega-exit of Utah’s Qualtrics to SAP was a fluke, or perhaps an echo to some prior success that the state had seen, is now moot. And that means that Kickstart has a fresh bloc of funds to invest in a startup scene that has been hot for some time.

To get a handle on what’s changing, however, in the COVID-19 era for the state’s startups and investing scene, TechCrunch spoke with a number of investors from the fund before their new fund was announced.

Kickstart’s funds have grown as its local tech scene expanded. From just a few million in Fund I back in 2008 to a $26 million Fund II, the firm has added capital with each raise. Its third fund clocked in at $39 million bested by its Fund IV tally of $74 million. Now flush with $110 million, you might think that the firm is prepped to shake up its strategy.

Not really, as it turns out. Kickstart’s Curt Roberts told TechCrunch during a call that the firm has stuck close to the stage that it invests at over time. The market has changed the size of seed rounds some, however, leading to the firm taking on a bit more capital over time. “It is very fair to say that your average seed round has gone up in size slightly,” Roberts said, noting that “companies are just getting more done before they raise [a] seed round.”

As you can imagine, if startups are doing more before raising seed money, they can command a higher valuation. Curt agrees, telling TechCrunch that startups can “justify a little more valuation [at] a similar level of dilution” now when they raise.

Toss in some pre-seed investing, and the fact that Kickstart wants to protect its percentage in investments over time, and the larger funds make sense. The firm isn’t big on SPVs, as it turns out, so having more duckets in the till should help it maintain ownership a bit more easily over time.

Most importantly perhaps for Utah itself is that one if its best-known funds now has nine-figures of capital to disburse right when the economy is falling apart. If you are a startup ecosystem, having new buckets of capital land in your region is good news, especially when the business climate is worsening.

Per the group, the COVID-19 crisis isn’t causing endless mayhem in their scene. Yet, at least. The firm stressed Utah’s community cohesion as helping limit public unrest, in addition to the fact that as many of the state’s startups are B2B SaaS shops, making them less likely to get the legs kicked out from underneath them by a drop in consumer spending. TechCrunch has reported on the Utah startup world, and while its scene hasn’t been immune to layoffs it hasn’t seen as many other, similarly-sized ecosystems.

It’s still early days, however.

Kickstart’s investors also told TechCrunch that companies in its area do not run as heavy a burn rate as some other region’s startups, meaning that they are perhaps less exposed to economic hardship if their growth slows.

Utah’s first tech successes like Omniture have been overshadowed by its second wave of breakouts (Qualtrics most of all). And now with Galileo’s exit (a Kickstart company, it turns out), and Podium and Lucid’s latest raises, it’s clear that the third generation of firms in the region are going to be alright. Kickstart now has the capital to make sure that a forth and fifth can get off their feet and follow them.

A number of UK computer security and privacy experts have signed an open letter raising transparency and mission creep concerns about the national approach to develop a coronavirus contacts tracing app.

The letter, signed by around 150 academics, follows a similar letter earlier this month signed by around 300 academics from across the world, who urged caution over the use of such tech tools and called for governments that choose to deploy digital contacts tracing to use privacy-preserving techniques and systems.

“We urge that the health benefits of a digital solution be analysed in depth by specialists from all relevant academic disciplines, and sufficiently proven to be of value to justify the dangers involved,” the UK academics write now, directing their attention at NHSX, the digital arm of the National Health Service which has been working on building a digital contacts tracing app since early March. 

“It has been reported that NHSX is discussing an approach which records centrally the de-anonymised ID of someone who is infected and also the IDs of all those with whom the infected person has been in contact. This facility would enable (via mission creep) a form of surveillance.”

Yesterday the NHSX’s CEO, Matthew Gould, was giving evidence to the UK parliament’s Science and Technology committee. He defended the approach it’s taking — claiming the forthcoming app uses only “a measure of centralization”, and arguing that it’s a “false dichotomy” to say decentralized is privacy secure and centralized isn’t.

He went on to describe a couple of scenarios he suggested show why centralizing the data is necessary in the NHSX’s view. But in the letter the UK academics cast doubt on the validity of the central claim, writing that “we have seen conflicting advice from different groups about how much data the public health teams need“.

“We hold that the usual data protection principles should apply: collect the minimum data necessary to achieve the objective of the application,” they continue. “We hold it is vital that if you are to build the necessary trust in the application the level of data being collected is justified publicly by the public health teams demonstrating why this is truly necessary rather than simply the easiest way, or a ‘nice to have’, given the dangers involved and invasive nature of the technology.”

Europe has seen fierce debate in recent weeks over the choice of app architecture for government-backed coronavirus contacts tracing apps — with different coalitions forming to back decentralized and centralized approaches and some governments pressuring Apple over backing the opposing horse with a cross-platform API for national coronavirus contacts tracing apps it’s developing with Android-maker Google.

Most of the national apps in the works in the region are being designed to use Bluetooth proximity as a proxy for calculating infection risk — with smartphone users’ devices swapping pseudonymized identifiers when near each other. However privacy experts are concerned that centralized stores of IDs risk creating systems of state surveillance as the data could be re-identified by the authority controlling the server.

Alternative decentralized systems have been proposed, using a p2p system with IDs stored locally. Infection risk is also calculated on device, with a relay server used only to push notifications out to devices — meaning social graph data is not systematically exposed.

Although this structure does require the IDs of people who have been confirmed infected to be broadcast to other devices — meaning there’s a potential for interception and re-identification attacks at a local level.

At this stage it’s fair to say that the momentum in Europe is behind decentralized approaches for the national contacts tracing apps. Notably Germany’s government switched from previously backing a centralized approach to decentralized earlier this week, joining a number of others (including Estonia, Spain and Switzerland) — which leaves France and the UK the highest profile backers of centralized systems for now.

France is also seeing expert debate over the issue. Earlier this week a number of French academics signed a letter raising concerns about both centralized and decentralized architectures — arguing that “there should be important evidence in order to justify the risks incurred” of using any such tracking tools.

In the UK, key concerns being attached to the NHSX app are not only the risk of social graph data being centralized and reidentified by the state — but also scope/function creep.

Gould said yesterday that the app will iterate, adding that future versions could ask people to voluntarily give up more data such as their location. And while the NHSX has said use of the app will be voluntary, if multiple functions get baked in that could raise questions over the quality of the consent and whether mission creep is being used as a lever to enforce public uptake.

Another concern is that a public facing branch of the domestic spy agency, GCHQ, has also been involved in advising on the app architecture. And yesterday Gould dodged the committee’s direct questions on whether the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) had been involved in the decision to select a centralized architecture.

There may be more concerns on that front, too. Today the HSJ reports that health secretary Matt Hancock recently granted new powers to the UK’s intelligence agencies which mean they can require the NHS to disclose any information that relates to “the security” of the health service’s networks and information systems during the pandemic.

Such links to database-loving spooks are unlikely to quell privacy fears.

There is also concern about how involved the UK’s data watchdog has been in the detail of the app’s design process. Last week the ICO’s executive director, Simon McDougall, was reported to have told a public forum he had not seen plans for the app, although the agency put out a statement on April 24 saying it was working with NHSX “to help them ensure a high level of transparency and governance”.

Yesterday Gould also told the committee the NHSX would publish data protection impact assessments (DPIAs) for each iteration of the app, though none has yet been published.

He also said the software would be “technically” ready to launch in a few weeks’ time — but could not confirm when the code would be published for external review.

In their letter, the UK academics call on NHSX to publish a DPIA for the app “immediately”, rather than dropping it right before deployment, to allow for public debate about the implications of its use and in order that that public scrutiny can take place of the claimed security and privacy safeguards.

The academics are also calling for the unit to publicly commit to no database or databases being created that would allow de-anonymization of users of the system (other than those self reporting as infected), and which could therefore allow the data to be used for constructing users’ social graphs.

They also urge the NHSX to set out details on how the app will be phased out after the pandemic has passed — in order “to prevent mission creep”.

Asked for a commitment on the database point, an NHSX spokesman told us that’s a question for the UK’s Department of Health and Social Care and/or the NCSC — which won’t salve any privacy concerns around the governments’ wider plans for app users’ data.

We also asked when the NHSX will be publishing a DPIA for the app. At the time of writing we were still waiting for a response.