Author: azeeadmin

Last year, four of the largest U.S. cell carriers were caught selling and sending real-time location data of their customers to shady companies that sold it on to big spenders, who would use the data to track anyone “within seconds” for whatever reason they wanted.

At first, a little-known company LocationSmart was obtaining (and leaking) real-time location data from AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint and selling access through another company, 3Cinteractive, to Securus, a prison technology company, which tracked phone owners without asking for their permission. This game of telephone with people’s private information was discovered, and the cell carriers, facing heavy rebuke from Sen. Ron Wyden, a privacy-minded lawmaker, buckled under the public pressure and said they’d stop selling and sharing customers’ locations.

And that would’ve been that — until it wasn’t.

Now, new reporting by Motherboard shows that while LocationSmart faced the brunt of the criticism, few focused on the other big player in the location-tracking business, Zumigo. A payment of $300 and a phone number was enough for a bounty hunter to track down the participating reporter by obtaining his location using Zumigo’s location data, which was continuing to pay for access from most of the carriers.

Worse, Zumigo sold that data on — like LocationSmart did with Securus — to other companies, like Microbilt, a Georgia-based credit reporting company, which in turn sells that data on to other firms who want that data. In this case, it was a bail bond company, whose bounty hunter was paid by Motherboard to track the reporter down — with his permission.

Everyone seemed to drop the ball. Microbilt said the bounty hunter shouldn’t have used the location data to track the Motherboard reporter. Zumigo said it didn’t mind location data ending up in the hands of the bounty hunter, but still cut Microbilt’s access.

But nobody quite dropped the ball like the carriers, which said it would not to share location data again.

T-Mobile, at the center of the latest location-selling revelations for passing the reporter’s location to the bounty hunter, said last year in the midst of the Securus scandal that it “reviewed” its real-time location data sharing program and found that appropriate controls in place. To appease even the skeptical, T-Mobile chief executive John Legere tweeted at the time that he “personally evaluated the issue” and promised that the company “will not sell customer location data to shady middlemen.”

It’s hard to see how that isn’t, in hindsight, a downright lie.

This time around, T-Mobile said it “does not have a direct relationship” with Microbilt but admitted one with Zumigo, which, given the story and the similarities to last year’s Securus scandal, could be considered one of many “shady middlemen” still obtaining location data from cell carriers.

It wasn’t just T-Mobile. Other carriers were also still selling and sharing their customers’ data.

AT&T said in last year’s letter it would “protect customer data” and “shut down” Securus’ access to its real-time store of customer location data. Most saw that as a swift move to prevent third-parties accessing customer location data. Now, AT&T seemed to renege on that year-ago pledge, saying it “only permit the sharing of location” in limited cases, including when required by law.

Sprint didn’t say what its relationship was with either Zumigo or Microbilt, but once again — like last year — cited its privacy policy as its catch-all to sell and share customer location data. Yet Sprint, like its fellow carriers AT&T and T-Mobile, which pledged to stop selling location data, clearly didn’t complete its “process of terminating its current contracts with data aggregators to whom we provide location data” as it promised in a letter a year ago.

Verizon, the parent company of TechCrunch, wasn’t explicitly cleared from sharing location data with third-parties in Motherboard’s report — only that the bounty hunter refused to search for a Verizon number. (We’ve asked Verizon if it wants to clarify its position — so far, we’ve had nothing back.)

In a letter sent last year when the Securus scandal blew up, Verizon said it would “take steps to stop” sharing data with two firms — Zumigo, and LocationSmart, an intermediary that passed on obtained location data to Securus. But that doesn’t mean it’s off the hook. It was still sharing location data with anyone who wanted to pay in the first place, putting its customers at risk from hackers, stalkers — or worse.

Wyden. who tweeted about the story, said carriers selling its customers location data “is a nightmare for national security and the personal safety of anyone with a phone.” And yet there’s no way to opt out — shy of a legislative fix — given that two-thirds of the U.S. population aren’t going to switch to a carrier that doesn’t sell your location data.

It turns out, you really can’t trust your cell carrier. Who knew?

Thailand has joined Japan in regulating crypto exchanges after it issued its first licenses to four applicants.

The four that were approved as licensed brokers and dealers of cryptocurrencies in the country are Bx, Bitkub, Coins and Satang Pro. One other exchange — Coin Asset — is under extended review after replacing its management team in a bid to win a license.

But two that failed to win a license — Cash2Coins and Southeast Asia Digital Exchange — will shut down this month. They have until January 14 to notify their customers and move any assets outside of their exchanges. The companies were rejected on account of insufficient know your customer (KYC) processes and inadequate IT infrastructure, according to a report from the Bangkok Post.

The deal has been hailed as a major step forward for the legitimacy of cryptocurrencies in Thailand.

“We can partner with traditional financial institutions, brokers, e-wallets etc to offer more financial products to customers,” Jirayut Srupsrisopa, the founder of Bitkub, told TechCrunch. “The bottleneck was the regulation.”

The move could help Thailand establish itself as a hub for the blockchain industry in Asia. The country announced regulation for ICOs — initial coin offerings — last year and it is said to considering moves to loosen those rules. That, combined with licensed exchanges, could appeal to those who seek ‘regulatory havens’ in light of China’s ban on crypto and increased activity from the SEC in the U.S.

But Thailand is up against stiff competition to attract blockchain projects and talent.

Singapore has established itself as a global hub for ICOs while it has a wider pool of developers than most of Southeast Asia. Japan was the first to regulate crypto exchanges — there are currently over a dozen licensed and the exchange industry has been granted self-regulatory status — while Vietnam had made its name as blockchain talent hub with China’s Huboi and Quoine, the parent company of the Liquid exchange, among the companies operating local offices.

Hong Kong has also said in the last year that it may license exchanges, now it has another model to look at for ideas.

Note: The author owns a small amount of cryptocurrency. Enough to gain an understanding, not enough to change a life.

Thailand has joined Japan in regulating crypto exchanges after it issued its first licenses to four applicants.

The four that were approved as licensed brokers and dealers of cryptocurrencies in the country are Bx, Bitkub, Coins and Satang Pro. One other exchange — Coin Asset — is under extended review after replacing its management team in a bid to win a license.

But two that failed to win a license — Cash2Coins and Southeast Asia Digital Exchange — will shut down this month. They have until January 14 to notify their customers and move any assets outside of their exchanges. The companies were rejected on account of insufficient know your customer (KYC) processes and inadequate IT infrastructure, according to a report from the Bangkok Post.

The deal has been hailed as a major step forward for the legitimacy of cryptocurrencies in Thailand.

“We can partner with traditional financial institutions, brokers, e-wallets etc to offer more financial products to customers,” Jirayut Srupsrisopa, the founder of Bitkub, told TechCrunch. “The bottleneck was the regulation.”

The move could help Thailand establish itself as a hub for the blockchain industry in Asia. The country announced regulation for ICOs — initial coin offerings — last year and it is said to considering moves to loosen those rules. That, combined with licensed exchanges, could appeal to those who seek ‘regulatory havens’ in light of China’s ban on crypto and increased activity from the SEC in the U.S.

But Thailand is up against stiff competition to attract blockchain projects and talent.

Singapore has established itself as a global hub for ICOs while it has a wider pool of developers than most of Southeast Asia. Japan was the first to regulate crypto exchanges — there are currently over a dozen licensed and the exchange industry has been granted self-regulatory status — while Vietnam had made its name as blockchain talent hub with China’s Huboi and Quoine, the parent company of the Liquid exchange, among the companies operating local offices.

Hong Kong has also said in the last year that it may license exchanges, now it has another model to look at for ideas.

Note: The author owns a small amount of cryptocurrency. Enough to gain an understanding, not enough to change a life.

Few outside of the food service industry know about Olo a 13.5-year-old, New York-based mobile and online ordering platform for 250 restaurant chains, from Applebee’s to Cheesecake Factory, Chipotle to Denny’s, and Jamba Juice to Chili’s.

Tiger Global has been tracking the company’s growth, however. In fact, in a new secondary transaction, Tiger just snapped up $18 million worth of employees’ equity.

Olo isn’t talking about at what valuation, but founder and CEO Noah Glass notes that the company’s previous investors — RRE Ventures, Core Capital, and the Raine Group, among them — have collectively provided Olo with $63.3 million in primary funding. And they didn’t sell a share to Tiger.

Seemingly, Olo’s traction has given them reason to hang tight to their holdings in the company. According to Glass, more than 100 million orders were processed on Olo’s platform last year — the same amount that had been processed by the platform across the first 12.5 years of the company’s existence. Olo has also outlived or outgrown many of its earlier competitors like Onosys, a company that was acquired by Living Social and later acquired again by another competitor called Splick.it, a smaller, Boulder, Co.-based outfit.

Not last, Olo, which sells it customizable tech stack as a subscription offering to its customers, is benefiting from numerous trends, including that people are increasingly eating restaurant food outside the establishments’ walls. According to the research firm NPD Group, close to half of dinners purchased from a restaurant are now consumed at home, partly because it can be cheaper and faster to eat at home, partly because there’s more entertainment at home (think Netflix), and partly because of the rise of on-demand delivery services like Uber and Postmates.

Indeed, Olo’s technology is largely responsible for enabling customers like Shake Shack to integrate third-party delivery services into their own point-of-sale systems, so that when an order comes through from, say, DoorDash, Shake Shack’s customized Olo software can not only process the sale but help find a just-in-time delivery person to pick it up and take it to the customer.

We talked with Glass at length yesterday to learn more. For a much deeper dive into how the whole thing works (we find it kind of fascinating ourselves), keep reading. Our conversation has been lightly edited for length

TC: You started this company back in 2005, two years before the iPhone was announced. How? Why?

NG: I’d been working for Endeavor Global, which is sort of like a venture firm with a high-impact, nonprofit model, and I got to see and work with a lot of smartphone developers who were working on software before we called them apps. I thought then that we’d all have smart phones, and that when we did, it would make e-commerce possible in on-demand ways.

That insight is what led to the first prototype, which I showed to [venture capitalist] David Frankel, now of Founder Collective. He said, ‘If you believe in this enough to go for it and quit your job and withdraw your admission to Harvard Business School,” where I was headed, “I’ll give you half a million dollars to get started.” When I launched in NYC, i think under 5 percent of the population had a smartphone or mobile web on a mobile device, so we brought the service to life through text-message ordering first, then it evolved to include the mobile web, then apps.

TC: And now Tiger is in the Olo business. Why stage a secondary?

NG: We’re in a very good place from a balance sheet perspective, but we now have 175 employees, with around half in engineering and then a big customer success team. And some of them have been with the company for 10-plus years. They’re true believers, and we wanted to reward them for that long-term loyalty.

TC: Olo sells software as service to fast-casual restaurants that don’t want to build their own enterprise software to take online orders. But you’re also involved in delivery. Can you explain how?

NG: First, about three years ago, we launched a service called Dispatch that enables our brands to take orders, then get the order delivered without having to do delivery themselves. We partnered with various delivery service providers to create a network, basically, and we’ll find the nearest or cheapest courier to deliver to the customer just in time. We can do that because we know how long it take for a meal to be prepared based on our deep integrations with our customers, so food is getting picked up at its peak quality, and then it takes 12 to 13 minutes on average for it to be delivered to someone’s front door.

TC: And you charge that delivery provider a fee per transaction, sort of like a finders fee.

NG: Yes.

We also have a service called Rails that enables third parties like DoorDash and Postmates and Amazon Restaurants to send orders through our API to keep things simpler operationally at the restaurants we serve. Every order comes in through the same point-of-sale system.

TC: So you aren’t competing with a DoorDash in any way but rather partnering with it.

NG: Right. We view DoorDash as another source of demand, and that’s a good thing for our restaurants. It drives more orders.

We have to play the role of Switzerland. If restaurants want to work with Amazon or with Caviar, that’s fine. We’ll work with anyone. We’re a common carrier. We could never say, “We’re only going to work with these two” third parties.

TC: How much are you charging your customers, and how long are your agreements with them?

NG: A typical agreement is 36 to 60 months on average, and it’s transactional SaaS, so we charge a fee per month per store — think of it as around $100 per month — then a small fee per transaction for our core ordering platform.

TC: You must have tons of data. What percentage of diners are picking up food versus having it delivered?

NG: More than 90 percent are customers picking it up. Delivery accounts for just 3 percent at this point. It has huge growth ahead of it if you think about it. What’s more convenient than going to a restaurant and picking food up than having it magically come you?

TC: But it comes to you at an added cost. If we enter into a longer recession, how does the picture change? How are your customers impacted? 

NG: First, officially we work with restaurants that have 10 units or more, though we make exceptions to that rule every now and then and the goal is to be able to work with small chains and independent restaurants some day.

And for the restaurants we work with, a recession could be an accelerant. We saw this in 2008, with more customers choosing to use digital ordering and save time instead of preparing food at home or heading to restaurants for a dining experience. Fine dining will take a hit in a recession, but [our customers] are selling every day lunch and dinner choices, and when you have families where both parents are working and you can get a meal curbside for often less than it costs to cook, that’s compelling.

TC: Do you sell the data you’re collecting from your transaction volume or might you someday?

NG: We make zero revenue from our data today and if we did anything, it would only be with aggregated, anonymized data. But we haven’t done anything with it [to date], including because it’s a precious commodity and also because we’e very restricted in our contracts with what we can do. We do give our customers all the same data as if they built their own software.

TC: But you can see things that no one else can see. Any trends you can share?

NG: We can see that the first Monday after New Year’s is the biggest day for every organic salad chain, whereas at the end of the year, people are eating burgers and pizza and chicken wings and burritos. You see the same thing play out each week. People start the week eating healthy food. By the end of the week, it’s barbecue-ville.

TC: Before you go, is Olo profitable?

NG: We’re not in a place of worrying about raising more money. We have no need for primary capital where we are. We’e big believers in this company as an independent company, and we’re building it until we’re ready to have some kind of [exit] event. We think that’s in the cards if we keep doing what we’re doing.

Few outside of the food service industry know about Olo a 13.5-year-old, New York-based mobile and online ordering platform for 250 restaurant chains, from Applebee’s to Cheesecake Factory, Chipotle to Denny’s, and Jamba Juice to Chili’s.

Tiger Global has been tracking the company’s growth, however. In fact, in a new secondary transaction, Tiger just snapped up $18 million worth of employees’ equity.

Olo isn’t talking about at what valuation, but founder and CEO Noah Glass notes that the company’s previous investors — RRE Ventures, Core Capital, and the Raine Group, among them — have collectively provided Olo with $63.3 million in primary funding. And they didn’t sell a share to Tiger.

Seemingly, Olo’s traction has given them reason to hang tight to their holdings in the company. According to Glass, more than 100 million orders were processed on Olo’s platform last year — the same amount that had been processed by the platform across the first 12.5 years of the company’s existence. Olo has also outlived or outgrown many of its earlier competitors like Onosys, a company that was acquired by Living Social and later acquired again by another competitor called Splick.it, a smaller, Boulder, Co.-based outfit.

Not last, Olo, which sells it customizable tech stack as a subscription offering to its customers, is benefiting from numerous trends, including that people are increasingly eating restaurant food outside the establishments’ walls. According to the research firm NPD Group, close to half of dinners purchased from a restaurant are now consumed at home, partly because it can be cheaper and faster to eat at home, partly because there’s more entertainment at home (think Netflix), and partly because of the rise of on-demand delivery services like Uber and Postmates.

Indeed, Olo’s technology is largely responsible for enabling customers like Shake Shack to integrate third-party delivery services into their own point-of-sale systems, so that when an order comes through from, say, DoorDash, Shake Shack’s customized Olo software can not only process the sale but help find a just-in-time delivery person to pick it up and take it to the customer.

We talked with Glass at length yesterday to learn more. For a much deeper dive into how the whole thing works (we find it kind of fascinating ourselves), keep reading. Our conversation has been lightly edited for length

TC: You started this company back in 2005, two years before the iPhone was announced. How? Why?

NG: I’d been working for Endeavor Global, which is sort of like a venture firm with a high-impact, nonprofit model, and I got to see and work with a lot of smartphone developers who were working on software before we called them apps. I thought then that we’d all have smart phones, and that when we did, it would make e-commerce possible in on-demand ways.

That insight is what led to the first prototype, which I showed to [venture capitalist] David Frankel, now of Founder Collective. He said, ‘If you believe in this enough to go for it and quit your job and withdraw your admission to Harvard Business School,” where I was headed, “I’ll give you half a million dollars to get started.” When I launched in NYC, i think under 5 percent of the population had a smartphone or mobile web on a mobile device, so we brought the service to life through text-message ordering first, then it evolved to include the mobile web, then apps.

TC: And now Tiger is in the Olo business. Why stage a secondary?

NG: We’re in a very good place from a balance sheet perspective, but we now have 175 employees, with around half in engineering and then a big customer success team. And some of them have been with the company for 10-plus years. They’re true believers, and we wanted to reward them for that long-term loyalty.

TC: Olo sells software as service to fast-casual restaurants that don’t want to build their own enterprise software to take online orders. But you’re also involved in delivery. Can you explain how?

NG: First, about three years ago, we launched a service called Dispatch that enables our brands to take orders, then get the order delivered without having to do delivery themselves. We partnered with various delivery service providers to create a network, basically, and we’ll find the nearest or cheapest courier to deliver to the customer just in time. We can do that because we know how long it take for a meal to be prepared based on our deep integrations with our customers, so food is getting picked up at its peak quality, and then it takes 12 to 13 minutes on average for it to be delivered to someone’s front door.

TC: And you charge that delivery provider a fee per transaction, sort of like a finders fee.

NG: Yes.

We also have a service called Rails that enables third parties like DoorDash and Postmates and Amazon Restaurants to send orders through our API to keep things simpler operationally at the restaurants we serve. Every order comes in through the same point-of-sale system.

TC: So you aren’t competing with a DoorDash in any way but rather partnering with it.

NG: Right. We view DoorDash as another source of demand, and that’s a good thing for our restaurants. It drives more orders.

We have to play the role of Switzerland. If restaurants want to work with Amazon or with Caviar, that’s fine. We’ll work with anyone. We’re a common carrier. We could never say, “We’re only going to work with these two” third parties.

TC: How much are you charging your customers, and how long are your agreements with them?

NG: A typical agreement is 36 to 60 months on average, and it’s transactional SaaS, so we charge a fee per month per store — think of it as around $100 per month — then a small fee per transaction for our core ordering platform.

TC: You must have tons of data. What percentage of diners are picking up food versus having it delivered?

NG: More than 90 percent are customers picking it up. Delivery accounts for just 3 percent at this point. It has huge growth ahead of it if you think about it. What’s more convenient than going to a restaurant and picking food up than having it magically come you?

TC: But it comes to you at an added cost. If we enter into a longer recession, how does the picture change? How are your customers impacted? 

NG: First, officially we work with restaurants that have 10 units or more, though we make exceptions to that rule every now and then and the goal is to be able to work with small chains and independent restaurants some day.

And for the restaurants we work with, a recession could be an accelerant. We saw this in 2008, with more customers choosing to use digital ordering and save time instead of preparing food at home or heading to restaurants for a dining experience. Fine dining will take a hit in a recession, but [our customers] are selling every day lunch and dinner choices, and when you have families where both parents are working and you can get a meal curbside for often less than it costs to cook, that’s compelling.

TC: Do you sell the data you’re collecting from your transaction volume or might you someday?

NG: We make zero revenue from our data today and if we did anything, it would only be with aggregated, anonymized data. But we haven’t done anything with it [to date], including because it’s a precious commodity and also because we’e very restricted in our contracts with what we can do. We do give our customers all the same data as if they built their own software.

TC: But you can see things that no one else can see. Any trends you can share?

NG: We can see that the first Monday after New Year’s is the biggest day for every organic salad chain, whereas at the end of the year, people are eating burgers and pizza and chicken wings and burritos. You see the same thing play out each week. People start the week eating healthy food. By the end of the week, it’s barbecue-ville.

TC: Before you go, is Olo profitable?

NG: We’re not in a place of worrying about raising more money. We have no need for primary capital where we are. We’e big believers in this company as an independent company, and we’re building it until we’re ready to have some kind of [exit] event. We think that’s in the cards if we keep doing what we’re doing.

Well, that didn’t take long. We’re less than ten days into 2019 and already Vietnam is aiming threats at Facebook after it violating its draconian cybersecurity law which came into force on January 1.

The U.S. social network stands accused of allowing users in Vietnam to post “slanderous content, anti-government sentiment and libel and defamation of individuals, organisations and state agencies,” according to a report from state-controlled media Vietnam News.

The content is said to have been flagged to Facebook which, reports say, has “delayed removing” it.

That violates the law which — passed last June — broadly forbids internet users from organizing with, or training, others for anti-state purposes, spreading false information, and undermining the nation state’s achievements or solidarity, according to reports at the time. It also requires foreign internet companies to operate a local office and store user information on Vietnamese soil. That’s something neither Google nor Facebook has complied with, despite the Vietnamese government’s recent claim that the former is investigating a local office launch.

In addition, the Authority of Broadcasting and Electronic Information (ABEI) claimed Facebook had violated online advertising rules by allowing accounts to promote fraudulent products and scams, while it is considering penalties for failure to pay tax. The Vietnamese report claimed some $235 million was spent on Facebook ads in 2018, with $152.1 million going to Google.

Facebook responded by clarifying its existing channels for reporting illegal content.

“We have a clear process for governments to report illegal content to us, and we review all these requests against our terms of service and local law. We are transparent about the content restrictions we make in accordance with local law in our Transparency Report,” a Facebook representative told TechCrunch in a statement.

TechCrunch understands that the company is in contact with the Vietnamese government and it intends to review content flagged as illegal before making a decision.

Vietnamese media reports claim that Facebook has already told the government that the content in question doesn’t violate its community standards.

It looks likely that the new law will see contact from Vietnamese government censors spike, but Facebook has acted on content before. The company latest transparency report covers the first half of 2018 and it shows that received 12 requests for data in Vietnam, granting just two. Facebook confirmed it has previously taken action on content that has included the alleged illegal sale of regulated products, trade of wildlife, and efforts to impersonate an individual.

Facebook did not respond to the tax liability claim.

The company previously indicated its concern at the cybersecurity law via Asia Internet Coalition (AIC) — a group that represents the social media giant as well as Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, Line and others — which cautioned that the regulations would negatively impact Vietnam.

“The provisions for data localization, controls on content that affect free speech, and local office requirements will undoubtedly hinder the nation’s fourth Industrial Revolution ambitions to achieve GDP and job growth,” AIC wrote in a statement in June.

“Unfortunately, these provisions will result in severe limitations on Vietnam’s digital economy, dampening the foreign investment climate and hurting opportunities for local businesses and SMEs to flourish inside and beyond Vietnam,” it added.

Vietnam is increasingly gaining a reputation as a growing market for startups, but the cybersecurity act threatens to impact that. One key issue is that the broad terms appear to give the government signficant scope to remove content that it deems offensive.

“This decision has potentially devastating consequences for freedom of expression in Vietnam. In the country’s deeply repressive climate, the online space was a relative refuge where people could go to share ideas and opinions with less fear of censure by the authorities,” said Amnesty International.

Vietnam News reports that the authorities are continuing to collect evidence against Facebook.

“If Facebook did not take positive steps, Vietnamese regulators would apply necessary economic and technical measures to ensure a clean and healthy network environment,” the ABEI is reported to have said.

Well, that didn’t take long. We’re less than ten days into 2019 and already Vietnam is aiming threats at Facebook after it violating its draconian cybersecurity law which came into force on January 1.

The U.S. social network stands accused of allowing users in Vietnam to post “slanderous content, anti-government sentiment and libel and defamation of individuals, organisations and state agencies,” according to a report from state-controlled media Vietnam News.

The content is said to have been flagged to Facebook which, reports say, has “delayed removing” it.

That violates the law which — passed last June — broadly forbids internet users from organizing with, or training, others for anti-state purposes, spreading false information, and undermining the nation state’s achievements or solidarity, according to reports at the time. It also requires foreign internet companies to operate a local office and store user information on Vietnamese soil. That’s something neither Google nor Facebook has complied with, despite the Vietnamese government’s recent claim that the former is investigating a local office launch.

In addition, the Authority of Broadcasting and Electronic Information (ABEI) claimed Facebook had violated online advertising rules by allowing accounts to promote fraudulent products and scams, while it is considering penalties for failure to pay tax. The Vietnamese report claimed some $235 million was spent on Facebook ads in 2018, with $152.1 million going to Google.

Facebook responded by clarifying its existing channels for reporting illegal content.

“We have a clear process for governments to report illegal content to us, and we review all these requests against our terms of service and local law. We are transparent about the content restrictions we make in accordance with local law in our Transparency Report,” a Facebook representative told TechCrunch in a statement.

TechCrunch understands that the company is in contact with the Vietnamese government and it intends to review content flagged as illegal before making a decision.

Vietnamese media reports claim that Facebook has already told the government that the content in question doesn’t violate its community standards.

It looks likely that the new law will see contact from Vietnamese government censors spike, but Facebook has acted on content before. The company latest transparency report covers the first half of 2018 and it shows that received 12 requests for data in Vietnam, granting just two. Facebook confirmed it has previously taken action on content that has included the alleged illegal sale of regulated products, trade of wildlife, and efforts to impersonate an individual.

Facebook did not respond to the tax liability claim.

The company previously indicated its concern at the cybersecurity law via Asia Internet Coalition (AIC) — a group that represents the social media giant as well as Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, Line and others — which cautioned that the regulations would negatively impact Vietnam.

“The provisions for data localization, controls on content that affect free speech, and local office requirements will undoubtedly hinder the nation’s fourth Industrial Revolution ambitions to achieve GDP and job growth,” AIC wrote in a statement in June.

“Unfortunately, these provisions will result in severe limitations on Vietnam’s digital economy, dampening the foreign investment climate and hurting opportunities for local businesses and SMEs to flourish inside and beyond Vietnam,” it added.

Vietnam is increasingly gaining a reputation as a growing market for startups, but the cybersecurity act threatens to impact that. One key issue is that the broad terms appear to give the government signficant scope to remove content that it deems offensive.

“This decision has potentially devastating consequences for freedom of expression in Vietnam. In the country’s deeply repressive climate, the online space was a relative refuge where people could go to share ideas and opinions with less fear of censure by the authorities,” said Amnesty International.

Vietnam News reports that the authorities are continuing to collect evidence against Facebook.

“If Facebook did not take positive steps, Vietnamese regulators would apply necessary economic and technical measures to ensure a clean and healthy network environment,” the ABEI is reported to have said.

A lot of people that will say that traditional retail is dying. They’ll point to the rising prominence of e-commerce, which accounts for under 10% of total retail in the U.S. and a whopping 15% or more of total retail in China, as diminishing opportunities for traditional retail. But the reality is that, thanks to technology, the future of traditional retail has never been brighter.

Today, brick-and-mortar retailers not only have unprecedented insight as to what is happening in their stores – from customer behavior, to traffic flow, and more, they also have an arsenal of new tools to keep raising the bar for the customer experience. This transformation can be looked at from three angles: Smart consumption, smart supply chain and smart logistics.

Smart consumption is blurring the boundaries of online and offline for retailers and customers alike. With AR/VR technology in offline stores, customers can walk into a store, and virtually ‘try on’ an article of clothing, for example, without ever visiting a fitting room. Similarly, while sitting at home, they can virtually place a treadmill in their living room to determine the best fit. IoT has even made it possible for customers to make purchases from the comfort of their cars. At every step of the way, the goal is to improve customer retention and loyalty.

Equally as important, smart supply chain is helping retailers improve operational efficiency by leaps and bounds. Whereas traditional retail requires a fair amount of guesswork — what will customers like, how many of each individual item will they want to buy, and over which time period — smart supply chain driven by AI and big data means that retailers have a much better sense of what customers actually want, and when they want it. With dynamic information about sales, pricing and inventory, brands can improve their time to market, inventory control and product design, and retailers can make smarter decisions about their offerings, making the most of confined physical retail spaces.

But if retailers can’t get products into customers’ hands quickly and cost effectively, then all of the efficiency of smart consumption and supply chain is of no use. It is imperative that behind all of the glitzy offline technology and supply chain algorithms, are extremely efficient logistics.

From smart warehousing, which ensures products get moved out and on their way to the customer as fast as possible, to autonomous delivery vehicles, which make urban delivery more efficient through being able to avoid traffic and follow scheduled routes, to drones, smart logistics work their magic behind the scenes to get products to customers’ doors.

Businesses that embrace innovative technology and invest in it wisely will have a better chance of being a step ahead of the competition and their likelihood of success will be magnified.

Technology is no longer just a support for retail. It is the essential tool for retailers to thrive in the market.

A lot of people that will say that traditional retail is dying. They’ll point to the rising prominence of e-commerce, which accounts for under 10% of total retail in the U.S. and a whopping 15% or more of total retail in China, as diminishing opportunities for traditional retail. But the reality is that, thanks to technology, the future of traditional retail has never been brighter.

Today, brick-and-mortar retailers not only have unprecedented insight as to what is happening in their stores – from customer behavior, to traffic flow, and more, they also have an arsenal of new tools to keep raising the bar for the customer experience. This transformation can be looked at from three angles: Smart consumption, smart supply chain and smart logistics.

Smart consumption is blurring the boundaries of online and offline for retailers and customers alike. With AR/VR technology in offline stores, customers can walk into a store, and virtually ‘try on’ an article of clothing, for example, without ever visiting a fitting room. Similarly, while sitting at home, they can virtually place a treadmill in their living room to determine the best fit. IoT has even made it possible for customers to make purchases from the comfort of their cars. At every step of the way, the goal is to improve customer retention and loyalty.

Equally as important, smart supply chain is helping retailers improve operational efficiency by leaps and bounds. Whereas traditional retail requires a fair amount of guesswork — what will customers like, how many of each individual item will they want to buy, and over which time period — smart supply chain driven by AI and big data means that retailers have a much better sense of what customers actually want, and when they want it. With dynamic information about sales, pricing and inventory, brands can improve their time to market, inventory control and product design, and retailers can make smarter decisions about their offerings, making the most of confined physical retail spaces.

But if retailers can’t get products into customers’ hands quickly and cost effectively, then all of the efficiency of smart consumption and supply chain is of no use. It is imperative that behind all of the glitzy offline technology and supply chain algorithms, are extremely efficient logistics.

From smart warehousing, which ensures products get moved out and on their way to the customer as fast as possible, to autonomous delivery vehicles, which make urban delivery more efficient through being able to avoid traffic and follow scheduled routes, to drones, smart logistics work their magic behind the scenes to get products to customers’ doors.

Businesses that embrace innovative technology and invest in it wisely will have a better chance of being a step ahead of the competition and their likelihood of success will be magnified.

Technology is no longer just a support for retail. It is the essential tool for retailers to thrive in the market.

Welcome to 2019 where we learn Facebook is the new crapware.

Sorry #DeleteFacebook, you never stood a chance.

Yesterday Bloomberg reported that the scandal-beset social media behemoth has inked an unknown number of agreements with Android smartphone makers, mobile carriers and OSes around the world to not only pre-load Facebook’s eponymous app on hardware but render the software undeleteable; a permanent feature of your device, whether you like how the company’s app can track your every move and digital action or not.

Bloomberg spoke to a U.S. owner of a Samsung Galaxy S8 who, after reading forum discussions about Samsung devices, found his own pre-loaded Facebook app could not be removed. It could only be “disabled”, with no explanation available to him as to what exactly that meant.

The Galaxy S8 retailed for $725+ when it went on sale in the U.S. two years ago.

A Facebook spokesperson told Bloomberg that a disabled permanent app doesn’t continue collecting data or sending information back to the company. But declined to specify exactly how many such pre-install deals Facebook has globally.

While Samsung told the news organization it provides a pre-installed Facebook app on “selected models” with options to disable it, adding that once disabled the app is no longer running.

After Bloomberg’s report was published, mobile research and regular Facebook technical tipster, Jane Manchun Wong, chipped in via Twitter to comment — describing the pre-loaded Facebook app on Samsung devices as “stub”.

Aka “basically a non-functional empty shell, acts as the placeholder for when the phone receives the ‘real’ Facebook app as app updates”.

Albeit many smartphone users have automatic updates enabled, and an omnipresent disabled app is always there to be re-enabled at a later date (and thus revived from a zombie state into a fully fledged Facebook app one future day).

While you can argue that having a popular app pre-installed can be helpful to consumers (though not at all helpful to Facebook competitors), a permanent pre-install is undoubtedly an anti-consumer move.

Crapware is named crapware for a reason. Having paid to own hardware, why should people be forever saddled with unwanted software, stub or otherwise?

And while Facebook is not the only such permanent app around (Apple got a lot of historical blowback for its own undeleteable apps, for instance; finally adding the ability to delete some built-in apps with iOS 12) it’s an especially egregious example given the company’s long and storied privacy hostile history.

Consumers who do not want their digital activity and location surveilled by the people-profiling giant will likely crave the peace of mind of not having any form of Facebook app, stub or otherwise, taking up space on their device.

But an unknown number of Android users are now finding out they don’t have that option.

Not cool, Facebook, not cool.

Another interesting question the matter raises is how permanent Facebook pre-installs are counted in Facebook’s user metrics, and indeed for ad targeting purposes.

In recent years the company has had to revise its ad metrics several times. So it’s valid to wonder whether a disabled Facebook app pre-install is being properly accounted for by the company (i.e. as minus one pair of eyeballs for its ad targeting empire) or not.

We asked Facebook about this point but at the time of writing it declined to comment beyond its existing statements to Bloomberg.