Author: azeeadmin

Amazon warehouse workers in several countries in Europe are protesting over what they claim are inhuman working conditions which treat people like robots. It’s the latest in a series of worker actions this year.

They’ve timed the latest protest for Black Friday, one of the busiest annual shopping days online as retailers slash prices and heavily promote deals to try to spark a seasonal buying rush.

In the UK, the GMB Union says it’s expecting hundreds of workers to attend protests timed for early morning and afternoon at Amazon warehouses in Rugeley, Milton Keynes, Warrington, Peterborough and Swansea.

At the time of writing the union had not provided details of turnout so far today. 

Protests are also reported to be taking place in Spain, France and Italy today.

Although, when asked about strikes at its facilities in these countries, Amazon claimed: “Our European Fulfilment Network is fully operational and we continue to focus on delivering for our customers. Any reports to the contrary are simply wrong.”

The demonstrations look intended to not only apply pressure on Amazon to accept collective bargaining but encourage users of its website to think about the wider costs involved in packing and despatching the discounted products they’re trying to grab.

Spanish newspaper El Diaro reports that today’s protests by workers at Amazon’s largest logistics center in the country, in San Fernando, Madrid, mark the fourth round of strikes over working conditions in Spain.

Protestors in Madrid this morning reportedly chanted: “We will not accept discounts to our rights.”

French press also reports warehouse workers striking locally, and a union representing Amazon logistics workers calling for a national strike.

In the UK the GMB Union is calling on Amazon to recognize its representation of workers, and has attacked the company for what it dubs “Victorian working practices”. 

This summer an investigation by the Union revealed ambulances had been called to Amazon’s UK warehouses 600 times during the past three financial years.

Earlier this month the Union also revealed a total of 602 reports have been made from Amazon warehouses to the Health and Safety Executive since 2015/16 — with workers reported to have suffered fractures, head injuries, contusions and collisions with heavy equipment.

It added that one report detailed a forklift truck crash caused by a ‘lapse of concentration possibly due to long working hours’.

In a statement on Wednesday announcing the Black Friday protest, Tim Roache, the GMB’s general secretary, said: “The conditions our members at Amazon are working under are frankly inhuman. They are breaking bones, being knocked unconscious and being taken away in ambulances. We’re standing up and saying enough is enough, these are people making Amazon its money. People with kids, homes, bills to pay — they’re not robots.”

“Jeff Bezos is the richest bloke on the planet; he can afford to sort this out,” he added. “You’d think making the workplace safer so people aren’t carted out of the warehouse in an ambulance is in everyone’s interest, but Amazon seemingly have no will to get round the table with us as the union representing hundreds of their staff. Working people and the communities Amazon operates in deserve better than this. That’s what we’re campaigning for.”

In a further update today the GMB Union said Amazon has not replied to a joint plea, backed by a shadow minister, for a health and safety review to reduce the hundreds of ambulance call outs to its warehouses.

Two UK MPs wrote to Amazon’s director of public policy for UK and Ireland last week to suggest a joint audit with the union and also a meeting hosted by them in parliament — to discuss the issues. But the union said Amazon has so far failed to respond.

Responding to today’s protest action, a spokesman for Amazon UK provided us with the following statement:

Amazon has created in the UK more than 25,000 good jobs with a minimum of £9.50/hour and in the London area, £10.50/hour on top of industry-leading benefits and skills training opportunities.

All of our sites are safe places to work and reports to the contrary are simply wrong. According to the UK Government’s Health and Safety Executive, Amazon has over 40% fewer injuries on average than other transportation and warehousing companies in the UK. We encourage everyone to compare our pay, benefits, and working conditions to others and come see for yourself on one of the public tours we offer every day at our centers across the UK uk.amazonfctours.com.

The spokesman declined to respond to additional questions.

In October, facing rising political pressure on its home turf after senator Bernie Sanders introduced legislation targeting low rates of pay at the coal face of Amazon’s business, the ecommerce giant said it would raise the minimum wage of its US workers to $15 per hour. That change went into effect at the start of this month.

In another change to its business announced yesterday, also just before the Black Friday spending binge kicked off, Amazon reversed a decision that had been triggered by a change in Australian tax law earlier this year, when it had shuttered its US store to shoppers in the country to avoid paying a 10% levy — deciding to suck up the charge to lift a geoblock that had proved unpopular with customers.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

It’s the day after Thanksgiving, so if you are reading this in America I hope there is a pet leaned up against your legs and that you are sitting next to a fire while staring down one more plate of leftovers.

We made this episode for just such a moment. Welcome to our take on a relaxed episode of Equity, a show normally featuring four people arguing about this or that. This week, it’s just TechCrunch’s Kate Clark and myself digging into some of the strangest and most interesting rounds of the year. Thus far, at least.

So what made our cut?

• First, Allbird’s $50 million round for shoes. Shoes that are popular here in Silicon Valley. $50 million? For shoes?
• Next, a few media rounds. Goop’s $50 million round for an e-commerce play powered by items of dubious scientific impact was worth our time. Also, Cheddar’s $22 million Series D was notable. The streaming service’s capital base will likely ensure that you’ll see lots of its videos on Twitter in 2019. And TheSkimm raised a $12 Series C. We had some thoughts on that, as you might imagine.
• Kate conjured up a theme called “Fewer And Fatter,” referring to funding events that are outsized for their putative stage. An $88 million investment for generic ED meds sent through the mail that is claimed as a Series A? Sure. And how about a $20 million Seed round for a company called “Oh My Green“? Why not.
• In the fitness realm, Peloton raised a $550 million round earlier this year (the company seems to be doing well, though its advertising load feels high). And Mirror raised $13 million. Guess what it does!
• And one more: Brex. This company provides corporate cards to startups, cards that its IRL advertising claims offer strong perks. How it will hold up in the eventual correction isn’t clear. What is, however, is that it has $125 million more to work with.

We hope that you are well and that the holidays are as delightful and full of joy as they can be. And if you are having a bad run of the end of the year, big hugs from the Equity crew. We think you are just perfect.

Stay warm!

After a record-breaking Thanksgiving with $3.7 billion in digital sales across desktop and mobile devices, it looks like Black Friday will also pull in a bumper year for e-commerce. Adobe — which tracks trillions of transactions across a range of retail sites — says that as of 7am Pacific Time, there has already been $645 million spent online.

That’s not only a rise on yesterday’s sales at this point in the day — when Adobe had recorded $406 million — but a rise of some 28.3 percent on the same period a year ago. For the full day last year, shoppers spent $5.03 billion online, a record at the time; Adobe is currently predicting that this year there will be $5.9 billion spent on Black Friday.

Shopify, which provides a real-time sales visualisation for some 600,000 merchants on its platform — typically smaller retailers than the 80 biggest tracked by Adobe — notes that at the moment the average sales per minute for those merchants is hovering at just over $400,000 per minute.

Black Friday — once the traditional ‘start’ of the holiday sales period — has downshifted somewhat in importance as retailers have brought up their seasonal promotions earlier and earlier, and tapped into a growing trend of e-commerce and shopping anytime you please.

But the day still has come to represent a significant bellwether in retail, and this year’s online sales look like they will not disappoint — despite the fact that online retailers are competing head to head with brick-and-mortar offerings.

We’ll update this post more with data as we get it.

A major player in the race to transport Chinese people around is losing steam. Meituan Dianping, the Tencent-backed all-encompassing platform for local services, continues to put the brakes on bike-sharing and ride-hailing, the company said on its earnings call on Thursday.

The eight-year-old firm is best known for competing with Alibaba-owned Ele.me in food deliveries — the segment that makes up the majority of its sales — and hotel booking, but it’s aggressively branched into various fronts like transportation.

In April, Meituan entered the bike-sharing fray after it scooped up top player Mobike for $2.7 billion to face off Alibaba-backed Ofo. Over the past few years, Mobike and Ofo were burning through large sums of investor money in a bid to win users from subsidized rides, but both have shown signs of softening their stance recently

Mobike is downsizing its fleets to “avoid an oversupply” as the bike-sharing market falters, Meituan’s chief financial officer Chen Shaohui said during the earnings call. Ofo has also scaled back by closing down many of its international operations.

In the meantime, Meituan said it has no plans to expand car-hailing beyond its two piloting cities — Shanghai and Nanjing — after venturing into the field to take on Didi Chuxing last December. The update is consistent with what the firm announced in its prospectus ahead of a blockbuster $4.2 billion initial public offering in Hong Kong this September.

The halt is likely related to changing dynamics in the country’s shared rides. Following two passenger murders on Didi, the Softbank-backed transportation platform that took over Uber China in 2016, Chinese regulators launched their strictest verification requirements for drivers across all ride-hailing apps. The mandate has squeezed driver numbers, making it harder to hire rides on Didi and its competitors.

During its third quarter that ended September 30, Meituan posted a 97.2 percent jump on revenues to 19.1 billion yuan, or $2.75 billion, on the back of strong growth in food delivery transactions. The firm’s investments in new initiatives – including ride-hailing and bike-sharing – took a toll as operating losses nearly tripled to 3.45 billion yuan compared to a year ago. Meituan shares plunged as much as 14 percent on Friday, the most since its spectacular listing.

A major player in the race to transport Chinese people around is losing steam. Meituan Dianping, the Tencent-backed all-encompassing platform for local services, continues to put the brakes on bike-sharing and ride-hailing, the company said on its earnings call on Thursday.

The eight-year-old firm is best known for competing with Alibaba-owned Ele.me in food deliveries — the segment that makes up the majority of its sales — and hotel booking, but it’s aggressively branched into various fronts like transportation.

In April, Meituan entered the bike-sharing fray after it scooped up top player Mobike for $2.7 billion to face off Alibaba-backed Ofo. Over the past few years, Mobike and Ofo were burning through large sums of investor money in a bid to win users from subsidized rides, but both have shown signs of softening their stance recently

Mobike is downsizing its fleets to “avoid an oversupply” as the bike-sharing market falters, Meituan’s chief financial officer Chen Shaohui said during the earnings call. Ofo has also scaled back by closing down many of its international operations.

In the meantime, Meituan said it has no plans to expand car-hailing beyond its two piloting cities — Shanghai and Nanjing — after venturing into the field to take on Didi Chuxing last December. The update is consistent with what the firm announced in its prospectus ahead of a blockbuster $4.2 billion initial public offering in Hong Kong this September.

The halt is likely related to changing dynamics in the country’s shared rides. Following two passenger murders on Didi, the Softbank-backed transportation platform that took over Uber China in 2016, Chinese regulators launched their strictest verification requirements for drivers across all ride-hailing apps. The mandate has squeezed driver numbers, making it harder to hire rides on Didi and its competitors.

During its third quarter that ended September 30, Meituan posted a 97.2 percent jump on revenues to 19.1 billion yuan, or $2.75 billion, on the back of strong growth in food delivery transactions. The firm’s investments in new initiatives – including ride-hailing and bike-sharing – took a toll as operating losses nearly tripled to 3.45 billion yuan compared to a year ago. Meituan shares plunged as much as 14 percent on Friday, the most since its spectacular listing.

I barely slept, the second night in Chunking Mansions. The loud neighbors, the hot Hong Kong air, the landlord banging on the door after midnight. None of these things are particularly conducive to a peaceful rest, and for once in my life I actually looked forward to attempts at shut eye on the 15+ hour flight home in the morning.

For all the dread of returning to the notorious Hong Kong hostiles that evening, after a day of exploring the area, I was actually looking forward to the strapping this weird thing to my head — closing my eyes and embracing the luxury of forgetting where I was for a few precious minutes.

I’d tried Silentmode’s PowerMask earlier in the day, in the middle of the Brinc accelerator’s well-lit meeting room. The whole thing was oddly soothing, if fairly awkward — a big, foam black out mask with headphones embedded on either side. Probably not the sort of thing you want to wear out in the open, though Lucas happily modeled it above — because we clearly don’t have enough pictures of our in-house VR guy wearing weird crap on his head over at TechCrunch.com.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy the minute or two I spent with the mask on, wondering if this is how pet parrots feel when you cover their cages with a blanket for the night. Maybe that’s just the jetlag talking.

It’s a momentary respite from the cloying terrors of the world, a way to briefly trick our overactive brains into thinking, yeah, sure, everything is just fine with some new agey music, breathing exercises and, most importantly, just complete, utter darkness.

I’m a sucker for this stuff. If have the Calm app on my phone and started getting pretty into the Muse headset before leaving for my two-week trip. I’ve shared the fact that I’m a bad and anxious meditator plenty of times before on these pages, but find even my failed attempts to be useful.

Someone described the PowerMask as a kind of small scale take on a sensory deprivation tank, and sure, why not? I’ve had worse nights.

A bit of a wrinkle in all of this: it isn’t a sleep device, exactly. Or at least the company isn’t branding it as such, Initially pitched as a “Power Nap” product, there does appear to be some in-house confusion with regard to how exactly to position the product. Certainly the startup wants to distinguish itself from the eight million connected sleep masks I see at tech events, particularly when traveling in Asia.

The company surprisingly doesn’t discuss current zeitgeisty startup phrases like meditation or mindfulness, either.

“We are on a much bigger mission to train the world in the art of relaxation,” cofounder Bradley Young writes in a followup email. The company’s site is far less subtle, with language rarely heard outside of supplement ads. “Reach peak state,” it writes in bold all caps font, “become a peak human.” I mean, sure, why not?

That last bit of hyperbole is courtesy of the company’s focus on something called CVT (Cardiac Vagal Tone). Silentmode claims the device can be used to help us normal folk achieve the resting heart rate of an athlete. Look, here’s a graph:

I won’t go too deep into that stuff here, because frankly, I don’t know what I’m talking about. Though I can see how buying some blackout curtains for your head b/w “psychoacoustic and therapeutic sonic experiences” could go a ways toward helping one chill the eff out. It did bring a momentary and much needed respite from my vaguely horrific lodging experiences.

Despite the company’s move away from sleep talk, it also went a ways toward helping me crash on this flight. The music is soothing, and while the padded headset isn’t a pillow exactly, it’s a lot more comfortable than just leaning your head on the seat in front of you. Assuming you can get over the awkwardness of wearing a giant thing on your head. Of course, no one looks good sleeping on a plane, weird head accessory or no.

At $199, it’s not cheap. And the company plans to offer up premium audio through an additional app subscription.  Silentmode is also working with some large companies to pilot these products in office spaces, where relaxation is a rare commodity indeed.

We love a great deal almost as much as we love early-stage startups. So, we decided to combine both into an awesome Black Friday mashup for Disrupt Berlin 2018. Europe’s premier tech startup conference takes place next week on 29-30 November, and this is your chance to save some serious euros.

For the next 24 hours, you can buy two Innovator passes to Disrupt Berlin for the price of one — that’s €1,184, VAT included. The clock runs out on this Black Friday special at midnight, CET, so don’t wait. Buy your 2-4-1 Innovator passes now.

Innovator passes are perfect for software engineers, product managers, marketers, consultants and all-around tech enthusiasts. They grant you access to all the Disrupt stages where you’ll hear from tech titans, startup veterans, up-and-coming founders and innovative investors.

Don’t miss compelling topics from the likes of Raycho Raychev, EnduroSat’s CEO — he’ll discuss making satellites more affordable. And that’s just one example of our stellar speaker lineup. You’ll find the full Disrupt Berlin agenda here.

Use your 2-for-1 Innovator passes to go watch Startup Battlefield, where a cadre of exceptional founders will launch their early-stage startups to the world while competing for the legendary Disrupt Cup, $50,000 in non-equity cash, media exposure and life-changing investor love.

Since 2007, Startup Battlefield has helped launch 778 companies — including the likes of Mint, Dropbox and Yammer — that have gone on to collectively raise $8.5 billion and generated 105 exits. Be in the room to cheer on the next generation of Startup Battlefield warriors and, who knows, you might witness the birth of the next tech unicorn.

Innovator passes also open the door to Startup Alley — our famed exhibition hall — where you’ll find more than 400 early-stage startups plying innovative tech products, platforms and services.

When you’re in the Alley, be sure to visit our TC Top Picks. These exceptional startups represent exciting innovations in the following tech categories: AI/Machine Learning, Blockchain, CRM/Enterprise, E-commerce, Education, Fintech, Healthtech/Biotech, Hardware, Robotics, IoT, Mobility and Gaming.

You’ll find networking opportunities everywhere at Disrupt Berlin, so take advantage of CrunchMatch and save your shoe leather. Our free business match-matching platform makes quick work of connecting you with tech service providers, product managers, developers, marketers or engineers, founders or investors — the choice is yours. CrunchMatch is curated, automated and efficient, and it’s all based on the criteria you provide.

Disrupt Berlin 2018 takes place on 29-30 November, and this is your last chance to get two Innovator passes for the price of one. Our Black Friday mashup offer disappears at 12 midnight CET, so buy your discounted Innovator passes right now. We’ll see you next week in Berlin!

It took all of 14 minutes for the Soundbrenner Core to hit full funding. Not too shabby. Last week, the wearable maker closed out its campaign with more than 10x its $50,000 goal. A few days later, we sat down with the startup at the headquarters of Hong Kong-based accelerator, Brinc.

Soundbrenner has already made a bit of a name for itself with Pulse. The connected, wrist-worn device brought some clever innovation to the metronome, that old familiar piano-mounted accessory long banished to the dustiest corners of the music shop. The wearable offers haptic feedback that can be synced across an entire band to keep everyone on the beat. The company sold 60,000 of the things.

Admittedly, simplicity is one of the best things the product has going for it, but Soundbrenner figured it could take things a bit further — and apparently 2,477 Kickstarter backers agreed. The Core (which can be pre-ordered through the a separate Indiegogo page), is being positioned as a “4-in-1 tool.”

First is the vibrating metronome, which allows up to five musicians to sync to a beat, via feedback that’s around 7x that of a standard smartwatch. Wearers can also tap the screen to create a manual beat.

The most introducing bit here is probably the modularity (which arrives, fittingly, around the time the company started receiving mentorship from Mistfit co-founder Sonny Vu). The magnetic display snaps off and attaches to a guitar tuning pegs, where it can test tuning via vibration. There’s also a built-in decibel meter and some standard push notifications — though it’s far from full smartwatch functionality, which is probably for the best.

The Core is smaller than its predecessor, but it’s not small, exactly. The company says this was intentional, at least in part, as these devices have become a kind of calling card among musicians. Beats a secret handshake, I guess.

The 2018 holiday season is predicted to be a bumper year for e-commerce, helped by economic forces like lower unemployment and underlying trends like an ever-growing proportion of shoppers opting to spend their money online, and specifically on mobile devices. Thanksgiving, a day when brick-and-mortar stores tend to be closed, is a big one for online spending, and so far it’s off to a flying start.

Adobe, which puts out real-time analytics tracking e-commerce sales, said that as of 10am  ET, $406 million had already been spent online today — growth of 23.2 percent on 2017. Adobe tracks e-commerce transactions across 80 of the top 100 US online retailers and says its analytics are based on over 1 trillion visits to retail sites and 55 million SKUs.

At this rate, Adobe said it believes that sales today will total a record $3.5 billion, versus $2.9 billion a year ago. Notably, this is revised up from figures Adobe put out earlier this month, when it projected $3.1 billion in sales today.

It’s the first day of the “big five” for holiday shopping. Figures from Internet Retailer research predict that the total amount that will be spent over the period between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday will be $21.6 billion. While rising tides might lift all boats, the biggest will reap the most rewards: it estimates that Amazon will account for nearly one-third of all sales.

The overall picture, interestingly, is that e-commerce continues to account for between 10 and 20 percent of all retail sales, largely the same proportion that we’ve seen for years. In other words, while the overall pie is growing in size, the proportion of the piece for online commerce does not appear to be changing for the moment.

Figures from eMarketer put overall US holiday sales at retailers at over $1 trillion for this season, while e-commerce will be around $123 billion, or around 12 percent of all sales.

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We’ll be on the lookout for some mobile stats, but so far, the prediction is that they will see their highest-ever level of activity, both for browsing and for spending. So far, smartphones have accounted for 48.4 percent of all retail site visits and 28.2 percent of sales, which outpaces on browsing but not on sales — respectively, desktop accounted for 43.4 percent of site visits, but 62.3 percent of sales (cart abandonment continues to be a big factor). Tablets in both categories hover at around eight percent.

“Black Friday” — the day after Thanksgiving — was once considered the official start of the holiday shopping season, but that start has come earlier and earlier each year, with brick-and-mortar stores kicking off their sales earlier to compete more with internet-based shopping sites.

Between November 1 and yesterday, a total of $34.3 billion has been spent online, up 17.6 percent. Notably, all 21 days in November hit more than $1 billion in sales, and two days each saw $2 billion in spend. That high spend reaches a kind of zenith in the next four days, when one out of every five dollars will be spent, working out to $23.4 billion in sales (or 19 percent of all holiday season shopping).

“Pre-Thanksgiving deals appear to have enticed consumers to spend a little earlier as we saw our second $2 billion day of the holiday shopping season. That growth is continuing in the early morning hours of Thanksgiving Day and we expect strong growth in sales and mobile throughout the day,” said Taylor Schreiner, director, Adobe Digital Insights.

Adobe said that this year will see an even higher total than previous years because of how the calendar works out: there will be an extra day between Thanksgiving and Christmas, working out to $284 million spent.

In terms of products that are doing well so far, Adobe notes that top toys include L.O.L. Surprise! and Hatchimals. Top electronics meanwhile are Amazon Fire TV, Roku and Apple iPads.

Discounts will be coming in strong through Cyber Monday, but they are already starting. Average savings, Adobe noted, include 16.3 percent for computers, 4.7 percent for TVs and 12.2 percent for toys.

I am not sure how and why retailers would coalesce around these trends, but apparently today is best for sporting goods (discounted on average by 13 percent). Black Friday is best for computers (16 percent) and tablets (33 percent). The Sunday before Cyber Monday will see the best deals for apparel (22 percent), appliances (18 percent) and jewelry (5 percent) (seems to be a “female” theme there), and the biggest discounts for toys will happen Cyber Monday (19 percent), when kids are back at school and can’t peek over their parents’ shoulders as they are snapping up stuff to put under the tree. 

We’ll keep updating this post as we get more updated figures.

If you’re reading this, chances are you’re:

• Pretty good at tech stuff
• Spending time with your family for Thanksgiving
• Bored because you’re reading this article right now

You may not celebrate Thanksgiving where you live, but most of our readers are American. So let’s use this opportunity to review the tech setup of your family. You don’t want to get a call in a few months because your aunt’s computer caught a nasty ransomware and she can’t find her photos again.

Updates

If you want to get the latest security patches for a phone or a computer, you have to turn on automatic updates. Modern devices are pretty good at enabling automatic updates by default, but make sure it’s turned on.

• On Windows 10, search for “Windows update settings” in the search bar, click on “Advanced options” and select “Automatic”.
• On macOS, open the App Store and install the latest version of macOS (10.14 Mojave). Then open System Preferences, click on “Software Update” and turn on automatic updates. Turn on automatic updates in the preferences of the App Store as well so that apps keep working over the years.
• On iOS, open the Settings app, go to General > Software Update and update to iOS 12. Go to the same menu after the update and turn on automatic updates. You can also turn on automatic updates in “iTunes & App Stores” so that apps keep working over the years.
• On Android, it’s a bit more… complicated. Manufacturers and carriers push operating system update themselves, so look for system updates in the phone settings — it may vary from one phone to another. After that, open Google Play, go to the settings and turn on automatic updates so that apps keep working over the years.

Backups

There are many ways to backup a computer and a phone, so I won’t list them all. On a computer, you can buy a cheap external hard drive and set up automatic backups using Time Machine (macOS) or File History (Windows 10).

You can also configure a cloud backup solution in case you want to make sure you can access backups and see that everything is working. Backblaze and Arq Backup are pretty good solutions.

Ideally, you should find a way so that it’s completely transparent for your family. If you tell your in-laws that they have to make a backup every week, chances are they won’t do it. Giving a hard drive is not enough.

As for phones, it’s a different story. If it’s an iPhone, turn on iCloud for contacts, calendars and other sensitive data. Most people don’t backup their phone to iCloud though because the 5GB limit is too low. You can either pay for an iCloud plan ($1 per month for 50GB) or set up a photo backup solution using an app. Dropbox, OneDrive and Google’s services offer photo backup services.

On Android, many people now use Google Photos. It’s a good way to make sure your photos are saved somewhere. Make sure that contacts, calendars and other sensitive data are also synchronized with a Google account.

Disk encryption

On a Mac, go to System Preferences > Security & Privacy > FileVault and turn on disk encryption. If your sibling loses their laptop and FileVault is not enabled, anybody could get the data on that computer and use it against your sibling. It’s completely transparent once it’s set up.

On Windows, turn on BitLocker. Microsoft doesn’t include BitLocker with Windows 10 Home edition. Install VeraCrypt in that case.

Passcodes

If you see a phone without a passcode, say something. It’s important because nasty things could happen if they lose their phone. Passcodes are also tied to disk encryption and various security features.

Six digits are better than four digits, but anything is better than nothing.

Security has always been about finding the right compromise between usability and perfect protection. Those tips aren’t going to make your family members perfectly secure, but it’s a good first step. Once you’re done with that, you can put all those devices down and spend some time with your family. Enjoy!