Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Xiaomi, Vivo, Samsung, Oppo and other smartphone companies have received approval from some state governments in India to partially resume manufacturing and assembling of devices amid the ongoing lockdown in the world’s second largest handset market that completely shut operations at these plants in late March.

The companies said that they have secured permission to kick start their manufacturing operations in the country, though several restrictions such as operating with limited workforce are still in place. (The federal government allowed the resumption of smartphone production earlier this month, but state governments have the final say on whether the local conditions are safe enough to enforce the relaxation.)

New Delhi’s decision comes days after it extended the lockdown by two weeks earlier this month but eased some restrictions to revive economic activity that’s been stalled since the stringent stay-at-home orders were imposed across the nation in late March.

Earlier this week, the government permitted e-commerce firms and ride-hailing services to resume services in green and orange zones, districts that have seen less severe outbreak of the coronavirus, across the country. Green and orange zones account for 82% of India’s 733 districts.

Xiaomi, which launched a range of gadgets in India today including its Snapdragon 865-powered Mi 10 smartphone, said earlier this month that it only had inventory to meet demand for up to three weeks.

Manu Kumar Jain, a VP at Xiaomi who oversees the Chinese firm’s business in India, said today that the company, which has been the top smartphone vendor in the country for more than two years, would restart operations in its contract partner Foxconn’s facility in the state of Andhra Pradesh.

A person familiar with the matter told TechCrunch that Wistron, a contract partner of Apple, has started limited operations for the iPhone-maker in Bangalore.

Vivo, the second largest smartphone vendor in India, said the company will resume production at 30% of their capacity. “We shall begin production with around 3000 employees,” a Vivo spokesperson said.

Like Vivo, Oppo will also resume production at its Greater Noida facility with around 3,000 employees who would work in rotation, it said. Samsung, which opened the world’s biggest smartphone factory in India in 2018, said it will restart production in that factory.

“On Thursday, the factory started limited operations, which will be scaled up over a period of time. Employee safety and well-being remaining our absolute priority, we have ensured that all hygiene and social distancing measures are maintained at the premises, as per government guidelines,” said a Samsung spokesperson.

The coronavirus outbreak has severely disrupted several businesses. India did not see any handset sale last month, according to research firm Counterpoint. Counterpoint estimated that the smartphone shipments in India will decline by 10% this year, compared to a 8.9% growth in 2019 and 10% growth in 2018.

Every top smartphone maker in India has either established its own manufacturing plant or partnered with contract vendors to produce units locally in recent years to avail the tax benefits that New Delhi offers.

China is showing renewed interest in live streaming. As the coronavirus swept through the country and shut down premises in droves, businesses are turning online to drive sales. Many have adopted live streaming, a model that predates the short videos that dominate many of our mobile screens now. Ecommerce titans like Alibaba, JD.com and Pinduoduo have ramped up efforts in live streaming, which sees customers interact with merchants and place orders in real time as many continue to avoid offline shopping.

An unorthodox player, WeChat, has also entered the fray.

The messaging giant, which commands 1.16 monthly active users, announced this week it’s partnering with the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou to host a live stream shopping festival in June. The news arrived not long after president Xi Jinping acknowledged the essential role of live streaming ecommerce in the economy, especially in promoting sales of rural produce.

The initiative led by a municipal government to pump up the local economy through live streaming ecommerce is first of its kind in China. It should surprise no one that it’s slated to take place in Guangzhou, a major trade and export center, as the global pandemic depressed China’s outbound shipments, putting pressure on the authority to stimulate domestic demand.

Like most of WeChat’s extended functions beyond messaging, live streaming is built upon the mini program — or lite app — infrastructure. The feature now sees registered merchants in the several tens of thousands and remains free to use during the testing phase, according to WeChat. Retailers in grocery, tourism and fashion are by far the biggest beneficiaries. Nasdaq-listed travel portal Ctrip, for example, has racked up nearly 100 million yuan, or $14 million, in sales by promoting live on WeChat as airlines and tourist attractions are shelling out deep discounts. Homegrown lifestyle brand Heilan Home recorded more than 3 million viewers in one live session. 

“In recent months, the demand for online shopping has surged due to the coronavirus pandemic. Selling through live streams is now a key way to help businesses reopen and resume production as well as stimulate consumer demand,” Gerald Hu, general manager of Tencent Guangzhou, said in a statement.

WeChat came late to live streaming. Despite years of hype around the sector, the social networking giant waited until this February to formally introduce live streams to its all-in-one platform. That in part could be a result of founder Allen Zhang’s minimalist and perfectionist approach to products.

After all, the core of WeChat is to facilitate communication among acquaintances. Other features like shopping and gaming are an extension of the socializing experience and are designed to complement not obstruct chatting. People might purchase the snacks their friends share with them through a WeChat message, or accept friends’ invitation to join an in-app game on WeChat, but how many want to spend 30 minutes focusing on a video and risk missing important messages?

Acast, a podcast monetization and distribution platform, announced a new partnership with JioSaavn, one of the largest streaming audio services in India. The agreement mean JioSaavn will distribute content from Acast and have access to its technology for podcasters.

JioSaavn, which claims 104 million monthly active users, is the second-largest streaming audio service in India after Gaana, and holds about 24% market share, according to an OTT Audience Measurement Insights report.

Podcasts from Acast’s network will be added to JioSaavn’s streaming app over the next two months. Based in Sweden, Acast focuses on developing ways to help podcasters monetize, including subscription paywalls and dynamic ads. Publishers on Acast’s network include the Guardian, BBC, the Financial Times and PBS NewsHour.

JioSaavn launched original programming in 2016, including JioSaavn podcasts, which it says now has more than 200 hours of original content.

In a press statement, Ishani Dasgupta, JioSaavn’s lead of podcast partnerships, said, “Podcasting is still largely nascent to consumers in the Indian market, with momentum growing quickly. The ability to grow and build new audiences, new shows and establish pathways for brands to access both is really just beginning for our 1.3 billion potential consumer market.”

After suspending them at the end of March because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Waymo has announced it will resume driving operations on May 11 in Arizona.

Waymo will start its driving operations in the Phoenix area again, a decision the company says it made after discussions with “our teams, partners and local and state authorities,” before restoring them in other cities, including San Francisco, Detroit and Los Angeles.

Arizona’s stay at home order expires on May 15, but academic experts have expressed concern that Arizona hasn’t reached the peak of its COVID-19 outbreak yet and some who worked with the state government recently told the Washington Post that they were asked to “pause” work on projections and modeling.

The company’s announcement says this is the first step in a “tiered approach to safely resume our operations,” starting with its test fleet and then eventually offering Waymo One, its self-driving ride hailing service, again.

Waymo said it is following safety guidance from local and state governments, as well as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Safety measures Waymo has implemented include requiring personnel to wear face masks in its facilities or vehicles, unless someone is driving alone in a vehicle and a partnership with AutoNation to clean cars several times a day.

The company says it has also limited maximum capacity and put in social distancing guidelines for its work areas, created health and safety training for its team and will work with occupational healthcare providers to screen people before they enter facilities.

Form Energy, which is developing what it calls ultra-low-cost, long-duration energy storage for the grid, has signed a contract with the Minnesota-based Great River Energy to develop a 1 megawatt, 150 megawatt hour pilot project.

The second-largest electric utility in the U.S., Great River Energy’s installation in Cambridge, Minn. will be the first commercial deployment of the venture-backed battery technology developer’s long-duration energy storage technology.

From Energy’s battery system is significant for its ability to deliver 1 megawatt of power for 150 hours — a huge leap over the lithium ion batteries currently in use for most grid-scale storage projects. Those battery systems can last for two- to four-hours.

The step change in the duration of energy delivery should allow energy storage projects to replace the peaking power plants that rely on coal and natural gas to smooth demand on the grid.

“Long duration energy storage solutions will play an entirely different role in a clean electricity system than the conventional battery storage systems being deployed at scale today,” said Jesse Jenkins, an assistant professor at Princeton University who studies low-carbon energy systems engineering, in a statement. “Lithium-ion batteries are well suited to fast bursts of energy production, but they run out of energy after just a few hours. A true low-cost, long-duration energy storage solution that can sustain output for days, would fill gaps in wind and solar energy production that would otherwise require firing up a fossil-fueled power plant. A technology like that could make a reliable, affordable 100% renewable electricity system a real possibility,”

Backed with over $49 million in venture financing from investors including MIT’s The Engine investment vehicle; Eni Next, the corporate venture capital arm of the Italian energy firm Eni Spa, and the Bill Gates-backed sustainability focused investment firm, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Form Energy has developed a new storage technology called an “aqueous air” battery system.

“Our vision at Form Energy is to unlock the power of renewable energy to transform the grid with our proprietary long-duration storage. This project represents a bold step toward proving that vision of an affordable, renewable future is possible without sacrificing reliability,” said Mateo Jaramillo, the chief executive of Form Energy, in a statement.

Form’s pitch to utilities relies on more than just a groundbreaking energy storage technology, and includes an assessment of how best utilities can optimize their energy portfolios using a proprietary software analytics system. That software, was built to model high penetration renewables at a system level to figure out how storage can be combined with renewable energy to create a low-cost energy source that can deliver better returns to energy providers.

“Great River Energy is excited to partner with Form Energy on this important project. The electrical grid is increasingly supplied by renewable sources of energy. Commercially viable long-duration storage could increase reliability by ensuring that the power generated by renewable energy is available at all hours to serve our membership. Such storage could be particularly important during extreme weather conditions that last several days. Long-duration storage also provides an excellent hedge against volatile energy prices,” said Great River Energy Vice President and Chief Power Supply Officer Jon Brekke, in a statement.

Ultimately, this deployment is intended to be the first of many installations of Form Energy’s battery systems, according to the statement from both companies.

“Long duration energy storage solutions will play an entirely different role in a clean electricity system than the conventional battery storage systems being deployed at scale today,” said Jesse Jenkins, an assistant professor at Princeton University who studies low-carbon energy systems engineering, in a statement. “Lithium-ion batteries are well suited to fast bursts of energy production, but they run out of energy after just a few hours. A true low-cost, long-duration energy storage solution that can sustain output for days, would fill gaps in wind and solar energy production that would otherwise require firing up a fossil-fueled power plant. A technology like that could make a reliable, affordable 100% renewable electricity system a real possibility,”

Private equity firm Vista Equity Partners said on Friday it would invest $1.5 billion in Reliance Jio Platforms, days after Facebook and Silver Lake also made bets on the Indian telecom giant.

The planned announcement, which would give U.S.-headquartered software-focused buyout firm Vista Equity Partners a 2.32% stake in Reliance Jio Platforms, values it at an equity valuation of $65 billion and enterprise valuation of $68 billion, the Indian firm said.

Reliance Jio Platforms, which began its commercial operation in the second half of 2016, upended the local telecom market by offering bulk of 4G data and voice calls for six months to users at no charge. A subsidiary of Reliance Industries (India’s most valuable firm by market value), Jio Platforms has amassed 388 million subscribers since its launch to become the nation’s top telecom operator.

More to follow…

A coronavirus conspiracy video featuring a well-known vaccine conspiracist is spreading like wildfire on social media this week, even as platforms talk tough about misinformation in the midst of the pandemic.

In the professionally-produced video, a solemn interviewer named Mikki Willis interviews Judy Mikovits, a figure best known for her anti-vaccine activism in recent years. The video touches on a number of topics favored among online conspiracists at the moment, filtering most of them through the lens that vaccines are a money-making enterprise that causes medical harm.

The video took off mid-week after first being posted to Vimeo and YouTube on May 4. From those sites, it traveled to Facebook, Instagram and Twitter where it circulated much more widely, racking up millions of views. Finding the video is currently trivial across social platforms, where it’s been reposted widely, sometimes with its title removed or reworded to make it more difficult to detect by AI moderation.

According to Twitter, tweets by Mikovits apparently don’t violate the platform’s rules around COVID-19 misinformation, but it has marked the video’s URL as “unsafe” and blocked the related hashtags “#PlagueOfCorruption and #Plandemicmovie. The company also hasn’t found evidence that her account is being amplified as part of a coordinated campaign.

Over on Facebook, the video indeed runs afoul of the platform’s coronavirus and health misinformation rules—but it’s still very easy to find. For this story, I was able to locate a copy of the full video within seconds and at the time of writing Instagram’s #plandemic hashtag was well-populated with long clips from the video and even suggestions for related hashtags like #coronahoax. Facebook is currently working to stem the video’s spread, but it’s already collected millions of views in a short time.

On YouTube, a search for “Plandemic” mostly pulls up content debunking the video’s many false claims, but plenty of clips from the video itself still make the first wave of search results.

The video itself is a hodgepodge of popular false COVID-10 conspiracies already circulating online, scientifically unsound anti-vaccine talking points and claims of persecution.

Mikovits, who in the video states that she’s not opposed to vaccines, later goes on to make the claim that vaccines have killed millions of people. “The game is to prevent the therapies ‘til everyone is infected and push the vaccines, knowing that the flu vaccines increase the odds… of getting COVID-19,” Mikovits says, conspiratorially. At the same time, she suggests that doctors and health facilities are incentivized to overcount COVID-19 cases for the medicare payouts, an assertion that contradicts the expert consensus that coronavirus cases are likely still being meaningfully undercounted.

In the video, Mikovits accuses Dr. Anthony Fauci of suppressing treatments like hydroxychloroquine—falsely touted by President Trump as a likely cure for the virus. While her claims appear to have landed at the perfect opportunistic moment, her beef with Fauci is actually longstanding. As Buzzfeed reported, in a book she wrote six years ago, Mikovits accused Dr. Fauci of banning her from the NIH’s facilities—an event Fauci himself was not familiar with.

Mikovits also touches on a popular web of conspiracy theories fixated on the idea Bill Gates is somehow implicated in causing the pandemic to profit off the eventual vaccine and makes the unfounded claim that “it’s very clear this virus was manipulated and studied in the laboratory.”

In other interviews, Mikovits has suggested that face masks pose a danger because they can “activate” the virus in the wearer. In the “Plandemic” clip, Mikovits also makes the unscientific claim that beaches should not have been closed due to “healing microbes in the saltwater” and “sequences” in the sand that protect against the coronavirus.

To the uninformed viewer, Mikovits might appear to ably address scientific-sounding topics, but her own scientific credentials are extremely dubious. In 2009, Mikovits authored a study on chronic fatigue syndrome that was retracted by the journal Science two years later when an audit found “evidence of poor quality control” in the experiment and the results could not be replicated in subsequent studies. That event and her subsequent firing from a research institute appear to have kicked off her more recent turn as an anti-vaccine crusader, conspiracist and author.

With “Plandemic,” Mikovits seems to have positioned herself successfully for relevance in the pandemic’s information vacuum—her book sales have even soared on Amazon. Toward the end of the clip, her interviewer even cannily sets up a future outrage cycle at the inevitable crackdown from social media platforms, where the video flouts rules ostensibly banning harmful health conspiracies like the ones it contains.

“It’s other people shutting down other citizens and the big tech platforms follow suit and they shut everything down,” Willis says with steely concern. “There is no dissenting voices allowed any more in this free country.” 

As we’ve reported previously, the coronavirus crisis is fertile ground for conspiracy theories and potentially lethal misinformation— a fact that the “Plandemic” video’s apparent mainstream crossover success demonstrates. Widespread uncertainty and fear is a powerful thing, capable of breathing new life into debunked ideas that would have otherwise kept collecting dust in conspiracist backwaters, where they belong.

Imagine a model of collaborative research and development among hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, universities and other research institutions where no one shared any actual data.

That’s the dream of the new New York-based startup Owkin, which has raised $25 million in fresh financing from investors including Bpifrance Large Venture, Cathay Innovation and MACSF (the French Pension Fund for Clinicians), alongside previous investors GV, F-Prime Capital and Eight Roads. 

The company’s pitch is that data scientists, clinical doctors, academics and pharmaceutical companies can all log in to the virtual lab that Owkin calls the Owkin Studio.

In that virtual environment, all parties can access anonymized data sets and models exclusively to refine their own research and development and studies to ensure that the most cutting edge insights into novel biomarkers, mechanisms of action and predictive models inform the work that all of the relevant parties are doing.

The ultimate goal, the company said, is to improve patient outcomes.

In its quest to get more companies and institutions to open up and share information — with the promise that the information can’t be extracted or used in a way that isn’t allowed by the owners of the data — Owkin is replicating work that other companies are pursuing in fields ranging from healthcare to financial services and beyond.

The Israeli company Qedit has developed similar technologies for the financial services industry, and Sympatic, a recent graduate from one of the recent batches of Techstars companies, is working on a similar technology for the healthcare industry.

Owkin makes money by enabling remote access to the data sets for pharmaceutical companies and licensing the models developed by universities to those companies. It’s a way for the company to entice researchers to join the platform and provide another revenue stream for research institutions who have seen their funding decline over the last forty years.

“We have a huge loop of academic universities that have access to the data and are developing algorithms and we share data,” said the company’s chief executive Dr. Thomas Clozel. “At the end what it helps is developing better drugs.”

The investment from Owkin’s new and existing investors takes the company to $55 million in total capital raised through the extension of its Series A round. In all the round totaled $52 million, Clozet said.

“We are exactly where we need to be because it’s about privacy and privacy is more important than ever before,” said Clozet.

The COVID-19 epidemic has emphasized the need for closer collaboration among different corporations and research institutions, and that has also increased demand for the company’s technology. “It touches everything… We have access to the right data sets and centers to build the best models for COVID,” said Clozet. “We’re lucky to have the right traction before the COVID happens and we have the right research that has been done.”

In fact, the company has launched the Covid-19 Open AI Consortium (COAI), and is using its platform to advance collaborative research and accelerate clinical development of effective treatments for patients infected with the coronavirus, the company said.  All of its findings will be shared with the global medical and scientific communities.

The initial focus on the research is on cardiovascular complications in COVID-19 patients in collaboration with CAPACITY, an international registry working with over 50 centers worldwide, the company said. Other areas of research will include patient outcomes and triage, and the prediction and characterization of immune response, according to Owkin.

“Since we first backed Owkin in 2017, we have been sharing its vision to apply AI to fighting one of the most dreadful diseases on earth: cancer,” said Jacky Abitbol, a partner at Cathay Innovation. “Owkin has risen to become a leader in digital health, we are proud to grow our investment in the company to fuel its ambition to pioneer AI for medical research, while preserving patient-privacy and data security.”

 

As countries work to reopen after weeks of lockdown, contact-tracing apps help to understand the spread of the deadly coronavirus strain, COVID-19.

While most governments lean toward privacy-focused apps that use Bluetooth signals to create an anonymous profile of a person’s whereabouts, others, like Israel, use location and cell phone data to track the spread of the virus.

Israel-based private security firm NSO Group, known for making mobile hacking tools, is leading one of Israel’s contact-tracing efforts.

Security researcher Bob Diachenko discovered one of NSO’s contact-tracing systems on the internet, unprotected and without a password, for anyone to access. After he contacted the company, NSO pulled the unprotected database offline. Diachenko said he believes the database contains dummy data.

NSO told TechCrunch that the system was only for demonstrating its technology and denied it was exposed because of a security lapse. NSO is still waiting for the Israeli government’s approval to feed cell records into the system. But experts say the system should not have been open to begin with, and that centralized databases of citizens’ location data pose a security and privacy risk.

Codename ‘Fleming’

NSO began work on its contact-tracing system codenamed Fleming in March.

Fleming is designed to “pour” in confirmed coronavirus test data from the health authorities and phone location data from the cell networks to identify people who may have been exposed to a person with the virus. Anyone who came into close proximity to a person diagnosed with coronavirus would be notified.

The unprotected database was hosted on an Amazon Web Services server in Frankfurt, where the data protection regime is one of the strictest in the world.

It contained about six weeks of location data, spanning around March 10 to April 23. It also included specific dates, times and the location of a “target” — a term that NSO used in the database to describe people — that may have come into contact with a potentially infected person.

The data also included the duration of the encounter to help score the likelihood of a transmitted infection.

“NSO Group has successfully developed ‘Fleming’, an innovative, unique and purely analytical system designed to respond to the coronavirus pandemic,” said Oren Ganz, a director at NSO Group. “Fleming has been designed for the benefit of government decision-makers, without compromising individual privacy. This system has been demonstrated worldwide with great transparency to media organizations, and approximately 100 individual countries,” he said.

TechCrunch was also given a demonstration of how the system works.

“This transparent demo, the same shown to individual countries and media organizations, was the one located on the open random server in question, and the very same demo observed today by TechCrunch. All other speculation about this overt, open system is not correct, and does not align with the basic fact this transparent demonstration has been seen by hundreds of people in media and government worldwide,” said Ganz.

John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at the Citizen Lab, part of the Munk School at the University of Toronto, said that any database storing location data poses a privacy risk.

“Not securing a server would be an embarrassment for a school project,” said Scott-Railton. “For a billion-dollar company to not password protect a secretive project that hopes to handle location and health data suggest a quick and sloppy roll out.”

“NSO’s case is the precedent that proves the problem: rushed COVID-19 tracking efforts will imperil our privacy and online safety,” he said.

Israel’s two tracing systems

As global coronavirus infections began to spike in March, the Israeli government passed an emergency law giving its domestic security service Shin Bet “unprecedented access” to collect vast amounts of cell data from the phone companies to help identify possible infections.

By the end of March, Israeli defense minister Naftali Bennett said the government was working on a new contact tracing system, separate from the one used by Shin Bet.

It was later revealed that NSO was building the second contact-tracing system.

Tehilla Shwartz Altshuler, a privacy expert and a senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute, told TechCrunch that she too was given a demonstration of Fleming over a Zoom call in the early days of the outbreak.

Without the authority to obtain cell records, NSO told her that it used location data gathered from advertising platforms, or so-called data brokers. Israeli media also reported that NSO used advertising data for “training” the system.

Data brokers amass and sell vast troves of location data collected from the apps installed on millions of phones. The apps that track your movements and whereabouts are often also selling those locations to data brokers, which then resell the data to advertisers to serve more targeted ads.

NSO denied it used location data from a data broker for its Fleming demo.

“The Fleming demo is not based on real and genuine data,” said Ganz. “The demo is rather an illustration of public obfuscated data. It does not contain any personal identifying information of any sort.”

Since governments began to outline their plans for contact-tracing systems, experts warned that location data is not accurate and can lead to both false positives and false negatives. Currently, NSO’s system appears to rely on this data for its core functions.

“This kind of location data will not get you a reliable measure of whether two people came into close contact,” said Scott-Railton.

NSO’s connection to the Middle East

Israel is not the only government interested in Fleming. Bloomberg reported in March that a dozen nations were allegedly testing NSO’s contact-tracing technology.

A review of the unprotected database showed large amounts of location data points in Israel, but also Rwanda, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Spokespeople for the Saudi, Rwandan and Emirati consulates in New York did not respond to our emails. NSO did not answer our questions about its relationship — if any — with these governments.

Saudi Arabia is a known customer of NSO Group. United Nations experts have called for an investigation into allegations that the Saudi government used NSO’s Pegasus spyware to hack into the phone of Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos. NSO has denied the claims.

NSO is also embroiled in a legal battle with Facebook-owned WhatsApp for allegedly building a hacking tool designed to be delivered over WhatsApp, which was used to hack into the cell phones of 1,400 users, including government officials, journalists and human rights activists, using AWS servers based in the U.S. and Frankfurt. NSO also rebuffed the claims.

Privacy concerns

Experts have expressed concerns over the use of centralized data, fearing that it could become a target for hackers.

Most countries are favoring decentralized efforts, like the joint project between Apple and Google, which uses anonymized Bluetooth signals picked up from phones in near proximity, instead of collecting cell location data into a single database. Bluetooth contact tracing has won the support of academics and security researchers over location-based contact-tracing efforts, which they say would enable large-scale surveillance.

Shwartz Altshuler told TechCrunch that location-based contact tracing is a “huge infringement” of privacy.

“It means that you can’t have any secrets,” she said. “You can’t have any meetings if you’re a journalist, and you can’t go to places where people want to know where you are.”

Favoring their own contact-tracing efforts, Apple and Google have already banned governments building contact-tracing apps utilizing their joint API from using location tracking, fearing that data stored on a centralized server could be breached.

Alan Woodward, a professor at the University of Surrey. said location data makes it “possible to build social graphs and to begin identifying who met who, when and where.”

“Even if it is just trial data, it’s still sensitive if it’s real people,” he said.

Just this week, the U.S. and U.K. governments warned that nation-state hackers are targeting organizations involved in the coronavirus response.

When Uber rolled out its selfie system for drivers in 2016, the ride-hailing company was focused on preventing fraud. In the future, it could be used to ensure drivers are wearing a mask.

Uber said earlier this week — CEO Dara Khosrowshahi reiterated today — that it is working through plans to require drivers and riders to wear face masks or face coverings as it prepares to ramp its ride-hailing business back up after being hobbled by the COVID-19 pandemic. The mask requirement will be issued in certain countries, including the United States.

Uber is leaning on a combination of logistics and technology to ensure when rides do ramp up that drivers are properly protected, Khosrowshahi said during Thursday’s earnings call.

“We’re shipping millions of PPE and masks, cleaning supplies etc., to our drivers to make sure that first drive, and the second, and the continuing drives, that our riders are safe and they feel safe,” he said.

Some gig workers, including those who work for Shipt, Uber, Lyft and Instacart have complained that they are struggling to get masks, gloves and other personal protective equipment. Supply chains, which are stretched as hospitals and healthcare facilities as well as companies gearing up to bring workers back to the office, compete for this equipment.

On the technology front, Khosrowshahi honed in on its existing products.

“We are looking at technologies such as, for example, our selfie technology where we make sure that the driver who signed up is the actual driver who is driving,” Khosrowshahi said. “We can use that technology, for example potentially, to make sure that the driver is wearing a mask where appropriate.”

Khosrowshahi didn’t provide further details of when the mask requirement would begin, and when the selfie technology might be used for mask verification.

The driver selfie technology, officially known as Real-Time ID Check, is a security feature that uses Microsoft Cognitive Services. Real-Time ID Check prompts drivers periodically to share a selfie before being allowed to accept fares. The account is temporarily locked if the selfie doesn’t match the photo that Uber has on file. The aim of technology is to prevent fraud and protect riders and drivers.