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Tesla will report its second-quarter earnings after market closes today. And while CEO Elon Musk’s traditional post-report conference call with analysts tends to garner the most buzz and headlines, there are some important matters — namely numbers — to watch for in the automaker’s actual earnings report.

Before getting into what indicators to pay attention to, here’s a quick recap of what happened in the last quarter.

In the first quarter of the year, Tesla reported a wider-than-expected loss of $702 million, or $4.10 a share, after disappointing delivery numbers, costs and pricing adjustments to its vehicles threw the automaker off of its profitability track.

The loss included $188 million of non-recurring charges. When adjusted for one-time losses, Tesla lost $494 million, or $2.90 a share, compared with a loss of $3.35 a share in the first quarter of 2018. Tesla reported that it also incurred $67 million due to a combination of restructuring and other non-recurring charges.

What to Expect in Q2 Earnings

Tesla has had a bit of comeback since reporting first-quarter earnings. Earlier this month, Tesla reported it delivered 95,200 of its electric vehicles in the second quarter. It wasn’t only a dramatic reversal from a disappointing first period; deliveries in the second quarter also set a new record.

Analysts expected Tesla to deliver 91,000 vehicles during the second quarter, according to estimates compiled by FactSet. The record-breaking figures stood in stark contrast to the company’s first quarter delivery numbers when it reported deliveries of 63,000 vehicles, nearly a one-third drop from the previous period.

The upshot for Tesla: the record-setting deliveries reported earlier this month should have a positive effect on second-quarter earnings.

But it will be enough? Analysts polled by FactSet expect Tesla to report an adjusted loss of 35 cents a share on revenue of $6.47 billion, which is substantially better than the loss of $3.06 a share that the company reported in the same period last year.

Revenue, profit or loss, and operating cash flow less capital expenditures are all important figures to pay attention to. But there are other numbers and details to watch for too. Here’s our list.

Automotive gross margin

Tesla has said it is targeting 25% automotive gross margins for Model S, Model X and Model 3. But that didn’t happen in the first quarter. Instead, automotive gross margins, excluding certain items shrank to 20.3% from 24.7% in the fourth quarter of 2018.

Tesla’s margins were buffeted in the past by sales of the higher-priced (and better margin per vehicle) Model S and X. Now Tesla is in an awkward spot where demand for the Model 3 hasn’t been enough to stave off contracting margins caused by a decline in Model S and X sales. Model 3s have a lower profit margin per vehicle than the S or X.

Tesla could see margins recover if it can sell enough Model 3s. It could also be helped by a recent decision to get rid of the standard versions of Model S and X.

Tesla’s automotive gross margin is central to the company’s future financial health, Citigroup analyst Itay Michaeli wrote in a recent note to clients.

Michaeli believes that gross margins in the range of 21% to 23% will act as a benchmark for investors. Anything “materially lower” would support the bear case on Tesla’s profitability, and anything materially higher would support the bull case,” he wrote.

Demand for Model S and X

The Model 3 might not have a demand problem, but the older Model S and Model X do. Registrations for the Model S sedan in the second quarter fell 54% to 1,205 in California, the company’s largest market in the U.S., according to a WSJ article that cited data from the Dominion Cross-Sell report. That indicates slowing sales for the higher-priced S and X elsewhere, which could effect sales and profit.

The falling demand isn’t a huge surprise. Both vehicle models are older and more expensive than the newer Model 3. But that means Tesla is more reliant than ever on Model 3 sales to close the gap.

Tesla could give the Model S or X a refresh to help boost sales. In the automotive world, “refreshed” typically means small revisions to a vehicle model that extend beyond the typical yearly updates made by manufacturers. A refresh is not a major redesign, although there’s often a noticeable change to the vehicle model.

But Musk recently stated that isn’t happening. Look for any guidance on what Tesla plans to do with the S and X.

2019 delivery guidance

Despite a dismal first-quarter earnings report, Tesla stuck by its prior guidance of delivering between 360,000 to 400,000 vehicle in 2019. The company’s second-quarter deliveries indicate a turnaround.

The company has delivered more than 186,000 vehicles in the first half of the year. Tesla will need to keep up the momentum and deliver another 174,000 in the second half of the year if it hopes to meet the lower end of its guidance.

China

Tesla’s factory in China is one of its biggest investments and bets. The automaker reached a deal in July 2018 with the Shanghai government to build a factory capable of producing 500,000 electric vehicles a year. Construction kicked off in January and has been moving forward at a brisk pace.

The factory would be the automaker’s second assembly plant and aimed at serving the alluring Chinese market. Importantly, producing Tesla vehicles in China will help it avoid challenges around shipping, pricing and tariffs, an issue that has been exacerbated by the ongoing U.S.-China trade war.

Other items we care about include production plans for the Model Y, the Tesla Semi — remember that? — the electric pickup, its battery production partnership with Panasonic, energy storage and solar as well as its progress on automated driving.

Every employee loves receiving their paycheck. It just so happens though that paying employees can be a royal pain, what with incredibly diverse labor laws across all 50 U.S. states. While large, Fortune 500 employers have a bevy of options, from traditional firms like ADP to newer entrants like Workday, small and medium businesses (SMBs) face the brunt of the challenge — too small to be attractive to the biggest players, but still responsible for following the complexity of U.S. labor law.

Gusto was founded to solve that problem for SMBs, and so far, it has seen strong adoption. The company crossed the 100,000 customer barrier in the past year, out of an estimated six million small businesses in the United States. “I feel like we are still at the beginning stages,” Gusto’s founder and CEO Josh Reeves told TechCrunch.

It may be early innings, but you wouldn’t know that from Gusto’s burgeoning cap table. The company announced today that it has raised $200 million of venture capital from wealth manager Fidelity Management & Research Company and Generation Investment Management, which was founded by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore to create a vehicle for “sustainable” investments.

In addition to the new capital, Gusto has added its first independent board member in the form of Anne Raimondi, a current Asana and former SendGrid board member who was SVP of Operations for customer experience SaaS platform Zendesk.

The new infusion of capital will be used for scaling the company’s product and team. “I like to take complex systems and take them apart and make them better,” Reeves explained about both around the complexity of payroll and the complexity of operating a growing workforce of his own.

While Gusto’s central product is payroll, Reeves sees two other product arcs he intends to develop more in the coming years as the company scales. One arc, which we talked about last year, is fintech features like Flexible Pay, a product that allows employees to receive their unpaid wages in advance, with the goal of reducing reliance on usurious payday lenders. The other product arc is health care and helping SMBs offer insurance benefits to their employees. “We want to be a force for universal health care,” Reeves said.

As Gusto explores additional products built around its payroll service, it has sought to expand its engineering R&D team. The company announced recently that it will open an R&D office in New York City in September, which it hopes will be able to both execute on these two products as well as others not yet planned. Today, Gusto has more than 1,000 employees in San Francisco and Denver.

That employee growth has also led to new executives joining the company recently. Danielle Brown, formerly head of diversity and inclusion at Google, has joined as Chief People Officer, and Fredrick Lee has joined as CISO from Square, where he similarly headed information security.

Asked about IPO plans, Reeves demurred, but did point out that the startup’s recent investor additions have been crossover funds that invest across public and private companies.

In addition to Fidelity and Generation, the round included participation from existing investors T. Rowe Price and Dragoneer (which led the Series C), as well as General Catalyst (which led Gusto’s Series A back when it was known as ZenPayroll). The company was founded in 2012.

After months of anticipation, Nintendo Switch is ready to shed more light on its China launch. The Japanese console giant and Tencent are “working diligently” to bring the Switch to the world’s largest market for video games, the partners announced on Weibo today, the Twitter equivalent in China.

The pair did not specify a date when the portable gaming system will officially launch as the government approval process can take months. But there are signs that things are moving forward. For example, Tencent has been given the green light to run a trial version of the New Super Mario Mario Bros. U Deluxe and a few other blockbuster titles in China.

On August 2, the partners will jointly host a press conference for Switch — no product launch yet — in Shanghai, Tencent confirmed to TechCrunch. It appears to be a strategic move that coincides with the country’s largest gaming expo China Joy beginning on the same day in the city.

Sales of Nintendo Switch in China, made possible through a distribution deal with Tencent, will likely add fuel to Nintendo’s slowing growth. It can also potentially diversify Tencent’s gaming revenues, which took a hit last year as Beijing tightened controls over online entertainment.

Switch faces an uphill battle as consoles, including Sony PS4 and Microsoft Xbox, have for years struggled to catch on in China. The reasons are multifaceted. China had banned consoles until 2014 to protect minors from harmful content. The devices are also much less affordable than mobile games, making it difficult as a form of social interaction in the mobile-first nation.

Following more than a year of speculation since the Federal Trade Commission announced it was investigating Facebook over privacy lapses, the regulator has officially announced the terms of its settlement with the beleaguered social network: $5 billion (as previously rumored) and improved privacy oversight within the company.

The order was approved in a 3-2 vote by the agency’s commissioners. The FTC notes that the penalty against Facebook is the largest ever imposed on any company for violating consumers’ privacy — as well as flagging that it’s “almost 20 times greater than the largest privacy or data security penalty ever imposed worldwide”.

In addition to the money, Facebook will have to create a board committee on privacy, and must provide executive assurance that user data is being respected.

“The settlement order announced today also imposes unprecedented new restrictions on Facebook’s business operations and creates multiple channels of compliance. The order requires Facebook to restructure its approach to privacy from the corporate board-level down, and establishes strong new mechanisms to ensure that Facebook executives are accountable for the decisions they make about privacy, and that those decisions are subject to meaningful oversight,” the FTC writes in a press release announcing the decision.

“Despite repeated promises to its billions of users worldwide that they could control how their personal information is shared, Facebook undermined consumers’ choices,” said FTC chairman, Joe Simons, in a statement. “The magnitude of the $5 billion penalty and sweeping conduct relief are unprecedented in the history of the FTC. The relief is designed not only to punish future violations but, more importantly, to change Facebook’s entire privacy culture to decrease the likelihood of continued violations. The Commission takes consumer privacy seriously, and will enforce FTC orders to the fullest extent of the law.”

The FTC first confirmed that it was investigating Facebook in March of last year, during the then-new hubbub surrounding Cambridge Analytica’s abuse of data siphoned from the network. The regulator was specifically concerned that Facebook had been systematically violating the terms of its 2012 agreement, which barred them from a number of practices concerning user data.

Rumors started less than a year later that the fine the FTC was considering would be “record-setting,” though as many pointed out at the time, almost any conceivable amount would be easily (if not gladly) written off by the company, which brings in upwards of $50 billion per year in revenue.

In April, seeing the writing on the wall and perhaps privy to some of the conversations, Facebook set aside $3 billion to cover the costs of the settlement it knew was coming (it still made a $2.4B profit), but said it expected the number may actually be $5 billion. And indeed that is the number that surfaced two weeks ago in early reports of the FTC vote. (Some had suggested fines far higher, perhaps mitigated by good behavior, but the FTC doesn’t seem to have taken them up on the idea.)

Facebook has responded to the penalty in a lengthy blog post penned by Colin Stretch.

“The agreement will require a fundamental shift in the way we approach our work and it will place additional responsibility on people building our products at every level of the company,” he writes. “It will mark a sharper turn toward privacy, on a different scale than anything we’ve done in the past.

“The accountability required by this agreement surpasses current US law and we hope will be a model for the industry. It introduces more stringent processes to identify privacy risks, more documentation of those risks, and more sweeping measures to ensure that we meet these new requirements. Going forward, our approach to privacy controls will parallel our approach to financial controls, with a rigorous design process and individual certifications intended to ensure that our controls are working — and that we find and fix them when they are not.”

Stretch goes on to describe the Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal as “a breach of trust between Facebook and the people who depend on us to protect their data”, before claiming the company will adopt a new more “robust” approach to privacy risk.

“We will be more robust in ensuring that we identify, assess and mitigate privacy risk,” he writes. “We will adopt new approaches to more thoroughly document the decisions we make and monitor their impact. And we will introduce more technical controls to better automate privacy safeguards.”

He also says Facebook will undertake a review of its “systems” — which he says the company expects will surface “issues” — pledging that “when it does, we will work swiftly to address them”.

In the blog he also confirms Facebook has settled a separate investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission — agreeing to pay a further $100M to resolve a probe of its processes for disclosing data abuses to investors.

“We share the SEC’s interest in ensuring that we are transparent with our investors about the material risks we face, and we have already updated our disclosures and controls in this area,” he writes, adding: “As part of the settlement with the SEC, we agreed to pay a $100 million penalty.

Take a moment to imagine the most successful salesperson you know.

Is it someone you respect? Probably not. That, precisely, is the problem Bravado — a startup emerging from stealth today with $12 million in backing from Redpoint Ventures, Freestyle Capital, Precursor Ventures, Village Global and Kindred Ventures — is working to solve.

Sahil Mansuri, Bravado founder and chief executive officer, got his start in sales. A gifted student, his father’s health issues forced him to land a job straight out of college that would make him a lot of money and fast. When his career counselor suggested he search for an opportunity in sales, he envisioned a crowded office packed with obnoxious telemarketers, not a lucrative position in B2B sales in his hometown of San Francisco.

Mansuri grew to adore sales so much, he built a company focused on evangelizing the profession. Before diving head-first into his own venture, Mansuri served as a vice president at SalesPredict, an eBay-acquired business that uses data to predict customer buying behavior and sales conversion. Before that, he worked his way up at Glassdoor, becoming the top-performing sales representative at the platform for submitting anonymous company reviews.

Although Mansuri’s parents, Indian immigrants, were initially horrified by their son’s career choice, they’ve since come around. His hope now is to help the general public develop a more favorable view of the sales profession, too.

“Sales has been transformative for my family,” Mansuri tells TechCrunch. “But when I say sales has a negative stigma, I know because I’ve lived it. That’s my life story.”

“Sales isn’t a profession that’s celebrated,” he added. “You can think of all these great engineers and product managers but you can’t think of any great people in sales.”

Bravado, yet to monetize its platform in any fashion, is focusing its efforts on building out its network. Currently, sales professionals can use the platform to develop credibility through the Bravado Credibility Score, which is based on customer testimonials recorded directly on a sales professional’s Bravado profile. The company is also helping sales workers develop their careers through networking events and workshops.

Fostering the next generation of sales professionals is the final piece of the Bravado business. Mansuri pointed out that none of the top 100 universities in the U.S. have sales majors, making it rather impossible for students to dream of becoming sales experts. Through Bravado’s sales mentorship program, students are provided sales curriculums, the opportunity to be placed at companies in sales roles and a growing network of sales professionals. It’s a “mini pre-professional path to sales,” says Mansuri.

Diversity is important to the team, too. There’s a reason sales has a fratty reputation; it’s a predominately white and male field with fewer than 25% women and a serious lack of minorities and LGBTQ folks. Bravado is putting forth a content strategy in an attempt to highlight these issues and invite new faces into the sales community.

“We want to build a world in which the best talent, no matter what they look like, is like ‘I really want to be in sales because that’s an awesome career,'” Mansuri explained.

Bravado’s community includes 50,000 members and 1,000 sales teams from Salesforce, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Slack, WeWork, Uber, Oracle, IBM and others. The startup recently attracted an $8.5 million Series A led by Redpoint Ventures’ Alex Bard and Annie Kadavy, a majority of which will be used to expand its membership base. When it comes time to make money, the company says it will attract dollars through a suite of to-be-developed “premium products.”

For Bravado to accomplish its goals, it must inspire the public to reimagine the salesperson stereotype, as well as encourage students across the U.S. to enter and redefine the sales field.

“Sales is perceived as a career for the leftovers,” Mansuri said. “We want to bring respect and credibility to the sales profession and share why it is that sales is a wonderful career.”

Cruise is postponing an ambitious target to launch a commercial robotaxi service before the end of the year, the company’s CEO Dan Ammann said Wednesday in a lengthy blog post that revealed new details about its plan to eventually deploy in San Francisco.

Cruise is now throwing its weight — which includes a treasure chest of more than 1,500 employees and $7.25 billion from majority shareholder GM, Softbank Vision Fund, automaker Honda and T. Rowe Price & Associates — towards a large scale deployment that “gets it right the first time,” Ammann told TechCrunch in a recent interview.

For the self-driving company, this means a steep ramp up in testing and validation of its autonomous vehicles, community outreach, investment in infrastructure that includes a massive electric charging station in San Francisco, and the development of a next-generation self-driving vehicle by a team of Cruise, GM and Honda engineers. 

“From the beginning, the approach at Cruise was to do this safely and to do this at a very large scale,” Cruise CEO Dan Ammann told TechCrunch. “There’s a technology race going on here, but there’s also a trust race going on as well. It’s really important that when we do this the first time, that we do it right.”

Ammann declined to give a new timeline for the commercial service that will first launch in San Francisco.

The decision not only provides a glimpse into Cruise’s operations, it reflects a broader trend in the nascent autonomous vehicle industry. Engineers and executives within the industry, once brazenly forecasting the imminent arrival of self-driving cars (without a human safety driver behind the wheel) have a decidedly more restrained outlook.

Cruise had one of the most aggressive timelines among companies hoping to deploy a commercial self-driving vehicle service. And even while other companies adjusted deployment plans, Cruise stuck to its timeline until now.

“It seemed highly unlikely that Cruise would meet that 2019 and not just because of the technical challenges,” Gartner analyst Mike Ramsey said in a recent interview, adding that company faced more pragmatic challenges such as designing a vehicle platform and launching a ride-hailing app and business.

“It’s further evidence that the ambitions for transitioning the world to self driving vehicles is unlikely to be as near term as some thought,” Ramsey said.

However, Ramsey noted that new details revealed Wednesday by Cruise does show a company that is thinking beyond just solving the technical juggernaut of autonomous vehicles and making some progress on how the service might function.

Developing. 

Tile — the company that makes popular small square-shaped tags and other technology to help people keep track of physical belongings like keys and bags — has made more recent moves to link up with chipmakers, helping it expand to wireless headsets and other electronic and other connected items as part of a wider smart home strategy. Now, Tile is announcing a round of funding of $45 million to double down on those strategies and fulfil a plan to have its technology in millions of devices by the end of this year.

The growth equity is being led by Francisco Partners, with participation from previous investors GGV Capital and Bessemer Venture Partners and new backers Bryant Stibel and SVB Financial Group.

CJ Prober — who joined as CEO last year in part to develop Tile’s newer areas of business — said in an interview that the funding will help the startup be more aggressive in doubling down on these new opportunities.

“We’re seeing great business momentum, with the first embedded partner products from our strategic initiatives coming out this year,” he said. It now has partnerships with five semiconductor companies, including Qualcomm and most recently Nordic, which they integrate Tile functionality on to their hardware, he added. “All this is now paying off with great momentum.”

Prober would not comment on the company’s valuation with this round except to say that it was definitely an upround. It’s notable that this appears to be only the first close for the Series C, which has “opened” with this $45 million commitment, in the words of a spokesperson for the company.

Tile has declined to specify any more detail on this front, but this is pretty standard procedure, and the startup has previously raised its rounds in stages — as you can see by this timeline in PitchBook. For some more context, Tile’s last noted valuation (also in PitchBook) was around $166 million, but that was now more than two years ago, before the various initiatives and other changes at the company.

Tile is not disclosing any metrics on its market share or how many of its devices are now in use, but it typically is rated as the largest of a crowded market for item-tracking devices (with others in the space including TrackR (Adero), Chipolo, and more).

But it notes that its European business (a relatively new area of focus for Tile) has grown by 160% in the last quarter. That’s coming from a small base, though: Prober confirmed that the US is still by far its biggest market in terms of sales and users.

And it also had a strong Prime Day on Amazon this year, doubling its unit sales (but didn’t provide hard numbers for comparison). It said it has exceeded projections for sign-ups for its Premium tier, which provides free battery replacements, 30-day location history, smart alerts (prompting you for example when you’ve left your keys somewhere), customer support and more for $30 for the year or $3 per month.

The company has been planting a lot of seeds, and some of them have yet to sprout. Last year, Tile announced that it would take an investment from Comcast to help it develop new products for its wider connected consumer strategy.

Prober however described this as still in the “roadmapping phase” and would not get into specifics except to say that there are a number of different initiatives in the works. There is also a partnership with Google unveiled at the most recent I/O that will see its home devices also being able to be tracked by the Tile platform.

I asked Prober if he worries ultimately about whether large tech companies like Apple, Amazon, Google and the rest — which all want to “own” connected home customers and the ecosystem of hardware and services that they may use — are seen as opportunities or threats for Tile, given that it’s piggy backing on their platforms and devices. His and the company’s fundamental feeling — one that should be supported in the spirit of competition and consumer choice — is that having a cross-platform option is the way to go.

“Our customers have different devices, products from different companies and it’s our job to ensure that Tile works well across all of those,” he said. “We see ourselves a little bit like Switzerland, which is also something that our customers and partners appreciate.”

While we’re seeing a surge of new communications technologies and protocols — 5G being perhaps the one we are hearing about most at the moment — Tile is sticking for now to Bluetooth.

“We love what Bluetooth enables for our customers in terms of the form factor, the cost and profile of the device and the power consumption,” said Prober. “We’re constantly evaluating different alternatives, and if there is an alternative we would consider that, but in our view that doesn’t exist right now.”

It’s a choice that its investors are also supporting.

“Tile pioneered the smart location category,” said Andrew Kowal, partner with Francisco Partners, in a statement. “With Bluetooth technology projected to be included in nearly 30 billion devices shipping in the next five years, Tile is poised to deliver an embedded finding solution for a rapidly expanding market. We are extremely excited to be partnering with Tile as the company enters the next chapter of its growth story.”

Researchers from two universities in Europe have published a method they say is able to correctly re-identify 99.98% of individuals in anonymized datasets with just 15 demographic attributes.

Their model suggests complex datasets of personal information cannot be protected against re-identification by current methods of ‘anonymizing’ data — such as releasing samples (subsets) of the information.

Indeed, the suggestion is that no ‘anonymized’ and released big dataset can be considered safe from re-identification — not without strict access controls.

“Our results suggest that even heavily sampled anonymized datasets are unlikely to satisfy the modern standards for anonymization set forth by GDPR [Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation] and seriously challenge the technical and legal adequacy of the de-identification release-and-forget model,” the researchers from Imperial College London and Belgium’s Université Catholique de Louvain write in the abstract to their paper which has been published in the journal Nature Communications.

It’s of course by no means the first time data anonymization has been shown to be reversible. One of the researchers behind the paper, Imperial College’s Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye, has demonstrated in previous studies looking at credit card metadata that just four random pieces of information were enough to re-identify 90 per cent of the shoppers as unique individuals, for example.

In another study which de Montjoye co-authored that investigated the privacy erosion of smartphone location data, researchers were able to uniquely identify 95% of the individuals in a dataset with just four spatio-temporal points.

At the same time, despite such studies that show how easy it can be to pick individuals out of a data soup, ‘anonymized’ consumer datasets such as those traded by brokers for marketing purposes can contain orders of magnitude more attributes per person.

The researchers cite data broker Experian selling Alteryx access to a de-identified dataset containing 248 attributes per household for 120M Americans, for example.

By their models’ measure essentially none of those households are safe from being re-identified. Yet massive datasets continue being traded, greased with the emollient claim of ‘anonymity’…

(If you want to be further creeped out by how extensively personal data is traded for commercial purposes the disgraced (and now defunct) political data company, Cambridge Analytica, said last year — at the height of the Facebook data misuse scandal — that its foundational dataset for clandestine US voter targeting efforts had beens licensed from well known data brokers such as Acxiom, Experian, Infogroup. Specifically it claimed to have legally obtained “millions of data points on American individuals” from “very large reputable data aggregators and data vendors”.)

While research has shown for years how frighteningly easy it is to re-identify individuals within anonymous datasets, the novel bit here is the researchers have built a statistical model that estimates how easy it would be to do so to any dataset.

They do that by computing the probability that a potential match is correct — so essentially they’re evaluating match uniqueness. They also found small sampling fractions failed to protect data from being re-identified.

“We validated our approach on 210 datasets from demographic and survey data and showed that even extremely small sampling fractions are not sufficient to prevent re-identification and protect your data,” they write. “Our method obtains AUC accuracy scores ranging from 0.84 to 0.97 for predicting individual uniqueness with low false-discovery rate. We showed that 99.98% of Americans were correctly re-identified in any available ‘anonymised’ dataset by using just 15 characteristics, including age, gender, and marital status.” 

They have taken the perhaps unusual step of releasing the code they built for the experiments so that others can reproduce their findings. They have also created a web interface where anyone can play around with inputting attributes to obtain a score of how likely it would be for them to be re-identifiable in a dataset based on those particular data-points.

In one test based inputting three random attributes (gender, data of birth, zipcode) into this interface, the chance of re-identification of the theoretical individual scored by the model went from 54% to a full 95% adding just one more attribute (marital status). Which underlines that datasets with far fewer attributes than 15 can still pose a massive privacy risk to most people.

The rule of thumb is the more attributes in a data-set, the more likely a match is to be correct and therefore the less likely the data can be protected by ‘anonymization’.

Which offers a lot of food for thought when, for example, Google -owned AI company DeepMind has been given access to one million ‘anonymized’ eye scans as part of a research partnership with the UK’s National Health Service.

Biometric data is of course chock-full of unique data points by its nature. So the notion that any eye scan — which contains more than (literally) a few pixels of visual data — could really be considered ‘anonymous’ just isn’t plausible.

Europe’s current data protection framework does allow for truly anonymous data to be freely used and shared — vs the stringent regulatory requirements the law imposes for processing and using personal data.

Though the framework is also careful to recognize the risk of re-identification — and uses the categorization of pseudonymized data rather than anonymous data (with the former very much remaining personal data and subject to the same protections). Only if a dataset is stripped of sufficient elements to ensure individuals can no longer be identified can it be considered ‘anonymous’ under GDPR.

The research underlines how difficult it is for any dataset to meet that standard of being truly, robustly anonymous — given how the risk of re-identification demonstrably steps up with even just a few attributes available.

“Our results reject the claims that, first, re-identification is not a practical risk and, second, sampling or releasing partial datasets provide plausible deniability,” the researchers assert.

“Our results, first, show that few attributes are often sufficient to re-identify with high confidence individuals in heavily incomplete datasets and, second, reject the claim that sampling or releasing partial datasets, e.g., from one hospital network or a single online service, provide plausible deniability. Finally, they show that, third, even if population uniqueness is low—an argument often used to justify that data are sufficiently de-identified to be considered anonymous —, many individuals are still at risk of being successfully re-identified by an attacker using our model.”

They go on to call for regulators and lawmakers to recognize the threat posed by data reidentification, and to pay legal attention to “provable privacy-enhancing systems and security measures” which they say can allow for data to be processed in a privacy-preserving way — including in their citations a 2015 paper which discusses methods such as encrypted search and privacy preserving computations; granular access control mechanisms; policy enforcement and accountability; and data provenance.

“As standards for anonymization are being redefined, incl. by national and regional data protection authorities in the EU, it is essential for them to be robust and account for new threats like the one we present in this paper. They need to take into account the individual risk of re-identification and the lack of plausible deniability—even if the dataset is incomplete—, as well as legally recognize the broad range of provable privacy-enhancing systems and security measures that would allow data to be used while effectively preserving people’s privacy,” they add.

“Moving forward, they question whether current de-identification practices satisfy the anonymization standards of modern data protection laws such as GDPR and CCPA [California’s Consumer Privacy Act] and emphasize the need to move, from a legal and regulatory perspective, beyond the de-identification release-and-forget model.”

On Wednesday the World Health Organization declared the ongoing – and now year-old – Ebola outbreak a global health emergency.

The emergency declaration comes after a man became sick and brought the virus to the Congolese city of Goma, a highly populated transit hub with an international airport and next door to Rwanda. As it stands today, the current Ebola outbreak has surpassed 2,500 cases and 1,500 deaths concentrated largely in two provinces in eastern Congo.

The response effort has been hampered by a deadly mix of armed conflict, distrust, and lack of medical resources. Less than half of the affected population trusts the government and Ebola responders; armed groups have even killed responders. Public health experts expect the outbreak to continue into the foreseeable future.

Yet outside the public health community there has been relatively little concern in America about the second largest Ebola outbreak in history. By one crude metric, the President’s tweets, the current outbreak hasn’t even registered. During the 2014-2016 Ebola epidemic, which also generated an emergency declaration, Mr. Trump tweeted nearly a hundred times about Ebola. This outbreak? 0. Unfortunately this lack of public attention has translated into a shortfall in funding particularly in contrast to the 2014-2016 Ebola epidemic.

Going viral?

The contrast in concern between the 2014-2016 Ebola epidemic and current Ebola outbreak can largely be explained by proximity and fear. Interest in the 2014-2016 Ebola epidemic rose when two U.S. nurses contracted the virus from an imported case in Dallas. However, there was considerable public interest in the outbreak even before the infections in Dallas.

This suggests there is an innate fear associated with the Ebola virus itself. Fear from infectious diseases can be quantified by the deadliness of the pathogen, the severity of the symptoms, how much is known about it, how it’s transmitted, and whether treatment or preventive measures are available. Due to the severity of Ebola virus disease, you would expect any abnormally large Ebola outbreak to create a large amount of news coverage.

When determining the amount of attention an event should receive, public health professionals and news editors face a similar question: is this event significantly different from the baseline, or what’s expected? If so, the event can be considered an outbreak and demands the public’s attention. If not, the event would be considered part of the expected baseline and not enter the public consciousness.

After the 2014-2016 Ebola epidemic resulted in nearly 30,000 infections, there is a legitimate concern that the public has reached Ebola fatigue and have shifted our expectations on what constitutes an emergency, leading to a subdued attention and response. Infectious diseases rarely make the news once the disease becomes an endemic, chronic problem (e.g., the HIV/AIDS epidemic).

Fear. What is it good for?

Fear, or lack of fear, is currently making a bad situation worse. In a recent interview, the WHO director-general spelled out two major facts: 1. the current Ebola outbreak is unlikely to end until security concerns are addressed in Congo and 2. donors refrain from funding unless they feel fear and panic.

On the ground, fear is continuing to deepen distrust towards responders occasionally triggering violence and unrest.

For potential donors, the absence of fear and public attention is causing a shortfall in funding needed for response and preparedness efforts (e.g., surveillance, healthcare infrastructure) that can limit an outbreak’s spread.

If fear can be leveraged to contain the current outbreak and fund preparedness efforts, fear can also eliminate future Ebola headlines for the right reasons; because we eliminated the threat, not because it becomes an endemic problem.

Drip Capital, a startup that helps small and medium-sized exporters secure working capital, has raised $25 million to expand its reach globally.

The Series B financing round for the two-and-a-half-year-old startup was led by Accel and Boosts Total Venture. In an interview with TechCrunch, Neil Kothari, co-founder and co-CEO of the startup, said Drip Capital has also raised $55 million in debt funding over the last two years, making the startup’s total raise $100 million.

Exporters worldwide have to wait for about 60 days (if not more) before they get paid. This creates an immense challenge for millions of small and medium-sized exporters who don’t have any savings to process additional orders until they get paid from their previous clients.

“Despite the fact that they’re reputable, credit-worthy businesses, over half of them still get turned down by banks for the capital they need. We invested in Drip to change this,” said Arun Mathew, a partner at Accel.

After signing up to the platform, an exporter can submit their invoices and open a credit line to finance their next orders.

Drip Capital works with investors and lenders in developed markets to help exporters secure financing. The startup, which has over 800 exporters and importers on its platform, said it has already issued loans worth more than $500 million to date.

Unlike many other online lenders that take no risk liabilities of the flowing capital, Kothari said Drip invests much of its own money in lending, too. “We have skin in the game. This adds tremendous credibility.”

The startup, whose platform is being used to do trading in 60 countries, will use the capital to expand its global footprint. It plans to launch in the UAE, Mexico, and the United States in the coming months.

“With new funding in place, we can replicate the model we’ve created in India with other geographies by scaling the product, engineering, sales and marketing teams,” the startup said.

Drip Capital also intends to expand its offerings to importers, adding a new option that will allow businesses to make more purchases from international markets and increase their sales.

Many established companies such as Honeywell, Sam’s Club, TJ Maxx, Whole Foods, and Zara have purchased goods from exporters that have received financing through Drip, the startup said.

Drip Capital, of course, isn’t the only platform that helps exporters get paid faster. But larger companies tend to do it all and optimize the supply chain for the biggest companies in the world. Drip Capital is focusing on a niche market.