Month: April 2018

Would being asked to pay Facebook to remove ads make you appreciate their value or resent them even more? As Facebook considers offering an ad-free subscription option, there are deeper questions than how much money it could earn. Facebook has the opportunity to let us decide how we compensate it for social networking. But choice doesn’t always make people happy.

In February I explored the idea of how Facebook could disarm data privacy backlash and boost well-being by letting us pay a monthly subscription fee instead of selling our attention to advertisers. The big takeaways were:

• Mark Zuckerberg insists that Facebook will remain free to everyone, including those who can’t afford a monthly fee, so subscriptions would be an opt-in alternative to ads rather than a replacement that forces everyone to pay
• Partially decoupling the business model from maximizing your total time spent on Facebook could let it actually prioritize time well spent because it wouldn’t have to sacrifice ad revenue
• The monthly subscription price would need to offset Facebook’s ad earnings. In the US & Canada Facebook earned $19.9 billion in 2017 from 239 million users. That means the average user there would have to pay $7 per month

However, my analysis neglected some of the psychological fallout of telling people they only get to ditch ads if they can afford it, the loss of ubiquitous reach for advertisers, and the reality of which users would cough up the cash. Though on the other hand, I also neglected the epiphany a price tag could produce for users angry about targeted advertising.

What’s Best For Everyone

This conversation is relevant because Zuckerberg was asked twice by congress about Facebook potentially offering subscriptions. Zuckerberg endorsed the merits of ad-supported apps, but never ruled out letting users buy a premium version. “We don’t offer an option today for people to pay to not show ads” Zuckerberg said, later elaborating that “Overall, I think that the ads experience is going to be the best one. I think in general, people like not having to pay for a service. A lot of people can’t afford to pay for a service around the world, and this aligns with our mission the best.”

But that word ‘today’ gave a glimmer of hope that we might be able to pay in the future.

Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg testifies during a US House Committee on Energy and Commerce hearing about Facebook on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, April 11, 2018. (Photo: SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)

What would we be paying for beyond removing ads, though?. Facebook already lets users concerned about their privacy opt out of some ad targeting, just not seeing ads as a whole. Zuckerberg’s stumping for free Internet services make it seem unlikely that Facebook would build valuable features and reserve them for subscribers

Spotify only lets paid users play any song they want on-demand, while ad-supported users are stuck on shuffle. LinkedIn only lets paid users message anyone they want and appear as a ‘featured applicant’ to hirers, while ad-supported users can only message their connections. Netflix only lets paid users…use it at all.

But Facebook views social networking as a human right, and would likely want to give all users any extra features it developed like News Feed filters to weed out politics or baby pics. Facebook also probably wouldn’t sell features that break privacy like how LinkedIn subscribers can see who visited their profiles. In fact, I wouldn’t bet on Facebook offering any significant premium-only features beyond removing ads. That could make it a tough sell.

Meanwhile, advertisers trying to reach every member of a demographic might not want a way for people to pay to opt-out of ads. If they’re trying to promote a new movie, a restaurant chain, or an election campaign, they’d want as strong of penetration amongst their target audience as they can get. A subscription model punches holes in the ubiquity of Facebook ads that drive businesses to the app.

Resentment Vs Appreciation

But the biggest issue is that Facebook is just really good at monetizing with ads. For never charging users, it earns a ton of money. $40 billion in 2017. Convincing people to pay more with their wallets than their eyeballs may be difficult. And the ones who want to pay are probably worth much more than the average.

Let’s look at the US & Canada market where Facebook earns the most per user because they’re wealthier and have more disposable income than people in other parts of the world, and therefore command higher ad rates. On average US and Canada users earn Facebook $7 per month from ads. But those willing and able to pay are probably richer than the average user, so luxury businesses pay more to advertise to them, and probably spend more time browsing Facebook than the average user, so they see more of those ads.

Brace for sticker shock, because for Facebook to offset the ad revenue of these rich hardcore users, it might have to charge more like $11 to $14 per month.

With no bonus features, that price for something they can get for free could seem way too high. Many who could afford it still wouldn’t justify it, regardless of how much time they spend on Facebook compared to other media subscriptions they shell out for. Those who truly can’t afford it might suddenly feel more resentment towards the Facebook ads they’ve been scrolling past unperturbed for years. Each one would be a reminder that they don’t have the cash to escape Facebook’s data mines.

But perhaps it’s just as likely that people would feel the exact opposite — that having to see those ads really isn’t so bad when faced with the alternative of a steep subscription price.

People often don’t see worth in what they get for free. Being confronted with a price tag could make them more cognizant of the value exchange they’re voluntarily entering. Social networking costs money to operate, and they have to pay somehow. Seeing ads keeps Facebook’s lights on, its labs full of future products, and its investors happy.

That’s why it might not matter if Facebook can only get 4 percent, or 1 percent, or 0.1 percent of users to pay. It could be worth it for Facebook to build out a subscription option to empower users with a sense of choice and provide perspective on the value they already receive for free.

For more big news about Facebook, check out our recent coverage:

Source: Tech Crunch

Few Facebook critics are as credible as Roger McNamee, the managing partner at Elevation Partners. As an early investor in Facebook, McNamee was only only a mentor to Mark Zuckerberg but also introduce him to Sheryl Sandberg.

So it’s hard to underestimate the significance of McNamee’s increasingly public criticism of Facebook over the last couple of years, particularly in the light of the growing Cambridge Analytica storm.

According to McNamee, Facebook pioneered the building of a tech company on “human emotions”. Given that the social network knows all of our “emotional hot buttons”, McNamee believes, there is “something systemic” about the way that third parties can “destabilize” our democracies and economies. McNamee saw this in 2016 with both the Brexit referendum in the UK and the American Presidential election and concluded that Facebook does, indeed, give “asymmetric advantage” to negative messages.

McNamee still believes that Facebook can be fixed. But Zuckerberg and Sandberg, he insists, both have to be “honest” about what’s happened and recognize its “civic responsibility” in strengthening democracy. And tech can do its part too, McNamee believes, in acknowledging and confronting what he calls its “dark side”.

McNamee is certainly doing this. He has now teamed up with ex Google ethicist Tristan Harris in the creation of The Center for Human Technology — an alliance of Silicon Valley notables dedicated to “realigning technology with humanity’s best interests.”

Source: Tech Crunch

Although some colleges may offer a major program in business or entrepreneurship, there isn’t exactly a major in venture capital or angel investment.

Crunchbase News has already examined where professional VCs and angel investors went to college (yes, there’s some truth to the Harvard and Stanford stereotypes) and when having an MBA matters in the world of entrepreneurial finance. But we haven’t yet looked at one facet of startup investors’ educational backgrounds: what they studied in college. So that’s what we’re going to dive into today.

To accomplish this, we’re going to use the educational histories from nearly 5,000 VC American and Canadian investment partners (e.g. folks who are employed by and invest on behalf of a venture capital firm) and nearly 8,500 angel investors in Crunchbase. For those with undergraduate degrees (e.g. B.S., B.A., A.B., and all manner of other variations) and majors listed, we then categorized majors into broader fields of study.¹

In the chart below, you’ll see a breakdown of professional VCs’ college degrees.

Because startup investors are ostensibly focused on technology companies, the fact that most professional venture capitalists have a background in engineering (electrical, mechanical and industrial engineering mostly, but there are some more niche areas like nuclear engineering represented here) or technical subjects (like information systems and materials science) is predictable.

What might be most interesting here is just how few investment partners majored in formal sciences like math or computer science, ranking lower than the humanities by just a hair.

However, this is not the case with angel investors. The chart below displays the breakdown of college degrees for U.S. and Canadian angel investors. It keeps the same color coding as the chart for VCs’ degrees.

Among individual angel investors who are unaffiliated with a venture capital firm, a background in math and computer sciences is more likely.

There are a number of other fun facts to be found in the data:

• For both professional VCs and angel investors who studied in the social sciences, economics majors vastly outnumber other disciplines like political science, sociology and psychology.
• Finance, somewhat unsurprisingly, was the most popular subject for investment partners who majored in a business-related field. Undergraduate degrees in marketing and business administration were also common.
• A lot of angel investors studied entrepreneurship as undergrads, whereas comparatively few professional VCs formally studied the subject.
• History was, by far, the most popular subject area in the humanities for both angels and venture capitalists.

So what does all of this tell us? At least by our reading, the academic backgrounds of startup investors is quite diverse. And this would make sense. There isn’t a clear career path to becoming a venture capitalist or to having enough money and enthusiasm to make angel investments.

Our first-blush analysis also suggests that folks who studied computer science, mathematics and statistics are potentially under-represented among professional venture capital investors. Considering that many of the startups in which VCs invest are built around a new computing technology on the software or hardware side, this is a rather weird and inexplicable irony.

If you find yourself in college and want to invest in startups someday, either as a professional VC or as an angel investor, study what you want. There’s going to be a lot of other factors besides your undergraduate major that will land you a position in the field.

Footnotes:

1. Biology, chemistry and geology degrees are more broadly categorized as “natural sciences.” Math and computer science are “formal sciences.” Political science, economics, psychology and sociology are part of the “social sciences” field.

Source: Tech Crunch

Silicon Valley is obsessed with unicorns, startups that reach a valuation of $1 billion valuation or more. But Aniyia Williams and her team over at Zebras Unite are more interested in zebras. Unlike unicorns, zebras are real animals. So, when applied to startups, zebras are the ones that bring in actual revenue.

When we talk about the greatest of all time (G.O.A.T.) in tech, it seems only reasonable that it would be a zebra, not necessarily a unicorn. Granted, it could be a zebra-unicorn blend, but it couldn’t be just be a unicorn.

The zebra movement is all-inclusive, Williams told me on an episode of the CTRL+T podcast. That’s regardless of race, gender, sexuality, ability status and so forth. Its focus is on startups building businesses that approach issues from a social impact lens and are focused on generating revenue, she said.

“We are optimizing for profitability over fundability,” Williams said.

We also chatted about Williams’ new organization, Black & Brown Founders, which aims to support black and Latinx founders in tech, and help them to become zebras.

Check it out.

Source: Tech Crunch

Western airstrikes on the Middle East: déjà vu all over again. Twenty years ago, the USA attacked Sudan and Afghanistan with Tomahawk cruise missiles. Two days ago, the USA attacked Syria with … Tomahawk cruise missiles. Aside from the (de)merits of each attack, isn’t it a bit surprising that technology hasn’t really changed small-scale strategic warfare in that time?

Just you wait. In the next decade, that strategic calculus will change a lot, and probably not in a good way. Consider this sharp one-liner from Kelsey Atherton last week:

Of course cheap drones are already being used on the battlefield in small-scale ways: by Daesh, by Hezbollah, by Hamas, by drug cartels, and of course by traditional nation-state militaries worldwide. But those are piloted drones, used in short-range, often improvisational ways; interesting but not really strategically significant.

Meanwhile, across the world, we are in the midst of a Cambrian explosion of artificial intelligence and automation technology. Consider Comma.ai, the startup that began as a literal one-man self-driving-car project. Consider the truly remarkable Skydio, a self-flying drone that can follow you wherever you go, avoiding obstacles enroute.

…Do you see where we’re going here? Right now only major powers can toss a few explosives at a faraway enemy to drive home a political point. But imagine a flock of bigger Skydios, reprogrammed to fly to certain GPS locations, or certain visual landmarks, or to track certain license plates … while packed full of explosives.

A  Tomahawk costs $1.87 million. It seems to me that we are not far at all from the point where a capable and wealthy non-state actor like Daesh, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Sinaloa cartel … or any unsavory group willing to be used for plausible deniability by a nation-state … could build a flock of self-flying targeted kamikaze drones, then smuggle them into the Western destination of their choice, for a lot less than the price of a single Tomahawk. The self-flying and targeting software / AI models won’t need to be nearly as perfect as that of a self-driving car. A 50% failure rate is more than acceptable if you only want to show force and sow panic.

It’s chillingly easy to envision a future of mutual assured terror, a multipolar world in which nations and terror cells and drug cartels and starry-eyed cults alike have the capability to inflict faraway havoc on thousands and constant dread on millions, a smoldering kaleidoscopic landscape of dozens of factions enmeshed in tit-for-tat vengeance and vendettas — ceaseless cycles of sporadic attacks which rarely kill more than a hundred, but send entire populations into perpetual fear and fury. Fury which will be very hard to direct. Like hacking, autonomous drone attacks will be extremely difficult to attribute.

You may call this science-fiction scaremongering, and you may have a point. It’s true that nothing like this has happened yet — though the existing adoption of commercial drones for warfare is a distinct warning sign. It’s true that it would be wrongheaded and ridiculously preemptive to try to slam the barn doors before any drone horses arrive. I’m definitely not suggesting that the West should start thinking about restricting research, or trying to comtrol either hardware or software. (Even if that worked, which it wouldn’t, it would be pointless; drone hardware is cheap, and R&D is global.)

But it’s not too early to start thinking about how we will cope if and when self-flying kamikaze drones do make asymmetric strategic warfare possible. And it’s definitely not too early to try to minimize such warfare before it happens, ideally by actually trying to deal with the root causes of the conflicts burning around the world, rather than lobbing a few cruise missiles their way every time we feel the need to seem particularly outraged. Because one day, not long away at all, that approach will begin to rebound on us disastrously.

Source: Tech Crunch

Another week, another massive privacy scandal. When it’s not Facebook admitting it allowed data on as many as 87 million users to be sucked out by a developer on its platform who sold it to a political consultancy working for the Trump campaign, or dating app Grindr ‘fessing up to sharing its users’ HIV status with third party A/B testers, some other ugly facet of the tech industry’s love affair with tracking everything its users do slides into view.

Suddenly, Android users discover to their horror that Google’s mobile platform tells the company where they are all the time — thanks to baked-in location tracking bundled with Google services like Maps and Photos. Or Amazon Echo users realize Jeff Bezos’ ecommerce empire has amassed audio recordings of every single interaction they’ve had with their cute little smart speaker.

The problem, as ever with the tech industry’s teeny-weeny greyscaled legalise, is that the people it refers to as “users” aren’t genuinely consenting to having their information sucked into the cloud for goodness knows what. Because they haven’t been given a clear picture of what agreeing to share their data will really mean.

Instead one or two select features, with a mote of user benefit, tend to be presented at the point of sign up — to socially engineer ‘consent’. Then the company can walk away with a defacto license to perpetually harvest that person’s data by claiming that a consent box was once ticked.

A great example of that is Facebook’s Nearby Friends. The feature lets you share your position with your friends so — and here’s that shiny promise — you can more easily hang out with them. But do you know anyone who is actively using this feature? Yet millions of people started sharing their exact location with Facebook for a feature that’s now buried and mostly unused. Meanwhile Facebook is actively using your location to track your offline habits so it can make money targeting you with adverts.

Terms & Conditions are the biggest lie in the tech industry, as we’ve written before. (And more recently: It was not consent, it was concealment.)

Senator Kennedy of Louisiana also made the point succinctly to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg this week, telling him to his face: “Your user agreement sucks.” We couldn’t agree more.

Happily disingenuous T&Cs are on borrowed time — at least for European tech users, thanks to a new European Union data protection framework that will come into force next month. The GDPR tightens consent requirements — mandating clear and accurate information be provided to users at the point of sign up. Data collection is also more tightly tied to specific function.

From next month, holding onto personal data without a very good reason to do so will be far more risky — because GDPR is also backed up with a regime of supersized fines that are intended to make privacy rules much harder to ignore.

Of course U.S. tech users can’t bank on benefiting from European privacy regulations. And while there are now growing calls in the country for legislation to protect people’s data — in a bid to steer off the next democracy-denting Cambridge Analytica scandal, at very least — any such process will take a lot of political will.

It certainly will not happen overnight. And you can expect tech giants to fight tooth and nail against laws being drafted and passed — as indeed Facebook, Google and others lobbied fiercely to try to get GDPR watered down.

Facebook has already revealed it will not be universally applying the European regulation — which means people in North America are likely to get a degree of lower privacy than Facebook users everywhere else in the world. Which doesn’t exactly sound fair.

When it comes to privacy, some of you may think you have nothing to hide. But that’s a straw man. It’s especially hard to defend this line of thinking now that big tech companies have attracted so much soft power they can influence elections, inflame conflicts and divide people in general. It’s time to think about the bigger impact of technology on the fabric of society, and not just your personal case.

Shifting the balance

So what can Internet users do right now to stop tech giants, advertisers and unknown entities tracking everything you do online — and trying to join the dots of your digital activity to paint a picture of who they think you are? At least, everything short of moving to Europe, where privacy is a fundamental right.

There are some practical steps you can take to limit day-to-day online privacy risks by reducing third party access to your information and shielding more of your digital activity from prying eyes.

Not all these measures are appropriate for every person. It’s up to you to determine how much effort you want (or need) to put in to shield your privacy.

You may be happy to share a certain amount of personal data in exchange for access to a certain service, for example. But even then it’s unlikely that the full trade-off has been made clear to you. So it’s worth asking yourself if you’re really getting a good deal.

Once people’s eyes are opened to the fine-grained detail and depth of personal information being harvested, even some very seasoned tech users have reacted with shock — saying they had no idea, for example, that Facebook Messenger was continuously uploading their phone book and logging their calls and SMS metadata.

This is one of the reasons why the U.K.’s information commissioner has been calling for increased transparency about how and why data flows. Because for far too long tech savvy entities have been able to apply privacy hostile actions in the dark. And it hasn’t really been possible for the average person to know what’s being done with their information. Or even what data they are giving up when they click ‘I agree’.

Why does an A/B testing firm need to know a person’s HIV status? Why does a social network app need continuous access to your call history? Why should an ad giant be able to continuously pin your movements on a map?

Are you really getting so much value from an app that you’re happy for the company behind it and anyone else they partner with to know everywhere you go, everyone you talk to, the stuff you like and look at — even to have a pretty good idea what you’re thinking?

Every data misuse scandal shines a bit more light on some very murky practices — which will hopefully generate momentum for rule changes to disinfect data handling processes and strengthen individuals’ privacy by spotlighting trade-offs that have zero justification.

With some effort — and good online security practices (which we’re taking as a given for the purposes of this article, but one quick tip: Enable 2FA everywhere you can) — you can also make it harder for the web’s lurking watchers to dine out on your data.

Just don’t expect the lengths you have to go to protect your privacy to feel fair or just — the horrible truth is this fight sucks.

But whatever you do, don’t give up.

How to hide on the internet

Action: Tape over all your webcams
Who is this for: Everyone — even Mark Zuckerberg!
How difficult is it: Easy peasy lemon squeezy
Tell me more: You can get fancy removable stickers for this purpose (noyb has some nice ones). Or you can go DIY and use a bit of masking tape — on your laptop, your smartphone, even your smart TV… If your job requires you to be on camera, such as for some conference calls, and you want to look a bit more pro you can buy a webcam cover. Sadly locking down privacy is rarely this easy.

Action: Install HTTPS Everywhere
Who is this for: Everyone — seriously do it
How difficult is it: Mild effort
Tell me more: Many websites offer encryption. With HTTPS, people running the network between your device and the server hosting the website you’re browsing can’t see your requests and your internet traffic. But some websites still load unencrypted pages by default (HTTP), which also causes a security risk. The EFF has developed a browser extension that makes sure that you access all websites that offer HTTPS using… HTTPS.

Action: Use tracker blockers
Who is this for: Everyone — except people who like being ad-stalked online
How difficult is it: Mild effort
Tell me more: Trackers refers to a whole category of privacy-hostile technologies designed to follow and record what web users are doing as they move from site to site, and even across different devices. Trackers come in a range of forms these days. And there are some pretty sophisticated ways of being tracked (some definitely harder to thwart than others). But to combat trackers being deployed on popular websites — which are probably also making the pages slower to load than they otherwise would be — there’s now a range of decent, user-friendly tracker blockers to choose from. Pro-privacy search engine DuckDuckGo recently added a tracker blocker to their browser extensions, for example. Disconnect.me is also a popular extension to block trackers from third-party websites. Firefox also has a built-in tracker blocker, which is now enabled by default in the mobile apps. If you’re curious and want to see the list of trackers on popular website, you can also install Kimetrak to understand that it’s a widespread issue.

Action: Use an ad blocker
Who is this for: Everyone who can support the moral burden
How difficult is it: Fairly easy these days but you might be locked out of the content on some news websites as a result
Tell me more: If you’ve tried using a tracker blocker, you may have noticed that many ads have been blocked in the process. That’s because most ads load from third-party servers that track you across multiple sites. So if you want to go one step further and block all ads, you should install an ad blocker. Some browsers like Opera come with an ad blocker. Otherwise, we recommend uBlock Origin on macOS, Windows, Linux and Android. 1Blocker is a solid option on iOS.
But let’s be honest, TechCrunch makes some money with online ads. If 100% of web users install an ad blocker many websites you know and love would simply go bankrupt. While your individual choice won’t have a material impact on the bottom line, consider whitelisting the sites you like. And if you’re angry at how many trackers your favorite news site is running try emailing them to ask (politely) if they can at least reduce the number of trackers they use.

Action: Make a private search engine your default
Who is this for: Most people
How difficult is it: A bit of effort because your search results might become slightly less relevant
Tell me more: Google probably knows more about you than even Facebook does, thanks to the things you tell it when you type queries into its search engine. Though that’s just the tip of how it tracks you — if you use Android it will keep running tabs on everywhere you go unless you opt out of location services. It also has its tracking infrastructure embedded on three-quarters of the top million websites. So chances are it’s following what you’re browsing online — unless you also take steps to lock down your browsing (see below).
But one major way to limit what Google knows about you is to switch to using an alternative search engine when you need to look something up on the Internet. This isn’t as hard as it used to be as there are some pretty decent alternatives now — such as DuckDuckGo which Apple will let you set as the default browser on iOS — or Qwant for French-speaking users. German users can check out Cliqz. You will also need to remember to be careful about any voice assistants you use as they often default to using Google to look stuff up on the web.

Action: Use private browser sessions
Who is this for: Most people
How difficult is it: Not at all if you understand what a private session is
Tell me more: All browsers on desktop and mobile now let you open a private window. While this can be a powerful tool, it is often misunderstood. By default, private sessions don’t make you more invisible — you’ll get tracked from one tab to another. But private sessions let you start with a clean slate. Every time you close your private session, all your cookies are erased. It’s like you disappear from everyone’s radar. You can then reopen another private session and pretend that nobody knows who you are. That’s why using a private session for weeks or months doesn’t do much, but short private sessions can be helpful.

Action: Use multiple browsers and/or browser containers
Who is this for: People who don’t want to stop using social media entirely
How difficult is it: Some effort to not get in a muddle
Tell me more: Using different browsers for different online activities can be a good way of separating portions of your browsing activity. You could, for example, use one browser on your desktop computer for your online banking, say, and a different browser for your social networking or ecommerce activity. Taking this approach further, you could use different mobile devices when you want to access different apps. The point of dividing your browsing across different browsers/devices is to try to make it harder to link all your online activity to you. That said, lots of adtech effort has been put into developing cross-device tracking techniques — so it’s not clear that fragmenting your browsing sessions will successful beat all the trackers. 
In a similar vein, in 2016 Mozilla added a feature to its Firefox browser that’s intended to help web users segregate online identities within the same browser — called multi container extensions. This approach gives users some control but it does not stop their browser being fingerprinted and all their web activity in it linked and tracked. It may help reduce some cookie-based tracking, though.
Last month Mozilla also updated the container feature to add one that specifically isolates a Facebook user’s identity from the rest of the web. This limits how Facebook can track a user’s non-Facebook web browsing — which yes Facebook does do, whatever Zuckerberg tried to claim in Congress — so again it’s a way to reduce what the social network giant knows about you. (Though it should also be noted that clicking on any Facebook social plug-ins you encounter on other websites will still send Facebook your personal data.)

Action: Get acquainted with Tor
Who is this for: Activists, people with high risks attached to being tracked online, committed privacy advocates who want to help grow the Tor network
How difficult is it: Patience is needed to use Tor. Also some effort to ensure you don’t accidentally do something that compromises your anonymity
Tell me more: For the most robust form of anonymous web browsing there’s Tor. Tor’s onion network works by encrypting and routing your Internet traffic randomly through a series of relay servers to make it harder to link a specific device with a specific online destination. This does mean it’s definitely not the fastest form of web browsing around. Some sites can also try to block Tor users so the Internet experience you get when browsing in this way may suffer. But it’s the best chance of truly preserving your online anonymity. You’ll need to download the relevant Tor browser bundle to use it. It’s pretty straightforward to install and get going. But expect very frequent security updates which will also slow you down.

Action: Switch to another DNS
Who is this for: People who don’t trust their ISP
How difficult is it: Moderately
Tell me more: When you type an address in the address bar (such as techcrunch.com), your device asks a Domain Name Server to translate that address into an IP address (a unique combination of numbers and dots). By default, your ISP or your mobile carrier runs a DNS for their users. It means that they can see all your web history. Big telecom companies are going to take advantage of that to ramp up their advertising efforts. By default, your DNS query is also unencrypted and can be intercepted by people running the network. Some governments also ask telecom companies to block some websites on their DNS servers — some countries block Facebook for censorship reasons, others block The Pirate Bay for online piracy reasons.
You can configure each of your device to use another public DNS. But don’t use Google’s public DNS! It’s an ad company, so they really want to see your web history. Both Quad9 and Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 have strong privacy policies. But Quad9 is a not-for-profit organization, so it’s easier to trust them.

Action: Disable location services
Who is this for: Anyone who feels uncomfortable with the idea of being kept under surveillance
How difficult is it: A bit of effort finding and changing settings, and a bit of commitment to stay on top of any ‘updates’ to privacy policies which might try to revive location tracking. You also need to be prepared to accept some reduction in the utility and/or convenience of the service because it won’t be able to automatically customize what it shows you based on your location
Tell me more: The tech industry is especially keen to keep tabs on where its users are at any given moment. And thanks to the smash hit success of smartphones with embedded sensors it’s never been easier to pervasively track where people are going — and therefore to infer what they’re doing. For ad targeting purposes location data is highly valuable of course. But it’s also hugely intrusive. Did you just visit a certain type of health clinic? Were you carrying your phone loaded with location-sucking apps? Why then it’s trivially easy for the likes of Google and Facebook to connect your identity to that trip — and link all that intel to their ad networks. And if the social network’s platform isn’t adequately “locked down” — as Zuckerberg would put it — your private information might leak and end up elsewhere. It could even get passed around between all sorts of unknown entities — as the up to 87M Facebook profiles in the Cambridge Analytica scandal appear to have been. (Whistleblower Chris Wylie has said that Facebook data-set went “everywhere”.)
There are other potential risks too. Insurance premiums being assessed based on covertly collected data inputs. Companies that work for government agencies using social media info to try to remove benefits or even have people deported. Location data can also influence the types of adverts you see or don’t see. And on that front there’s a risk of discrimination if certain types of ads — jobs or housing, for example — don’t get served to you because you happen to be a person of color, say, or a Muslim. Excluding certain protected groups of people from adverts can be illegal — but that hasn’t stopped it happening multiple times on Facebook’s platform. And location can be a key signal that underpins this kind of prejudicial discrimination.
Even the prices you are offered online can depend on what is being inferred about you via your movements. The bottom line is that everyone’s personal data is being made to carry a lot of baggage these days — and most of the time it’s almost impossible to figure out exactly what that unasked for baggage might entail when you consent to letting a particular app or service track where you go.
Pervasive tracking of location at very least risks putting you at a disadvantage as a consumer. Certainly if you live somewhere without a proper regulatory framework for privacy. It’s also worth bearing in mind how lax tech giants can be where location privacy is concerned — whether it’s Uber’s infamous ‘god view’ tool or Snapchat leaking schoolkids’ location or Strava accidentally revealing the locations of military bases. Their record is pretty terrible.
If you really can’t be bothered to go and hunt down and switch off every location setting one fairly crude action you can take is to buy a faraday cage carry case — Silent Pocket makes an extensive line of carry cases with embedded wireless shielding tech, for instance — which you can pop your smartphone into when you’re on the move to isolate it from the network. Of course once you take it out it will instantly reconnect and location data will be passed again so this is not going to do very much on its own. Nixing location tracking in the settings is much more effective.

Action: Approach VPNs with extreme caution
Who is this for: All web users — unless free Internet access is not available in your country
How difficult is it: No additional effort
Tell me more: While there may be times when you feel tempted to sign up and use a VPN service — say, to try to circumvent geoblocks so you can stream video content that’s not otherwise available in your country — if you do this you should assume that the service provider will at very least be recording everything you’re doing online. They may choose to sell that info or even steal your identity. Many of them promise you perfect privacy and great terms of service. But you can never know for sure if they’re actually doing what they say. So the rule of thumb about all VPNs is: Assume zero privacy — and avoid if at all possible. Facebook even has its own VPN — which it’s been aggressively pushing to users of its main app by badging it as a security service, with the friendly-sounding name ‘Protect’. In reality the company wants you to use this so it can track what other apps you’re using — for its own business intelligence purposes. So a more accurate name for this ‘service’ would be: ‘Protect Facebook’s stranglehold on the social web’.

Action: Build your own VPN server
Who is this for: Developers
How difficult is it: You need to be comfortable with the Terminal
Tell me more: The only VPN server you can trust is the one you built yourself! In that case, VPN servers can be a great tool if you’re on a network you don’t trust (a hotel, a conference or an office). We recommend using Algo VPN and a hosting provider you trust.

Action: Take care with third-party keyboard apps
Who is this for: All touchscreen device users
How difficult is it: No additional effort
Tell me more: Keyboard apps are a potential privacy minefield given that, if you allow cloud-enabled features, they can be in a position to suck out all the information you’re typing into your device — from passwords to credit card numbers to the private contents of your messages. That’s not to say that all third-party keyboards are keylogging everything you type. But the risk is there — so you need to be very careful about what you choose to use. Security is also key. Last year, sensitive personal data from 31M+ users of one third-party keyboard, AI.type, leaked online after the company had failed to properly secure its database server, as one illustrative example of the potential risks.
Google knows how powerful keyboards can be as a data-sucker — which is why it got into the third-party keyboard game, outing its own Gboard keyboard app first for Apple’s iOS in 2016 and later bringing it to Android. If you use Gboard you should know you are handing the adtech giant another firehose of your private information — though it claims that only search queries and “usage statistics” are sent by Gboard to Google (The privacy policy further specifies: “Anything you type other than your searches, like passwords or chats with friends, isn’t sent. Saved words on your device aren’t sent.”). So if you believe that Gboard is not literally a keylogger. But it is watching what you search for and how you use your phone. 
Also worth remembering: Data will still be passed by Gboard to Google if you’re using an e2e encrypted messenger like Signal. So third party keyboards can erode the protection afforded by robust e2e encryption — so again: Be very careful what you use.

Action: Use end-to-end encrypted messengers
Who is this for: Everyone who can
How difficult is it: Mild effort unless all your friends are using other messaging apps
Tell me more: Choosing friends based on their choice of messaging app isn’t a great option so real world network effects can often work against privacy. Indeed, Facebook uses the fuzzy feelings you have about your friends to manipulate Messenger users to consent to continuously uploading their phone contacts, by suggesting you have to if you want to talk to your contacts. (Which is, by the by, entirely bogus.)
But if all your friends use a messaging app that does not have end-to-end encryption chances are you’ll feel forced to use that same non-privacy-safe app too. Given that the other option is to exclude yourself from the digital chatter of your friend group. Which would clearly suck. 
Facebook-owned WhatsApp does at least have end-to-end encryption — and is widely used (certainly internationally). Though you still need to be careful to opt out of any privacy-eroding terms the company tries to push. In summer 2016, for example, a major T&Cs change sought to link WhatsApp users’ accounts with their Facebook profiles (and thus with all the data Facebook holds on them) — as well as sharing sensitive stuff like your last seen status, your address book, your BFFs in Whatsapp and all sorts of metadata with Zuck’s ‘family’ of companies. Thankfully most of this privacy-hostile data sharing has been suspended in Europe, after Facebook got in trouble with local data protection agencies. 

Action: Use end-to-end encryption if you use cloud storage
Who is this for: Dedicated privacy practitioners, anyone worried about third parties accessing their stuff
How difficult is it: Some effort, especially if you have lots of content stored in another service that you need to migrate
Tell me more: Dropbox IPO’d last month — and the markets signalled their approval of its business. But someone who doesn’t approve of the cloud storage giant is Edward Snowden — who in 2014 advised: “Get rid of Dropbox”, arguing the company is hostile to privacy. The problem is that Dropbox does not offer zero access encryption — because it retains encryption keys, meaning it can technically decrypt and read the data you store with it if it decides it needs to or is served with a warrant.
Cloud storage alternatives that do offer local encryption with no access to the encryption keys are available, such as Spideroak. And if you’re looking for a cloud backup service, Backblaze also offers the option to let you manage the encryption key. Another workaround if you do still want to use a service like Dropbox is to locally encrypt the stuff you want to store before you upload it — using another third party service such as Boxcryptor.

Action: Use an end-to-end encrypted email service
Who is this for: Anyone who wants to be sure their email isn’t being data mined
How difficult is it: Some effort — largely around migrating data and/or contacts from another email service
Tell me more: In the middle of last year Google finally announced it would no longer be data-mining the emails inside its Gmail free email service. (For a little perspective on how long it took to give up data-mining your emails, Gmail launched all the way back in 2004.) The company probably feels it has more than enough alternative data points feeding its user profiling at this point. Plus data-mining email with the rise of end-to-end encrypted messaging apps risks pushing the company over the ‘creepy line’ it’s been so keen to avoid to try to stave off the kind of privacy backlash currently engulfing Facebook.
So does it mean that Gmail is now 100% privacy safe? No, because the service is not end-to-end encrypted. But there are now some great webmail clients that do offer robust end-to-end encryption — most notably the Swiss service Protonmail. Really it’s never been easier to access a reliable, user-friendly, pro-privacy email service. If you want to go one step further, you should set up PGP encryption keys and share them with your contacts. This is a lot more difficult though.

Action: Choose iOS over Android
Who is this for: Mainstream consumers, Apple fans
How difficult is it: Depends on the person. Apple hardware is generally more expensive so there’s a cost premium
Tell me more: No connected technology is 100% privacy safe but Apple’s hardware-focused business model means the company’s devices are not engineered to try to harvest user data by default. Apple does also invest in developing pro-privacy technologies. Whereas there’s no getting around the fact Android-maker Google is an adtech giant whose revenues depend on profiling users in order to target web users with adverts. Basically the company needs to suck your data to make a fat profit. That’s why Google asks you to share all your web and app activity and location history if you want to use Google Assistant, for instance.
Android is a more open platform than iOS, though, and it’s possible to configure it in many different ways — some of which can be more locked down as regards privacy than others (the Android Open Source Project can be customized and used without Google services as default preloads, for example). But doing that kind of configuration is not going to be within reach of the average person. So iOS is the obvious choice for mainstream consumers.

Action: Delete your social media accounts
Who is this for: Committed privacy lovers, anyone bored with public sharing
How difficult is it: Some effort — mostly feeling like you’re going to miss out. But third party services can sometimes require a Facebook login (a workaround for that would be to create a dummy Facebook account purely for login purposes — using a name and email you don’t use for anything else, and not linking it to your usual mobile phone number or adding anyone you actually know IRL)
Tell me more: Deleting Facebook clearly isn’t for everyone. But ask yourself how much you use it these days anyway? You might find yourself realizing it’s not really that central to what you do on the Internet after all. The center of gravity in social networking has shifted away from mass public sharing into more tightly curated friend groups anyway, thanks to the popularity of messaging apps.
But of course Facebook owns Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp too. So ducking out of its surveillance dragnet entirely is especially hard. Ideally you would also need to run tracker blockers (see above) as the company tracks non-Facebook users around the Internet via the pixels it has embedded on lots of popular websites.
While getting rid of your social media accounts is not a privacy panacea, removing yourself from mainstream social network platforms at least reduces the risk of a chunk of your personal info being scraped and used without your say so. Though it’s still not absolutely guaranteed that when you delete an account the company in question will faithfully remove all your information from their servers — or indeed from the servers of any third party they shared your data with.
If you really can’t bring yourself to ditch Facebook (et al) entirely, at least dive into the settings and make sure you lock down as much access to your data as you can — including checking which apps have been connected to your account and removing any that aren’t relevant or useful to you anymore.

Action: Say no to always-on voice assistants
Who is this for: Anyone who values privacy more than gimmickry
How difficult is it: No real effort
Tell me more: There’s a rash of smart speaker voice assistants on shop shelves these days, marketed in a way that suggests they’re a whole lot smarter and more useful than they actually are. In reality they’re most likely to be used for playing music (albeit, audio quality can be very poor) or as very expensive egg timers.
Something else the PR for gadgets like Amazon’s (many) Echos or Google Home doesn’t mention is the massive privacy trade off involved with installing an always-on listening device inside your home. Essentially these devices function by streaming whatever you ask to the cloud and will typically store recordings of things you’ve said in perpetuity on the companies’ servers. Some do offer a delete option for stored audio but you would have to stay on top of deleting your data as long as you keep using the device. So it’s a tediously Sisyphean task. Smart speakers have also been caught listening to and recording things their owner didn’t actually want them to — because they got triggered by accident. Or when someone on the TV used the trigger word.
The privacy risks around smart speakers are clearly very large indeed. Not least because this type of personal data is of obvious and inevitable interest to law enforcement agencies. So ask yourself whether that fake fart dispenser gizmo you’re giggling about is really worth the trade off of inviting all sorts of outsiders to snoop on the goings on inside your home.

Action: Block some network requests
Who is this for: Paranoid people
How difficult is it: Need to be tech savvy
Tell me more: On macOS, you can install something called Little Snitch to get an alert every time an app tries to talk with a server. You can approve or reject each request and create rules. If you don’t want Microsoft Word to talk with Microsoft’s servers all the time for instance, it’s a good solution — but is not really user friendly.

Action: Use a privacy-focused operating system
Who is this for: Edward Snowden
How difficult is it: Need to be tech savvy
Tell me more: If you really want to lock everything down, you should consider using Tails as your desktop operating system. It’s a Linux distribution that leaves no trace by default, uses the Tor network for all network requests by default. But it’s not exactly user friendly, and it’s quite complicated to install on a USB drive. One for those whose threat model really is ‘bleeding edge’.

Action: Write to your political reps to demand stronger privacy laws
Who is this for: Anyone who cares about privacy, and especially Internet users in North America right now
How difficult is it: A bit of effort
Tell me more: There appears to be bipartisan appetite among U.S. lawmakers to bring in some form of regulation for Internet companies. And with new tougher rules coming in in Europe next month it’s an especially opportune moment to push for change in the U.S. where web users are facing reduced standards vs international users after May 25. So it’s a great time to write to your reps reminding them you’re far more interested in your privacy being protected than Facebook winning some kind of surveillance arms race with the Chinese. Tell them it’s past time for the U.S. to draft laws that prioritize the protection of personal data. 

Action: Throw away all your connected devices — and choose your friends wisely
Who is this for: Fugitives and whistleblowers
How difficult is it: Privacy doesn’t get harder than this
Tell me more: Last month the former Catalan president, Carles Puigdemont — who, in October, dodged arrest by the Spanish authorities by fleeing to Brussels after the region’s abortive attempt to declare independence — was arrested by German police, after crossing the border from Denmark in a car. Spanish intelligence agents had reportedly tracked his movements via the GPS on the mobile device of one or more of his friends. The car had also been fitted with a tracker. Trusting anything not to snitch on you is a massive risk if your threat model is this high. The problem is you also need trustworthy friends to help you stay ahead of the surveillance dragnet that’s out to get you.

Action: Ditch the Internet entirely
Who is this for: Fugitives and whistleblowers
How difficult is it: Privacy doesn’t get harder than this
Tell me more: Public administrations can ask you to do pretty much everything online these days — and even if it’s not mandatory to use their Internet service it can be incentivized in various ways. The direction of travel for government services is clearly digital. So eschewing the Internet entirely is getting harder and harder to do.
One wild card option — that’s still not a full Internet alternative (yet) — is to use a different type of network that’s being engineered with privacy in mind. The experimental, decentralized MaidSafe network fits that bill. This majorly ambitious project has already clocked up a decade’s worth of R&D on the founders’ mission to rethink digital connectivity without compromising privacy and security by doing away with servers — and decentralizing and encrypting everything. It’s a fascinating project. Just sadly not yet a fully-fledged Internet alternative.

Source: Tech Crunch

While the vagaries of the cryptocurrency markets are keeping crypto traders glued to their CoinDesk graphs, the real potential of blockchain is its capability to solve real human challenges in a decentralized, private, and secure way. Government officials have increasingly investigated how blockchain might solve critical problems, but now one city intends to move forward with an actual implementation.

The city of Austin is piloting a new blockchain platform to improve identity services for its homeless population, as part of a competitive grant awarded by the Mayor’s Challenge program sponsored by Bloomberg Philanthropies. Austin was one of 35 cities to be awarded pilot grants, and the top city from that group will ultimately be awarded $5 million.

Steve Adler, the mayor of Austin since 2015, explained to TechCrunch that “at a high level, [the pilot] is trying to figure out how to solve one of the challenges we have in our community related to the homeless population, which is how to keep all the information of that individual with that individual.”

Identity is among the thorniest challenges for governments to solve, particularly for marginal populations like the homeless or refugees. As Sly Majid, Chief Services Officer for Austin, said, “If you have your backpack stolen or if your social security card gets wet and falls apart, or if you are camping and the city cleans up the site and takes your possessions, you have to start all over from the beginning again.” That is devastating for marginal populations, because it means that the cycle of poverty persists. “It really prevents you from going about and doing the sort of activities that allow you to transition out of homelessness,” he continued.

Austin has been on an economic tear, becoming one of the top startup hubs in the United States and increasingly drawing talent from major cities like San Francisco. But, “For everything that is going right, we have some challenges that are shared by a lot of large cities,” Adler said. That dizzying growth has raised housing prices, making it more difficult to improve the city’s homelessness rate. Some 2,000 individuals are homeless in the city according to a census taken earlier this year, with several thousand more at various states of transition.

The city wanted to improve the ability of its patchwork of government and private homeless service providers to offer integrated and comprehensive aid. There are a number of separate challenges here: verifying the identity of a person seeking help, knowing what care that individual has previously received, and empowering the individual to “own” their own records, and ultimately, their destiny.

The goal of the city’s blockchain pilot program is to consolidate the identity and vital records of each homeless person in a safe and confidential way while providing a means for service providers to access that information. Adler explained that “there are all kinds of confidentiality issues that arise when you try to do that, so the thought was that blockchain would allow us to bridge that need.”

By using blockchain, the hope is that the city could replace paper records, which are hard to manage, with electronic encrypted records that would be more reliable and secure. In addition, the blockchain platform could create a decentralized authentication mechanism to verify a particular person’s identity. For instance, a homeless services worker operating in the field could potentially use their mobile device to verify a person live, without having to bring someone back to an office for processing.

More importantly, vital records on the blockchain could build over time, so different providers would know what services a person had used previously. Majid provided the example of health care, where it is crucially important to know the history of an individual. The idea is that, when a homeless person walks into a clinic, the blockchain would provide the entire patient history of that individual to the provider. “Here was your medical records from your last clinic visits, and we can build off the care that you were given last time,” he said. Austin is partnering with the Dell Medical School at the University of Texas to work out how best to implement the blockchain for medical professionals.

Identity is a popular area for investors interested in blockchain and decentralization more generally. As I wrote about earlier this week, Element, a New York City-based startup co-founded by famed deep learning researcher Yann LeCun, hopes to provide decentralized identity to people in developing countries like Indonesia and the Philippines. Austin is exploring partnering with decentralized startups like BanQu to implement the details of the service for the city.

Majid noted that “It’s an iterative process for us, … and we need to crawl before we walk, and walk before we run.” Adler believes that the program is an example of the power of fusing government and private industry. Austin “tries to work with new industries, and new technologies, and new economies and tries to find the proper intersection of government innovation and responsibility,” he said. If blockchain can improve homelessness here, that solution could carry throughout the world.

Source: Tech Crunch

Facebook is rolling out a redesigned bookmarks section in its app that will make it easier to navigate and access various Facebook settings – including Account Settings, Privacy Shortcuts, News Feed Preferences, Activity Log, Payments Settings, access to Help & Support, and more. None of the options in the updated menu are new to Facebook. Instead, the changes are focused on centralizing a variety of controls that were previously located in other places, where they may have been unknown to some users.

The updated menu, at first glance, appeared to be a continuation of the redesign to Facebook’s Settings, announced last month.

At the time, the company promised a revamped settings menu on mobile that moves settings from across 20 different screens to a single place. It also launched the menu item “Privacy Shortcuts,” where you can lock down who can view your profile or contact you as well as learn about how to protect your privacy on its social network.

However, Facebook tells us this redesign was not related to the earlier announcement, but has been in the works for a while.

Now the entire Bookmarks menu is getting a makeover, where controls aren’t just centralized, but some have moved to the forefront instead of being buried behind an extra click.

The Bookmarks menu has also been given a new look and updated icons. While most of the list remains colorful, all the Settings Bookmarks appear in shades of gray to differentiate them.

Facebook confirmed the change to the Bookmarks section has begun to roll out to new users worldwide as part of a staged rollout.

“We’ve been looking into how to make Bookmarks easier to navigate and more relevant for people for some time,” a Facebook spokesperson told TechCrunch. “We hope this update, similar to the ones we’ve been making recently, will help people navigate Facebook more easily so they can continue to connect with the people, Pages and Groups they log on to see.”

The redesign comes at a time when Facebook is being heavily scrutinized over its data privacy protections for users, which has led to changes in other areas of its business as well – including its API (app) platform, apps’ access to user data, data portability and more. It had already acknowledged that some of its controls were too hard to find in the past, and it needed to correct that.

The new look for Bookmarks will be scaled to all users globally across all platforms over the next two weeks, Facebook told us. 

Source: Tech Crunch

Grab’s plan to shutter Uber’s app quickly following its merger deal in Southeast Asia has hit another snag in Singapore where the ride-hailing firm has been forced to delay closing its rival’s service until May 7.

This is the second time that Grab has pushed back the removal of Uber’s app in Singapore, which was initially scheduled for closure on April 8 but was given an additional week as part of an investigation from the Competition and Consumer Commission of Singapore (CCCS) which is assessing the merger deal. This new May 7 date is also down to the CCCS probe, with the commission issuing an ‘Interim Measures Directions’ (IMD) to Grab in order to “ensure that the market remains open and contestable.”

Those directives — which Grab said it has had a hand in formulating — include measures that prevent Grab from taking Uber’s operational data on customers and their trip history, prevent lock-in and exclusivity options for drivers that join Grab or move over from Uber’s Lion City Rental entity, and end any exclusive deals Grab has with Singapore taxi firms.

The CCCS has also ruled that Grab and the Uber service must maintain prices for passengers and drivers, and remind both that their migration to the Grab platform is optional.

The ruling impacts the Singapore market only, which is where Grab is registered. The Uber app has already been closed in six other markets where it operated in Southeast Asia, while the UberEats service will fold into GrabFood by the end of May. Elsewhere, Uber’s ride-hailing service is scheduled to be closed on April 16 in the Philippines where, like Singapore, the regulator had handed down a week-long extension while it looked into the merger deal.

In both extensions, Grab is the one footing the bill for the continued operation of Uber since the U.S. firm has already exited these markets, in terms of funding and staffing, Uber’s head of operations for Asia Pacific has said.

The CCCS previously said that it has “reasonable grounds” to suspect that the Grab-Uber deal may fall foul of section 54 of Singapore’s Competition Act. The Philippine Competition Commission is still looking into the and there’s no word on whether it will follow the CCCS’ lead and force Grab to keep the Uber app open for a longer period.

The Singapore ruling is a blow for Grab which set out an aggressive two-week timeframe for closing Uber in Southeast Asia, having contacted regulators in advance of the deal which sees it pick up a dominant slice of app-based taxi books across eight countries in Southeast Asia. The key question for regulators, however, appears to be whether app-based hailing is a market unto itself, or whether it is part of the wider taxi market.

If regulators chose the former option, then Uber-Grab almost certainly creates a monopoly, but since consumers can also hail apps in more traditional ways — e.g. on the street — or via taxi companies’ dedicated apps — as is the case in Singapore — then the deal hasn’t created a dominant player. It’s certainly a tricky one to assess.

Meanwhile, here is Grab’s statement on the Uber app extension and the IMD:

We appreciate that CCCS accepted our alternative interim measures. On CCCS’ request, we have agreed to extend the Uber app to 7 May to allow for a smoother transition time for riders and drivers. We trust that the CCCS’ review takes into account a dynamic industry that is constantly evolving, highly competitive, and being disrupted by technology and new services. The interim measures should not have the unintended effect of hampering competition and restricting businesses that have already been investing in the country over the years.

Grab notes the CCCS’ objective of giving drivers choice, and is fully supportive of extending our platform to all taxi drivers, including ComfortDelGro drivers who are still constrained from picking up JustGrab jobs. Grab entered Singapore five years ago with minimal resources and the goal of enabling all taxi drivers to earn a better living using our platform. We recognise CCCS’ commitment to preserving competition; all companies – no matter big or small, digital or traditional – are capable of innovation in a free market.

We’re proud to headquarter in Singapore, where the country’s free market economy and policies enable businesses to compete and innovate vigorously to solve customer needs. We trust the government will continue to be pro-business in providing a path for startups to flourish and become sustainable businesses. We will work within the set constraints and continue to focus on building better products to compete, ensuring fairness for passengers and drivers, and cultivating the local tech talent pool through our regional R&D centre in Singapore.

Note: The original version of this story was updated to correct that Grab said it had been in contact with regulators prior to announcing the deal with Uber. Also corrected the name of its food delivery service is GrabFood.

Source: Tech Crunch