Ideaforge

Two Democratic senators introduced a bill Thursday that would strip away the liability shield that social media platforms hold dear when those companies boost anti-vaccine conspiracies and other kinds of health misinformation.

The Health Misinformation Act, introduced by Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Ben Ray Luján (D-NM), would create a new carve-out in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to hold platforms liable for algorithmically-promoted health misinformation and conspiracies. Platforms rely on Section 230 to protect them from legal liability for the vast amount of user-created content they host.

“For far too long, online platforms have not done enough to protect the health of Americans,” Klobuchar said. “These are some of the biggest, richest companies in the world and they must do more to prevent the spread of deadly vaccine misinformation.”

The bill would specifically alter Section 230’s language to revoke liability protections in the case of “health misinformation that is created or developed through the interactive computer service” if that misinformation is amplified through an algorithm. The proposed exception would only kick in during a declared national public health crisis, like the advent of Covid-19, and wouldn’t apply in normal times. The bill would task the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) with defining health misinformation.

“Features that are built into technology platforms have contributed to the spread of misinformation and disinformation, with social media platforms incentivizing individuals to share content to get likes, comments, and other positive signals of engagement, which rewards engagement rather than accuracy,” the bill reads.

The bill also makes mention of the “disinformation dozen” — just twelve people, including anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and a grab bag of other conspiracy theorists, who account for a massive swath of the anti-vax misinformation ecosystem. Many of the individuals on the list still openly spread their messaging through social media accounts on Twitter, Facebook and other platforms.

Section 230’s defenders generally view the idea of new carve-outs to the law as dangerous. Because Section 230 is such a foundational piece of the modern internet, enabling everything from Yelp and Reddit to the comment section below this post, they argue that the potential for unforeseen second order effects means the law should be left intact.

But some members of Congress — both Democrats and Republicans — see Section 230 as a valuable lever in their quest to regulate major social media companies. While the White House is pursuing its own path to craft consequences for overgrown tech companies through the Justice Department and the FTC, Biden’s office said earlier this week that the president is “reviewing” Section 230 as well. But as Trump also discovered, weakening Section 230 is a task that only Congress is positioned to accomplish — and even that is still a long shot.

While the new Democratic bill is narrowly targeted as far as proposed changes to Section 230 go, it’s also unlikely to attract bipartisan support.

Republicans are also interest in stripping away some of Big Tech’s liability protections, but generally hold the view that platforms remove too much content rather than too little. Republicans are also more likely to sow misinformation about the Covid-19 vaccines themselves, framing vaccination as a partisan issue. Whether the bill goes anywhere or not, it’s clear that an alarming portion of Americans have no intention of getting vaccinated — even with a much more contagious variant on the rise and colder months on the horizon.

“As COVID-19 cases rise among the unvaccinated, so has the amount of misinformation surrounding vaccines on social media,” Luján said of the proposed changes to Section 230. “Lives are at stake.”

Source: Tech Crunch

In the United States, same-day and next-day Amazon Prime deliveries have become the de facto standard in e-commerce. People want convenience and instant gratification, evidenced by the fact that an astonishing ~45% of U.S. consumers are Amazon Prime members.

Most major retailers are scrambling to catch up to Amazon by partnering with last-mile delivery startups. Walmart has become a major investor in Cruise for autonomous-vehicle deliveries, and Target acquired Shipt and Deliv last-mile delivery startups to increase its delivery speed. Costco partnered with Instacart for same-day deliveries, and even Domino’s Pizza has jumped in by partnering with Nuro for last-mile delivery using autonomous vehicles.

The holdout: Latin America

Venture capitalists have been investing heavily in last-mile delivery over the past five years on a global scale, but Latin America (LatAm) has lagged behind. Over $11 billion has been invested globally in last-mile logistics over the past decade, but Latin America only saw about $1 billion over the same period (Source: PitchBook and WIND Ventures research).

Within this, only about $300 million was in Spanish-speaking Latin America — a surprisingly small amount for a region that has 110 million more consumers than in the U.S.

Brazil-based Loggi accounts for about 60% of last-mile VC investment in Latin America, but it only operates in Brazil. That leaves major Spanish countries like Mexico, Colombia, Chile and Argentina without a leading independent last-mile logistics company.

In these countries, about 60% of the last-mile delivery market is dominated by small, informal companies or independent drivers using their own trucks. This results in inefficiencies due to a lack of technologies such as route optimization as well as a lack of operating scale. These issues are quickly becoming more pronounced as e-commerce in LatAm has taken off at a compound annual industry growth rate of 16% over the past five years.

Retailers are missing an opportunity to give customers what they want. Customers today expect free, reliable same- or next-day delivery — on-time, all the time, and without damage or theft. All of these are challenging in LatAm. Theft, in particular, is a significant problem, because unprofessional drivers often steal products out for delivery and then sell them for a profit. Cost is a problem, too, because free same- and next-day deliveries are simply not available in many places.

Operational and technological roadblocks abound

Why does Latin America lag when it comes to the last mile? First, traditional LatAm e-commerce delivery involves multiple time-consuming steps: Products are picked up from the retailer, delivered to a cross-dock, distributed to a warehouse, delivered to a second cross-dock, and then finally delivered to the customer.

By comparison, modern delivery operations are much simpler. Products are picked up from the retailer, delivered to a cross-dock, and then delivered directly to the customer. There’s no need for warehousing and an extra pre-warehouse cross-dock.

And those are just the operational challenges. Lack of technology also plays a significant role. Most delivery coordination and routing in LatAm are still done via a spreadsheet or pen and paper.

Dispatchers have to manually pick up a phone to call drivers and dispatch them. In the U.S., computerized optimization algorithms dramatically cut both delivery cost and time by automatically finding the most efficient route (e.g., packing the most deliveries possible on a truck along the route) and automatically dispatching the driver that can most efficiently complete the route based on current location, capacity and experience with the route. These algorithms are almost unheard of in the Latin America retail logistics sector.

Major retail brands are the last-mile catalyst

Source: Tech Crunch

Waymo, Google’s former self-driving car project that’s now an independent business unit under Alphabet, is expanding its presence in the eastern U.S. The company said Thursday it would be opening offices in Pittsburgh, joining a growing suite of companies developing and testing autonomous vehicle technology in the Steel City.

The company will start by hiring around a dozen engineers, a source familiar with the move told TechCrunch, and they’ll co-locate in Google’s existing offices in the Bakery Square district. As of Thursday, only around three open positions for the Pittsburgh area were listed on Waymo’s website, but the company will be adding more roles soon.

Some of the new team will come from Pittsburgh-based RobotWits, a tech startup focused on autonomous vehicle decision-making. That includes RobotWits’ founder and CEO Maxim Likhachev, and other members of its engineering and technical team. While Waymo did not technically acquire the startup, it did acquire RobotWits’ IP rights, the source said.

There are no current plans to deploy the so-called Waymo Driver, its autonomous driving platform, in Pittsburgh, the source added. Instead, the new team will work on motion planning development, real-time route planning and developing Driver. Thus far, Driver has seen deployment in the Phoenix, Arizona metro area. Its Waymo Via trucking and cargo service will be deployed in a test run with trucking logistics company J.B. Hunt Transport Services in Texas.

AV tech rivals Aurora, Motional, Argo AI have already established offices in the city; combined with talent at Carnegie Melon University, the city has established itself as a bona fide hub for autonomous engineering development. Pittsburgh is also home to many smaller AV startups, including Locomation, which is working on autonomous trucks.

Waymo’s Pittsburgh location will join its network of offices in Mountain View, San Francisco, Phoenix, New York, Dallas and Hyderabad, India.

Source: Tech Crunch

Finding go-to-market fit (GTM) is a pivotal moment for a startup. It means you’ve found a repeatable formula for finding and winning lead that can be written into a repeatable GTM playbook. But before you scale up your sales and marketing, you should check the metrics to make sure you’re ready.

So, how do you know when your startup is ready to scale? I’ll help you answer this using numbers you can calculate on a napkin.

You have to consider three metrics — gross churn rate, the magic number and gross margin. With these, you can measure the health and profitability of your business. By combining them into a simple equation, you can get your LTV:CAC ratio (long-term customer value to customer acquisition cost), which is a measure of your business’ long-term financial outlook. If the LTV:CAC is over 3, you’re ready to scale.

Let’s unpack the three basic metrics:

Gross churn rate (GCR) is a measure of product-market fit (PMF). GCR is the percentage of recurring revenue lost from customers that didn’t renew. It answers the question: Do your customers stay with you? If your customers don’t stick with you, you haven’t found PMF.

GCR = Lost monthly recurring revenue / Total MRR.

Example: At the beginning of March, the company brought in $60,000 in MRR. By the end of the month, $15,000 worth of contracts didn’t renew.

GCR = $15,000 / $60,000 = 0.25, or 25% GCR.

Source: Tech Crunch

Maine has joined a growing number of cities, counties and states that are rejecting dangerously biased surveillance technologies like facial recognition.

The new law, which is the strongest statewide facial recognition law in the country, not only received broad, bipartisan support, but it passed unanimously in both chambers of the state legislature. Lawmakers and advocates spanning the political spectrum — from the progressive lawmaker who sponsored the bill to the Republican members who voted it out of committee, from the ACLU of Maine to state law enforcement agencies — came together to secure this major victory for Mainers and anyone who cares about their right to privacy.

Maine is just the latest success story in the nationwide movement to ban or tightly regulate the use of facial recognition technology, an effort led by grassroots activists and organizations like the ACLU. From the Pine Tree State to the Golden State, national efforts to regulate facial recognition demonstrate a broad recognition that we can’t let technology determine the boundaries of our freedoms in the digital 21^st century.

Facial recognition technology poses a profound threat to civil rights and civil liberties. Without democratic oversight, governments can use the technology as a tool for dragnet surveillance, threatening our freedoms of speech and association, due process rights, and right to be left alone. Democracy itself is at stake if this technology remains unregulated.

We know the burdens of facial recognition are not borne equally, as Black and brown communities — especially Muslim and immigrant communities — are already targets of discriminatory government surveillance. Making matters worse, face surveillance algorithms tend to have more difficulty accurately analyzing the faces of darker-skinned people, women, the elderly and children. Simply put: The technology is dangerous when it works — and when it doesn’t.

But not all approaches to regulating this technology are created equal. Maine is among the first in the nation to pass comprehensive statewide regulations. Washington was the first, passing a weak law in the face of strong opposition from civil rights, community and religious liberty organizations. The law passed in large part because of strong backing from Washington-based megacorporation Microsoft. Washington’s facial recognition law would still allow tech companies to sell their technology, worth millions of dollars, to every conceivable government agency.

In contrast, Maine’s law strikes a different path, putting the interests of ordinary Mainers above the profit motives of private companies.

Maine’s new law prohibits the use of facial recognition technology in most areas of government, including in public schools and for surveillance purposes. It creates carefully carved out exceptions for law enforcement to use facial recognition, creating standards for its use and avoiding the potential for abuse we’ve seen in other parts of the country. Importantly, it prohibits the use of facial recognition technology to conduct surveillance of people as they go about their business in Maine, attending political meetings and protests, visiting friends and family, and seeking out healthcare.

In Maine, law enforcement must now — among other limitations — meet a probable cause standard before making a facial recognition request, and they cannot use a facial recognition match as the sole basis to arrest or search someone. Nor can local police departments buy, possess or use their own facial recognition software, ensuring shady technologies like Clearview AI will not be used by Maine’s government officials behind closed doors, as has happened in other states.

Maine’s law and others like it are crucial to preventing communities from being harmed by new, untested surveillance technologies like facial recognition. But we need a federal approach, not only a piecemeal local approach, to effectively protect Americans’ privacy from facial surveillance. That’s why it’s crucial for Americans to support the Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act, a bill introduced by members of both houses of Congress last month.

The ACLU supports this federal legislation that would protect all people in the United States from invasive surveillance. We urge all Americans to ask their members of Congress to join the movement to halt facial recognition technology and support it, too.

Source: Tech Crunch

Mobileye, a subsidiary of Intel, has expanded its autonomous vehicle testing program to New York City as part of its strategy to develop and deploy the technology.

New York City joins a number of other cities including Detroit, Paris, Shanghai and Tokyo where Mobileye has either launched testing or plans to this year. Mobileye launched its first test fleet in Jerusalem in 2018 and added one in Munich in 2020.

“If we want to build something that will scale, we need to be able to drive in challenging places and almost everywhere,” Mobileye president and CEO Amnon Shashua said during a presentation Tuesday that was streamed live. As part of the announcement, Mobileye also released a 40-minute unedited video of one of its test vehicles equipped with a self-driving system navigating New York’s city streets.

These vehicles, which began testing in New York City last month, are driving autonomously with a safety operator behind the wheel using only cameras. The vehicles are equipped with 8 long-range and 4 parking cameras powered by its fifth generation system on chip called EyeQ5.

That does not mean that Mobileye is taking a camera-only approach to autonomy once it deploys. The company has also developed another subsystem with lidar and radar, but no cameras that also drives autonomously. The two subsystems of sensors and software will be combined and integrated to provide redundancy in robotaxis. The camera-only subsystem is what Shashua described as at “the cost level for consumers” and one that will be used to evolve driving assist systems. Later this year, Mobilieye’s camera-only system using the EyeQ5 SoC will be launched in a Geely Auto Group vehicle.

New York City has been in Shashua’s sights for more than six months. He first mentioned a desire to test on public roads in New York during the virtual 2021 CES tech trade show in January with the caveat that the company would need to receive regulatory approval. Now, with that regulatory approval in hand, Mobileye is the only company currently permitted to test AVs in the state and city. GM’s self-driving subsidiary Cruise outlined in 2017 a plan to test AVs in New York and even mapped parts of lower Manhattan. The company never scaled up the test program in NYC, deciding instead to focus on its primary target for commercial deployment: San Francisco. 

Mobileye applied for a permit through New York State’s autonomous vehicle technology demonstration and testing program. The company met the requirements outlined in the program which includes compliance with all federal standards and applicable New York State inspection standards as well as a law enforcement interaction plan, according to Mobileye.

“I don’t think there’s anything special about receiving approval you simply need to go through this process, Shashua said, who described it has lengthy and in some ways similar to the stringent requirements to test in Germany. “I think what is special is that it’s very very difficult to drive here.”

Mobileye is perhaps best known for supplying automakers with computer vision technology that powers advanced driver assistance systems. It’s a business that generated nearly $$967 million in sales for the company. Today, 88 million vehicles on the road are using Mobileye’s computer vision technology.

Mobileye has also been developing automated vehicle technology. Its full self-driving stack — which includes redundant sensing subsystems based on camera, radar and lidar technology — is combined with its REM mapping system and a rules-based Responsibility-Sensitive Safety (RSS) driving policy.

Mobileye’s REM mapping system crowdsources data by tapping into consumer and fleet vehicles equipped with its so-called EyeQ4, or fourth generation system on chip, to build high-definition maps that can be used to support in ADAS and autonomous driving systems. That data is not video or images but compressed text that collects about 10 kilobits per kilometer. Mobileye has agreements with six OEMs, including BMW, Nissan and Volkswagen, to collect that data on vehicles equipped with the EyeQ4 chip, which is used to power the advanced driver assistance system. On fleet vehicles, Mobileye collects data from an after-market product it sells to commercial operators.

Mobileye’s technology is mapping nearly 8 million kilometers day globally, including in New York City.

The strategy, Shashua contends, will allow the company to efficiently launch and operate commercial robotaxi services as well as bring the technology to consumer passenger vehicles by 2025. Shashua explained this dual approach in an interview with TechCrunch in 2020. 

“There was realization that dawned on us awhile ago,” he said at the time. “The Holy Grail of this business is passenger car autonomy: where you buy a passenger car and you pay an option price and with a press of button it can take you autonomously to wherever you want to go. The realization is that you can’t reach that Holy Grail if you don’t go through the robotaxi business.”

On Tuesday, Shashua said Mobileye was the only company that has its foot in both camps. (Although it should be noted that Toyota’s Woven Planet does have some strategic overlap.)

“We’re building our technology in a way that supports scale, especially geographic scale, using our crowdsourced mapping technology and building new sensors such that the entire package — the entire system — will be under $5,000 cost to allow consumer AVs, and on the other hand, we have a division building a mobility-as-a-service or robotaxi service,” Shashua said Tuesday. “This is one of the reasons why we purchased Moovit last year, to enable the customer facing of all the layers above the self-driving system to enable mobility-as-a-service business.”

Source: Tech Crunch