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Technology
Europelead data regulator has issued its first ever sanction of an EU institution — taking enforcement action against the European parliament over its use of US-based digital campaign company, NationBuilder, to process citizens& voter data ahead of the spring elections.
NationBuilder is a veteran of the digital campaign space — indeed, we first covered the company back in 2011— which has become nearly ubiquitous for digital campaigns in some markets.
But in recent years European privacy regulators have raised questions over whether all its data processing activities comply with regional data protection rules, responding to growing concern around election integrity and data-fuelled online manipulation of voters.
The European parliament had used NationBuilder as a data processor for a public engagement campaign to promote voting in the spring election, which was run via a website called thistimeimvoting.eu.
The website collected personal data from more than 329,000 people interested in the EU election campaign — data that was processed on behalf of the parliament by NationBuilder.
The European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS), which started an investigation in February 2019, acting on its own initiative — and &taking into account previous controversy surrounding this company& as its press release puts it — found the parliament had contravened regulations governing how EU institutions can use personal data related to the selection and approval of sub-processors used by NationBuilder.
The sub-processors in question are not named. (We&ve asked for more details.)
The parliament received a second reprimand from the EDPS after it failed to publish a compliant Privacy Policy for the thistimeimvotingwebsite within the deadline set by the EDPS.Although the regulator says it acted in line with its recommendations in the case of both sanctions.
The EDPS also has an ongoing investigation into whether the Parliamentuse of the voter mobilization website, and related processing operations of personal data, were in accordance with rules applicable to EU institutions (as set out in Regulation (EU) 2018/1725).
The enforcement actions had not been made public until a hearing earlier this week — when assistant data protection supervisor, Wojciech Wiewiórowski, mentioned the matter during a Q-A session in front of MEPs.
He referred to the investigation as &one of the most important cases we did this year&, without naming the data processor. &Parliament was not able to create the real auditing actions at the processor,& he told MEPs. &Neither control the way the contract has been done.&
&Fortunately nothing bad happened with the data but we had to make this contract terminated the data being erased,& he added.
When TechCrunch asked the EDPS for more details about this case on Tuesday a spokesperson told us the matter is &still ongoing& and &being finalized& and that it would communicate about it soon.
Todaypress release looks to be the upshot.
Provided canned commentary in the release Wiewiórowski writes:
The EU parliamentary elections came in the wake of a series of electoral controversies, both within the EU Member States and abroad, which centred on the the threat posed by online manipulation. Strong data protection rules are essential for democracy, especially in the digital age. They help to foster trust in our institutions and the democratic process, through promoting the responsible use of personal data and respect for individual rights. With this in mind, starting in February 2019, the EDPS acted proactively and decisively in the interest of all individuals in the EU to ensure that the European Parliament upholds the highest of standards when collecting and using personal data. It has been encouraging to see a good level of cooperation developing between the EDPS and the European Parliament over the course of this investigation.
One question that arises is why no firmer sanction has been issued to the European parliament — beyond a (now public) reprimand, some nine months after the investigation began.
Another question is why the matter was not more transparently communicated to EU citizens.
The EDPS& PR emphasizes that its actions &are not limited to reprimands&, without explaining why the two enforcements thus far didn&t merit tougher action. (At the time of writing the EDPS had not responded to questions about why no fines have so far been issued.)
There may be more to come, though.
The regulator says it will &continue to check the parliamentdata protection processes& — revealing that the European Parliament has finished informing individuals of a revised intention to retain personal data collected by the thistimeimvoting website until 2024.
&The outcome of these checks could lead to additional findings,& it warns, adding that it intends to finalise the investigation by the end of this year.
Asked about the case, a spokeswoman for the European parliament told us that the thistimeimvoting campaign had been intended to motivate EU citizens to participate in the democratic process, and that itused a mix of digital tools and traditional campaigning techniques in order to try to reach as many potential voters as possible.
She said NationBuilder had been used as a customer relations management platform to support staying in touch with potential voters — via an offer to interested citizens to sign up to receive information from the parliament about the elections (including events and general info).
Subscribers were also asked about their interests — which allowed the parliament to send personalized information to people who had signed up.
Some of the regulatory concerns around NationBuilder have centered on how it allows campaigns to match data held in their databases (from people who have signed up) with social media data thatpublicly available, such as an unlocked Twitter account or public Facebook profile.
TechCrunch understands the European parliament was not using this feature.
In 2017 in France, after an intervention by the national data watchdog, NationBuilder suspended the data matching tool in the market.
The same feature has attracted attention from the UKInformation Commissioner — which warned last year that political parties should be providing a privacy notice to individuals whose data is collected from public sources such as social media and matched. Yet aren&t.
&The ICO is concerned about political parties using this functionality without adequate information being provided to the people affected,& the ICO said in the report, while stopping short of ordering a ban on the use of the matching feature.
Its investigation confirmed that up to 200 political parties or campaign groups used NationBuilder during the 2017 UK general election.
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Read more: European parliament’s NationBuilder contract under investigation by data regulator
Write comment (98 Comments)The Samsung Galaxy Fold is a very unique smartphone, in more ways than one. The most obvious differentiator is that it folds out to expose a large, continuous 7.3″ display, hiding the seam thanks to a flexible OLED screen. Italso at the very top end of the smartphone market price-wise, which could explain why it only debuted in a few limited markets at launch. Samsung says that customer interest has helped expand that initial pool of availability, however, which is why itlaunching pre-orders in Canada today.
Theregoing to be some sticker shock for Canadians, however: The Fold starts at $2,599.99 CAD in its newest market. Thatthe price you&d pay for a well-specced computer, but itactually right in line with the price of the phone in the U.S. when you account for currency conversion. Pre-orders are also going to be exclusively in-store, at SamsungEaton Center, Sherway Gardens and Yorkdale locations, all of which are in Toronto. Retail sales, also exclusive to Samsungown retail operations, are starting December 6 but pre-order customers will be able to ensure a day one pickup.
SamsungGalaxy Fold has had a bit of an uneven launch, with a first attempt cancelled in light of multiple reviewers experiencing issues with their devices. Samsung re-designed elements of the phone as a result, including adding caps to prevent dust entering the crucial hinge component that powers the folding actions, and embedding a necessary pre-installed protective screen covering under the phonebezels. Still, our own Brian Heater experienced a display hardware issue within a day with his redesigned review device.
Samsung is offering free &Fold Premiere Service& which includes discounted screen replacements and standard free repairs when an issue is not due to any misuse on a userpart. Overall, the takeaway should be that this is a first-generation device, but also a totally unique piece of technology in todaymarketplace for those willing to risk it.
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Read more: The Samsung Galaxy Fold is headed to Canada, with in-store pre-orders starting today
Write comment (98 Comments)Nix Pro 2 and Nix Mini color sensors are powerful, easy-to-use additions to any creative pro toolkit
Translating the physical world to the digital has been a challenge, especially when it comes to things like color: Color isn&t actually all that static a thing, and the myriad displays and cameras we use can represent them in very different ways. But new gadgets from startup Nix can help cut through the confusion & the Nix line of color sensors, including the accessible Nix Mini (normally $99) and the more sophisticated Nix Pro 2 (normally $349).
These devices are deceptively simple in their use and construction, but do one job remarkably well & with a lot going on behind the scenes to make that possible. They&re main purpose is to give you a digital interpretation of an analog color, which could be the color of any surface you come across. To do this, they house a small lens and sensor inside a diamond-shaped plastic enclosure. Both the Mini and the Pro are easily pocketable, but the Mini is about the diameter of a large coin, while the Pro feels more like a golf ball in the hand.
The sensors include built-in batteries that charge via Micro USB, and since they aren&t really using that much power when in operation, you can get around 3,000 individual surface scans out of a single full battery. Using them is also fantastically easy: You download an app (Nix has three, including one for digital color capture, one for paint, and one for Pro users with additional info useful for professional paint shops and other applications), pair one of the devices (they should show up automatically once charged) and then tap a button in the app to scan a surface, holding the Nix up to said surface.
The process is super quick, and provides different results depending on which app you&re using. In the Nix Paints app, once you select your preferred brand, it&ll give you the closes possible off-the-shelf matches, which is great if you&re doing patch work or repainting a portion of your house. You can also get a palette of complimentary or otherwise matching colors for redecorating. And the ‘Digital& app lets you see all the HEX and other values you&d use for web or digital product design, and also build palettes that work together for project work.
[gallery ids="1917679,1917680,1917681,1917682"]
Nix Pro provides a range of color readouts that are used by professionals for super-accurate matching and measurement, and you can again use the built-in paint library to match accurately, or the color values to have a batch custom mixed to your specifications.
Nix can scan just about any surface, including all types of paints and fabrics, as well as tile and other flooring. Itan accessory that really makes quick and painless what has been a pretty messy process in the past, and it also comes calibrated out of the box so therenothing the user has to do to ensure color accuracy when actually using it.
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Fintech startup Bunq is launching a metal card called the Green Card. While some banks offer a cashback program with premium cards, Bunq is offering a special kind of &cashback&. For every €100 spent, Bunq plants a tree. The company has partnered with Eden Reforestation Projects to finance reforestation around the globe.
Manufacturing a metal card isn&t particularly environmentally friendly. Thatwhy the Green Card expires after six years instead of four years. It is also made of recyclable material (even though I&m not sure itthat easy to recycle a metal card with a chip, a magnetic stripe and an NFC antenna after it expires).
Other than that, the Green Card works more or less like the Travel Card. While Bunq offers traditional bank accounts, you can order a Travel Card or a Green Card and keep your existing bank account.
The Green Card is a Mastercard without any foreign exchange fee. The company uses the standard Mastercard exchange rate but doesn&t add any markup fee.
While the Green Card is a credit card, it doesn&t work like normal credit cards. You don&t get a direct debit on your bank account once a month to cover your credit line. Instead, you have to open the Bunq app and top up your Bunq account — topping up your account with another card may incur some fees, more details here. If you don&t have enough money on your account, the transaction gets rejected like a debit card.
The Travel Card costs €9.99 to order the card. Thereno monthly fee after that. The Green Card costs €99 per year. Bunq charges €0.99 per ATM withdrawal but you get 10 free withdrawals with the Green Card.
The company is selling a limited edition today with &Founders Edition& engraved in the top right corner but the first batch is nearly sold out:
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Read more: Bunq launches metal card and plants a tree for every €100 spent
Write comment (92 Comments)TikTok has issued a public apology to a teenager who had her account suspended shortly after posting a video that asked viewers to research the persecution of Uighur people and other Muslim groups in Xinjiang. TikTok included a &clarification on the timeline of events,& and said that the viral video was removed four days after it was posted on November 23 &due to a human moderation error& and did not violate the platformcommunity guidelines (the account @getmefamouspartthree and video have since been reinstated).
But the user, Feroza Aziz, who describes herself in her Twitter profile as &just a Muslim trying to spread awareness,& rejected TikTokclaims, tweeting &Do I believe they took it away because of an unrelated satirical video that was deleted on a previous deleted account of mine? Right after I finished posting a 3 part video about the Uyghurs? No.&
In the video removed by TikTok, Aziz begins by telling viewers to use an eyelash curler, before telling them to put it down and &use your phone, that you&re using right now, to search up whathappening in China, how they&re getting concentration camps, throwing innocent Muslims in there, separating families from each other, kidnapping them, murdering them, raping them, forcing them to eat pork, forcing them to drink, forcing them to convert. This is another Holocaust, yet no one is talking about it. Please be aware, please spread awareness in Xinjiang right now.&
TikTok is owned by ByteDance and the videoremoval led to claims that the Beijing-based company capitulated to pressure from the Chinese Communist Party (Douyin, ByteDanceversion of TikTok for China, is subject to the same censorship laws as other online platforms in China).
Though the government-directed persecution of Muslim minority groups in China began several years ago and about a million people are believed to be detained in internment camps, awareness of the crisis was heightened this month after two significant leaks of classified Chinese government documents were published by the New York Times and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, confirming reports by former inmates, eyewitnesses and researchers.
Aziz told BuzzFeed News she has been talking about the persecution of minority groups in China since 2018 because &as a Muslim girl, I&ve always been oppressed and seen my people be oppressed, and I&ve always been into human rights.&
In the BuzzFeed News article, published before TikTokapology post, the company claimed Azizaccount suspension was related to another video she made that contained an image of Osama Bin Laden. The video was created as a satirical response to a meme about celebrity crushes and Aziz told BuzzFeed News that &it was a dark humor joke that he was at the end, because obviously no one in their right mind would think or say that.& A TikTok spokesperson said it nonetheless &violated its policies on terrorism-related content.&
&While we recognize that this video may have been intended as satire, our policies on this front are currently strict. Any such content, when identified, is deemed a violation of our Community Guidelines and Terms of Service, resulting in a permanent ban of the account and associated devices,& a TikTok spokesperson told BuzzFeed, adding that the suspension of Azizsecond account, which the makeup tutorial video was posted on, was part of the platformblocking of 2,406 devices linked to previously suspended accounts.
In TikTokapology post today, TikTok US head of safety Eric Tan wrote that the platform relies on technology to uphold community guidelines and human moderators as a &second line of defense.&
&We acknowledge that at times, this process will not be perfect. Humans will sometimes make mistakes, such as the one made today in the case of @getmefamouspartthreevideo,& he added. &When those mistakes happen, however, our commitment is to quickly address and fix them, undertake trainings or make changes to reduce the risk of the same mistakes being repeated, and fully own the responsibility for our errors.&
Aziz told the Washington Post, however, that &TikTok is trying to cover up this whole mess. I won&t let them get away with this.&
The controversy comes as TikTok faces an inquiry by the U.S. government into how it secures the personal data of users. Reuters reported yesterday that TikTok plans to separate its product and business development, and marketing and legal teams from Douyin in the third quarter of this year.
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The market for second-hand clothes — the &circular economy& as itsometimes called — has been on the rise in the last several years, fuelled by economic crunches, a desire to make more responsible and less wasteful fashion choices, and a wave of digital platforms that are bringing the selling and buying of used clothes outside the charity shop. Today, one of the bigger companies in Europe working in the third of these areas is announcing a huge round of funding to double down on the trend.
Vinted, a site where consumers can sell and buy second-hand fashion, has raised €128 million (around $140.9 million) in a round that is being led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with previous backers Sprints Capital, Insight Venture Partners, Accel and Burda Principal Investments also participating.
With this investment, the startup — founded and headquartered out of Vilnius, Lithuania — has passed a valuation of $1 billion (it is not specifying an exact amount), making it one of the biggest startups to come out of the country (but not the Baltics& first unicorn… Estonian Uber competitor Bolt, formerly known as Taxify, is also valued at over $1 billion.)
The company is going to use the money to continue expanding in Europe, and building out more features on its platform to improve the buying and selling process, while sticking to its goal of providing a platform for consumers to list and buy used fashion.
&We want to make sure we don&t have new products,& CEO Thomas Plantenga said in an interview earlier. &All our sellers are regular people.& Some 75% of Vinted customers have never bought or sold second hand clothes in their lives before coming to the platform, he added. &The stigma is no longer there.&
Vintedgrowth comes on the heels of a remarkable turnaround for the startup. Founded in 2008 by Milda Mitkute and Justas Janauskas as a way to help Mitkute clear out her wardrobe before a house move, the company expanded fast, but at a price: by 2016, it was close to running out of money and business had slowed down to a crawl. Investors brought in Plantenga to turn it around.
&We changed the business model in 2016 to make the costs as low as possible for users to list clothes,& Pantenga said today. &That produced a dramatic change in our growth trajectory.&
The company, more specifically, went through some drastic changes. First, it clawed back a lot of its pricey international expansion strategy (and along with that a lot of the costs associated with it); and second, it removed all listing fees to encourage more people to list. Now, Vinted charges a 5% commission only if you conduct transactions on Vinted itself, bundling in buyer protection and shipping to sweeten the deal. (You can still post, sell and buy for free if you pay offline but you don&t get those perks.)
The turnaround worked, and the company bounced back, and two years later, in 2018, it went on to raise €50 million. Today, Vinted has some 180 million products live on its platform, 25 million registered users in 11 markets (plus a small base of users in the US, but business there is not actively cultivated) and 300 employees. It expects to sell €1.3 billion in clothes in 2019, has seen sales grow 4x in the last 17 months.
From fast fashion to fashion that lasts
Vintedrise has matched a wider trend in the region.
Europe is the home to some of the worldbiggest &fast fashion& businesses: companies like H-M, Zara and Primark have built huge brands around making quick copies of the hottest styles off the fashion presses, and selling them for prices that will not break the bank (or at least, no more than you might have previously paid to buy a pair of average jeans on the discount rack of a Gap).
But it turns out that Europe is also home to a very thriving market in second-hand clothes. One estimate has it that two out of every three Europeans have bought a second-hand good, and 6 out of 10 have sold their belongings using platforms dedicated to second-hand trade.
So even as the company continues to hold back on expanding in the US — perhaps burned a little too much by its previous efforts there; or simply aware of the wide competition from the likes of Ebay, OfferUp, Letgo, Poshmark, and many more — Vintedgrowth in Europe has caught the eye of US investors.
&At Lightspeed, we look for outlier management teams building generational companies. We&ve been impressed by the teamability to build an incredible product and value proposition for their community, and adapt and expand their business along the way,& said Brad Twohig, a partner at Lightspeed. &Vinted is defining its market and has built a global brand in C2C commerce and communities. We&re proud to partner with Vinted and leverage our global platform and resources to help them continue to build on their success and achieve their goals.&
While charity shops have traditionally dominated this market, sites like eBay, followed by a secondary wave of platforms like Vinted and another competitor in this space, Depop, have made selling and buying items into an established, low-barrier business.
All the same, given that extending the life of onegoods feeds into a do-good ethos, itnoticeable to me that Vinted hasn&t quite replaced the Salvation Army. There is no easy facility to sell on Vinted and give the proceeds to charity, if you so choose.
This could be something Vinted might try to address in the future, but there are no concrete plans at the moment.
&We are looking at making fashion circular for our users so that clothing that they bought doesn&t go to waste,& Plantenga said. &[Giving proceeds to charity] is super interesting and we should explore it as part of our growth story. To be honest, those things have been in the background and not developed because we&ve just been trying to keep up with everything, but the idea fits into our culture.&
E-commerce — in particular startups nipping at the heels of bigger players like Amazon and eBay by focusing on specific areas of the market that aren&t as well served by them — has had a bumper day in Europe, after brick-and-mortar marketplace Trouva earlier today also raised a sizeable round.
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Read more: Vinted, the second-hand clothes marketplace, raises $141M at a $1B+ valuation
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