Google has been sanctioned A$60 million (around $40M+) in Australia over Android settings it had applied, dating back around five years, which were found — in a 2021 court ruling — to have mislead consumers about its location data collection.

Australia’s Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) instigated proceedings against Google and its Australia subsidiary back in October 2019, going on to take the tech giant to court for making misleading representations to consumers about the collection and use of their personal location data on Android phones, between January 2017 and December 2018.

In April 2021 the court found Google had breached Australia’s Consumer Law when it represented to some Android users that the “Location History” setting was the only Google account setting affecting whether it collected, kept and used personally identifiable data about their location.

In actuality, another setting — called ‘Web & App Activity’ — also enabled Google to grab Android users’ location data and this was turned on by default, as the ACCC noted in a press release today. Aka, a classic dark pattern. (Actually Google deployed nested dark patterns, plural, as we detail below.)

The regulator estimates that users of around 1.3 million Google accounts in Australia may have viewed a screen found by the Court to have breached the Consumer Law.

“This significant penalty imposed by the Court today sends a strong message to digital platforms and other businesses, large and small, that they must not mislead consumers about how their data is being collected and used,” said ACCC chair, Gina Cass-Gottlieb, in a statement.

“Google, one of the world’s largest companies, was able to keep the location data collected through the ‘Web & App Activity’ setting and that retained data could be used by Google to target ads to some consumers, even if those consumers had the ‘Location History’ setting turned off.”

“Personal location data is sensitive and important to some consumers, and some of the users who saw the representations may have made different choices about the collection, storage and use of their location data if the misleading representations had not been made by Google,” she added.

Per the ACCC, Google took steps to correct the contravening conduct by 20 December 2018, meaning consumers in the country were no longer shown the misleading screens.

At the time of the court ruling last year, Google said it disagreed with the findings and that it was considering an appeal. But, in the event, it decided to take the lumps.

(These are not as painful as they might have been if the infringements had occurred more recently: The ACCC notes that the majority of the sanctioned conduct occurred prior to September 2018 which is before the maximum penalty for breaches of the Consumer Law was substantially increased — from $1.1M per breach to — since then — the higher of $10M, 3x the value of any benefit obtained or, if the value cannot be determined, 10% of turnover.)

The Court has also ordered Google to ensure its policies include a commitment to compliance, and requirements that it train certain staff about the country’s Consumer Law, as well as to pay a contribution to the ACCC’s costs.

Google was contacted for comment on the sanction. A company spokesperson sent us this statement:

“We can confirm that we’ve agreed to settle the matter concerning historical conduct from 2017-2018. We’ve invested heavily in making location information simple to manage and easy to understand with industry-first tools like auto-delete controls, while significantly minimising the amount of data stored. As we’ve demonstrated, we’re committed to making ongoing updates that give users control and transparency, while providing the most helpful products possible.”

Dark patterns inside dark patterns

The ACCC’s press release includes some screengrabs showing Google notifications to Android users that the court found to be misleading — which includes three versions of Google’s Web & Activity setting screen shown to consumers setting up a Google account on their device that do not mention the word “location” at all.

Instead, on one — which appeared between April 30, 2018 and December 19 2018 — Google instructs consumers that the setting “saves your searches, Chrome browsing history and activity from sites and apps that use Google services”, before nudging them to retain a pre-selected option to “save my Web & Activity to my Google account” (aka, opt into Google’s tracking) by suggesting: “This gives you better search results, suggestions and personalisation across Google services.” But nowhere does it explain that the user is agreeing to be location tracked.

If Android users chose to try to turn off “Location History” — i.e. via a totally separate setting that did not actually enable them to prevent Google’s location tracking — they could also be shown a confusing pop-up querying their decision to “Pause Location History?”, as Google put it, warning them the decision would “limit functionality of some Google products over time”.

It’s hard to know what even the point of this was, since the setting did not empower consumers to entirely prevent Google snooping on their location, so probably it was mostly there to spread FUD.

The text in this notification concludes with a further confusing line — telling the user to “remember, pausing this setting doesn’t delete any previous activity” — and pointing them to yet more settings where Google suggests they could “view and manage this information in your Location History map”. This was presumably intended to send them down a pointless rabbit hole — while drawing their attention away from the Web & Activity setting where Google had hidden another location tracking setting.

Other versions of the Web & Activity setting which the court found misleading Android users between early 2017 and late 2018 include one which contains a full five possible actions a user could take — a surfeit of choice obviously intended to bamboozle them into leaving the ‘on’ setting as is, since it’s so drastically unclear what anything else available on the screen means.

“If you use more than one account at the same time, some data may get saved in your default account. Learn more at support.google.com,” runs one prominent piece of cryptic Google small print — without actually hyperlinking the URL in question to send the consumer to where they might actually ‘learn more’ (or, well, quickly realize there is nothing much to learn and certainly no ‘off’ switch there).

This chunk of small print mostly appears intended to shield consumers from reading the actual description of the Web & Activity setting’s function — a setting which, remember, is defaulted to ‘on’ — since this very salient information is buried below it (and above a more eye-catching tick-box). But even here Google is not clear: Again, it does not use the word ‘location’ at all; there’s only an indirect reference to “Maps” buried in a list that foregrounds ‘faster searches’ and ‘customized experiences’ to nudge consumers to agree.

By using the name of its popular Maps product as a stand in for location Google appears to be suggesting that Android users need this setting to be on if they want to use Maps — rather than making it plain that the setting refers to its ability to track their location.

The same setting screen also includes a pre-ticked check-box next to yet more text that states: “Include Chrome browsing history and activity from websites and apps that use Google services” — so Google is seemingly unbundling tracking settings, presumably as a back-up in case one of these pre-checked settings gets unchecked, meaning it can at least grab data via the other.

After that there’s more small print, lodged under the bland rubric “data from this device”, which reads: “Control reporting of App Activity from this device”. However this text is not instantly visually linked to any setting the user is able to interact with — so anyone glancing at it might assume it’s not pointing them to an option at all and skip over it.

Airgapped below, towards the very bottom of the screen, is a hyperlinked option to “MANAGE ACTIVITY”. This text is bolder — being in ALL CAPS. So does draw the eye. Yet what even is this? Why does the user have to wade into fresh Google submenu hell to try to turn off tracking, as this option seems to be implying? Surely they can just toggle the ‘on’ switch at the top of the settings screen to do that…

Of course everything baked into this dark pattern layer cake is pushing the consumer far away from any understanding of what’s actually going on with their data in order that they give up and leave the default tracking on. Truly a masterclass in deceptive manipulative design.

Screengrab: ACCC

A big reboot?

While Google’s statement today on the ACCC sanction seeks to imply that all misleading location tracking stuff is in the past, the company is facing an ongoing investigation into the same practices in the European Union — open since February 2020 — where it could be on the hook for a more sizeable fine if it’s found to have infringed the bloc’s General Data Protection Regulation (as penalties can scale as high as 4% of global annual turnover).

Consumer watchdogs in the EU actually filed complaints about Google’s deceptive location tracking back in November 2018. So Google will still be able to claim it’s moved on — whatever the outcome.

A draft decision by Ireland’s DPA, which is leading the investigation, is expected this year — although a final decision could be pushed into 2023 since it must be reviewed by the bloc’s network of DPAs and agreement reached on any enforcement.

But there’s more — earlier this summer, European consumer rights groups filed a new series of complaints against Google — accusing the advertising giant of deceptive design around the account creation process that they say steers users into agreeing to extensive and invasive processing of their data.

The complaints highlight how many more ‘clicks’ are required by Google to let users opt out of its tracking vs handling it the keys to their data… so plus ça change right?

The plodding pace of European privacy law enforcement suggests Google can expect several years’ grace before any corrective orders land — leaving consumers exposed in the meanwhile.

But there’s some harder reform on the horizon: EU lawmakers recently agreed to include a ban on online platforms designing and deploying deceptive/manipulative and/or confusing interfaces in a forthcoming flagship update to the bloc’s digital rulebook.

The Digital Services Act (DSA) is generally intended to dial up responsibility and accountability around digital services by steering governance.

On dark patterns, much will hinge on the specifics of the DSA text, and its interpretation, clearly — and there may still be wiggle room for powerful platforms to find ways to use sharkish practices to rob consumers of their rights and agency. But a key feature of the law is it entails an active role for the European Commission in enforcement (against larger platforms — so called VLOPs).

This includes empowering the EU’s executive to step in and issue guidance on best practice in areas like interface design. Combined with a new ability to bare teeth at repeat offenders — as it gets empowered to hit VLOPs with beefy fines if they break the DSA’s rules — so some of the EU’s consumer-focused regulation could, suddenly, get rather harder to ignore. (The DSA will start applying from next year.)

Penalties for breaches of the DSA can scale up to 6% of global annual turnover. So the cost and risk of stealing people’s data are certainly rising. Whether it’ll be enough to give tracking giants pause for thought — or, what’s really needed, force meaningful reform of privacy-hostile business models — remains to be seen.

A new app for iPhone users can help you browse the web without being constantly bothered by pop-up panels that beg you to use the company’s app instead. The app, called Banish, is an Safari extension that helps remove the “open in app” banners from various websites and other popups that block content across a number of sites, like Reddit, TikTok, LinkedIn, Twitter, Quora, Medium, Yelp, and some Google sites, to name a few.

While there are a number of similar Safari extensions for blocking cookie banners and ads, the scourge of the “Open in App” banners is often not addressed by existing solutions. It’s unfortunate that using the mobile web today requires so many interventions, but that’s the state of the things. It’s also possibly a contributing factor as to why people are now spending four to five hours per day in their apps.

Developer Alex Zamoshchin says he was frustrated by the problem, too, as he felt people shouldn’t have to use a company’s app if they don’t want to. Taking inspiration from a similar cookie blocking extension, Hush, he created Banish.

The app was recently featured on Product Hunt and highlighted by the popular Apple blog Daring Fireball.

To use Banish, you’ll first install the app to your iPhone then configure it in the Settings. This involves a few key steps for Banish to function properly. There are two places where Banish needs to be enabled, under Safari Extensions — you need to toggle on the switch next to Banish under “Allow These Content Blockers” and “Allow These Extensions.” Then you need to set the “Allow” permission to “All Websites” below.

Image Credits: Banish

Once enabled, Banish can help you avoid pop-ups in many cases. But the app can’t eliminate all the “open in app” distractions.

For instance, we found clicking Reddit links would sometimes open in Safari and other times open the native app when we tested it. The developer explained the Reddit app doesn’t use consistently use deep links (links that open directly in apps) for all its pages. So while some pages would correctly deep link, others — like Reddit’s Topic pages — would not. We also had to set links to open in Safari by default. The solution was to long-press on the Reddit.com link you want to view, then tap on the option from the menu that appears to open the link in Safari. This will change the default action for Reddit links going forward, Zamoshchin says.

Another issue Banish can’t solve is with those “Open” links that are baked into Safari, like the ones that appear at the top of the page when you visit Instagram.com, for example. That’s a different type of banner than the ones this app was built to address. (If you don’t want to see these, you can uninstall the app from your iPhone.)

There were a few other quirks, as well. LinkedIn, for example, still showed a login box in Safari rather than immediately taking you to the person’s LinkedIn profile, if you were logged out when you visited the site. But that’s just how LinkedIn works. And while Twitter browsing is much easier, its website still includes Login/Signup buttons at the top of the screen and the same sort of baked in “Open” app button that Instagram.com offers at the top of the page. But, again, these are issues that are beyond Banish’s scope.

Still, in other ways, the app proved incredibly useful. For instance, when on Quora, clicking a link to another Quora page would normally pop up a blocker that requires you to log in to continue navigating the website. With Banish, this pop-up was gone and you could use the site normally.

The app is available for download on the App Store for a $1.99 one-time fee. It’s currently the No. 2 app on the Top Paid apps chart in the Utilities section of the App Store.

In June, Google told us that it would start merging its Duo video chat service for consumers with Meet, its Zoom competitor for business users. The next phase of this merger starts today.

Merging two apps was always going to be a complicated process. Add to that the overall confusion around Google’s messaging strategy and you can imagine what this looks like, but what Google is basically doing here is bringing all of Meet’s capabilities to the Duo app and then turning that into the new and updated Google Meet app.

In July, Google already started adding more of Meet’s capabilities to Duo in preparation for the transition, while Meet also got an update and a new green icon. Oh, and the Google Meet app is now called “Google Meet (original).” Users who don’t follow along with every turn and twist of this saga will surely wonder about that for a few seconds, before dropping into their next unnecessary meeting and forgetting all about it.

Starting today, Google will release an update to the Duo app for Android and iOS that will feature the new Meet logo, as well as a new notification in the app that explains what’s happening.

Since the Duo app already features Meet’s meeting capabilities today, there aren’t any major functional updates here, but it’s worth highlighting that you’ll need a Google account to use these meeting features (before, to use Duo, all you needed was a phone number).

Come September, all users will see the new Google Meet icon and app name. At that point, if you want to install Meet from Google’s Play Store of Apple’s App Store, you’ll get the updated Google Meet app (which used to be Google Duo) with the combined video calling and meeting features.

If you’re currently using the Google Meet (original) app, you can continue to do so for now, you just won’t get the new ad hoc calling features. At some point, though, that app will go away. “We’ll inform you when you should migrate to the new app experience,” Google says.

If you use Duo on the Web, you’ll see the new branding today, but that’s about all that will change. It’ll take a few months before the Duo website will redirect to Meet.

A ruling put out yesterday by the European Union’s top court could have major implications for online platforms that use background tracking and profiling to target users with behavioral ads or to feed recommender engines that are designed to surface so-called ‘personalized’ content.

The impacts could be even broader — with privacy law experts suggesting the judgement could dial up legal risk for a variety of other forms of online processing, from dating apps to location tracking and more. Although they suggest fresh legal referrals are also likely as operators seek to unpack what could be complex practical difficulties arising from the judgement.

The referral to the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) relates to a Lithuanian case concerning national anti-corruption legislation. But the impact of the judgement is likely to be felt across the region as it crystalizes how the bloc’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which sets the legal framework for processing personal data, should be interpreted when it comes to data ops in which sensitive inferences can be made about individuals.

Privacy watchers were quick to pay attention — and are predicting substantial follow-on impacts for enforcement as the CJEU’s guidance essentially instructs the region’s network of data protection agencies to avoid a too-narrow interpretation of what constitutes sensitive data, implying that the bloc’s strictest privacy protections will become harder for platforms to circumvent.

In an email to TechCrunch, Dr Gabriela Zanfir-Fortuna, VP for global privacy at the Washington-based thinktank, the Future of Privacy Forum, sums up the CJEU’s “binding interpretation” as a confirmation that data that are capable of revealing the sexual orientation of a natural person “by means of an intellectual operation involving comparison or deduction” are in fact sensitive data protected by Article 9 of the GDPR.

The relevant bit of the case referral to the CJEU related to whether the publication of the name of a spouse or partner amounted to the processing of sensitive data because it could reveal sexual orientation. The court decided that it does. And, by implication, that the same rule applies to inferences connected to other types of special category data.

“I think this might have broad implications moving forward, in all contexts where Article 9 is applicable, including online advertising, dating apps, location data indicating places of worship or clinics visited, food choices for airplane rides and others,” Zanfir-Fortuna predicted, adding: “It also raises huge complexities and practical difficulties to catalog data and build different compliance tracks, and I expect the question to come back to the CJEU in a more complex case.”

As she noted in her tweet, a similarly non-narrow interpretation of special category data processing recently got the gay hook-up app Grindr into hot water with Norway’s data protection agency, leading to fine of €10M, or around 10% of its annual revenue, last year.

GDPR allows for fines that can scale as high as 4% of global annual turnover (or up to €20M, whichever is greater). So any Big Tech platforms that fall foul of this (now) firmed-up requirement to gain explicit consent if they make sensitive inferences about users could face fines that are orders of magnitude larger than Grindr’s.

Ad tracking in the frame

Discussing the significance of the CJEU’s ruling, Dr Lukasz Olejnik, an independent consultant and security and privacy researcher based in Europe, was unequivocal in predicting serious impacts — especially for adtech.

“This is the single, most important, unambiguous interpretation of GDPR so far,” he told us. “It’s a rock-solid statement that inferred data, are in fact [personal] data. And that inferred protected/sensitive data, are protected/sensitive data, in line of Article 9 of GDPR.”

“This judgement will speed up the evolution of digital ad ecosystems, towards solutions where privacy is considered seriously,” he also suggested. “In a sense, it backs up the approach of Apple, and seemingly where Google wants to transition the ad industry [to, i.e. with its Privacy Sandbox proposal].”

Since May 2018, the GDPR has set strict rules across the bloc for processing so-called ‘special category’ personal data — such as health information, sexual orientation, political affiliation, trade union membership etc — but there has been some debate (and variation in interpretation between DPAs) about how the pan-EU law actually applies to data processing operations where sensitive inferences may arise.

This is important because large platforms have, for many years, been able to hold enough behavioral data on individuals to — essentially —  circumvent a narrower interpretation of special category data processing restrictions by identifying (and substituting) proxies for sensitive info.

Hence some platforms can (or do) claim they’re not technically processing special category data — while triangulating and connecting so much other personal information that the corrosive effect and impact on individual rights is the same. (It’s also important to remember that sensitive inferences about individuals do not have to be correct to fall under the GDPR’s special category processing requirements; it’s the data processing that counts, not the validity or otherwise of sensitive conclusions reached; indeed, bad sensitive inferences can be terrible for individual rights too.)

This might entail an ad-funded platforms using a cultural or other type of proxy for sensitive data to target interest-based advertising or to recommend similar content they think the user will also engage with. Examples of inferences could include using the fact a person has liked Fox News’ page to infer they hold right-wing political views; or linking membership of an online Bible study group to holding Christian beliefs; or the purchase of a stroller and cot, or a trip to a certain type of shop, to deduce a pregnancy; or inferring that a user of the Grindr app is gay or queer.

For recommender engines, algorithms may work by tracking viewing habits and clustering users based on these patterns of activity and interest in a bid to maximize engagement with their platform. Hence a big-data platform like YouTube’s AIs can populate a sticky sidebar of other videos enticing you to keep clicking. Or automatically select something ‘personalized’ to play once the video you actually chose to watch comes to an end. But, again, this type of behavioral tracking seems likely to intersect with protected interests and therefore, as the CJEU rules underscores, to entail the processing of sensitive data.

Facebook, for one, has long faced regional scrutiny for letting advertisers target users based on interests related to sensitive categories like political beliefs, sexuality and religion without asking for their explicit consent — which is the GDPR’s bar for (legally) processing sensitive data.

Although the tech giant now known as Meta has avoided direct sanction in the EU on this issue so far, despite being the target of a number of forced consent complaints — some of which date back to the GDPR coming into application more than four years ago. (A draft decision by Ireland’s DPA last fall, apparently accepting Facebook’s claim that it can entirely bypass consent requirements to process personal data by stipulating that users are in a contract with it to receive ads, was branded a joke by privacy campaigners at the time; the procedure remains ongoing, as a result of a review process by other EU DPAs — which, campaigners hope, will ultimately take a different view of the legality of Meta’s consent-less tracking-based business model. But that particular regulatory enforcement grinds on.)

In recent years, as regulatory attention — and legal challenges and privacy lawsuits — have dialled up, Facebook/Meta has made some surface tweaks to its ad targeting tools, announcing towards the end of last year, for example, that it would no longer allow advertisers to target sensitive interests like health, sexual orientation and political beliefs.

However it still processes vast amounts of personal data across its various social platforms to configure “personalized” content users see in their feeds. And it still tracks and profiles web users to target them with “relevant” ads — without providing people with a choice to deny that kind of intrusive behavioral tracking and profiling. So the company continues to operate a business model that relies upon extracting and exploiting people’s information without asking if they’re okay with that.

A tighter interpretation of existing EU privacy laws, therefore, poses a clear strategic threat to an adtech giant like Meta.

YouTube’s parent, Google/Alphabet, also processes vast amounts of personal data — both to configure content recommendations and for behavioral ad targeting — so it too could also be in the firing line if regulators pick up the CJEU’s steer to take a tougher line on sensitive inferences. Unless it’s able to demonstrate that it asks users for explicit consent to such sensitive processing. (And it’s perhaps notable that Google recently amended the design of its cookie consent banner in Europe to make it easier for users to opt out of that type of ad tracking — following a couple of tracking-focused regulatory interventions in France.)

“Those organisations who assumed [that inferred protected/sensitive data, are protected/sensitive data] and prepared their systems, should be OK. They were correct, and it seems that they are protected. For others this [CJEU ruling] means significant shifts,” Olejnik predicted. “This is about both technical and organisational measures. Because processing of such data is, well, prohibited. Unless some significant measures are deployed. Like explicit consent. This in technical practice may mean a requirement for an actual opt-in for tracking.”

“There’s no conceivable way that the current status quo would fulfil the needs of GDPR Article 9(2) paragraph by doing nothing,” he added. “Changes cannot happen just on paper. Not this time. DPAs just got a powerful ammunition. Will they want to use it? Keep in mind that while this judgement came this week, this is how the GDPR, and EU data protection law framework, actually worked from the start.”

The EU does have incoming regulations that will further tighten the operational noose around the most powerful ‘Big Tech’ online platforms, and more rules for so called very large online platforms (VLOPs), as the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and the Digital Services Act (DSA), respectively, are set to come into force from next year — with the goal of levelling the competitive playing field around Big Tech; and dialling up platform accountability for online consumers more generally.

The DSA even includes a provision that VLOPs that use algorithms to determine the content users see (aka “recommender systems”) will have to provide at least one option that is not based on profiling — so there is already an explicit requirement for a subset of larger platforms to give users a way to refuse behavioral tracking looming on the horizon in the EU.

But privacy experts we spoke to suggested the CJEU ruling will essentially widen that requirement to non-VLOPs too. Or at least those platforms that are processing enough data to run into the associated legal risk of their algorithms making sensitive inferences — even if they’re not consciously instructing them to (tl;dr, an AI blackbox must comply with the law, too).

Both the DSA and DMA will also introduce a ban on the use of sensitive data for ad targeting — which, combined with the CJEU’s confirmation that sensitive inferences are sensitive data, suggests there will be meaningful heft to an incoming, pan-EU restriction on behavioral advertising which some privacy watchers had worried would be all-too-easily circumvented by adtech giants’ data-mining, proxy-identifying usual tricks.

Reminder: Big Tech lobbyists concentrated substantial firepower to successfully see off an earlier bid by EU lawmakers, last year, for the DSA to include a total ban on tracking-based targeted ads. So anything that hardens the limits that remain is important.

Behavioral recommender engines

Dr Michael Veal, an associate professor in digital rights and regulation at UCL’s faculty of law, predicts especially “interesting consequences” flowing from the CJEU’s judgement on sensitive inferences when it comes to recommender systems — at least for those platforms that don’t already ask users for their explicit consent to behavioral processing which risks straying into sensitive areas in the name of serving up sticky ‘custom’ content.

One possible scenario is platforms will respond to the CJEU-underscored legal risk around sensitive inferences by defaulting to chronological and/or other non-behaviorally configured feeds — unless or until they obtain explicit consent from users to receive such ‘personalized’ recommendations.

“This judgement isn’t so far off what DPAs have been saying for a while but may give them and national courts confidence to enforce,” Veal predicted. “I see interesting consequences of this judgment in the area of recommendations online. For example, recommender-powered platforms like Instagram and TikTok likely don’t manually label users with their sexuality internally — to do so would clearly require a tough legal basis under data protection law. They do, however, closely observe how users interact with the platform, and mathematically cluster together user profiles with certain types of content. Some of these clusters are clearly related to sexuality, and male users clustered around content that is aimed at gay men can be confidently assumed not to be straight. From this judgment, it can be argued that such cases would need a legal basis to process, which can only be refusable, explicit consent.”

As well as VLOPs like Instagram and TikTok, he suggests a smaller platform like Twitter can’t expect to escape such a requirement thanks to the CJEU’s clarification of the non-narrow application of GDPR Article 9 — since Twitter’s use of algorithmic processing for features like so called ‘top tweets’ or other users it recommends to follow may entail processing similarly sensitive data (and it’s not clear whether the platform explicitly asks users for consent before it does that processing).

“The DSA already allows individuals to opt for a non-profiling based recommender system but only applies to the largest platforms. Given that platform recommenders of this type inherently risk clustering users and content together in ways that reveal special categories, it seems arguably that this judgment reinforces the need for all platforms that run this risk to offer recommender systems not based on observing behaviour,” he told TechCrunch.

In light of the CJEU cementing the view that sensitive inferences do fall under GDPR article 9, a recent attempt by TikTok to remove European users’ ability to consent to its profiling — by seeking to claim it has a legitimate interest to process the data — looks like extremely wishful thinking given how much sensitive data TikTok’s AIs and recommender systems are likely to be ingesting as they track usage and profile users.

TikTok’s plan was fairly quickly pounced upon by European regulators, in any case. And last month — following a warning from Italy’s DPA — it said it was ‘pausing’ the switch so the platform may have decided the legal writing is on the wall for a consentless approach to pushing algorithmic feeds.

Yet given Facebook/Meta has not (yet) been forced to pause its own trampling of the EU’s legal framework around personal data processing such alacritous regulatory attention almost seems unfair. (Or unequal at least.) But it’s a sign of what’s finally — inexorably — coming down the pipe for all rights violators, whether they’re long at it or just now attempting to chance their hand.

Sandboxes for headwinds

On another front, Google’s (albeit) repeatedly delayed plan to depreciate support for behavioral tracking cookies in Chrome does appear more naturally aligned with the direction of regulatory travel in Europe.

Although question marks remain over whether the alternative ad targeting proposals it’s cooking up (under close regulatory scrutiny in Europe) will pass a dual review process, factoring in competition and privacy oversight, or not. But, as Veal suggests, non-behavior based recommendations — such as interest-based targeting via whitelisted topics — may be less risky, at least from a privacy law point of view, than trying to cling to a business model that seeks to manipulate individuals on the sly, by spying on what they’re doing online.

Here’s Veal again: “Non-behaviour based recommendations based on specific explicit interests and factors, such as friendships or topics, are easier to handle, as individuals can either give permission for sensitive topics to be used, or could be considered to have made sensitive topics ‘manifestly public’ to the platform.”

So what about Meta? Its strategy — in the face of what senior execs have been forced to publicly admit, for some time now, are rising “regulatory headwinds” (euphemistic investor-speak which, in plainer English, signifies a total privacy compliance horrorshow) — has been to elevate a high profile former regional politician, the ex UK deputy PM and MEP Nick Clegg, to be its president of global affairs in the hopes that sticking a familiar face at its top table, who makes metaverse ‘jam tomorrow’ jobs-creation promises, will persuade local lawmakers not to enforce their own laws against its business model.

But as the EU’s top judges weigh in with more jurisprudence defending fundamental rights, Meta’s business model looks very exposed, sitting on legally challenged grounds whose claimed justifications are surely on their last spin cycle before a long overdue rinsing kicks in, in the form of major GDPR enforcement — even as its bet on Clegg’s local fame/infamy scoring serious influence over EU policymaking always looked closer to cheap trolling than a solid, long-term strategy.

If Meta was hoping to buy itself yet more time to retool its adtech for privacy — as Google claims to be doing with its Sandbox proposal — it’s left it exceptionally late to execute what would have to be a truly cleansing purge.

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy.

Global app spending reached $65 billion in the first half of 2022, up only slightly from the $64.4 billion during the same period in 2021, as hypergrowth fueled by the pandemic has slowed down. But overall, the app economy is continuing to grow, having produced a record number of downloads and consumer spending across both the iOS and Google Play stores combined in 2021, according to the latest year-end reports. Global spending across iOS and Google Play last year was $133 billion, and consumers downloaded 143.6 billion apps.

This Week in Apps offers a way to keep up with this fast-moving industry in one place with the latest from the world of apps, including news, updates, startup fundings, mergers and acquisitions, and much more.

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Top Stories

Users demand the TikTok-ification of Instagram must stop 

How do you modernize an app like Instagram, whose roots are in iconic iPhone photography, to support users’ growing engagement with short-form video? If you’re one of the many increasingly frustrated Instagram users, you simply wish it would not attempt this pivot at all. You’re sick of the app’s constant changes, its clutter, its ads, its force-fed recommendations, and you’re not a fan of its TikTok ambitions. You just want to see your friends’ posts.

This issue finally came to a head this week when celeb sisters and Instagram top creators Kylie Jenner and Kim Kardashian shared a petition that demanded Instagram to “stop trying to be tiktok.” The day after, Instagram head Adam Mosseri posted a video addressing the concerns and said the app would temporarily roll back some of its recent changes, including the test of a full-screen TikTok-like experience and the increase in “recommended” posts.

The company has brought this user backlash on itself, of course, with its continual “tests” of new UIs and its desperate admissions about how TikTok is eating its lunch, forcing it to adapt or die. Plus, Instagram claims video is what people want even when they’re saying otherwise. It insists its own data supports that video has been growing faster as mobile networks got faster and data became cheaper.

While that may be true, Instagram has been throwing out the baby with the bathwater as it attempts to prioritize elements of TikTok in its own app. People want different experiences from their social platforms — and Instagram is trying to do it all, without acknowledging that the real threat from TikTok is not the video content itself, necessarily, but rather TikTok’s addictive algorithm that increases users’ time spent in the app. TikTok has figured out how to recommend posts that users welcome, while Instagram’s attempt to do the same has fallen flat. Combined with TikTok’s ability to attract a younger demographic in terms of both creators and viewers alike, the app has become a massive force in social media.

Instagram will need to find a way to balance the demands of a user base that wants to still celebrate social connection (including through static media), with creator demands for increased discovery and the rise of video. This is not an easy task, but perhaps step one should be to allow users to engage with Instagram as they like. Just as how users can opt to scroll the main Feed instead of viewing Stories and vice versa, Instagram’s TikTok-ishness should rather be an optional entry point, not the entirety of the Instagram experience.

Snapchat+ outpaces Twitter Blue after just a month

Image Credits: Snapchat

Snapchat’s recent move into premium subscriptions has gained a bit of traction in its first weeks on the market.

The new Snapchat+ paid subscription launched on June 29, 2022 offering users access to various premium features, while also importantly giving the company a means of diversifying its revenue streams beyond advertising. This is critical for the social app given that the ad market is currently impacted by broader macroeconomic forces that have slowed demand. In addition, Snapchat continues to feel the effects of Apple’s 2021 privacy changes that allowed users to opt-out of tracking and is facing increased competition from rival TikTok.

For $3.99 per month, the Snapchat+ subscription allows devoted app users to see who has rewatched their Stories, change their app icon, pin another user as a “#1 Best Friend,” try out pre-release features and more. Earlier this month, the company also made web access a part of the Snapchat+ subscription.

Since the subscription’s arrival, Snapchat’s mobile app has generated approximately $7.3 million in worldwide consumer spending across iOS and Android according to Sensor Tower. This represents the first 30 days of Snapchat+’s availability, June 29, 2022–July 26, 2022. The figure is also around 116 times higher than the $63,000 the app pulled in via in-app purchases in the 30 days prior from May 30, 2022–June 28, 2022, indicating the bulk of the new revenue was driven by Snapchat+.

Notably, the number is already larger than Twitter’s in-app revenue, which totals nearly $4 million since Twitter Blue’s June 2021 launch — over a year’s time. Snapchat+ could be succeeding because it has more power users than Twitter, Sensor Tower data shows, as 34% of its active installs open the app every single day compared with just 19% for Twitter.

Image Credits: Sensor Tower

TikTok gets into mobile games

Here’s a scoop: TikTok is getting into gaming.

The company confirmed the launch of a pilot test of “mini-games” that can be played inside the social video app and discovered through creators’ videos. The gaming pilot quietly launched just weeks ago with a variety of new partners, including game developers Vodoo, Nitro Games, FRVR, Aim Lab and Lotem.

The launch follows reports earlier this year that the social video app maker was looking to expand into HTML5 gaming after first testing the waters with gaming giant Zynga last November. The two companies had then teamed up to launch a TikTok exclusive title, Disco Loco 3D, which was similar to Zynga’s successful game (by way of acquisition) High Heels.

TikTok’s mobile games today don’t monetize through ads or in-app purchases of any kind, but if they find traction with users, things could change as TikTok further developed its games platform. In that case, the app would not only recall the social gaming era of early Facebook (which incidentally drove Zynga’s success), it would also allow TikTok to route around the app stores’ commissions.

Image Credits: TikTok

Weekly News

Platforms: Apple

• Apple released the fourth beta of iOS 16. The update offers a variety of new features, like the ability to edit and delete iMessages — a feature that now includes an edit history log in response to user concerns that the editing feature could be used maliciously. Other new features include the ability for developers to test Live Activities, improved integrations with Continuity Camera, a new interface when updating the Home Screen’s design, more options for the “unsend” time in Mail, and a few new wallpapers, among other smaller tweaks.
• Apple announced Live Activities and Activity Kit won’t launch with the initial release of iOS 16 but will rather become available later in the year.
• Apple is also hosting summer programs that allow developers to attend live presentations and Q&A sessions with App Store experts.
• Apple reported Q3 earnings with revenue of $83B, up 2% YoY and above estimates of $82.8B. iPhone revenue was up 3% to $40.7B but Mac was down 10% to $7.4B. Apple’s services revenue grew 12% YoY to $19.6B and 860M paid subscribers, up from 825M in Q2.

Platforms: Google

• Google announced new Play Store policies around intrusive ads, VPNs, alarms, health misinformation, impersonation and more. The policies will roll out at different intervals and will, among other things, restrict apps’ usage of full-screen ads that aren’t closeable after 15 seconds and full-screen interstitials that appear before the app’s loading screen. Apps that use icons that trick users into thinking they’re affiliated with another brand will also be restricted along with VPNs that track user data or reroute traffic to make money through ads.
• At the Think with Google Gaming Day in China, Google shared ways to help developers earn more revenue and attract high-value players with a variety of new features and ad tools.
• Google updated its Google Maps app with location-sharing notifications, immersive views and better bike navigation in several markets.

Augmented Reality

• Snapchat launched its own spooky AR game called “Ghost Phone,” which sees players working to discover the secrets of an abandoned phone and hunting ghosts using AR. The game was built using the Lens Studio and web-first game engine PlayCanvas. It also uses Snap’s World Mesh technology and surface recognition to place game objects around the user. The company launched a Bitmoji dance game last month.

Fintech/Crypto

• A U.S. Senator sent a letter to both Apple and Google asking for details as to how they’re preventing cryptocurrency apps from engaging in fraud on their respective app stores.
• Messaging app Viber debuted a new digital wallet called Payments, offering bill pay, money transfers and support for buying goods.
• The new Google Wallet rolled out to all users with Android 5.2+. The wallet app is available as a separate app in the U.S. and Singapore and as a Google Pay update for other markets.

Social

• Snap missed in Q2 with revenue of $1.11 billion — a figure up 13% from the same period a year earlier but below its previous guidance of 20% to 25%. The company cited macroeconomic conditions for lower advertiser demand and continues to be impacted by Apple’s privacy changes. DAUs grew 18% YoY to 347 million. The company said it will reduce hiring, repurchase up to $500M in stock, and it locked in CEO and CTO roles until at least Jan. 1, 2027. Its stock tanked after earnings.
• Snap announced a new creator fund that will award independent musicians posting their music on Snapchat up to $100,000 per month. The company will distribute payments for up to 20 songs per month at $5,000/song starting in August for musicians distributing to Snapchat via DistroKid.
• Meta reported its first-ever decline in quarterly revenue year over year in its Q2 earnings. The company’s revenue was $28.82 billion, a 1% decrease from $29.07 billion in the second quarter of 2021. It also swapped its CFO.
• Meta is killing Tuned, its social app for couples which will cease operations on Sept. 19, 2022. The app was a project from Meta’s New Product Experimentation Team (NPE) — one of many now shuttered attempts designed to test if Meta could create new social experiences in-house.
• BeReal got ripped off. Because Instagram didn’t have enough drama this week, it also quietly rolled out a copycat of BeReal inside its app — which misses the point about why the new social network grew popular in the first place: It’s about your friends.
• Instagram said it will begin to survey its U.S. users about race to assess if it is “fair and equitable.” The optional survey will be hosted by research group YouGov.
• Twitter Blue is getting more expensive. Twitter announced it’s increasing the price of its premium subscription from $2.99 to $4.99 per month effective immediately for new subscribers and starting in October for existing subscribers. The hike is also rolling out to other Twitter Blue markets, including Australia, Canada and New Zealand at 6.99 AUD (previously 4.49 AUD), 6.49 CAD (previously 3.49 CAD) and 6.49 NZD (previously 4.49 NZD).
• Twitter also began testing a status feature that lets you add a mood (hot take, vacation mode, unpopular opinion, etc.) alongside your posts and a way to post multiple forms of media in a single tweet.
• The anticipated Twitter-Elon trial has set a date. The parties will battle it out in court starting October 17.

Photos

• The Google Photos app gained an AI-based new movie editor and video editing features, but only for Chromebook users for the time being.
• Amazon is killing its cloud storage service Amazon Drive and shifting users to Amazon Photos instead. Customers have until Dec. 31, 2023 to save their stored files.

Messaging

• WhatsApp rolled out chat migration from Android to iOS and iOS to Android for all users. The feature requires Android 5 or higher, iOS 15.5 or above, and the Move to iOS app.
• WhatsApp also appears to be working on a chatbot that will alert you to what’s new when the app is updated.

Streaming & Entertainment

Image Credits: YouTube

• YouTube’s mobile app added a new feature that allows creators to select any segment up to 60 seconds from an existing long-form video and turn it into a YouTube Shorts video that links back to the original.
• Baidu’s video streaming service iQiyi signed a content deal with TikTok’s Chinese sister app Douyin, which allows Douyin users to use iQiyi content to make short videos. The deal ends a dispute over alleged copyright infringement.
• Comcast’s streaming app Peacock’s paid subscribers stayed flat at 13 million, as losses widen to $467 million in the company’s first quarter.
• YouTube’s ad revenue grew just 4.8% YoY to $7.34 billion in Q2, below expectations of a 7% YoY increase to $7.49 billion. This YouTube’s slowest ad growth in over two years.
• Twitter for iOS updated the Spaces bar for live audio streams to make it easier to see who’s hosting, what topics are being discussed and more.
• Spotify rolled out a new Friends Mix playlist that gives users a way to discover new tracks based on the “Blends” they’ve created with their friends.
• TikTok filed a trademark application for a service called TikTok Music that could allow users to buy, share and download music. Parent company ByteDance already runs a music service, Resso, but not in the U.S. — although ByteDance has considered expanding it in the past.

Gaming

• Roblox rolled out an update that makes its materials appear more lifelike and overhauled aspects of its developer toolkit to support this change. The move is a part of the company’s mission to improve its visual fidelity, but game developers will be able to choose if they want to keep creating using the more blocky, traditional style.
• Backbone, the maker of a popular gaming controller for iPhone, expanded with the launch of the Backbone One PlayStation Edition. The new device allows compatible mobile games to use proper PlayStation glyphs (Triangle, Circle, etc.) instead of ABXY. It will cost the same as the original Backbone One at $100.
• K-pop stars Blackpink collaborated with PUBG Mobile, which just hosted its first in-game concert. The band released a new video featuring virtual avatars inside the game, which was earlier teased during the concert.

Government & Policy

• The popular mobile game Battlegrounds Mobile India (BGMI) was pulled by Apple and Google from their respective app stores in India to comply with a government order. Krafton had said it cut ties with publishing partner Tencent, so it’s unclear why the game was pulled. The game had over 16.5M MAUs.
• Google will be allowed to relaunch Street View in India in 10 cities initially, 10 years after the government shut down the service for security reasons.
• China’s government asked TikTok for a stealth social account to target Western audiences with propaganda, Bloomberg reported, but TikTok execs pushed back and denied the request.

Security & Privacy

• Messaging app JusTalk, popular in Asia, has been leaking users’ unencrypted private messages. The app, which has 20 million global users, had claimed to offer end-to-end encryption across its flagship apps and its child-friendly JusTalk Kids.

Funding and M&A

Livestream shopping app for collectibles Whatnot raised $260 million in Series D funding at a $3.7 billion valuation, up from $1.5 billion in September 2021. The livestream shopping market has only grown to $11 billion in the U.S. versus the $600 billion industry in China.

School communications app ClassDojo raised $125 million in Series D funding in September 2022, valuing the business at $1.25 billion. The company plans to launch a kids virtual space in August 2022.

Paris-based Contentsquare raised $400 million in Series F funding and $200 million in debt for its web and app analytics business. The round doubled the startup’s May 2021 valuation to $5.6 billion.

Conversational commerce startup Charles raised $20 million in Series A funding led by Salesforce Ventures to bring its service to WhatsApp in Europe. The company so far has seen the most traction in its domestic German market, but has received inbound interest from Italy, Spain, France, the Netherlands, and the U.K.

Blockchain infrastructure company Chain acquired Measurable Data Token for $100 million. The deal sees it acquiring a cash-back mobile app, RewardMe, and the financial data protocol MeFi.

Banking and networking platform Guava, targeting Black entrepreneurs, raised $2.4 million in a pre-seed round led by Heron Rock. The company aims to narrow the racial wealth gap by providing financial services to Black small businesses and creators.

Text-to-speech app Peech raised $550,000 in funding led by Flyer One Ventures. The app offers natural-sounding text-to-speech in 50 languages, allowing users to listen to Word docs, web articles or PDFs for $3/week.

South African startup Qwili raised $1.2 million in seed funding to scale its app and low-cost NFC-enabled smartphone. Qwili software can be downloaded to any phone in addition to being pre-installed on Qwili’s phones, which are used as point-of-sale devices for merchants selling data, pay-TV subscriptions, groceries or clothing to customers.

Brooklyn-based fantasy sports app Underdog raised $35 million in Series B funding, valuing the business at $485 million. The company plans to launch licensed sports betting in Ohio and Colorado in 2023.

Spotify’s latest SEC filing revealed it paid €291 million ($295 million) for its four recent acquisitions, Findaway, Podsights, Chartable, and Sonantic. Findaway, specifically, cost the company €117 million (around $123 million).

U.K. investing app Shares raised $40 million led by Peter Thiel-backed Valar Ventures, bringing its total raised to $90 million. The app has over 150,000 users.

U.S.-based digital bank Umba, which focuses on emerging markets, acquired a majority share of Kenyan microfinance bank Daraja for an undisclosed amount.

Downloads

Lock Screen widget TestFlights

A new type of app to download? We’re in!

If you’re running the iOS 16 public beta and looking to dig into Lock Screen widgets, there are a number of interesting apps now being tested that offer a look into how iOS developers are thinking about use cases for this prominent iPhone real estate. (If you ask nicely, the developers might add you to the TestFlight!)

A few apps we’ve found useful include:

• Lock Screen Contacts: This allows you to put a favorite contact directly on your Lock Screen, without having to give the app access to your iPhone Contacts thanks to Apple’s more secure Contacts API. Users can toggle and choose to remove the text, image and background. The app will sell for $3.99 at launch.  The same developer is also working on a Lock Screen Icon widget that will allow you to place any of some 4,000 icons on your Lock Screen to personalize your device.

• Day Ticker: This simple icon widget lets you quickly view how many more days until an important event — like a birthday, vacation, anniversary or anything else. Days until the kid goes to camp? Just two, my widget told me. We’d better start packing!

Can’t wait to use these!

• Parcel’s Package Tracker: This widget keeps track of your expected deliveries and lets you see their status right on your Lock Screen.

• Home Widget: This widget will bring your HomeKit devices to your Lock Screen.
• LockLauncher: Create custom Lock Screen widgets that can actually take actions — like open websites or apps, for example.
• Tally: The current beta of this quick counter app includes a Lock Screen widget and other goodies.
• Countdowns: Another widget for tracking the time until upcoming events.

YouTube wants to quickly ramp up the number of short-form “Shorts” videos available on its platform in order to better compete with TikTok. To aid with this effort, the company is today rolling out a new creator tool that turns existing YouTube videos into Shorts in a matter of moments. The update, now available on YouTube’s mobile app, allows a video’s creator to easily select a segment of any video they’ve uploaded previously, then publish that clip as YouTube Shorts content.

The company was already converting users’ uploaded vertical videos under 60 seconds as Shorts videos, even if the content had been originally uploaded as a standard YouTube video. (Not all creators were fans of this idea, we should note.) Now YouTube is hoping creators will more actively help build out the Shorts library even further with the launch of this new tool that allows them to clip interesting bits from their longer videos.

The move may signal how much YouTube parent Google is worried about TikTok’s dominance in short-form. Clearly, it doesn’t think that allowing YouTube’s Shorts library to grow organically through new, original content uploads will be enough to compete. Instead, YouTube has been relying on leveraging its existing long-form content to create more Shorts. This April, for example, YouTube announced that any public YouTube video could be “remixed” into YouTube Shorts unless creators opted out.

The new tool, meanwhile, at least puts some of the power back into creators’ own hands.

The updated mobile app allows creators to select a part of their video up to 60 seconds in length and turn that into Shorts content using the same editing tools they’re familiar with inside the app, explains the company. If their selection is less than 60 seconds long, they can then shoot additional videos using the Shorts camera or they can add gallery videos to complete their 60-second Shorts content.

Creators may be motivated to use the tool as a means of generating interest in their long-form content, as YouTube notes that Shorts created using VOD (video on demand) content will automatically link back to the original.

YouTube has been touting Shorts’ ability to drive views to creators’ long-form content as part of a trend it referred to as “the rise of the multiformat creator.” In June, the company said Shorts had topped 1.5 billion logged-in monthly users but only had anecdotal data to suggest that Shorts were helping to grow critical metrics like watch time or subscribers.

In the meantime, the fact that YouTube is leaning so heavily on its existing long-form content to build out Shorts suggests a possible lack of creator interest in filming original Shorts; or it could also mean that YouTube ultimately still sees more potential as a long-form platform — but it envisions Shorts as a marketing mechanism to boost views for its better-monetized content. 

The new Shorts creation feature is rolling out starting today on YouTube’s mobile app for both iOS and Android devices, the company says.

After Snap’s poorly received Q1 digest and ahead of this week’s string of earnings reports from the largest U.S. tech companies, we wondered whether the advertising market is in trouble. Not that most folks associate Microsoft or Apple with advertising the way they may with Alphabet or Meta, but the majors — Amazon and Apple included — have ads businesses of material size, meaning that the ad market impacts each of them.

(That ads are considered to be a lackluster business model for smaller companies and startups — speaking loosely — but are a huge revenue source for platform companies says something interesting about competition inside of the technology industry. But perhaps that’s a topic for another day.)

Now, with three of the five majors having reported their Q2 results, how are their advertising results faring?

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.

Read it every morning on TechCrunch+ or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

The question ripples into other areas of the economy: Tech companies generate huge incomes from hosting advertisements, but with companies as far afield as Netflix working hard to bolster their subscription incomes through ads, the question of advertising performance is not idle, and impacts trillions of dollars of corporate value.

Remember Natural Language Processing? NLP arose several years ago but it was only in 2018 that AI researchers proved it was possible to train a neural network once on a large amount of data and use it again and again for different tasks. In 2019 GPT-2 from Open AI, and T5 by Google appeared, showing that they were startlingly good (it’s now been incorporated into Google Duplex, pictured). Concerns were even raised about their possible misuse.

But since then, things have gone, well, pretty exponential. 


2021 saw a veritable’ Cambrian explosion’ of NLP Start-ups and Large Language Models.

This year, Google released LambDa, a large language model for chatbot applications. Then Deepmind released Alpha Code then later Flamingo – a language model capable of visual understanding. In July of this year alone, the Big Science project released Bloom, a massive open source language model and Meta announced that they’d trained a single language model capable of translation between 200 languages.

We are now reaching a sort of tipping point where we will see many more commercial applications of NLP – some using some of these open source, publicly available platforms – hit the market. You could almost say a goldrush has begun of start-ups trying to build on this technology, with an arms race developing between the large language model providers.

One of those startups is Humanloop, a University College AI spinout which claims to make it “significantly” easier for companies to adopt this new wave of NLP technology via a suite of tools which helps humans ‘teach’ AI algorithms. This means a lawyer, doctor or banker can put into the platform a piece of knowledge which the software then applies at scale across a large data set, allowing a broader application of AI to various industries.

It’s now pulled in a $2.6m seed funding round led by Index Ventures, with participation by Y Combinator, Local Globe and Albion.

Founded in 2020 by a team of preeminent computer scientists from UCL and Cambridge, and alumni of Google and Amazon, Humanloop’s applications, it says, might include building a picture of a national real estate market from unstructured data on the internet; reading through electronic health records to identify people who could be candidates to try new therapies; and even moderating comments on Facebook groups.

“People would be shocked if they knew what language-based AI was capable of now,” says CEO Raza Habib in a statement. “But getting the data into a form that the algorithm can use is the biggest challenge. With Humanloop, we want to democratize access to AI and enable the next generation of intelligent, self-serve applications – by allowing any company to take its domain expertise and distil it efficiently in a machine learning model.”

Humanloop claims its success is the growth of ‘probabilistic deep learning’, where algorithms can work out what they don’t know, by tuning out the noise in data sets, finding the good stuff and asking humans for help with the parts they don’t understand.

Other start-ups building their own large language models and putting them behind APIs include Cohere AI ($164.9M in funding) and Open AI GPT-3. Snorkel AI ($135.3M in funding) is also a new startup in this arena.

However, Humanloop says it is less focused on developing the models and more on the tools needed to adapt them to specific use cases.

“What many people don’t know is that it’s not the lack of appropriate algorithms that’s holding back AI from being ubiquitous in every workplace – it’s the absence of properly labelled data,” adds Erin Price-Wright, the partner at Index Ventures who led the investment. “In fact, machine learning itself is becoming increasingly commoditized and off-the-shelf, but it’s still really hard for non-technical people to transmit their knowledge to a machine and help the algorithm refine its model.” Hence why Humanloop allows people to tweak the data.

If the NLP gold-rush is indeed on it’s way, expect a whole bunch of other startups to appear soon…

Google today announced that it is adding a new movie editor and a few new video editing features to Google Photos, but for now these new features will only be available in the Android app running on Chromebooks. No word on when these features are coming to other platforms or why Google decided to go this way.

It’s worth noting that you could obviously already manipulate single videos in Google Photos before, using what is essentially the same set of editing tools as for photos. More recently, Google also added an AI-based movie creation tool that mostly focused on automatically creating themed movies for you, with a very basic set of features to manually edit them.

Now, however, with the new movie editor, you’ll be able to combine multiple videos on a single-track timeline, add title cards and musing and create basic movies within just a few minutes. Like with similar tools, you’ll be able to easily trim your clips and adjust their brightness and contrast (no LUTs here, though, of course). And while Google will continue to offer its own themes, you will be able to build movies from scratch as well (and, of course, add photos to them, too).

Image Credits: Google

As Google notes, for users who need more power, LumaFusion is bringing its far more powerful video editor, which is currently only available on iOS, to Chromebooks as well.

There seems to be a trend here, with Adobe’s venerable Lightroom photo tool also adding video features recently. Maybe that’s no surprise, though. A lot of people now record far more videos than ever before and the popularity of platforms like TikTok and Instagram’s pivot to video is surely only accelerating this trend. Meanwhile, editing video remains far harder than just posting a photo and slapping a filter on it, so there’s plenty of room for a consumer platform like Google Photos to make things easier.

Image Credits: Google

In addition to the new movie editor, Google is also bringing a few other updates to Chromebooks in the new few weeks. Chrome OS will now feature light and dark themes, for example, with transitions between them timed for when the sun sets or rises. There’s also a new version of the Gallery app, which will now feature PDF editing, and a deeper integration between the Chromebook shelf and your Google calendar (Google somehow only refers to these features as coming to Chromebooks and doesn’t mention Chrome OS anywhere in its announcement). For those of you who use virtual desks (I’m not organized enough to think about even one desk, let alone multiple ones), you’ll now be able to save and close an entire desk and then reopen it when you’re ready to resume your work there.

As regulation, platform dynamics and consumer choice continue to eat into the adtech stalwart known as cookies, it’s leaving a gap in the market for advertising solutions that can work well without relying on cookie functionality. Today, an adtech out of Spain that’s doing just this has raised a big round of funding to double down on the opportunity.

Seedtag, a contextual advertising startup that uses AI tools both to “read” content on a page to match that up with advertisers’ aims, as well as to subsequently track how those ads perform, has raised “over” €250 million (more than $252 million, exact amount unspecified). The money is coming in the form of an equity investment from a single investor, Advent International, and it will be used to help the company expand beyond Europe, specifically deeper into the U.S.

Seedtag was co-founded and is co-led by Jorge Poyatos and Albert Nieto, two ex-Googlers, and as part of the investment Nieto will be relocating to the U.S. to help grow the business there.

“We’re very excited about this partnership with Advent,” Nieto and Poyatos said in a joint statement. “This investment will massively accelerate our US expansion, boost our growth and reinforce our team and the development of our technology. This move further supports our mission of building the global leading platform for contextual advertising, offering an effective solution for cookieless advertising on the open web.”

The company is not disclosing its valuation with the round, but this investment is a significant step up for it. Founded in Madrid in 2014, Seedtag had only raised around $46 million in the last eight years, with past investors including Intelectium Business, Oakley Capital, All Iron Ventures and Adara Ventures. Its past investors are remaining shareholders with this round, along with the two co-founders. In another signal of its progress, it’s picked up a number of big-name clients, including the likes of Unilever brands, LG, Levis and more.

The situation for these brands is that the nature of how they connect with consumers, raise awareness among them and even deliver their products have all been drastically changing in the last several years, pushed along by a massive swing towards digital screen usage, changing data protection and privacy priorities, and advances in technology, among other trends. And just as many of them were getting their heads around the move away from static, analogue campaigns for marketing, their understanding of how they can and should use digital platforms has changed, too.

One of the casualties of that has been the cookie — the unit that had been built to track what users are doing online that could in turn be used to present more relevant information to them, based on that activity — which has fallen afoul of privacy and security experts, and subsequently regulators and platform operators. Subsequently, they’re now getting phased out of usage.

Seedtag is part of a wave of tech companies building what they like to describe as “privacy first” alternatives in advertising, typically solutions that continue to allow companies to serve ads in relevant places on programmatic platforms, but without collecting the kind of data that previously would have been needed to do so.

Seedtag has built a what it describes as “contextual AI technology,” which it has branded “LIZ”, which uses AI to do some of the work that cookies might have done in the past: it “reads” what is on a page or within a site, rather than what a user is browsing across all of the web, and combines that with its own algorithms to determine what kinds of interests that particular user might have, and serves ads that are in turn relevant to that particular experience, which appear within a particular piece of content.

What is less clear is how Seedtag tracks the effectiveness of that ad after it has been seen, if it’s not using cookies. (I’ve asked and will update as and when I hear back on this point.)

In any case, as cookies become a more problematic, and definitely less effective, route for tracking user interest and intent, it will push more attention to a wider set of tools, and companies building them. The two co-founders both worked in industry analytics and strategy at Google so understand not just what adtech companies like Google built but what advertisers are looking to do, giving them a unique position in being able answer the big questions about what is lacking in the market today, and how to address that.

“Seedtag has established itself as a leading player in Europe and Latin America in the very dynamic contextual advertising sector. We are delighted to partner with Jorge and Albert as they continue to build on this momentum,” said Gonzalo Santos, MD at Advent International and Head of Spain, in a statement. “With our international presence and deep sector expertise, Advent will work with the Seedtag management team to further expand the business internationally. We look forward to supporting this hugely exciting business to grow and scale-up and to taking it to the next level.”

Hey, friends! It’s that time again. Another week has passed us by, which means another issue of Week in Review — the newsletter where we recap the top stories to hit TechCrunch’s front page in the past seven days. Sign up here!

The top story this week was about a new set of documents detailing how (and how often) the Department of Homeland Security taps third-party data brokers to obtain potentially sensitive location info while “sidestepping the legal process government officials would typically need to go through.” A privacy bill aptly named the “Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale” act is in the works that would require agencies to get a warrant for this data — but it’s still in its early stages.

other stuff

What else were people reading on TechCrunch? Here’s a handful of the most read posts this week:

Solar for your balcony: Got a balcony bathed in sunlight and want to make a shift toward renewable energy? That’s the idea behind these vertical solar panels designed to strap right onto a balcony’s railing. Mike Butcher caught up with WeDoSolar, a team founded by a Ukrainian entrepreneur to “wean Europe off Russian gas,” to hear their story.

Google pauses hiring: Last week Google announced that it was slowing its hiring pace for the latter half of 2022; now the company says it’ll outright freeze hiring for the next few weeks “to enable teams to prioritize their roles and hiring plans for the rest of the year.”

Netflix loses customers: The good news? Netflix lost fewer customers this quarter than it was predicting. The bad news? It still lost nearly a million customers, which works out to the “the largest quarterly loss in the company’s history.”

OpenAI expands access to DALL-E 2: DALL-E 2, OpenAI’s tool for generating entirely new (and often impossibly good if wildly surreal) imagery from a text prompt, will be available to a million new users in the weeks ahead. The company also announced pricing for the (thus far free) tool, and it basically works out to “free if you just want to mess with it occasionally, but expect to pay if you use it a lot.”

Tesla dumps most of its Bitcoin: Last year Tesla announced that it had acquired $1.5 billion in Bitcoin. The price of Bitcoin has been up and down (mostly down) since, and it seems the company wants at least partly off this roller coaster; in its most recent earnings report, Tesla disclosed that it has sold 75% of its Bitcoin holdings.

Slack price hike: Inflation comes for everything! Milk! Meat! and now… Slack? This week the company announced its first ever price hike since launching in 2014, bumping the price per user by around 60 to 75 cents per month (depending on if you pay monthly/annually.) They’re also changing the way free plans work a bit; if you’re part of any smaller/less active Slack communities that use the free plan, know that messages wont hang around as long.

audio stuff

Podcasts podcasts podcasts!

Want a recap of everything thats been going on in the world of TC podcasts lately? Check out Matt’s weekly podcast roundup. Here’s some of what went down:

• On TechCrunch Live, Brian Heater talks with Ayanna Howard (dean of the Ohio State University College of Engineering) and Ayah Bdeir (founder of littleBits) about the future of robotics and how to get more kids into the field.
• On Chain Reaction, Lucas and Anita talk about OpenSea’s layoffs, Binance looking to gain ground in the U.S. as Coinbase stumbles, and the latest project from the Bored Apes founders.
• On The TechCrunch Podcast, Darrell Etherington is joined by TC climate writer Harri Weber to hear about the challenges Tesla is facing in its effort to install 1,000 solar roofs a week.

Oh! And if you’re free Tuesday July 26 at noon Pacific and are interested in the nitty-gritty of startup economics, tune into our “WTF is a 409A?” Twitter space and learn why lowering your company’s valuation might actually be a good thing.

additional stuff

TechCrunch+. Are you a member yet? No? I know, I know — paywalls are a bummer. But this paywalled section of our site helps us keep the words aflowin’ and, crucially, lets us go deep on the stuff our most vocal readers tell us they want to see more of. Things like:

Stripe’s new valuation, explained: Speaking of 409As and lowered valuations, Alex Wilhelm dives into why Stripe lowered its internal valuation from around $95 billion to $74 billion.

Fundraising tips for 2022: With dozens upon dozens of investor meetings behind him, Kami Vision CEO Yamin Durrani has insights for raising a round in the current climate.

A look at Arkive’s $9.7M seed deck: Working on your startup’s slide deck and need some inspiration? In the latest installment of his popular Pitch Deck Teardown series, Haje takes a look at the deck that helped Arkive — described as the “world’s first decentralized physical museum” — close a $9.7 million seed round.

Once seemingly unstoppable, big tech is now in reset mode.

We’re not talking about Snap’s earnings sending its stock plunging, or Twitter’s lackluster earnings report from earlier this morning. No, we’re talking about big tech. The world’s largest tech companies are pulling back in a way that could, perhaps, clear some brush for startups still making their way through the wild (the private markets) towards the promised land (the public markets).

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.

Read it every morning on TechCrunch+ or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

This is good news for smaller companies, which were long irked at the sheer amount of cash the Googles and Microsofts of the world could throw at potential hires, some of whom came from smaller, more financially-constrained startups.

But as with most good news, there’s a catch.