Google’s Privacy Sandbox initiative for its Chrome browser hasn’t exactly been an unmitigated success, but it has definitely kicked off a healthy discussion about online privacy — and the company’s own role in the advertising ecosystem. Now, with many of the initiatives around Chrome still in flux, Google also plans to expand many of these tools to its Android operating system and that will likely have a profound impact on the advertising industry.

If you’re in the advertising ecosystem, though, don’t despair just yet. Google says the current system will remain active for “at least” two more years while it tests these new systems.

Typically, on Android, advertisers use Google’s advertising ID to serve personalized ads and track your behavior across applications so they can, for example, attribute a purchase you made to an ad you clicked on. Simplified, you can think of the advertising ID as Android’s version of cookies. You can turn this off and opt for non-personalized ads in the Android ads settings by deleting your advertising ID. When you do, Google will then helpfully remind you that ads help keep many services free — which is also an argument Google makes for today’s changes.

In a briefing ahead of today’s announcement, Google’s VP of product management for Android security and privacy specifically stressed the importance of advertising (which, of course, also drives the vast majority of Google’s own revenue).

“It’s useful to highlight some of the critical capabilities that matter to the ecosystem,” he said. “So tools like [advertising] ID help provide better, more relevant advertising experiences, tackle fraud, and more. And this has helped make possible much of the free content and services that we enjoy today in mobile apps. So it’s vital that we ensure that these capabilities are supported as we build the next generation of mobile technologies.”

The elephant in the room here, of course, is Apple, which is using what Google’s team would consider a very blunt instrument since it basically makes tracking impossible. That’s a win for privacy but Google argues that, in their desperation, advertisers will just come up with new ways to fingerprint your behavior and devices to get that lucrative tracking data. The fact that Meta said it would lose $10 billion in ad revenue in 2022 because of Apple’s changes seems like it would invalidate this argument, though. If Meta can’t find a good way around this, who can?

So, like on Chrome, Google is trying to have it both ways: preserve your privacy and preserve the advertising ecosystem. And just to be clear, Google says its own advertising systems will follow the same rules here as third-party advertisers.

Some of the proposals here are based on Google’s work with Chrome. They include Topics, the recent replacement for FLoC, and FLEDGE, a system that allows advertisers to show ads based on their own definition of a ‘custom audience’ without having to rely on individual identifiers.

There would be no modern ad ecosystem without attribution reporting, so Google is also proposing a new system here that promises to still give advertisers the data they need while still improving its users’ privacy.

There will also be an SDK for developers that isolates third-party advertising code so that it will run separately from the app’s own code. As of now, this looks to be an Android 13-only feature as it requires a different overall SDK architecture that focuses on both these new privacy features but also provides additional security guarantees to any SDK.

Google says it wants to work with the advertising industry on this new system. So far, all of its supporting quotes are from app developers, not the wider advertising ecosystem.

Google today announced Chrome OS Flex, an early preview of a new initiative that aims to bring Chrome OS to virtually any PC (and older Intel-based Macs). Built on top of CloudReady, which Google acquired in 2020), Chrome OS Flex is aimed at enterprises and educational users who want to prolong the lifetime of their existing devices, but anyone with access to a USB drive can use it to give an older PC — or maybe even a low-powered new one — a new lease on life. There is an obvious sustainability angle here.

The idea here is to bring the full Chrome OS experience to virtually any computer. Right now, that may not be the case, given that there is an infinite number of possible PC configurations out there. Google has published a list of certified machines (mostly laptops), but chances are others will work as well — and giving it a try is about as hard as trying out a modern Linux distribution, which Chrome OS is obviously based on.

Thomas Riedl, Google’s director of product management for Chrome OS, noted that the install experience can still be a bit rough for consumers if they have to go into their BIOS and configure their machine to boot from a USB drive

Image Credits: Google

Both Chrome OS and Chrome OS Flex use the same code base and will follow the same release cadence. For the user, both systems should look and feel virtually identical. Google is very clear though, that this is still a very early release and users shouldn’t expect everything to work perfectly right away.

What about Android apps, you ask? As a Google spokesperson told me, the team is currently focused on making the core user experience as solid as possible but it doesn’t have any plans to add support for Google Play Store and Android Apps to Chrome OS Flex. “But of course, we’re continually evaluating how to improve Chrome OS Flex for the future,” the spokesperson said.

Image Credits: Google

If you’re on a modern Mac or MacBook, chances are you are out of luck, just as Apple’s proprietary hardware makes it nearly impossible to install a Linux distribution on those machines — and especially the newer M1 devices. Most pre-2016 devices should work just fine, though. If you still have a white MacBook lying around, maybe now is the time to dust it off.

Since it’s based on the work of CloudReady, there is also an enterprise component here. All of the usual IT management abilities that apply to Chrome OS also apply to Chrome OS Flex. Enterprises can also apply their Chrome OS licenses to Chrome OS Flex devices (while previously, CloudReady had a different license structure).

Forrest Smith, the former Director of Product at CloudReady-maker Neverware and now the product manager for CloudReady at Google, told me that somewhere around 2016, enterprises started catching up to the idea of using its service to extend the life of their devices.

“There were a lot of people who wanted to get an extra 12 months of life out of devices — and they were willing to make really any trade,” he told me. “And really, quite starkly, in that 2015, 2016, 2017 region, was when things shifted to people really being bought in on the Chrome OS ecosystem and customers coming to us and saying, ‘I just can’t get as many Chromebooks as I want.'”

“The thing that is really exciting to me is that we have managed to take what was really an interesting but standalone solution with CloudReady and their management offering and integrated it seamlessly now,” Riedl said. “So these Chrome OS Flex devices, even though they ran Windows in the past — or Mac — they just show up in the admin console, which means a single pane of glass where you manage all of these devices, be it a Chromebook or Chromebox or a Flex device. It makes it a ton easier for admins.”

Right on schedule, Google today announced the first developer release of Android 13. These very early releases, which are only meant for developers and aren’t available through over-the-air updates, typically don’t include too many user-facing changes. That’s true this time as well, but even in this early release, the company is already showing off a few changes that will impact how you’ll use your Android phone.

Unlike with Android 12, Google plans to have two developer releases and then launch a beta in April, a month earlier than in 2021. The final release could come as early as August, based on Google’s roadmap, whereas Android 12 launched in early October.

All of this is happening while Android 12L, the Android release for large-screen devices, is still in development, too, though Google notes that it will bring some of those features to Android 13 as well. These include improved support for tablets, foldables and Android apps on Chromebooks.

One of the most visible changes in Android 13 so far is that Google will bring the dynamic color feature of Material You, which by default takes its cues from your home screen image to all app icons. Developers will have to supply a monochromatic app icon for this to work, which many will hopefully do, because the current mix of themed and un-themed icons doesn’t make for a great look. For now, this will only be available on Pixel devices, though, and Google says it will work with its partners to bring it to more devices.

Image Credits: Google

As with previous releases, Google is putting an emphasis on privacy and security here. There is a new system-wide photo and video picker, for example, which allows you to share photos from your local device or the cloud with an app — all without giving that app access to all of your photos. Android already featured a document picker, but not a dedicated photo and video picker. Developers that want to use this feature will be able to do so with a new API and their apps won’t have to ask for permission to view all media on a device.

Image Credits: Google

In a similar way, Google is also now making it easier for apps to ask for a list of nearby WiFi devices without having to ask for location permissions. Until now, these two were intertwined and you couldn’t get information about nearby access points without asking for location permissions.

With Android 13, Google continues its efforts around Project Mainline, its project to make more of the operating system updatable through Google Play system updates without having to wait for vendors to make Android point updates available to their users. “We can now push new features like photo picker and OpenJDK 11 directly to users on older versions of Android through updates to existing modules. We’ve also added new modules, such as the Bluetooth and Ultra wideband modules, to further expand the scope of Android’s updatable core functionality,” the company explains in today’s announcement.

For the multilingual among you, Android 13 will also feature per-app language preferences — or, at least, apps will be able to let you choose a language that’s different from the system language. There will be an API for that, as well as a similar API in Google’s Jetpack library.

In Android 13, Google will also make it easier for developers to highlight that they offer Quick Setting tiles. Apps could already offer custom quick settings before, but unless you knew about them, chances are you’d never seen them. Now, developers get a new API that allows them to prompt users to directly add their custom tiles to the Quick Settings menu.

Image Credits: Google

Other new features include programmable shaders, updates to the Android core libraries to align them with the OpenJDK 11 LTS release and — get hyped — faster hyphenation. “In Android 13 we’ve optimized hyphenation performance by as much as 200% so you can now enable it in your TextViews with almost no impact on rendering performance,” Google explains.

Image Credits: Google

For a lot of the opt-in changes in Android 13, Google now also once again makes it easier for developers to test them by providing a list of toggles to turn them on and off from the developer options or adb.

As usual, these early releases will only be available as downloads, so if you want to give them a try, you’ll have to flash a system image to your phone (after that, you’ll get over-the-air updates). With this release, Google supports the Pixel 6 Pro, Pixel 6, Pixel 5a 5G, Pixel 5, Pixel 4a (5G), Pixel 4a, Pixel 4 XL, and Pixel 4 (sorry, Pixel 3 owners). There will also be a system image for the Android Emulator in Android Studio and generic system images (that is, pure Android) for vendors who want to test that.

European cloud computing companies have raised the alarm over what they say is a “critical loophole” in the EU’s flagship plan to tackle anti-competitive behaviors by gatekeeping digital giants.

In an open letter sent to competition commissioner and EVP Margrethe Vestager this week, 41 European cloud enterprises called for an urgent clarification to be made to the draft Digital Markets Act (DMA) to ensure that productivity and enterprise software are brought clearly in scope.

The signatories to the letter range in size from startups to large enterprises such as France’s OVHCloud.

“We are facing an urgent situation. Monopoly software providers are once again using their dominant position to lock in customers, forcing them to use the cloud infrastructure they provide. This abuse of software licences means that other, smaller cloud infrastructure providers cannot compete. That includes innovative European cloud companies which are being shut out of their own market,” they write.

“Today it is essential that the DMA includes clear remedies to stop the unfair practices by software gatekeepers. Minor clarifications are all that is needed to close this critical loophole.”

The Commission unveiled its DMA proposal to apply ex ante rules to so-called digital “gatekeepers” — aka, large, intermediating platforms with significant market power — back in December 2020, saying the legislation would put specific, listed behavioural obligations on major platforms to supplement traditional (ex post) competition enforcement by proactively prohibiting abusive behaviors such as self preferencing or anti-interoperability.

The EU’s executive said the DMA would ensure fairness in the marketplace by creating a regime of proactive antitrust intervention against tech giant market power. 

However the Commission’s approach — of a prescriptive list of ‘dos and dont’s’, attached to some named examples (e.g. operating systems, browsers or voice assistants) — could risk creating coverage blindspots, i.e. if the list of behaviors or examples are not comprehensive enough to capture and keep up with problematic gatekeepers.

A lack of specificity could also be exploited by deep-pocketed tech giants to file legal challenges in a bid to evade or delay ex ante obligations.   

That said, vis-a-vis enterprise software licensing, it’s worth noting the DMA does list “cloud computing services” as potentially falling in scope, as a “core platform service”, i.e. provided the company in question has been designated as a gatekeeper.

Nonetheless, the European cloud companies penning the letter to the Commission are worried that the language and examples are not explicit enough to ensure legal clarity for their sector, according to local member organization CISPE — aka Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers in Europe — which is another of the signatories.

A spokesman for CISPE told TechCrunch its members and the other signatories want the DMA tightened up to put it beyond doubt that the ex ante rules clearly apply to enterprise gatekeepers, such as those selling productivity, ERP or database services.

Some such legacy enterprise software giants do already stand formally accused of using unfair tactics to squeeze the market. (See, for example, the Nextcloud complaint against Microsoft.)

The letter flags a study CISPE commissioned into cloud infrastructure and software licensing, conducted by professor Frédéric Jenny, which highlighted a number of potentially anti-competitive behaviors — such as lock-ins, inflated costs and frequent audits, and billing for potential rather than actual use — suggesting such unfair tactics are being used by legacy providers to squeeze out smaller cloud service players.

CISPE also noted that while European cloud infrastructure services have been growing their revenue in recent years their market share has dropped — from 27% in 2017 down to <16% in 2021.

In one of the conclusions to his study, Jenny also writes that the DMA should “guarantee” that abusive practices by the “very large incumbent software providers” are stopped:

“The presence of lock-in effects, high switching costs, barriers to entry, economies of scale and potential network effects in a fast-growing cloud services market make action particularly urgent, as it will be difficult for other cloud services providers to compete on the merits and for the innovation in this sector to continue to grow for the benefits of the cloud users. Customers of cloud infrastructures services should be guaranteed to rely on the Digital Markets Act to stop abusive practices of the very large incumbent software providers.”

The DMA has already had a first pass through the European Parliament last year, when MEPs agreed their negotiating position.

At that point a number of amendments, which CISPE said had been aimed at closing potential loopholes around enterprise and productivity software giants, did not manage to gain support.

The EU’s co-legislative process has now moved to trilogue negotiations between the parliament, Council and the Commission — so CISPE said its hope is that there is still an opportunity for the legislation to be tweaked to put it beyond doubt that the bloc’s incoming ex ante regime will apply to gatekeeping enterprise software giants.

The big three companies in this space that are likely to fall under the regime are Microsoft, Oracle and SAP.

While Microsoft and Oracle are US companies, ERP giant SAP hails from Germany — which may be one reason for EU lawmakers to be reluctant to more explicitly target the sector in the choice of examples written into the DMA.

The Commission was contacted for its response to the cloud companies’ open letter but it declined to comment.

Google today announced a couple of updates to Chrome that bring, among other things, a new way to resume your past searches in the browser.

This new feature, dubbed ‘Journeys,’ is now rolling out to Chrome on the desktop and will smartly group past searches by topic. The browser will automatically highlight this new experience when you start searching for a related term, or you can head diretly to the new Chrome History Journey page once it’s enabled on your browser.

Image Credits: Google

“Journeys will even take into account how much you’ve interacted with a site to put the most relevant information front and center, while also bringing you helpful suggestions on related searches you may want to try next,” Yana Yushkina, a product manager on the Chrome team, explains in today’s announcement. 

If you’ve ever started researching something and then had to abort that to work on another project, you know how hard it is to find your way back to the sites you previously visited. Any browser’s history list quickly becomes unwieldy after a while and until now, no browser vendor has really given it a lot of attention. In an increasingly competitive browser market, we’ll likely see vendors continue to innovate in exactly these kinds of areas that were long left untouched.

Image Credits: Google

Google stresses that users can turn this feature off completely if they are uncomfortable with the browser building these clusters for them. Google says Journeys will only group your history on your device and the clusters are generated on the device. Nothing is saved to your Google account.

These topics, by the way, are completely unrelated to Topics, Google’s latest proposal to replace cookies for advertising purposes. Those Topics group the sites you visited into clusters around about 300 pre-set topics and there’s clearly some overlap in basic functionality here, but a Google spokesperson confirmed to me that they are not connected at all.

This new feature is now rolling out across operating systems in English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese and Turkish.

In addition to Journeys, Google is also introducing more Chrome Actions in the browser. These are features that you can access by using the right kinds of trigger words in the address bar. Some of the new actions include “Manage settings,” “Customize Chrome,” “View your Chrome history,” “Manage accessibility settings,” “Share this tab,” and, maybe most importantly, “Play Chrome Dino game.” Fun, but I’m not sure how many people really want to type this much when a few clicks will usually get you to the same destination faster.

For mobile users, Google is introducing a few new Chrome-related widgets on Android today. There’s one to get right to the Dino game, for example (I sense a theme here), while others mostly focus on kicking off a search from your home screen, be that through text, voice search or the visual Lens search feature.

Video is the beating heart of the most popular content online these days, and it’s not just because it’s entertaining. It’s also because of how accessible it is: it’s become incredibly easy for anyone, whether you’re technical or not, to make, post or watch video. Today, a London-based startup called Veed that’s built an online-only, web-based platform for all those video creators to edit and publish their work is announcing $35 million in funding to double down on strong demand.

The funding is coming from a single investor, Sequoia, and this is Veed’s first outside money since starting out as a bootstrapped business in 2018.

Sequoia has picked a promising horse in the startup race. Veed currently has 1 million users and annual recurring revenues of $7 million, a figure that is growing quickly: ARR was $6 million just two months ago. Veed is sold as a freemium product — “tens of thousands” pay for the service, CEO Sabba Keynejad told me — and it is profitable.

Veed started with basic cutting/cropping/merging editing tools, but today it covers a really wide range of other features that speak to the many ways video is used today: they include the ability to add in music or other media and manipulate the sound; create video effects; subtitles; and a range of editing tools optimised for specific platforms like YouTube; along with enterprise video features such as screen and webcam recording and creating teleprompter text.

Veed will use the funding in part to grow that list with features that will see it lean into content distribution: it plans to add live streaming and hosting tools next.

Video has been an online juggernaut for a while now, with its magnetic pull played out through premium streaming services, user-generated content platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, through advertising, and more. Cisco estimates that in 2021, video accounted for 82% of all online traffic.

Video editing tools have gone hand-in-hand with that rise. There are dedicated apps for professional and casual desktop and mobile users, online platforms either specifically focused on video or part of bigger suites of creative tools, and tools embedded directly into social media apps, or offshoots of them, as well as tools available via other video services. Some like Picsart and Canva have raised substantial funding; others like ClipChamp are getting snapped up by bigger platforms (in its case, Microsoft) and getting incorporated into much larger, existing products.

So why does the world need another video platform?

It was a question that investors seemed to ask initially, too: Keynejad said the fact that Veed was bootstrapped until now was not because it wanted to build it that way. It was because he and co-founder Timur Mamedov — a computer scientist who tools around as a graffiti artist in his spare time; his work is the background of the picture illustrating this story — couldn’t raise any money. Their attempts to do so included applying and getting rejected from Y Combinator, multiple times. (The essay Keynejad wrote about their YC experience is funny and charming, worth a read.) And they couldn’t get on the same page with seed funds and angels, either.

However, Keynejad said he arrived at the business of building a video editing startup not strictly as a pragmatic entrepreneur looking for an interesting money-making gap in the market, but as someone working in the industry and finding that the available tools were lacking.

Keynejad studied design and interaction at Central St Martin’s in London and after that moved into a career putting that training to work at design studios, where he was required to do a lot with online video. As he recalls it, everything he encountered in the market to do his job was “clunky and complex.” This was not just about how to get to grips with using a particular package, or it having (or lacking as the case may be) a feature you would like to use, but also how the service existed in the modern world. If you collaborated with someone else, for example, many of the packages required users to transfer huge files to each other.

The non-intuitive nature of a lot of existing video tools was particularly acute, perhaps, for Keynejad himself.

He tells me that he grew up with significant dyslexia and was held back for three years trying to pass his English GCSE (one of a set of intense exams students have to take in year 11, aged 15/16, in England to progress to the next stage of school). But if he was conceiving of Veed for the toughest customer — himself — he was also building for a massive market, with an increasing amount of permutations of what online video online looked and what it ws intended to do.

“I just thought that the range and amount of video content we consume had outpaced the tools we had to make it,” he said.

So he got to making the first version of Veed, with the aim of making something that could be used by anyone, regardless of the video creator’s level of experience. Smart choice, given how online video has evolved as a genuinely democratized medium: you’re just as likely to come across highly produced, professional video as you are something from a regular Joe. Key to Veed was building it entirely online: if you collaborated with someone else, all you need to share your work was a URL.

“It’s a super broad set of use cases,” Keynejad said, noting that people have edited weddings, birthday videos, professional coaching sessions, internal communications, influencers doing their thing, and anything else you might brighten up with a ring light.

The funding will also be used to hire more people for Veed to build out the product further. In keeping with the times, Veed won’t be requiring people to work out of London, not least because its own leadership is not: Keynejad left The Smoke for Lisbon this week on a one-way ticket. He told me he plans to stay there for around a month, and then live the life of a digital nomad, working while hopping from city to city for at least five months — ideally hiring people as he moves along, he added.

Sequoia is an interesting VC to come in as a first investor in Veed.

After many years of backing startups in Europe from afar, the Silicon Valley-based venture capital icon set up shop in London in 2020 to take on more European investments in earnest. Partner Luciana Lixandru, who was poached from Accel, was a key hire for that effort, with a reputation for making prescient bets on startups and founders that others were overlooking. Keynejad said that conversations with Sequoia started some time back, after it started to pick up steam as a business, and felt like the natural choice as a first investor for the company.

“Just as we were early believers in YouTube, at Sequoia we believe Veed is the future of video,” Lixandru said over email. “Sabba, Timur and their team are building the next great platform in this ever expanding space. As artists themselves, they have a deep empathy for the creator community and in turn, creators really love their product. It’s incredible what they have achieved so far and we’re honored to be by their side for this next part of the journey.” 

Streaming service Netflix is expanding its gaming lineup once again with the launch of two more titles, which will begin to roll out globally starting today at 5 PM ET. Among the new addition is Riot Games’ “Hextech Mayhem,” a League of Legends story, which is also available through other gaming platforms and marketplaces, including Nintendo Switch, Steam, the Epic Games Store, and GOG.com, where it’s offered as a paid download of $9.99. The other new title, “Dungeon Dwarves,” comes from Canadian developer Hyper Hippo, a company founded by Club Penguin co-founder Lance Priebe in 2012.

Both of the titles launching today represent new gaming partnerships for Netflix.

Netflix notes that “Hextech Mayhem,” a fast-paced rhythm runner, had already soft-launched in test markets Poland, Italy, Spain and Brazil, but is now launching to global subscribers. Notably, this is a fairly new game that just became available to other gaming platforms in November 2021. It also represents the first major gaming franchise to come to the Netflix games collection. However, it’s not the first Netflix game that’s sold elsewhere. Recently added “Arcanium: Rise of Akhan” is also a premium title available on other platforms.

The dungeon crawler “Dungeon Dwarves,” meanwhile, is just now becoming available to Netflix members. It’s the first and only idle game to launch on the Netflix service.

Image Credits: Netflix

Like its other games, Netflix users will be directed to the new titles through the company’s apps on iOS and Android. On Android, users can find games in multiple places, including on a dedicated gaming tab in the app’s main navigation. On iOS, however, games are instead featured in a dedicated row. The games themselves are hosted on the platforms’ respective app stores, not on Netflix’s infrastructure, but they can only be played by Netflix users. After installation, the games will prompt users to authenticate with their Netflix account information to get started.

Netflix has been building out its gaming service since late last year, when the company debuted its initial lineup which had then included a couple of “Stranger Things”-themed titles and other casual titles. Since then, it has rapidly expanded its available offerings to include puzzle games, racing games, open-world strategy games, and more. The games themselves aren’t developed in-house at Netflix, but are provided by partners, which have included Frosty Pop, Rogue Games, and BonusXP. Sometimes they use older IP licensed from larger outfits, like Gameloft. To date, Netflix has launched a dozen titles, but it has so far yet to capitalize on its acquisition of Night School Studios, known best for narrative-driven games like Oxenfree.

The company explained to investors during its recent Q4 earnings call that these initial gaming launches are more about setting up Netflix to better understand what consumers want from the new service.

“It’s tremendously exciting to get to this point because we basically have been building the plumbing and all the technical infrastructure just to get to the point where we can do this, which is consistently launching games globally to all of our members,” said Netflix’s COO and Chief Product Officer Greg Peters during the call. “We’re now really getting to learn from all those games what are the discovery patterns, what are the engagement patterns, how are they performing, what do our members want from games on the service.”

The company, however, has yet to detail how well its games are performing, only saying that it has a “growing number” of both daily active and monthly active users on its gaming titles.

Netflix also hinted it’s open to licensing larger game IP that people will recognize in the future, noting that “I think you’ll see some of that happen over the year to come.”

A growing number of U.S. consumers are getting scammed on social media according to a new report by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which revealed that consumers lost $770 million to social media scams in 2021 — a figure that accounted for about one-fourth of all fraud losses for the year. That number has also increased 18 times from the $42 million in social media fraud reported in 2017, the FTC said, as new types of scams involving cryptocurrency and online shopping became more popular. This has also led to many younger consumers getting scammed, as now adults ages 18 to 39 reported fraud losses at a rate that’s 2.4x higher than adults 40 and over.

Scammers have clearly found that social media is one of the most profitable places to commit fraud. More than 95,000 fraud victims said they were first contacted on social media — more than double 2020’s number, and up 19x from 2017.

Image Credits: FTC

More than one in four individuals who reported losing money to fraud to the FTC last year said they first saw a post, message, or ad on social media which had prompted the scam. Excluding reports that didn’t indicate a contact method, social media scams accounted for 26% of the losses attributed to fraud in 2021 ($770 million), followed by websites and apps at 19% ($554 million), then phone calls at 18% ($546 million). The median individual losses, however, were highest with phone fraud at $1,110 compared with $468 for social media fraud.

Facebook and Instagram were where most of these social media scams took place, the data indicated.

In the case of online romance scams, more than a third of users reported the first outreach they had from the scammer was on Facebook or Instagram. Specifically, Facebook accounted for 23% and Instagram 13% of romance scams. These scams would begin with a seemingly innocent friend request, followed by sweet talk, then a request for money, the report explained.

Meanwhile, more than half (54%) of the investment scams in 2021 began with social media platforms, where scammers would promote bogus investment opportunities or connect with people directly to encourage them to invest. Instagram was popular with scammers here, accounting for 36% of investment scams, followed by Facebook at 28%, then messaging apps WhatsApp and Telegram at 9% and 7%, respectively.

A large majority of the investment scams now involve cryptocurrency, the report also found. In 2021, cryptocurrency was the method of payment in 64% of social media investment scams reported to the FTC. Payment apps and services were the payment methods used in 13% of cases, followed by bank transfers or bank payments in 9%.

Image Credits: FTC

Although romance and investment scams continued to account for the largest losses by dollar amounts, even reaching record highs, the scams with the largest number of reports to the FTC involve consumers trying to purchase something they first saw on social media. In most cases, people were trying to make a purchase of something they saw marketed on Facebook or Instagram.

In 2021, 45% of reports sent to the FTC over money lost in social media scams were related to online shopping. Nearly 70% of those involved people who placed an order, typically after seeing an ad on social media, but then never received the merchandise. Some also noted the ads would direct them to “lookalike” websites, designed to fool them into thinking they were purchasing from a real online retailer. Facebook and Instagram served as the platforms of choice for 9 out of 10 of these scams, the report noted.

The increase in online shopping scams isn’t just an issue for the consumers losing money — it’s determinantal to the overall e-commerce ecosystem and social media companies’ businesses. In recent years, Facebook and Instagram have invested heavily in making online shopping a core part of their services, promising to connect advertisers with targeted customers. The Meta-owned apps also now include their own “Shop” sections, where consumers can browse goods and check out directly — without having to exit to an external website. But if consumers become wary of the legitimacy of the online retailers featured on these platforms, they may hesitate to shop from social media in the future.

For Meta, a change in consumer shopping behavior would matter more today than in years past, as the company’s larger ad business has been impacted by Apple’s privacy changes on iOS which let consumers opt out of tracking. Anticipating the market shift that would result from this reduced ability to personalize ads, Meta has been diversifying its revenue by creating in-app shops where it can capture more first-party data based on consumer shopping inside its own platform. It’s also tapping into new revenue streams from the creator economy, like subscriptions and tipping.

The FTC said that investment, romance, and e-commerce scams, combined, accounted for 70% of social media scams in 2021, but there were other types of fraud also associated with social platforms. The report did not break these down by category, however.

A new app called Weavit wants to be a “Shazam for your thoughts” — that is, it wants to offer people a different way to quickly capture their thoughts in a note-taking tool with a press of a button, which are then matched to other content in a broader knowledge base. Currently, Weavit can link your notes to your contacts, meetings, topics, and other weblinks, allowing you to jot down your ideas and other inspiration without having to try to first organize those thoughts in some more structured way.

The startup’s founders believe this parallels how your brain already works.

“Every thought that we have in our mind, sometimes, is completely unstructured and simply does not fit within an existing note that we have,” explains Weavit co-founder Komal Narwani. “You just want to throw a thought out there, and you want the machine to do the organization for you — so you can surface that information at a later stage and have it all neatly organized.”

To use the app, you can either type or dictate your idea to enter it into Weavit’s database.

The app then uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology to link certain items within the note to people, places, events, and other topics it knows about. For instance, if you wrote down you met someone at a certain event, like CES, then “CES” would be identified as an event and linked to other content where “CES” was also included. (Weavit connects to over 60 million Wikipedia topics to aid in these sorts of connections.) Plus, the person in your note could be identified and linked to their company, to past locations or meetings, and more.

Image Credits: Weavit

This automated form of linking makes it easier for people to build on their own existing knowledge as they write down their ideas. However, Weavit will also support using common tools, like the hashtag or the @ mention, so its users can make more manual connections as needed.

Weavit’s co-founder, Emmanuel Lefort, came up with the idea for the note-taking app in his past life working at a bank. The bank was tasked with selling financial products to its clients, but the sales staff wasn’t fully able to take advantage of latent information that resided within people’s personal networks. He thought it would be interesting if there was a way to automatically connect information together, automatically, without requiring manual entry into a CRM.

At launch, Weavit isn’t yet at the stage of connecting its users’ content to others across a distributed network of some kind — like within an internal organization, perhaps; that’s more of a long-term goal.

Instead, everything recorded in your Weavit app is private and encrypted. (Data is also encrypted while in transit, we’re told).

Currently, Weavit is iOS only but only available to users with an access code, as the startup is still in the early phases of testing.

TechCrunch readers who want to try the app can use the code “braincrunch.”

Image Credits: Weavit

Narwani says Weavit could fill a niche by being a more approachable app amid other tools powered by or resembling graph databases, like Roam Research or Obsidian, which are Markdown-based knowledge management tools. While those productivity apps are more complex and powerful, that also means they’re more complicated to adopt — especially for everyday users who aren’t as technical. Weavit, on the other hand, could be used by anyone for jotting down notes not only about their work or their research, but for remembering, organizing connecting everyday bits of information — like movie recommendations, the names of your kids’ teachers, or websites on a particular subject you want to save for later.

The startup raised a $1.25 million seed round in 2020, led by Fluxus Ventures and is a team of six full-time, based in Hong Kong.

Though the app’s MVP had been live last year, the app was retooled and relaunched in December 2021, based on user feedback. In other words, the version of the app live now is only a few weeks old. In its first ten days on the App Store, the new version of Weavit gained 1,500 sign-ups, the company claims.

The Weavit team is also working on a web app and will soon launch a Chrome extension for capturing images and web pages while browsing, to make Weavit capable of collecting content from the web — not just your own thoughts, ideas and inspirations. An Android app is further down the road.

Instagram is giving creators more ways to make money with today’s launch of Instagram Subscriptions. The feature, which was spotted hitting the App Store back in November, is now officially in early testing with a small group of U.S. creators who will be able to offer their followers paid access to exclusive Instagram Live videos and Stories. Subscribers will also receive a special badge that will help them to stand out in the comments section and creators’ inboxes.

At launch, only 10 total U.S. creators have gained access to the new feature, as Instagram considers this an “alpha” test meant to allow for feedback from fans and creators alike which it will then iterate upon.

Currently, the list of alpha creators includes actor and influencer @alanchikinchow; basketball player @sedona._; astrologer @alizakelly; dancer/actress/model @kelseylynncook; digital creator @elliottnorris; Olympic silver medalist @jordanchiles; gymnast and creator @jackjerry; spiritual coach and artist @bunnymichael; XR creator @donalleniii; and digital creator @lonnieiiv.

Through the Subscriptions product, creators can choose their own price point for access to their exclusive content. There are eight different price points to choose from, starting at $0.99 per to month to as much as $99.99 per month, depending on how much a creator believes their content is worth. Most creators will likely start towards the bottom of that range, at price points like $0.99, $1.99, $2.99, $4.99, or maybe even $9.99 per month, before experimenting with higher pricing like $19.99, $49.99, or $99.99 per month.

Once subscribed, users will be able to access prior subscriber-only content, like Stories saved as Highlights, for example. They’ll be alerted to exclusive broadcasts, where they’ll be able to engage more deeply with the creators as the viewing audience will be, naturally, smaller. In subscriber-only Stories, indicated with a purple ring, creators may share things like behind-the-scenes content, special polls, and more. Subscriber badges, also purple, will help fans stand out in the comments of public content, and will help them to be identified in creators’ message request folders in the inbox.

Image Credits: Instagram

Although there had been reports that Instagram was developing technology that would prevent creators’ exclusive content from being screenshot, Instagram told us there isn’t any such technology available during this initial test phase. However, resharing the content is a violation of its terms and creators are being encouraged to report anyone screenshotting or recording their content.

There’s also no dedicated section for Subscriptions in creators’ analytics dashboards during the early tests. But creators will be able to access their total estimated earnings from subscriptions, total subscribers, new subscriptions, and cancellations from their Subscriptions Settings. They aren’t able to export subscriber lists, or any sort of data, but Instagram says it hopes to build tools that would allow creators to connect with subscribers “off-platform” in the future.

For fans, signing up for a subscription to their favorite creators’ content takes place via traditional in-app purchases across iOS and Android. And for now, Instagram is not taking a cut of the creators’ revenues.

“We are the same as all of Meta — we’re not taking any rev share until at least 2023,” noted Instagram Co-Head of Product, Ashley Yuki. “Our main goal here is that we help creators make a living…We’re trying to think of all the ways that we can build monetization products where that’s possible.”

Of course, Instagram isn’t just trying to help creators make a living. It’s also trying to shore up its platform against the threat of competition, namely from TikTok, which has attracted a growing number of creators looking to reach a younger, Gen Z following. It’s also seen other large tech rivals, like YouTube and Snapchat, try to appeal to TikTok users with similar short-form video products, like Instagram’s TikTok clone called Reels. Meanwhile, even Twitter has launched its own creator initiative with its Super Follow platform, and numerous startups are working on services that allow creators to consolidate, track and monetize their following in new ways.

The activity in this space is a reflection of the size of the market. The creator economy is estimated to be a little over $100 billion dollars, and growing. Even if Instagram (and Facebook) defer collecting their cut of creator transactions for a year, Meta sees it as a small investment in ensuring a larger piece of that pie going forward.

Despite the competitive landscape, Instagram believes its strength will come from the fact that it’s not a new product.

“One of the biggest differentiators here for creators and for fans is just the convenience of the fact that you actually know how to use all these things already. You’re already on Instagram. And we hear a lot [about] the friction of having to do the ‘click out.’ It might seem like a small thing. But in those moments, it can be the difference between having someone jump over your subscription or not,” explained Yuki. “The convenience of just having it all where the conversation and connection is already happening, we think is going to be one of the strongest points of this for both creators and for fans,” she said.

Instagram Subscriptions is only one way Meta has been working to help creators monetize. Last year, Facebook rebranded Facebook Fan Subscriptions to just “Subscriptions,” and allowed creators to download their subscribers’ emails. Facebook creators can also use personalized links to promote their subscriptions. And across Facebook and Instagram, creators can participate in Meta’s $1 billion bonus program.

In time, it seems likely that Facebook and Instagram Subscriptions could merge. If that came to be, fans would also be able to sign up on Facebook or Instagram — including via the websites, where no App Store commissions would need to be paid. And those subscriptions could carry over to the respective mobile apps. Yuki didn’t discount the idea, when asked.

“In this alpha, that’s not implemented yet. But that’s something that we could definitely consider for the future,” she said.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also touted the launch on his Facebook profile today, noting Subscriptions would “help creators earn more by offering benefits to their most engaged followers like access to exclusive Lives and Stories.

“I’m excited to keep building tools for creators to make a living doing creative work and to put these tools in more creators’ hands soon,” he wrote.

A competition legal expert, backed by a powerful litigation fund, is to mount a multi-billion class action for breach of competition law against Facebook/Meta on the basis that it abused its dominance of social networking in the UK for several years. If successful, the action would see Facebook having to pay out $3.1 billion (£2.3 billion) in damages to the Facebook UK users.

The multi-billion pound class action lawsuit was yesterday lodged with the UK”S Competition Appeal Tribunal in London against Meta, Facebook’s parent company.

The unusual approach claims Facebook should pay its 44 million UK users compensation for the exploitation of their data between 2015 and 2019. Effectively it’s saying, Facebook took all the personal and private data of its users – who, due to Facebook’s dominance, had no other viable social platform – and in return all its users got – in effect – was the ability to post pictures of babies and kittens to their friends and families.

The action is being mounted by International competition law expert Dr Liza Lovdahl Gormsen (pictured) who has made submissions before the UK’s Parliament on Facebook’s market dominance, as well as written academic legal papers about it.

Dr Lovdahl Gormsen’s case rests on the idea that Facebook (recently renamed Meta) set an ‘unfair price’ for UK Facebook users.

The “price” set for granting access to the social network was the surrender of UK users’ highly valuable personal data, who in return simply got “free” access to Facebook’s social networking platform, no financial compensation, and all this while Facebook generated billions in revenues.

Key to the case’s argument is that Facebook ‘surrounded’ its UK users not just by locking them and their data into its platform, but also by tracking them via the Facebook Pixel, on other websites, thus generating deep “social graph” data about its users.

Germain to Dr Lovdahl Gormsen’s argument is that user profiles resurfaced time and again in controversies, such as during the Cambridge Analytica scandal, further illustrating their market exploitation. 

Dr Lovdahl Gormsen’s lawyers, Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, LLP, have written to Meta to notify them of the claim. Dr Lovdahl Gormsen will represent the class of people affected – that is all people domiciled in the UK who used Facebook at least once during 1 October 2015 – 31 December 2019.

The ‘opt-out’ class action, is the first of its kind against Meta in England and Wales. As an opt-out case, Facebook’s 4 million UK users will not need to actively join the case to seek damages, but will be part of the claim unless they decide to opt-out from it. 

Financial backing for the case is coming from Innsworth, one of the largest litigation funders in the world. Quinn Emanuel and Innsworth have previous history in bringing consumer class action claims of this kind.

The wider context to this is that Meta is also facing a consumer class action in the US, regulatory action around the world, and an antitrust suit from the FTC in the US that could break it up from the Instagram and WhatsApp platforms.

In a statement, Dr Lovdahl Gormsen said: “In the 17 years since it was created, Facebook became the sole social network in the UK where you could be sure to connect with friends and family in one place. Yet, there was a dark side to Facebook; it abused its market dominance to impose unfair terms and conditions on ordinary Britons giving it the power to exploit their personal data. I’m launching this case to secure billions of pounds of damages for the 44 million Britons who had their data exploited by Facebook.”

Speaking to me over a call, I asked Dr Lovdahl Gormsen if Facebook could argue that there were other social networks available such as Twitter or MySpace?

“I don’t think people can connect to their family and friends in the same way on Twitter, and Snapchat and all these other places. Facebook is quite unique in the way they’re doing it,” she said.

The action is also based on the ubiquity of the Facebook pixel on other websites. What is the significance of that to the case, I asked?

“Imagine yourself as a Facebook user,” said Dr Lovdahl Gormsen. “You may be aware that your data will be used by Facebook.com. But what the pixels are doing is when you use a third-party website, that of course has nothing to do with Facebook. That means Facebook has created many, many, many more data points on you that you actually knew you’d signed up to.”

She argues that although it’s possible for a user to remove themselves from Facebook’s platform, deep down in the Settings, in practice the vast majority of users have no idea how to do this or even know it’s possible.

Dr Lovdahl Gormsen is a Senior Research Fellow at the British Institute of International and Comparative Law (BIICL), the director of the Competition Law Forum, a Non-Governmental Advisor to the International Competition Network, and sits on the advisory board of the Journal of Antitrust Enforcement (OUP).

TechCrunch reached out to Facebook asking for comment but had received no reply at the time of publication.

Around the same time Apple was touting its sizable App Store revenue growth this week, developer and noted App Store critic Kosta Eleftheriou brought to light what appeared to be yet another App Store scammer hiding in plain sight. On Twitter, Eleftheriou documented the earnings for a music syncing app called AmpMe, which claims to boost your music’s volume by syncing it across devices, including friends’ phones, Bluetooth speakers and computer speakers. AmpMe, he found, had been charging an incredible $10 per week for this basic service, which it had been promoting on the App Store by way of fake reviews.

The AmpMe iOS app doesn’t require a subscription to use some of its features, but does if you want to synchronize your music to other devices — the main reason users likely downloaded the app in the first place.

Eleftheriou noted this offering was priced at what he called “an absurd $10/week (~$520/year).” The subscription also auto-renews, as most in-app subscriptions do. And while Apple makes it easy to sign up and stay subscribed, subscription cancelations can only be performed from your Account page’s Subscriptions section, which you can get to from the App Store or the iPhone’s Settings app. You can’t cancel inside the app itself.  

AmpMe hadn’t been trying to trick users about its pricing, at least. The sign-up page clearly stated its free trial was offered for just three days and would then be followed by a $9.99 per week subscription.

But where the app ran afoul of the App Store’s rules was how it marketed itself to potential customers.

AmpMe had purchased a ton of fake reviews, as evidenced by its large slate of five-star ratings associated with nonsensical names. These names — like Nicte Videlerqhjgd or Elcie Zapaterbpmtl, for example — looked like someone just mashed buttons on a keyboard. But the reviewers were sure to have left positive feedback, like “It’s sooo good!” or “super useful” or “Don’t need any other music apps!”

(Interestingly, these same reviewers left glowing five-star reviews on other apps, too, and all on the same day! That’s suspicious!)

The fake reviews gave the app an overall rating of 4.3 stars on the App Store, making it seem like a legitimate and useful music syncing tool. Meanwhile, the real reviews — where legitimate App Store customers complained about the outrageous pricing, basic functionality or the obvious fake reviews — were drowned out by the spam.

Apple had not taken action on this deceptively marketed app for years. And to make matters worse, it had even promoted it several times through App Store editorial collections, Eleftheriou pointed out. 

The conclusion he draws from this is that not only is Apple lax on hunting down App Store scammers, it may actually be disincentivized to do so because of scam apps’ earnings potential. (The only other possible conclusion here is that Apple is just inept when it comes to keeping the App Store safe for consumers… which isn’t really a good look either.)

Citing data from Appfigures, Eleftheriou notes AmpMe has pulled in $13 million in lifetime revenue on the App Store, after Apple’s cut.

Another firm puts the figure even higher. Apptopia told TechCrunch the app has earned $16 million since it began monetizing through in-app purchases in October 2018; $15.5 million of that was through the App Store and another $500,000 came through Google Play. The majority (or 75%) of the in-app purchase revenue came from consumers in the U.S. To date, AmpMe has seen 33.5 million lifetime installs, 38% of which are from the U.S.

In a response provided to TechCrunch, AmpMe disputed some of the claims being made.

The company said its users aren’t paying $520 per year — what a $10 per week subscription would add up to if users stayed subscribed. Instead, AmpMe said across its paying users, its average yearly subscription revenue is around $75. This would indicate users are taking advantage of the free trial then canceling the subscription after some time. AmpMe also said that, internally, this reinforced its belief that its pricing is transparent and its opt-out procedures are easy.

The company did not, however, have a great answer as to why its App Store Listing is filled with fake reviews, opting to toss blame on an anonymous third party instead.

“Through the years, like most startups, we’ve hired outside consultants to help us with marketing and app store optimization. More oversight is needed and that’s what we are currently working on,” a statement sent by an unnamed AmpMe representative said. (They had signed the email “The AmpMe Team.”)

In addition, the company said it was responding to this recent feedback by releasing a new version of the app with a lower price point.

“We always adhere to Apple’s subscription guidelines and are continually working to ensure their high standards are met,” the email read. “We also respect and value the community’s feedback. Therefore, a new version of the app with a lower price has already been submitted to the App Store for review.”

That version has since gone live and sees the weekly subscription reduced to $4.99 from $9.99.

Today, Eleftheriou tells us it looks like a manual cleanup of the fake reviews is now underway.

On Monday at 11 AM, he documented the app had 54,080 reviews. By Tuesday at 9 PM, after AmpMe saw a fair bit of bad press, the app’s review count had dropped to 53,028. By 7 AM on Wednesday, the review count dropped again to 50,693. But the app’s overall rating hasn’t been meaningfully impacted. This could be because the reviews being removed are those submitted by the fake App Store users instead of the ones where the app was given a five-star rating but no review text or reviewer name is visible. That means the cleanup process will make it less obvious the app had purchased fake reviews. 

Also of interest, perhaps, is AmpMe’s CEO: the Canadian technology entrepreneur Martin-Luc Archambault. His Wajam software-turned-adware was previously investigated by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC), and found to have violated Canadian internet privacy laws by collecting user data without consent. It also used several methods to evade detection by antivirus software, reports claimed at the time. When the OPC announced its findings, Archambault claimed the Canadian user data in question had been destroyed and Wajam had sold its assets to a Chinese company. Over its lifetime, the adware had been installed millions of times, the OPC’s report said.

In other words, this does not sound like someone who would be opposed to buying some fake reviews!

AmpMe hasn’t responded to further follow-up questions beyond its original statement, and Apple has not responded to a request for comment.

To date, AmpMe had raised $10 million in VC funding, per Crunchbase data.