User blogs

Advances in technology provide all kinds of benefits, but also introduce risks — especially to already marginalized populations. AI for the People’s Mutale Nkonde, disability rights lawyer Haben Girma, and author of Algorithms of Oppression Safiya Umoja Noble have studied and documented these risks for years in their work. They joined us at TC Sessions: Justice 2021 to talk about the deep origins and repercussions of bias in tech, and where to start when it comes to fixing them.

On bias in tech versus bias in people

When it comes to identifying bias in tech, there are two ways of coming at it: the tech itself and the people who are putting it to work. A facial recognition system may be be racist itself (such as working poorly with dark skin) or used in furtherance of racist policies (like stop and frisk).

Nkonde: There is the problem of technologies which are inherently racist, or sexist, or ableist, as Haben so beautifully pointed out. But there is another part… an imagination for technologies that could actually serve all people. And if the if the scientists who are creating those technologies don’t have experience outside of their own experiences, and we’re sitting in a moment where Google AI has got rid of [Margaret] Mitchell and Timnit Gebru, both of whom were technologists from, researchers from, minoritized communities who are thinking about new and different ways that tools could be designed… then you may not see them coming to products. I’d say that the two are definitely married. (Timestamp: 3:00)

• Twitter and Zoom’s algorithmic bias issues
• Google fires top AI ethics researcher Margaret Mitchell
• What’s next for Dr. Timnit Gebru

On the danger in ‘banal’ technologies

Bias does not only exist in controversial tech like facial recognition. Search engines, algorithmic news feeds, and other things we tend to take for granted also can contain harmful biases or contribute to them.

Noble: My concerns were with what we might think of as just banal technologies, things that we really don’t give a second thought to, and that also present themselves as widely neutral, and valuable. Of course this is where I became interested in looking at Google search, because Google’s own kind of declaration that they were interested in organizing all the world’s knowledge, I think was a pretty big claim. I’m coming out of the field of Library and Information Science and thinking about, I don’t know, thousands of years of librarians, for example, around the world, who have been indeed organizing the world’s knowledge, and what it means to have an advertising company, quite frankly, data mine our knowledge, but also commingle it with things like disinformation, propaganda, patently false information and ideas, and really flatten our ability to understand knowledge and good information. (Timestamp: 5:13)

• Google’s latest user-hostile design change makes ads and search results look identical
• Google threatens to close its search engine in Australia as it lobbies against digital news code

On how excluding groups harms them twice over

Haben Girma, who is deaf and blind, has advocated for accessibility with the skills she learned at Harvard Law. But the lack of accessibility goes deeper than simply not captioning images properly and other small tasks.

Girma: So most of the technology that’s built was not imagined for disabled people, which is frustrating… and also absolutely ridiculous. Tech has so much potential to exist in visual forms, in auditory forms, in tactile forms, and even smell and taste. It’s up to the designers to create tools that everyone can use. (Timestamp: 0:56)

A disturbing viral trend on TikTok recently questioned the story of deafblind icon Helen Keller. Doubt that she existed as described or did the things she did was widespread on the platform — and because TikTok is not designed for accessibility, others like Keller are excluded from the conversation and effectively erased from consideration in addition to being the subject of false claims.

Girma: Deafblind people have used technology for quite a while, and were early users of technology, including being designers and engineers. We are on many of the social media platforms, there are blind and deaf blind people on Twitter. TikTok was not designed with accessibility in mind.

When you have a space where there are few disabled people, ableism grows. People on TikTok have questioned the existence of Helen Keller, because the people on the platform can’t imagine how a deafblind person would write a book, or travel around the world. Things that are well documented that Helen Keller did. And there’s also lots of information on how blind and deaf blind people are doing these things today, writing books today, using technology today. So when you have these spaces where there are no disabled people, or very few disabled people, ableism and negative biases grow more rapidly. And that’s incredibly harmful, because the people there are missing out on talented, diverse voices. (Timestamp: 12:16)

• White House, dark mode: Biden admin refreshes presidency’s website, vows accessibility
• Evinced raises $17M to speed up accessibility testing for the web

On tech deployed against black communities

The flip side of racism within tech is ordinary tech being used by racist institutions. When law enforcement employs “objective” technology like license plate readers or biometric checks, they bring their own systematic biases and troubling objectives.

Nkonde: One of the things that that really brought me to was this whole host of technologies that when used by security forces, or police, reinforce these discriminatory impacts on black communities. So that could be the way license plate readers were used by ICE to identify cars, and when they pulled people over, they would do these additional biometric checks, whether it was fingerprinting or iris readers, and then use that to criminalize these people onto the road to deportation. (Timestamp: 17:16)

And when the two forms of bias are combined, certain groups are put at serious disadvantage:

Nkonde: We’re seeing how all of these technologies on their own, are impacting black lives, but imagine when all of those technologies are together, imagine when, here in New York, I walked to the subway to take a train because I have to go to work. And my face is captured by a CCTV camera that could wrongly put me at the scene of a crime because it does not recognize my humanity, because black faces are not recognized by those systems. That’s a very old idea that really takes us back to this idea that black people aren’t human, they’re in fact three fifths of a human, which was at the founding of this country, right? But we’re reproducing that idea through technology. (Timestamp: 19:00)

• For Seattle’s cop-free protest zone, tech is both a revolutionary asset and disastrous liability
• Racial disparity in Chicago cops’ use of force laid bare in new data

On the business consequences of failing to address bias and diversity

While companies should be trying to do the right thing, it may help speed things up if there’s a financial incentive as well. And increasingly there is real liability resulting from failing to consider these problems. For instance, if your company produces an AI solution that’s found to be seriously biased, you not only lose business but may find yourself the subject of civil and government lawsuits.

Noble: I think that first of all, there’s a tremendous amount of risk by not taking up these issues. I’ve heard that the risk management profile, for example for a company like Facebook, in terms of harm, what they can’t solve with software and AI, that they use human beings, quite frankly to sort through, for example, the risk that they face is probably estimated around $2 billion, right?

If you’re talking about a $2 billion risk, I think then this is a decision that exceeds the design desires and software engineers. (Timestamp 24:25)

Not just bias but unintended consequences need to be considered, such as how an app or service may be abused in ways the creators might not have thought of.

Noble: I think you have to think far beyond, you know, like, what you can do versus what you should do, or what’s ethical and responsible to do and I think these conversations now can no longer be avoided. This is a place where founders, venture capitalists, everything, every VC in the Valley on Sandhill road should have a person who is responsible for thinking about the adverse effects of the products that they might invest in. (Timestamp: 25:43)

• DE&I at Facebook, Prop 22 and gig worker earnings
• Facebook fined again in Italy for misleading users over what it does with their data

On getting people in the room before, not after the crisis

The tendency to “ship it and fix it” rather than include accessibility from the ground up is increasingly being questioned by both advocates and developers. Turns out it’s better for everyone, and cheaper in the long run, to do it right the first time.

Girma: The answer to most of these questions is have the people involved. ‘Nothing about us without us’ is the saying in the Disability Justice Movement, so if these seas and companies are thinking about investing in a solution that they think will be good for the world? Ask disability justice advocates, get us involved. (Timestamp: 29:25)

We need the VCs to also connect with Disability Justice advocates, and really find someone who has knowledge and background in accessibility and tech. Same thing for any company. All the companies should have, technology existing and tech in the process of being built, should be consulting on accessibility. It’s easier to make something accessible if you design for accessibility, rather than trying to make it accessible afterwards. It’s like having an elevator in a physical building. You don’t build the structure, and then think about adding an elevator. You think about adding an elevator before you design it. (Timestamp: 30:55)

• Microsoft offers new accessibility testing service for PC and Xbox games
• Fable aims to make disability-inclusive design as simple as a service

Read the full transcript here.

Early Stage is the premier ‘how-to’ event for startup entrepreneurs and investors. You’ll hear first-hand how some of the most successful founders and VCs build their businesses, raise money and manage their portfolios. We’ll cover every aspect of company-building: Fundraising, recruiting, sales, product market fit, PR, marketing and brand building. Each session also has audience participation built-in – there’s ample time included for audience questions and discussion. Use code “TCARTICLE at checkout to get <a href=”http://techcrunch.com/events/tc-early-stage-2021-part-1?promo=tcarticle&display=true”>20 percent off tickets right here.

In its latest strike against online content it doesn’t control Russia is throttling Twitter. State agency Roskomnadzor said today it was taking the action in response to the social media not removing banned content, claiming it had identified more than 3,000 unlawful posts that have not been taken down — and warning it could implement a total block on the service.

However the action by the comms regulator to slow down all Twitter’s mobile traffic and 50% of desktop users in Russia appeared to have briefly taken down Roskomnadzor’s own website earlier today.

Reports also circulated on social media that Russian government websites, including kremlin.ru, had been affected. At the time of writing these sites were accessible but earlier we were unable to access Roskomnadzor’s site.

The stand-off between the state agency and Twitter comes at a time when Russia is trying to clamp down on anti-corruption protestors who are supporters of the jailed opposition leader, Alexei Navalny — who has, in recent weeks, called for demonstrators to take to the streets to ramp up pressure on the regime.

Roskomnadzor’s statement makes no mention of the state’s push to censor political opposition — claiming only that the content it’s throttling Twitter for failing to delete is material relating to minors committing suicide; child pornography; and drug use. Hence it also claims to be taking the action to “protect Russian citizens”. However a draconian application of speech-chilling laws to try to silence political opposition are nothing new in Putin’s Russia.

The Russian regime has sought to get content it doesn’t like removed from foreign-based social media services a number of times in recent years, including — as now — resorting to technical means to limit access.

Most notoriously, back in 2018, an attempt by Russia to block access to the messaging service Telegram resulted in massive collateral damage to the local Internet as the block took down millions of (non-Telegram-related) IP addresses — disrupting those other services.

Also in 2018 Facebook-owned Instagram complied with a Russian request to remove content posted by Navalny — which earned it a shaming tweet from the now jailed politician.

Although now behind bars in Russia — Navalny was jailed in February, after Russia claimed he had violated the conditions of a suspended sentence — the prominent Putin critic has continued to use his official Twitter account as a megaphone to denounce corruption and draw attention to the injustice of his detention, following his attempted poisoning last year (which has been linked to Russia’s FSB).

Recent tweets from Navalny’s account include amplification of an investigation by the German newspaper Bild into RT DE, the Russian state-controlled media outlet Russia Today’s German channel — which the newspaper accuses of espionage in German targeting Navalny and his associates (he was staying in a German hospital in Berlin at the time, recovering from the attempted poisoning).

Slowing down access to Twitter is one way for Russia to try to put a lid on Navalny’s critical output on the platform — which also includes a recent retweet of a video claiming that Russian citizen’s taxes were used this winter by Putin and his cronies to fund yachts, whiskey and a Maldivian vacation.

Navalny’s account has also tweeted in recent hours to denounce his jailing by the Russian state following its attempt to poison him — saying: “This situation is called attempted murder”.

At the time of writing Twitter had not responded to requests for comment on Roskomnadzor’s action.

However last month, in a worrying development in India that’s also related to anti-government protests (in that case by farmers who are seeking to reverse moves to deregulate the market), Twitter caved in to pressure from the government — shuttering 500 accounts including some linked to the anti-government protests.

It also agreed to reduce the visibility of certain protest hashtags.

Growth for Facebook is coming from the developing world, and so the social network today made another key move to cater better to consumers in those countries. After nearly three years in the planning, Facebook is taking the plunge today and officially launching Instagram Lite, a less data- and storage-intensive Android-only version of one of its popular photo and video app, which will take up just 2MB on a phone and is going live in 170 countries, with a focus on emerging markets, today.

Instagram Lite is launching with all the basic bells and whistles around editing, sharing and viewing photos and videos, as well as the ability to add stickers, create and view Stories, IGTV and the Explore discovery and recommendation algorithms. And given the launch across 170 countries, it’s coming with specific language support to be usable in those markets.

But to whittle down the experience from the 30MB that full-fat Instagram takes up on iOS and Android devices (and countless MB of mobile data usage), it’s launching without some things, too.

Namely, the developers have left out many graphics; they haven’t included advertising; and it’s missing some key features like dark mode, Shopping, and end-to-end encryption. (Notably, encryption was reportedly being worked on for the main app in 2019, but it has yet to launch). Nor are there iOS or feature phone versions of the app in the works.

Facebook said that some of that list — such as dark mode, and (of course) adverts — will be added in future updates.

Instagram Lite has been teased out in different forms by Facebook since 2018, and it’s hitting what has proven to be a receptive market for the social media giant. Tzach Hadar, Tel Aviv-based director of product management for all of Facebook’s Lite apps — which also include versions of Facebook and Messenger, also built in Tel Aviv — said this week that Facebook Lite now has more than 200 million monthly active users.

That’s just a fraction of the billions that use Facebook itself, but represents a key way of targeting those newer to Facebook or those who might not otherwise be using the app because of financial or bandwidth constraints.

But although Instagram is wildly popular and would have been an obvious candidate for the Lite treatment years ago, and Instagram Lite was one of the most requested items from users in developing markets, it has proven to be trickier beast.

That’s not just because the app focuses on images and videos, which by their nature use up more bandwidth and data; but because over the years Instagram has become increasingly laden with features: those aimed at enhancing the user experience; those aimed at competing better with other apps (hello, Stories); and those to extend monetization opportunities for Facebook.

“Instagram offered another kind of unique challenge for us to deliver under the same constraints the same experience,” said Nick Brown, a product manager based out of New York (the app was co-developed across Facebook’s Tel Aviv and NYC offices and — presumably, given the year we’ve had — across many Facebook employees’ homes). “The philosophy is really that we want to bring all of Instagram to these users.”

Image Credits: Facebook

Indeed, as with other Lite versions of apps like Facebook and Messenger, Instagram Lite is geared towards consumers in emerging economies, where smartphones are most likely to be Android-based and less likely to be top-of-the-range devices; consumers are more likely to be more price- and bandwidth-sensitive when it comes to using mobile data; and a substantial proportion are still only now getting to grips with being online.

Facebook notes estimates that show 65% of emerging market populations are online versus 90% in North America, which is one reason why the company focuses so squarely on serving those users: they represent growth at a time when growth has slowed down, or become significantly more competitive against newer entrants, in its more mature markets like the U.S. and Europe.

However, building for the demands of developing markets can often, by their nature, run counter to the concept of building in ever more features as you might otherwise see with highly competitive consumer apps.

The Instagram Lite app had some fits and starts over the years, with the first version, built on React Native, launching in a limited release back in 2018, taking up a mere 573kb of space on a device. It also came without a lot of features, but Instagram itself had less features, too. While it was never explained why, that version was quietly pulled last year, and then shortly after a newer version was launched again in December in a limited test. Debuted first in India, a key market for the company, Instagram Lite launched there with support for Bangla, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu.

And it’s that last test that has turned into the official Instagram Lite app. Interestingly, it turns out that in the process, the whole app was rebuilt, moving it away from Facebook’s own React Native framework and building it instead on an internal framework called Bloks (not to be confused with Bloks), heavy lifting a lot of the basic workings from Messenger and Facebook’s Lite versions. I’ve asked for more detail about this, and I wonder if it’s related to LightSpeed, which was a development shift that saw a lighter and new version of Messenger get released last year.

“Bloks is a framework that is much more performant and has more features and capabilities, and this new Instagram light application is built upon it,” said Hadar. “So it’s like a new app altogether.” It’s not clear what exactly happened behind the scenes leading to the previous app getting pulled, but it seems that in any case the foundations now give the company more room for expanding the service (even while bumping up the app size from under 600kb to 2MB).

That fact might matter less to users, but does point to some notable trends at the company itself and how it’s approaching tech in the future, and viewing feature parity between full and Lite versions of its flagship apps.

Sources say Web Summit, the giant tech conference company which specialized in very large gatherings in cities like Lisbon, is poised to spin out its Hopin-like proprietary conference software as an independent startup. Although it’s put out a statement today that it will be licensing its software to the United Nations Development Programme, I’ve spoken to well-placed sources who say the platform will be spun out as a separate company and will raise venture funding, the context being that similar virtual conference platforms have already achieved million and billion-dollar valuations. A spokesperson denied the claim.

The software – which was first showcased at Collision in June 2020 and played host to 104,000 attendees at Web Summit in December 2020 – was initially designed to complement networking at physical events, but was flipped to work online after international travel was restricted for business and companies worldwide as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The United Nations Development Programme will be the first customer to run Web Summit’s conference software for its event – Istanbul Innovation Days, March 23-25.

Paddy Cosgrave, co-founder and CEO of Web Summit said: “We’ve agreed to run an event in March for the UNDP on our platform. We couldn’t imagine having a better first customer. It’s been a long journey, and we’ve taken it slow, perfecting the software over years. We’re in no rush for new customers, and we will take our time. In 2022, we hope to partner with other great events.” Speaking to TechCrunch, he denied the platform was to be spun-out.

However, our sources say investors are circling around the software platform in the light of the recent valuations of the likes of Zoom and Hopin, with the latter recently achieving a valuation of between $5 billion and $6 billion after its recent $400 million Series C.

The potential move come by Web Summit comes at an interesting time for the virtual events space.

Although Hopin’s valuation has soared, Zoom’s valuation has been called “impossible to justify”. And the huge growth of Microsoft Teams could hurt Zoom’s business as well.

That said, specialized virtual conference software is doing well, as we’ve seen with the recent $14m funding of Spatial and others.

Web Summit says will return to an in-person conference in November 2021, in Lisbon, Portugal.

Remix, the startup that developed mapping software used by cities for transportation planning and street design, was born out of a hackathon during a Code for America fellowship. Nearly seven years later, the San Francisco-based startup is being acquired by Via for $100 million in cash and equity.

Remix will become a subsidiary of Via, an arrangement that will let the startup maintain its independent brand. Remix’s 65 employees and two of its co-founders — CEO Tiffany Chu and CTO Dan Getelman — will stay on.

The acquisition adds yet another service to Via’s ever-expanding business as well as customer base of more than 350 local governments in 22 countries.

Remix’s strength is in planning, while Via brings expertise in software and operations, Chu said in a recent interview.

“By having those two strengths come together, we can be much stronger as an end-to-end solution — from the initial genesis of this idea around transportation planning and carrying that through to operations — in a way that we, individually, would not have been able to achieve otherwise,” Chu said.

Image Credits: Remix 

Via started as a on-demand shuttle operator in 2012. The company, which last year hit a $2.25 billion valuation after raising $400 million in a Series E round, has evolved from its initial consumer-facing focus.

Today, Via’s core business is its software and operations platform, which is used by cities and transportation authorities to plan, schedule and deploy their own on-demand and fixed route transit, paratransit and school buses. Via has 200 partners in 24 countries.

Via is backed by Exor, the Agnelli family holding company that owns stakes in PartnerRe, Ferrari and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles as well as Macquarie Capital, Mori Building, Shell 83North, Broadscale Group, Ervington Investments, Hearst Ventures, Planven Ventures, Pitango and RiverPark Ventures.

Accidental founders

Remix’s Silicon Valley-esque origin story was driven by some unlikely entrepreneurs.

Chu had been a user experience designer at Zipcar when she moved to San Francisco to complete a one-year fellowship with Code for America. In the middle of the fellowship, Chu along her eventual co-founders Getelman, Sam Hashemi and Danny Whalen were working on a hackathon project that to help citizens of San Francisco suggest better transit routes to the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency.

The transportation planning tool was shared on Twitter and it went viral. Within two weeks, 30,000 maps had been created.

“It became this funny, unexpected armchair transportation planning tool that people explored online,” Chu recalled. But it wasn’t just the local citizenry who took notice. About 200 urban planners reached out, asking the team to build extra features that could be used by agencies for their own transportation planning projects.

“It was kind of a mind blowing moment for us when we realized the project that was supposed to be a grassroots kind of civic project actually had implications around solving real needs and problems in transportation,” Chu said.

Remix was founded shortly after and the company’s founders applied and were accepted into Y Combinator. The company went on to raise a total of $27 million in investments from Y Combinator, Sequoia and Energy Impact Partners.