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DNA profiling company Ancestry has confirmed it fought two U.S. law enforcement requests to access its DNA database in the past six months, but that neither request resulted in turning over customer or DNA data.
The Utah-based company disclosed the two requests in its latest transparency report covering the latter half of 2020. The report said Ancestry “challenged both of these requests, which were withdrawn,” and that the company “provided no data” at the time of the report, published Tuesday.
Ancestry did not say which agencies or police departments requested the DNA data or for what reason the company challenged the request. Ancestry spokesperson Gina Spatafore confirmed the search warrants were to obtain DNA data but declined to comment beyond what was in the report.
The company also said in its most recent report that it “refused numerous inquiries” from U.S. law enforcement for failing to obtain the proper legal process. The report also said the company received four valid law enforcement requests, but that it did not provide any data in response.
Ancestry has more than 3.6 million subscribers and has more than 18 million customer DNA profiles in its database, making it the largest in the world.
DNA profiling companies like Ancestry are increasingly popular with customers wanting to learn more about their family heritage, their genetic markers, and to understand their cultural and ethnic backgrounds. But as these DNA databases become larger, they are also attracting attention from law enforcement who want access to help solve crimes.
On its website, Ancestry says: “We believe that the nature of our members’ DNA data is particularly sensitive, so we insist on a court order or search warrant as the minimum level of due process before we will review our ability to comply with the request. We also seek to put our members’ privacy first, so we also will try to minimize the scope or even invalidate the warrant before complying.”
It’s not the first time Ancestry has pushed back against a legal demand. Last year the company said it rejected an out-of-state search warrant, ordered by a court in Pennsylvania, to “seek access” to its DNA database on the grounds that the warrant was “improperly served.”
Ancestry has only complied with one search warrant for DNA data from a database it acquired and later made public, not realizing that police would use the database to search for leads.
It’s not uncommon for companies with large amounts of customer data to frequently receive law enforcement demands for user data — or for companies to publish periodic transparency reports that detail the number of legal demands they receive.
To its credit, Ancestry is one of only two DNA profiling sites that publishes a transparency report. 23andMe also publishes the number of data demands it receives each quarter, but to date has not released any customer data to law enforcement. FamilyDNA said over a year ago that it was “working on publishing” a transparency report.
The move by Ancestry and 23andMe came shortly after police used DNA profiling site GEDmatch to identify the DNA of a suspected serial killer, a breakthrough which later led to the arrest of the so-called Golden State Killer in 2018. GEDmatch said it was “not approached by law enforcement” prior to the search. GEDmatch soon after allowed its users to opt-in for their DNA to be included in police searches.
Last year, GEDmatch confirmed it was hit by two data breaches that made user profiles visible to other users, including law enforcement.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/10/ancestry-police-warrant-dna-database/
Apple Maps is inching into more Waze-like territory with an update that will give drivers the ability to report road hazards, accidents, or even speed traps. The new features are live now in the iOS 14.5 beta, which is now open to public beta testers as well as developers, but won’t roll out to the general public until later this spring, Apple says.
To use the new features, drivers will be able to report road issues and incidents by using Siri on their iPhone or through Apple’s CarPlay. For example, during navigation, they’ll be able to tell Siri things like “there’s a crash up head,” “there’s something on the road,” or “there’s a speed trap here.” They’ll also be able to correct stale accident or hazard alert information by saying things like “the hazard is gone” or the “incident is no longer here.”
While using Siri makes the reporting experience safer, the updated app will also allow users to swipe up on the map to tap a report button to alert others to accidents, hazards or speed traps, as well.
The update could present a challenge to Google-owned navigation app Waze, which has long been a popular tool for staying alerted to road conditions, hazards, accidents and police presence. In Waze, users can interact by touching the screen or issuing commands through Google Assistant, but voice support for iOS users, naturally, is more limited. Today, Waze supports the use of Siri Shortcuts, which have to be manually configured and added to Siri, for example.
The new Apple Maps features could also make Apple’s app more appealing to users who feel their user data is safer within Apple’s ecosystem, thanks to the work Apple has done to position itself as the company that cares more about consumer privacy.
Notable, too, is the addition of speed traps, which represents a shift in direction for Apple Maps. Historically, Apple has been opposed to including police warnings in its product. But that lack of support has contributed to Google’s ability to dominate the navigation and mapping market on mobile devices.
Apple’s decision here also follows an expansion of Waze-like features to Google Maps, blurring the distinctions between Google’s two navigation products even further. And as Google continued to roll out the ability to report accidents, traffic, speed traps and more to Google Maps users on iOS, it made it even harder for anyone who would have otherwise considered switching to Apple Maps to make the jump.
Apple, belatedly, has seemed to realize this as well.
The founders of Accord, an early stage startup focused on bringing order to B2B sales, are not your typical engineer founders. Instead, the two brothers, Ross and Ryan Rich, worked as sales reps seeing the problems unique to this kind of sale first-hand.
In November 2019, they decided to leave the comfort of their high-paying jobs at Google and Stripe to launch Accord and build what they believe is a missing platform for B2B sales, one that takes into account the needs of both the sales person and the buyer.
Today the company is launching with a $6 million seed round from former employer Stripe and Y Combinator. It should be noted that the founders applied to YC after leaving their jobs, and impressed the incubator with their insight and industry experience, even though they didn’t really have a product yet. In fact, they literally drew their original idea on a piece of paper.
The original prototype was just a drawing of their idea. Image Credits: Accord
Recognizing they had the sales skills, but lacked programming chops, they quickly brought in a third partner, Wayne Pan to bring their idea to life. Today, they have an actual working program with paying customers. They’ve created a kind of online hub for B2B sales people and buyers to interact.
As co-founder Ross Rich points out these kinds of sales are very different from the consumer variety, often involving as many as 14 people on average on the buyer side. With so many people involved in the decision-making process, it can become unwieldy pretty quickly.
“We provide within the application shared next steps and milestones to align on and that the buyer can track asynchronously, a resource hub to avoid sorting through those hundreds of emails and threads for a single document or presentation and stakeholder management to make sure the right people are looped in at the right time,” Rich explained.
Accord also integrates with the company CRM like Salesforce to make sure all of that juicy data is being tracked properly in the sales database. At the same time, Rich says the startup wants to this platform to be a place for human interaction. Instead of an automated email or text, this provides a place where humans can actually interact with one another, and he believes that human element is important to help reduce the complexity inherent in these kinds of deals.
With $6 million in runway and a stint at Y Combinator under their belts, the founders are ready to make more concerted go-to-market push. They are currently at 9 people, mostly engineers aside from the two sales-focused founders. He figures to be bringing in some new employees this year, but doesn’t really have a sense of how many they will bring on just yet, saying that is something that they will figure out in the coming months.
As they do that, they are already thinking about being inclusive with several women on the engineering team, recognizing if they don’t start diversity early, it will be more difficult later on. “[Hiring a diverse group early] only compounds when you get to nine or 10 people and then when you’re talking to someone and they are wondering ‘do I trust this team and is that a culture where I want to work?’ He says if you want to build a diverse and inclusive workplace, you have to start making that investment early.
It’s early days for this team, but they are building a product to help B2B sales teams work more closely and effectively with customers, and with their background and understanding of the space, they seem well positioned to succeed.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/10/accord-launches-b2b-sales-platform-with-6m-seed/
Lang.ai, which has developed a no-code platform for businesses, closed on a $2 million seed funding round.
The company’s SaaS platform aims to allow business users to structure any free-text data with custom categories built through a drag & drop interface, based on AI-extracted concepts.
Village Global led the financing, which included participation from new and existing backers including Acceleprise, Oceans Ventures, Alumni Ventures Group, 2.12 Angels, GTMFund, and Lorimer Ventures.
Spain-born Jorge Penalva founded Lang.ai in 2018 with the goal of giving any business user the ability “to build enterprise-ready natural language processing models in just minutes.” It was built to give non-engineers a way to automate repetitive tasks in use cases such as customer service and claims processing.
“It can be installed in our cloud or theirs,” Penalva said.
Lang.ai saw its revenue double from the last quarter of 2020 to the first quarter of 2021 and the seed funding was motivated mainly to continue that momentum.
“We’re getting demand in the form of projects with our larger customers, so we needed the funding to be able to support that demand,” Penalva told TechCrunch.
In his previous role of CEO of Séntisis, Penalva realized that processes driven by free-text data remained a blind spot for many companies.
“Today, millions of dollars and hours are invested by companies to manually read and process textual information captured from disparate areas of their business,” he said.
His mission with Lang.ai is to “empower businesses to put AI to work for them, without the technical complexities of building and training custom algorithms.”
Specifically, Penalva said that Lang.ai’s product analyzes a customer’s historical data “in minutes” and suggests AI-extracted concepts to build custom categories through a drag & drop interface. The custom categories are applied in real-time to automate “tedious” tasks such as the manual tagging and routing of support tickets, the processing of insurance claims and the dispatching of field engineers to incoming work order requests.
Put simply, Lang.ai’s goal is to remove the technical burden of implementing AI for a business.
Lang.ai’s community of users (called “Citizen NLP Builders”) consists of mostly non-technical business roles, ranging from customer service operations to marketers, business analysts and UX designers.
Customers include Freshly, Userzoom, Playvox, Spain’s CaixaBank, Yalo Chat and Bancolombia, among others.
Ben Segal, director of infrastructural efficiency at Freshly, described the platform as “so nimble.”
“Out of the box, it took us two days to make automated tagging 15% more reliable than a previous platform that we had had in production for 2 years, with the added benefit that now all of our teams can tap into and exploit our support data,” Segal said. “The marketing team has built workflows to understand key customer moments. Our data and analytics team is super excited about having all these new tags in Snowflake, and it’s crazy how easy it is to use.”
Penalva is proud of the fact that Lang.ai’s engineering team is primarily based in Spain and that he has been able to grow the 10-person company outside of his native country.
“With very few resources, it took us a little over two years to build an enterprise-grade product and find the right set of early customers and investors who are aligned with our vision,” he said. “I moved to the US from Spain to build a global company and this is just the beginning…Lang has always been powered by immigrant hustle, and it has been core to our values since day 1.”
Earlier this week, Huawei CEO Ren Zhengfei spoke rather diplomatically about the company’s hopes of holding talks with the new U.S. administration. The hardware giant is also taking a less conciliatory route, challenging its FCC designation as a national security threat.
The company this week filed a suit with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, calling the FCC ruling, “arbitrary, capricious, and an abuse of discretion and not supported by substantial evidence.”
Questions have swirled around the smartphone maker’s ties to the Chinese government for years, but the U.S. greatly ramped up actions against Huawei during the Trump years. The federal government has taken a number of routes to essentially kneecap the company, including, notably, its addition to the Department of Commerce’s “entity list,” which effectively barred it from working with U.S. companies.
Huawei likely sees a change in U.S. governance as an opportunity to be reevaluated by the powers that be. The company has long denied spying and other security charges. “I would welcome such phone calls and the message is around joint development and shared success,” Ren earlier this week told the media that he was eager to speak with Biden. “The U.S. wants to have economic growth and China wants to have economic growth as well.”
In a statement offered to The Wall Street Journal, however, an FCC spokesperson stayed firm to the 2020 decision, stating, “Last year the FCC issued a final designation identifying Huawei as a national security threat based on a substantial body of evidence developed by the FCC and numerous U.S. national security agencies. We will continue to defend that decision.”
Thus far, the Biden administration hasn’t indicated any plans to soften restrictions on Huawei. Facing opposition from Republican lawmakers, Commerce Secretary nominee Gina Raimondo noted, “I currently have no reason to believe that entities on those lists should not be there. If confirmed, I look forward to a briefing on these entities and others of concern.”
The Biden administration does appear to be reviewing other actions against Chinese companies taken during the Trump administration. Notably, a planned forced sale of TikTok’s U.S. wing has been put on hold while the White House reassesses security concerns.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/10/huawei-files-suit-over-security-threat-designation/
