Social media-fuelled anti-vaxxer propaganda is the latest online harm the U.K. government is targeting.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today program this morning health secretary Matt Hancock said he will meet with representatives from social media platforms on Monday to pressure them into doing more to prevent false information about the safety of vaccinations from being amplified by their platforms.

“I’m seeing them on Monday to require that they do more to take down wrong — well lies essentially — that are promoted on social media about the impact of vaccination,” he said, when asked about a warning by a U.K. public health body about the risk of a public health emergency being caused by an increase in the number of British children who have not received the measles vaccination.

“Vaccination is safe; it’s very, very important for the public health, for everybody’s health and we’re going to tackle it.”

The head of NHS England also warned last month about anti-vaccination messages gaining traction on social media.

“We need to tackle this risk in people not vaccinating,” Hancock added. “One of the things I’m particularly worried about is the spread of anti-vaccination messages online. I’ve called in the social media companies like we had to for self-harming imagery a couple of months ago.”

Hancock, who between 2016 and 2018 served as the U.K.’s digital minister, prior to taking over the health brief, held a similar meeting with the boss of Instagram earlier this year.

That followed a public outcry over suicide content spreading on Instagram after a British schoolgirl was reported to have been encouraged to killed herself by viewing graphic content on the Facebook -owned platform.

Instagram subsequently announced a policy change saying it would remove graphic images of self harm and remove non-graphic self-harm images so they don’t show up in searches, relevant hashtags or the explore tab.

But it remains to be seen whether platforms will be as immediately responsive to amped up political pressure to scrub anti-vaccination content entirely given the level of support anti-vaxxer messages can attract among social media users.

Earlier this year Facebook said it would downrank such content in the News Feed and hide it on Instagram in an effort to minimize the spread of vaccination misinformation.

It also said it would point users toward “authoritative” vaccine-related information — i.e. information that’s been corroborated by the health and scientific establishment.

But deleting such content entirely was not part of Facebook’s announced strategy.

We’ve reached out to Facebook for any response to Hancock’s comments.

In the longer term social media platforms operating in the U.K. could face laws that require them to remove content deemed to pose a risk to public health if ordered to by a dedicated regulator, as a result of a wide-ranging government plan to tackle a range of online harms.

Earlier this month the U.K. government set out a broad policy plan for regulating online harms.

The Online Harms Whitepaper proposes to put a mandatory duty of care on platforms to take reasonable steps to protect users from a range of harms — including those linked to the spread of disinformation.

It also proposes a dedicated, overarching regulator to oversee internet companies to ensure they meet their responsibilities.

The government is currently running a public consultation on the proposals, which ends July 1, after which it says it will set out any next actions as it works on developing draft legislation.

Huawei’s controversial status in North America and Europe stems from a lot of different factors. At the heart of most of them, however, is the hardware maker’s alleged ties to the Chinese government. The notion of government control has been enough to cause something approaching an outright ban on its products in the States, over worries that handsets and networking equipment could be used to spy on the U.S. government and its citizens.

A recently published report from professors at Fulbright University Vietnam and George Washington University Law School resurfaced those issues. The simply titled “Who Owns Huawei?” attempts to get to the bottom of who is controlling the rapidly ascending smartphone maker. The results published struggle to draw a clear conclusion on the matter, though the authors note in the summary, “Regardless of who, in a practical sense, owns and controls Huawei, it is clear that the employees do not.”

Huawei held a press call this week in an attempt to clarify some of that confusion, and the results were, well, also pretty confusing. The company provided TechCrunch with a transcript of the remarks by Chief Secretary of its Board of Directors, Jiang Xisheng. Jiang explained that, contrary to reports, Huawei is “wholly owned by its employees.”

The executive is referring to Huawei’s labor union. Under the plan, employees control 99 percent of the company’s “virtual restricted shares.” The executive explains the structure thusly:

In China, a limited liability company can have up to 50 registered shareholders. A non-listed stock corporation can have up to 200 registered shareholders. At Huawei, we have way more than 50 or 200 shareholding employees, so they cannot be registered as Huawei’s shareholders. This is true for Huawei as a limited liability company. Even if we make our company a stock corporation, it would still be impossible to register all our shareholding employees as shareholders. Because of this, the Union acts as a platform through which our employees can hold shares.

Certainly sounds nice, but as The Wall Street Journal notes, founder Ren Zhengfei only has one percent, but makes the key decisions, including who sits on the board and other major moves. “The Trade Union Committee also does not influence the operations of Huawei Holding or Huawei Technologies,” Jiang explains. “The Trade Union Committee is not involved in any of the company’s business operations.”

Jiang says the trade union involves itself with improving the physical and mental well-being of its staff, from helping to pay for medical expenses to organizing a variety of clubs, including basketball and badminton.

The paper, however, dismisses the notion that trade union ownership and government control are mutually exclusive. “Given the public nature of trade unions in China,” its authors write, “if the ownership stake of the trade union committee is genuine, and if the trade union and its committee function as trade unions generally function in China, then Huawei may be deemed effectively state-owned.”

Jiang, for his part, outright rejects the notion of government stake in the company. “Most of what the US government says is not true,” he says. “Regarding this point, we have responded many times. Though it is not under my charge, one thing is for sure – there is no government capital in Huawei. Huawei issued some bonds, many in the capital markets in Hong Kong and in countries outside of China. So far, to my knowledge, we have not issued bonds on the Chinese mainland.”

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1. Facebook reserves $3B for FTC fine, but keeps growing with 2.38B users in Q1

A massive penalty hangs over Facebook’s head, but it otherwise had a very strong Q1 earnings report. The company reached 2.38 billion monthly users, up 2.5 percent from the previous quarter, and it pulled in $15.08 billion in revenue.

Facebook recorded earnings per share were significantly lower than expected, but that’s because it set aside $3 billion to cover a potential FTC fine that it’s still resolving.

2. Scientists pull speech directly from the brain

In a feat that could eventually unlock the possibility of speech for people with severe medical conditions, scientists have successfully recreated the speech of healthy subjects by tapping directly into their brains.

3. Verizon announces 20 5G markets for 2019, as Samsung Galaxy S10 5G preorders open

Verizon (which owns TechCrunch) just revealed a one-two punch: opening up preorders for the Galaxy S10 5G and announcing a list of 20 cities that will be getting the technology before year’s end.

4. Microsoft beats expectations with $30.6B in revenue as Azure’s growth continues

Microsoft Azure had a pretty good quarter, with revenue growing 73 percent. That’s a bit lower than last quarter’s results, but only by a fraction.

5. Slack to extend collaboration to folks who don’t want to give up email

The company announced a new email and calendar bridge that enables team members who might not have made the leap to Slack to still be kept in the loop.

6. NASA and FEMA are contingency planning for a potential asteroid Armageddon

Alongside international partners, NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office will participate in a “tabletop exercise” that will simulate a scenario for how to respond to an asteroid on an impact trajectory with Earth.

7. How to source hard-to-fill programming positions

Zack Burt’s recruiting strategy is surprisingly simple, and boils down to optimizing various segments of the sourcing funnel: awareness, page views and application submits. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

Comcast is in talks about selling its 30 percent stake in Hulu to Disney, according to a report from CNBC this morning. The discussions are still in early stages. Comcast is considering whether the timing is right for the sale, as Hulu’s valuation could still increase over time. But if Comcast is less certain about Hulu’s future, it may want to unload its minority stake now, then use the cash to pay down its other debt — like that from its $39 billion acquisition of Sky, for example.

The report weighs the broader set of pro’s and con’s associated the potential deal, noting that retaining the stake could give Comcast a bargaining chip with Disney further down the road, among other advantages. But it’s also unclear how much Hulu aligns with Comcast’s long-term strategic plans — especially considering it has plans for its own streaming service in 2020. 

In addition, Hulu is expected to generate losses, and won’t turn profitable until 2024, Disney has said. It also plans to expand Hulu outside the U.S., which is an added cost.

Disney today has majority ownership of Hulu, following its acquisition of 21st Century Fox’s 30 percent stake and this month’s deal with AT&T. The latter saw Disney picking up AT&T’s 9.5 percent stake for $1.43 billion. The AT&T deal valued Hulu at $15 billion.

Up until recently, Comcast was not looking to sell its ownership in Hulu. A Variety report from February said that Comcast didn’t want to exit the joint venture at this time, even though Disney was itching to buy them out. It’s natural that Disney and Comcast would still be having an ongoing dialog about this, given Disney’s ambitions. But the new report today seems to indicate these talks are now of a more serious nature — perhaps because Disney is upping what it’s willing to pay.

Comcast today provides 17 percent of Hulu’s content, and it doesn’t plan to remove that content any time soon, including after the launch of the NBC streaming service, CNBC said.

The latest damning assessment of Facebook’s trampling of user privacy comes from the Canadian and Columbia privacy commissioners — which have just published the results of an investigation kicked off in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal last year.

They found Facebook committed serious contraventions of local laws and failed generally to take responsibility for protecting the personal information of Canadians.

Facebook has disputed the findings and refused to implement the watchdogs’ recommendations — including refusing to voluntarily submit to audits of its privacy policies and practices over the next five years.

The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada said it therefore plans to take Facebook to Federal Court to seek an order to force it the company to correct its deficient privacy practices.

Both watchdogs have also called for local privacy laws to be beefed up so that regulators have stronger sanctioning powers to protect the public’s interest.

“Facebook’s refusal to act responsibly is deeply troubling given the vast amount of sensitive personal information users have entrusted to this company,” said Daniel Therrien, privacy commissioner of Canada, in a statement. “Their privacy framework was empty, and their vague terms were so elastic that they were not meaningful for privacy protection.

“The stark contradiction between Facebook’s public promises to mend its ways on privacy and its refusal to address the serious problems we’ve identified – or even acknowledge that it broke the law – is extremely concerning.”

“Facebook has spent more than a decade expressing contrition for its actions and avowing its commitment to people’s privacy. But when it comes to taking concrete actions needed to fix transgressions they demonstrate disregard,” added B.C. information and privacy commissioner, Michael McEvoy, in another supporting statement. “The ability to levy meaningful fines would be an important starting point.”

“It is untenable that organizations are allowed to reject my office’s legal findings as mere opinions,” added Therrien.

We’ve reached out to Facebook for comment.

The privacy watchdogs combined their efforts to investigate Facebook and Cambridge Analytica-linked data company Aggregate IQ last year — setting out to determine whether the companies had complied with local privacy laws.

More than 600,000 Canadians had their data extracted from Facebook via an app whose developer was working with Cambridge Analytica to try to build profiles of U.S. voters.

Among the privacy-related deficiencies the two watchdogs are attaching to Facebook’s business are what they dub “superficial and ineffective safeguards” of user data that enabled unauthorized access by third party apps on its platform; a failure to obtain meaningful consent for the use of users’ friends’ data; a lack of proper oversight of the privacy practices of apps using Facebook’s platform, with a reliance on contractual terms and “wholly inadequate” monitoring of compliance.

All familiar stuff if you were following the twists and turns of the Cambridge Analytica data misuse saga last year. (Aleksandr Kogan, the third party app developer at the centre of the Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal also accused Facebook of not having a valid developer policy.)

“A basic principle of privacy laws is that organizations are responsible for the personal information under their control. Instead, Facebook attempted to shift responsibility for protecting personal information to the apps on its platform, as well as to users themselves,” the watchdogs write, further accusing Facebook of an overall lack of responsibility for the personal data of users.

They further point out that their findings are of particular concern given an earlier 2009 investigation of Facebook by the federal commissioner’s office — which found similar contraventions with respect to Facebook seeking overly broad, uninformed consent for disclosures of personal information to third-party apps, as well as inadequate monitoring to protect against unauthorized data access by apps.

“If Facebook had implemented the 2009 investigation’s recommendations meaningfully, the risk of unauthorized access and use of Canadians’ personal information by third party apps could have been avoided or significantly mitigated,” they add.

(Oh hai, deja vu… )

The commissioners are calling for not only the power to levy financial penalties on companies that break privacy laws — as equivalent watchdogs in Europe already can — but also broader authority to inspect the practices of organizations to independently confirm privacy laws are being respected.

“This measure would be in alignment with the powers that exist in the U.K. and several other countries,” they note.

“Giving the federal Commissioner order-making powers would also ensure that his findings and remedial measures are binding on organizations that refuse to comply with the law,” they add.

The UK’s data protection watchdog levied the maximum possible fine on Facebook last year — although it’s just £500,000 and Facebook is appealing, claiming there’s no evidence that UK users’ data was misused.

An updated pan-EU privacy framework, GDPR, which came into force after the Cambridge Analytica-related data misuse occurred, has massively upgraded the maximum possible fines that European data watchdogs can hand down for privacy violations. (And the Irish DPC, the lead privacy regulator for Facebook’s European business, has a very long list of open probes against Facebook and Facebook-owned platforms. So watch that space.)

Earlier this year a U.K. parliamentary committee which spend multiple months last year investigating Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, as part of a wider inquiry into online disinformation, called for Facebook’s use of user data to be investigated by the privacy watchdog.

The committee also urged the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority to undertake an antitrust probe Facebook’s business practices, and recommended that the social media ad market face a comprehensive audit to address concerns about its lack of transparency.

Long before there was an autonomous vehicle industry, there was Project Chauffeur — a secret endeavor staffed by about a dozen engineers and housed under Google’s moonshot factory X.

That venture, popularly known as the Google self-driving car project, would eventually graduate from its project status to become a standalone company called Waymo in 2016 — along the way helping launch an entire industry and numerous careers.

And Waymo’s CTO and VP of engineering Dmitri Dolgov has been there for the entire ride.

We’re excited to announce that Dolgov will participate in TechCrunch’s inaugural TC Sessions: Mobility, a one-day event on July 10, 2019 in San Jose, Calif., that is centered around the future of mobility and transportation.

We’ll talk to Dolgov about those early days, how the company has evolved and where it’s headed next as well as dig into the tech behind self-driving cars.

TC Sessions: Mobility will present a day of programming with the best and brightest founders, investors and technologists who are determined to invent a future Henry Ford might never have imagined. In case you missed it some of our recently announced speakers include, Nuro co-founder and CEO Dave Ferguson, Scoot SVP of Product Katie DeWitt, Co-founder and CEO of Voyage Oliver Cameron and co-founder, president and CEO of Mobileye Amnon Shashua — who also is a senior vice president at Intel. And there are more.

TC Sessions: Mobility aims to do more than highlight the next new thing. We’ll dig into the how and why, the cost and impact to cities, people and companies, as well as the numerous challenges that lie along the way, from technological and regulatory to capital and consumer pressures.

Early-Bird tickets are now on sale — save $100 on tickets before prices go up.

Students, you can grab your tickets for just $45.

A couple of weeks ago, when Pinterest filed its S-1, its AWS bills raised eyebrows and questions about cheaper alternatives for startups. Render is a small startup with a big idea to provide infrastructure services for developers, who might be looking for a cheaper and easier alternative to bigger more familiar names. The company launched today with broad ambition and $2.25 million in seed funding from General Catalyst and the South Park Common Fund.

As developers work with increasingly complex sets of technologies, it often requires teams of people to launch an application and keep it running.”What we’re doing at Render is making it incredibly easy and quick for application developers to deploy their applications online without knowledge of servers, and without having a DevOps person with them,” Anurag Goel, founder and CEO told TechCrunch.

Steve Herrod, managing director at General Catalyst and former CTO at VMware, knows a thing or two about infrastructure and he sees a company that could provide a viable alternative to the established players in this space. “Render is building the logical next step to cloud infrastructure — making it disappear. Application developers clearly want to focus on the functionality and usability of their work, and not on server setup, deployment and scaling. Render is enabling exactly this focus and that’s why early developer users love it so much,” he said in a statement.

The company is going after companies like Salesforce Heroku on the platform side and AWS, Azure, GCP and even DigitalOcean on the infrastructure side. It is not an easy market to ease your way into, but Goel believes he has come up with a solution that is cost-effective and easy to use, and that could help separate him from these established brands.

The complexity of today’s application environment requires teams of highly trained engineers to implement. While a company like Harness is trying to reduce that complexity by providing Continuous Delivery as a Service, Render is going at it from a different angle by providing a platform and infrastructure to launch and manage applications more easily.

“We’re focused, first and foremost, on developer experience and ease of use. And we’ve seen over and over again, that when you look at AWS and Azure and GCP, they force you to build out these large DevOps teams that take care of all the infrastructure needs,” he said. He believes part of the problem with the larger company approaches is that they put this expensive engineering layer between the developer and the application they created, and Render brings the developer closer to the process.

The company got the funding last year, but is announcing now because it wasn’t really ready to launch at that point, and didn’t want to announce the funding before it had a viable product.

Goel got his start as an early employee at Stripe, a company that made it simple for developers to add payment infrastructure to an application. He is hoping to bring that same level of simplicity to application hosting.

New Enterprise Associates, the 42-year-old venture capital firm, has invested in the $23 million Series B round for Mejuri, a startup capturing millennial women’s penchant for affordable and treat yo’ self type of jewelry rather than diamonds and precious stones for special occasions.

It’s the latest instance of startups drawing investor interest with their direct-to-customer retail model. Based in Toronto and Buenos Aires, four-year-old Mejuri designs, makes and sells jewelry directly to women online and through offline showrooms, bypassing middle-person costs. Besides striving for reasonable prices, Mejuri also wants to upend an entrenched practice in its industry.

Traditional jewelry, the startup points out, targets men for gifting and makes higher markups acceptable. With its D2C play, Mejuri believes it’s putting the purchasing decision back to women; indeed, it found out 75 percent of its customers are buying for themselves. Its team of 120 employees is constantly on the watch for trends and consumer feedback, a strategy made possible by its online presence of over 422,000 Instagram followers. Instead of releasing large batches of seasonal pieces, Mejuri adapts the so-called “drop” model that introduces only a small quantity of products each week, which allows it to timely translates customer sentiments into designs.

Another enabling factor is the company’s female-led team: 80 percent of the staff are women, headed by founder Noura Sakkijha, a third-generation jeweler and a former industrial engineer who scored the company’s latest capital when she was seven months pregnant with two twins.

“Mejuri’s mission really hits home for me,” said NEA partner Vanessa Larco in a statement. “I noticed a shift in trends when none of my friends wanted to go to any of the traditional fine jewelry companies to purchase jewelry anymore, and I realized a lot of those big brands were in trouble.”

Natalie Massenet, founder of Net-a-Porter and partner at Imaginary, another venture fund that participated in Mejuri’s Series B, said the startup is set to “disrupt” the jewelry industry through supply chain standards that modern consumers demand, “like sourcing from conflict-free and socially responsible diamond suppliers and maintaining affordable prices to serve a consumer who is buying for herself and her friends.”

The user-centric focus has brought customer loyalty to Mejuri. The startup claims that 30 percent of its monthly transactions come from returning shoppers, and 70,000 customers are on the waitlist for its products. It’s accumulated a total of 20 million visitors to its website and released 1,500 designs since launch. Revenues have quadrupled year-over-year for the fourth consecutive year, and the company, one of TechCrunch’s favorite picks from 500 Startups’ Batch 15 Demo Day three years ago, said it’s on track to achieve the same level of traction in 2019.

The new proceeds bring Mejuri’s total funds raised to over $29 million to date. Others in the new funding round include follow-on backers Felix Capital, BDC Capital, Incite Ventures and Dash Ventures. The company plans to spend its latest financial injection on offline expansion, overseas growth and investment in branding and customer experience.

The Entrepreneurs’ Roundtable Accelerator is today presenting yet another batch of startups to the world at its Demo Day in NYC. ERA has already launched a total of 180 startups which have raised more than $300 million and are collectively valued at more than $2 billion.

This sixteenth class is comprised of 13 companies across a variety of sectors, all of whom have received $100K in investment from the accelerator.

So without any further ado, here’s a look at the startups launching out of ERA today:

Apteo is a platform that helps financial institutions &mash; analysts, equity researchers, asset managers, etc. — make sense of all the data at their fingertips without actually hiring a data scientist. The key features of the product include continuously updated data (on the interval of your choice), automatically cleaned and normalized data, and easy-to-use access to troves of publicly available datasets.

CareSwitch matches home care agencies with qualified professionals. The platform gives agencies a reliable and steady stream of candidates to match supply with demand, and gives home care professionals the chance to work more flexibly across multiple agencies. The platform also manages payroll, benefits and employee records.

Cloudonix is a CRM platform that facilitates and aggregates conversations between businesses and their consumers via voice, text, and video over IP.

Confetti is a product that helps companies with their various events. Event planners can specify the requirements around their event and then be matched with vendors. Confetti also generates proposals for the various vendors and handles the logistics for customers.

Riding the wave of investment in eco-friendly food, HoneyFlower Foods is offering plant-based, grab-and-go meals that are sold both through physical retailers or sold wholesale to offices.

Iterate Labs is a hardware company that has developed the Delta-1 wearable focused on improving workplace safety. The wrist-worn wearable tracks repetitive wrist and arm movement and lets managers track the safety of their employees from the moment they walk out on the floor for the first time.

Maverick Retirement offers customers a special bank account, either as an alternative or a compliment to an existing IRA, that allows those customers to choose their investments in assets such as real estate, technology startups, etc.

Moon is a new payments platform that allows online retailers to accept cryptocurrency for purchases. The Moon browser extension gives users the chance to attach their Coinbase account or other wallet to make transactions in crypto. For now, Moon is only operational on Amazon.com, but the company says it will soon roll out to “any of your favorite ecommerce websites.”

Pawlicy Advisor, a pet insurance broker, allows pet parents to select a plan that makes the most sense for their specific breed of animal and its respective health risks.

Piecewise is looking to make a different in the student debt crisis. The payment platform lets universities and financial institutions lower student loan default rates and manage their loan portfolios. Borrowers can save toward their loan payments via round-ups and auto-save features, as well as refinance their loans.

Scopio is looking to take on Shutterstock with its own platform of high-quality commercial images taken by social media users. The platform looks to offer a steady stream of fresh new images to clients at a fraction of the cost while allowing anyone to submit their own photos and make some extra cash.

Soundmind is a system that lets senior care providers manage and customize voice assistants to better serve their customers. The platform gives seniors the ability to simply ask about their daily schedule, what’s on the menu at dinner, or make a request from the staff. These queries are centralized for the organization’s staff so they can spend less time organizing and more time serving their clients.

Yogi is a tool that helps businesses aggregate and understand all the feedback that comes back about its product. This includes product reviews, customer interviews and survey results, usability tests and more. This information is pulled from all its various sources and translated into actionable insights.

Adobe today used the OFFF festival in Barcelona to show off an experimental feature for its Illustrator vector drawing application. The basic idea here is to allow Illustrator users to easily experiment with color palettes based on photos and other images. That makes it incredibly easy to create new variations of an existing drawing, based on real-life color palettes from an image.

For now, though, this is only what Adobe likes to call a ‘sneak,’ that is, an experimental feature that the company plans to bring to its applications but that hasn’t quite reached the production stage yet.

Some of these feature eventually become part of their respective Creative Cloud app, some don’t. This experiment, however, seems pretty straightforward, so I would be surprised if it didn’t end up in one of the next versions of Illustrator. Extracting a color palette isn’t all that hard, after all. Indeed, with Adobe Color, the company already offers a stand-alone tool that can do just this. The trick then is to match those palettes to the existing drawing. It’s hard to tell how well that currently works, but at least in Adobe’s demos, it’s a pretty seamless experience.