You can now once again flip the camera during FaceTime calls with just one tap

With the release of iOS 12, Apple hid the button that lets you jump from front camera to rear camera (or vice versa) during a FaceTime call. Previously a one-click thing, it was suddenly shoved away into a menu as if it wasn’t something you might use a half-dozen times per call.

Don’t like the change? Good news! Apple is undoing it.

As of iOS 12.1.1, released today, the camera swap button is returning to the main call screen. Basically every FaceTime call I’ve had since this change was made has started with someone asking “Wait, how do I flip the screen. What the hell, where’d that button go?” so changing this back is the only right call.

This build also reintroduces the ability to take Live Photo captures during a one-on-one FaceTime call, if both people in the call have the feature toggled on. Don’t want anyone grabbing Live Photos mid-chat? A switch in FaceTime’s settings lets you disable it.

Beyond those two things, this update mostly polishes up existing features. According to the patch notes: real-time text now works when using WiFi calling, Dual SIM support has been added for additional carriers, you can now hide the sidebar in the News app on the iPad, and it has all the usual bug/performance fixes.

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Foxconn or Foxgone? Tariffs, Wisconsin, and iPhone fires

First some notes on SoftBank’s rumored expansion into China and its weird fund math, then Foxconn, and then quick notes on tech depression, Huawei, and more.

TechCrunch is experimenting with new content forms. This is a rough draft of something new – provide your feedback directly to the author (Danny at danny@techcrunch.com) if you like or hate something here.

SoftBank has fund visions (and a Vision Fund) for China? That, and more money

Kane Wu at Reuters reported over night that SoftBank is looking to open an office and hire an investment team in China, which Wu says will be based in Shanghai. That’s following the fund’s recent global expansion with new targeted offices in Saudi Arabia and India.

When I saw this, I sort of did a double-take: SoftBank doesn’t have a presence in China? The fund has reportedly been seeking investments in some of China’s leading unicorn stars, including controversial face recognition startup SenseTime, and leading edtech startup Zuoyebang (作业帮, which literally translates as “school assignment help”). (Hat tips to Selina Wang at Bloomberg, who seems to just be sitting in Vision Fund partner meetings). And of course, it dumped a pretty penny into WeWork China, where it was part of a $500 million syndicate, and is a huge investor in Didi.

It’s sort of obvious that SoftBank would expand to China. What will be interesting though is to see how the fund structures itself long-term. As far as I know, the Vision Fund is a singular “fund” that invests worldwide (send me an email if I am wrong on this count). China has a thicket of regulations on funds and companies, which is one of several reasons we see specifically China-focused vehicles (such as Lightspeed and Lightspeed China or Sequoia and Sequoia China). If the Vision Fund continues to be a unified fund, that would be a notable strategy shift that might be cloned by other trans-Pacific funds.

Aside: SoftBank Vision Fund math is complicated

Rajeev Misra, board director of SoftBank Group and CEO of SoftBank Investment Advisors. Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images.

When it first closed the Vision Fund, SoftBank explained they had raised just over $93 billion in committed capital or, more precisely, around $93.15-$93.2 billion according to the initial investor presentations and its annual Form D filings. In those docs, SoftBank said that the fund was financed with $28 billion from SoftBank and $65 billion from third-party investors.

On top of the $93 billion raised for the Vision Fund, SoftBank detailed that it had committed $4.5 billion of its own capital to a separate “Delta Fund,” which was used to alleviate conflicts around SoftBank’s Didi investment. Thus, SoftBank’s total VC funding aggregates to around $97.7 billion.

To add a complication, SoftBank later shifted $1.6 billion of the Vision Fund’s previously disclosed $65 billion in third-party capital over to the Delta Fund. In current disclosures, SoftBank shows $91.7 billion of committed capital for the Vision Fund ($28.1 billion from SoftBank and $63.6 billion from third-party investors). For the Delta Fund, SoftBank shows $6 billion in committed capital ($4.5 billion SoftBank contribution and $1.6 billion from third-party investors).

Here is where it gets even more complicated. In its latest filings, SoftBank also notes that it completed the interim closing of an additional $5 billion for the Vision Fund in mid-October, “intended for the installment of an incentive scheme for operations of SoftBank Vision Fund.” That additional cash would bring Vision Fund’s total committed capital to $96.7 billion, and $102.7 billion together with the Delta Fund.

While it wouldn’t be included in the committed equity capital total, SoftBank is also rumored to be raising a $4 billion credit facility to help finance additional acquisitions.

So, it’s probably best to say that the Vision Fund — as constituted right now — is $97 billion or $96.7 billion with precision, assuming this $5 billion reaches a final close.

SoftBank IPO

We have of course covered SoftBank quite obsessively, particularly its debt situation (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5). What we haven’t covered more recently is the latest developments in SoftBank’s IPO, which is slated for December 19th and expected to bring in a haul of $21 billion. More to come on that front in the coming days.

Foxconn or Foxgone?

US President Donald Trump and Foxconn Chairman Terry Gou. BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images

The South China Morning Post reported yesterday that Foxconn is investigating expanding its factories to Vietnam in order to avoid tariffs. Makes sense, and I have some calls this week and next trying to suss out how much hardware supply chains have really changed in response to the trade conflict.

That decision though isn’t just about the trade conflict, but also about the quickly increasing wages of Chinese laborers as well as political interference from Beijing. The Trump administration’s trade policies are just the excuse Foxconn needs to (at least partially) extricate itself from China, while saving face in the process.

What’s interesting is that Foxconn is also dealing with a massive brush fire in Wisconsin, where it received one of the largest economic development incentives ever offered by an American government, a whopping $3 billion package that was expected to drive manufacturing employment in the state.

Over night, Republicans in the state legislature passed a bill that would place large restrictions on incoming Democratic governor Tony Evers. Jessie Opoien for the (Madison) Cap Times:

Under the bill, legislators would have increased influence over the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation, and the WEDC board, not the governor, would appoint the job creation agency’s CEO. However, the governor’s power to appoint a CEO would be restored in September 2019.

That is the agency that provided the Foxconn funding, which has become a political football in Wisconsin politics. Republicans are trying to protect one of the major economic legacies of outgoing governor Scott Walker, as well as what they believe is the future direction of manufacturing work in the state. Democrats smell a boondoggle in the making.

If that wasn’t all, rumored skimpy sales for iPhones is putting enormous pressure on Foxconn’s bottom line. Debby Wu at Bloomberg reported two weeks ago that:

The contract manufacturer aims to cut 20 billion yuan ($2.9 billion) from expenses in 2019 as it faces “a very difficult and competitive year,” according to an internal document obtained by Bloomberg. The company’s spending in the past 12 months is about NT$206 billion ($6.7 billion).

Foxconn is a very dynamic organization that has weathered repeated crises over the years. It is pretty much unique in what it does today: very few other companies can scale up and down hundreds of thousands of workers to meet iPhone and other device demands with such alacrity.

But, the fundamentals of the mobile device market have apparently changed dramatically this year, and Foxconn is likely to be the company most harmed as the assembler of those devices. That could destroy not just the Chinese dream of leading in manufacturing, but also the Vietnam and Wisconsin dreams as well.

Also: If you haven’t read it, this poetry by a Foxconn worker who committed suicide really resonated with me. Foxconn’s suicide problem is well-documented, but we often don’t hear from the individuals themselves.

Quick bites

Which big tech companies are most depressed?

Blind, the anonymous enterprise chatting app that has taken the tech world by storm, published survey results asking tech employees “I believe I am depressed.” Roughly 40% of employees responded yes. Interestingly, there wasn’t too much variation between companies. Amazon had the highest rate at 43% and Apple had the lowest rate at 30%. It’s an informal survey, probably without high scientific validation, but it is a reminder for all of us in the community that mental health and burnout is very real in the startup and tech ecosystems and we should be vigilant in helping each other when times are rough.

More bad news for Huawei as British Telecom bans its equipment

This is one of those stories that we are just going to keep on hearing about. After bans in Australia and New Zealand, British Telecom has announced they will not just ban Huawei’s 5G equipment, but also its 3G and 4G equipment. Britain, like Aus/NZ, Canada and the US are part of the Five Eyes intelligence network, and national security officials have been leading the crusade against Huawei infrastructure. What’s interesting is not just the rapidity of the bans, but also that the bans haven’t (from what I have seen) migrated outside the Five Eyes community yet.

Pendo commits to hometown of Raleigh

Relaigh skyline. Photo by James Willamor used under Creative Commons via Flickr.

Pendo is a digital product management platform that has had quite a bit of success with customers and has raised more than $100 million in VC funding, most recently a Series D from Sapphire. The company announced that they have received a grant from home state North Carolina’s economic development department to grow in the Raleigh region. Pendo is committing $34.5 million to its headquarters (with the potential of creating 590 jobs), while the state will offer around $8.8 million in potential reimbursements over the next 12 years.

Given what I wrote yesterday about Wes McKinney leaving NYC and heading to Nashville and the work Chattanooga is doing to aid startups, it’s great to see other hotspots like Raleigh, NC invest to build out their ecosystems in a compelling way.

Todd Olson, CEO of Pendo, explained to me by email that, “Office rents in our downtown are a fraction of the cost of operating in other cities, and the cost of living is appealing to our employees. They can afford to buy a house here. In some markets around the country, that is becoming more difficult. It’s also just a nice place to live and work.”

Creative work is increasingly going to have to find a lower cost home.

What’s next

I am still obsessing about next-gen semiconductors. If you have thoughts there, give me a ring: danny@techcrunch.com.

Thoughts on Articles

The LP Anti-Portfolio – Great short read. Lindel Eakman, former managing director at UTIMCO, the University of Texas/Texas A&M endowment, gives a list of funds that he passed on that he now regrets. Unfortunately, this is pretty rare coming from an LP, albeit a former one. It would be great to get more public discussion on what funds were missed and why by LP investors.

Hopefully more reading time tomorrow.

Reading docket

What I’m reading (or at least, trying to read)

• Huge long list of articles on next-gen semiconductors. More to come shortly.

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Seized cache of Facebook docs raise competition and consent questions

A UK parliamentary committee has published the cache of Facebook documents it dramatically seized last week.

The documents were obtained by a legal discovery process by a startup that’s suing the social network in a California court in a case related to Facebook changing data access permissions back in 2014/15.

The court had sealed the documents but the DCMS committee used rarely deployed parliamentary powers to obtain them from the Six4Three founder, during a business trip to London.

You can read the redacted documents here — all 250 pages of them.

The committee has been investigating online disinformation and election interference for the best part of this year, and has been repeatedly frustrated in its attempts to extract answers from Facebook.

But it is protected by parliamentary privilege — hence it’s now published the Six4Three files, having waited a week in order to redact certain pieces of personal information.

Committee chair Damian Collins has included a summary of key issues, as the committee sees them after reviewing the documents, in which he draws attention to six issues.

Here is his summary of the key issues:

1. White Lists Facebook have clearly entered into whitelisting agreements with certain companies, which meant that after the platform changes in 2014/15 they maintained full access to friends data. It is not clear that there was any user consent for this, nor how Facebook decided which companies should be whitelisted or not.
2. Value of friends data It is clear that increasing revenues from major app developers was one of the key drivers behind the Platform 3.0 changes at Facebook. The idea of linking access to friends data to the financial value of the developers relationship with Facebook is a recurring feature of the documents.
3. Reciprocity Data reciprocity between Facebook and app developers was a central feature in the discussions about the launch of Platform 3.0.
4. Android Facebook knew that the changes to its policies on the Android mobile phone system, which enabled the Facebook app to collect a record of calls and texts sent by the user would be controversial. To mitigate any bad PR, Facebook planned to make it as hard of possible for users to know that this was one of the underlying features of the upgrade of their app.
5. Onavo Facebook used Onavo to conduct global surveys of the usage of mobile apps by customers, and apparently without their knowledge. They used this data to assess not just how many people had downloaded apps, but how often they used them. This knowledge helped them to decide which companies to acquire, and which to treat as a threat.
6. Targeting competitor Apps The files show evidence of Facebook taking aggressive positions against apps, with the consequence that denying them access to data led to the failure of that business

The publication of the files comes at an awkward moment for Facebook — which remains on the back foot after a string of data and security scandals, and has just announced a major policy change — ending a long-running ban on apps copying its own platform features.

Albeit the timing of Facebook’s policy shift announcement hardly looks incidental — given Collins said last week the committee would publish the files this week.

The policy in question has been used by Facebook to close down competitors in the past, such as — two years ago — when it cut off style transfer app Prisma’s access to its live-streaming Live API when the startup tried to launch a livestreaming art filter (Facebook subsequently launched its own style transfer filters for Live).

So its policy reversal now looks intended to diffuse regulatory scrutiny around potential antitrust concerns.

But emails in the Six4Three files suggest Facebook took “aggressive positions” against competing apps could spark fresh competition concerns.

In one email dated January 24, 2013, a Facebook staffer, Justin Osofsky, discusses Twitter’s launch of its short video clip app, Vine, and says Facebook’s response will be to close off its API access.

“As part of their NUX, you can find friends via FB. Unless anyone raises objections, we will shut down their friends API access today. We’ve prepared reactive PR, and I will let Jana know our decision,” he writes. 

Osofsky’s email is followed by what looks like a big thumbs up from Zuckerberg, who replies: “Yup, go for it.”

Also of concern on the competition front is Facebook’s use of a VPN startup it acquired, Onavo, to gather intelligence on competing apps — either for acquisition purposes or to target as a threat to its business.

The files show various Onavo industry charts detailing reach and usage of mobile apps and social networks — with each of these graphs stamped ‘highly confidential’.

Facebook bought Onavo back in October 2013. Shortly after it shelled out $19BN to acquire rival messaging app WhatsApp — which one Onavo chart in the cache indicates was beasting Facebook on mobile, accounting for well over double the daily message sends at that time.

The files also spotlight several issues of concern relating to privacy and data protection law, with internal documents raising fresh questions over how or even whether (in the case of Facebook’s whitelisting agreements with certain developers) it obtained consent from users to process their personal data.

The company is already facing a number of privacy complaints under the EU’s GDPR framework over its use of ‘forced consent‘, given that it does not offer users an opt-out from targeted advertising.

But the Six4Three files look set to pour fresh fuel on the consent fire.

Collins’ fourth line item — related to an Android upgrade — also speaks loudly to consent complaints.

Earlier this year Facebook was forced to deny that it collects calls and SMS data from users of its Android apps without permission. But, as we wrote at the time, it had used privacy-hostile design tricks to sneak expansive data-gobbling permissions past users. So, put simple, people clicked ‘agree’ without knowing exactly what they were agreeing to.

The Six4Three files back up the notion that Facebook was intentionally trying to mislead users.

In one email dated November 15, 2013, from Matt Scutari, manager privacy and public policy, suggests ways to prevent users from choosing to set a higher level of privacy protection, writing: “Matt is providing policy feedback on a Mark Z request that Product explore the possibility of making the Only Me audience setting unsticky. The goal of this change would be to help users avoid inadvertently posting to the Only Me audience. We are encouraging Product to explore other alternatives, such as more aggressive user education or removing stickiness for all audience settings.”

Another awkward trust issue for Facebook the documents could stir up afresh related to its repeat claim — including under questioning from lawmakers — that it does not sell user data.

In one email from the cache — sent by Mark Zuckerberg, dated October 7, 2012 — the Facebook founder appears to be entertaining the idea of charging developers for “reading anything, including friends”.

Yet earlier this year, when he was asked by a US lawmaker how Facebook makes money, Zuckerberg replied: “Senator, we sell ads.”

He did not include a caveat that he had apparently personally entertained the idea of liberally selling access to user data.

Responding to the publication of the Six4Three documents, a Facebook spokesperson told us:

As we’ve said many times, the documents Six4Three gathered for their baseless case are only part of the story and are presented in a way that is very misleading without additional context. We stand by the platform changes we made in 2015 to stop a person from sharing their friends’ data with developers. Like any business, we had many of internal conversations about the various ways we could build a sustainable business model for our platform. But the facts are clear: we’ve never sold people’s data.

Zuckerberg has repeatedly refused to testify in person to the DCMS committee.

At its last public hearing — which was held in the form of a grand committee comprising representatives from nine international parliaments, all with burning questions for Facebook — the company sent its policy VP, Richard Allan, leaving an empty chair where Zuckerberg’s bum should be.

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Australia rushes its ‘dangerous’ anti-encryption bill into parliament, despite massive opposition

Australia’s controversial anti-encryption bill is one step closer to becoming law, after the two leading but sparring party political giants struck a deal to pass the legislation.

The bill, in short, grants Australian police greater powers to issue “technical notices” — a nice way of forcing companies — even websites — operating in Australia to help the government hack, implant malware, undermine encryption or insert backdoors at the behest of the government.

If companies refuse, they could face financial penalties.

Lawmakers say that the law is only meant to target serious criminals — sex offenders, terrorists, homicide and drug offenses. Critics have pointed out that the law could allow mission creep into less serious offenses, such as copyright infringement, despite promises that compelled assistance requests are signed off by two senior government officials.

In all, the proposed provisions have been widely panned by experts, who argue that the bill is vague and contradictory, but powerful, and still contains “dangerous loopholes.” And, critics warn (as they have for years) that any technical backdoors that allow the government to access end-to-end encrypted messages could be exploited by hackers.

But that’s unlikely to get in the way of the bill’s near-inevitable passing.

Australia’s ruling coalition government and its opposition Labor party agreed to have the bill put before parliament this week before its summer break.

Several lawmakers look set to reject the bill, criticizing the government’s efforts to rush through the bill before the holiday.

“Far from being a ‘national security measure’ this bill will have the unintended consequence of diminishing the online safety, security and privacy of every single Australian,” said Jordon Steele-John, a Greens’ senator, in a tweet.

Tim Watts, a Labor member of Parliament for Gellibrand, tweeted a long thread slamming the government’s push to get the legislation passed before Christmas, despite more than 15,000 submissions to a public consultation, largely decrying the bill’s content.

The tech community — arguably the most affected by the bill’s passing — has also slammed the bill. Apple called it “dangerously ambiguous”, while Cisco and Mozilla joined a chorus of other tech firms calling for the government to dial back the provisions.

But the rhetoric isn’t likely to dampen the rush by the global surveillance pact — the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand, known as the so-called “Five Eyes” group of nations — to push for greater access to encrypted data. Only earlier this year, the governmental coalition said in no uncertain terms that it would force backdoors if companies weren’t willing to help their governments spy.

Australia’s likely to pass the bill — but when exactly remains a mystery. The coalition government has to call an election in less than six months, putting the anti-encryption law on a timer.

Apple rebukes Australia’s “dangerously ambiguous” anti-encryption bill

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JioSaavn becomes India’s answer to Spotify and Apple Music

India finally has its answer to Spotify after Reliance Jio merged its music service with Saavn, the startup it acquired earlier this year.

The deal itself isn’t new — it was announced back in March — but it has reached its logical conclusion after two apps were merged to create a single entity, JioSaavn, which is valued at $1 billion. For the first time, India has a credible rival to global names like Spotify and Apple Music through the combination of a venture capital-funded business — Saavn — and good old-fashioned telecom, JioMusic from Reliance’s disruptive Jio operator brand.

This merger deal comes days after reports suggested that Spotify is preparing to (finally) enter the Indian market, a move that has been in the planning for over a year as we have reported.

That would set up an interesting battle between global names Spotify and Apple and local players JioSaavn and Gaana, a project from media firm Times Internet which is also backed by China’s Tencent.

It isn’t uncommon to see international firms compete in Asia — Walmart and Amazon are the two major e-commerce players while Chinese firms Alibaba and Tencent have busily snapped up stakes in promising internet companies for the past couple of years — but that competition has finally come to the streaming space.

There have certainly been misses over the years.

Early India-based pioneer Dhingana was scooped by Rdio back in 2014 having initial shut down its service due to financial issues. Ultimately, though, Rdio itself went bankrupt and was sold to Pandora, leaving both Rdio and Dhingana in the startup graveyard.

Saavn, the early competitor too Dhingana, seemed destined to a similar fate, at least from the outside. But it hit the big time in 2015 when it raised $100 million from Tiger Global, the New York hedge fund that made ambitious bets on a number of India’s most promising internet firms. That gave it the fuel to reach this merger deal with JioMusic.

Unlike Dhingana’s fire sale, Saavn’s executive team continues on under the JioSaavn banner.

The coming-together is certainly a far more solid outcome than the Rdio deal. JioSaavn has some 45 million songs — including a slate of originals started by Saav — and access to the Jio network, which claims over 250 million subscribers.

JioSaavn is available across iOS, Android, web and Reliance Jio’s own app store

The JioMusic service will be freemium but Jio subscribers will get a 90-day trial of the ad-free ‘Pro’ service. The company maintains five offices — including outposts in Mountain View and New York — with over 200 employees while Reliance has committed to pumping $100 million into the business for “growth and expansion of the platform.”

While it is linked to Reliance and Jio, JioMusic is a private business that counts Reliance as a stakeholder. You’d imagine that remaining private is a major carrot that has kept Saavn founders — Rishi Malhotra, Paramdeep Singh and Vinodh Bhat — part of the business post-merger.

The window certainly seems open for streaming IPOs — Spotify went public this past April through an unconventional listing that valued its business around $30 billion while China’s Tencent Music is in the process of a listing that could raise $1.2 billion and value it around that $30 billion mark, too. JioSaavn might be the next streamer to test the public markets.

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GCHQ’s not-so-smart idea to spy on encrypted messaging apps is branded ‘absolute madness’

Nobody wants to be a third wheel. Unless you’re a British spy.

Two of the most senior officials at British eavesdropping agency GCHQ say one way that law enforcement could access encrypted messages is to simply add themselves to your conversations.

“It’s relatively easy for a service provider to silently add a law enforcement participant to a group chat or call,” said Ian Levy, technical director of the U.K.’s National Cyber Security Center, and Crispin Robinson, cryptanalysis director at GCHQ, in an op-ed for Lawfare.

“The service provider usually controls the identity system and so really decides who’s who and which devices are involved — they’re usually involved in introducing the parties to a chat or call,” they said. “You end up with everything still being end-to-end encrypted, but there’s an extra ‘end’ on this particular communication.”

Law enforcement and intelligence agencies have long wanted access to encrypted communications, but have faced strong opposition to breaking the encryption for fears that it would put everyone’s communications at risk, rather than the terror suspects or criminals that the police primarily want to target. In this case, two people using an end-to-end encrypted messaging app would be joined by a third, invisible person — the government — which could listen in at will.

This solution, Levy and Robinson say, would be “no more intrusive than the virtual crocodile clips” that lawmakers have already authorized police to use to wiretap communications.

Presumably that would require compelled assistance from the tech companies that built the encrypted messaging apps in the first place, like Apple, Facebook’s WhatsApp, Signal, Wire and Wickr. That poses not only an ethical problem for the companies, which developed their own end-to-end encrypted services so that even they can’t access people’s communications, but also a technical one, which would require the government to ask a court to compel the companies to rework their own technologies to allow government spies in.

It wouldn’t be the first time the government’s pushed for compelled assistance.

Only recently the U.S. government lost its bid to force Facebook to re-architect its Messenger app to allow the government to listen in on suspected gang members. And not just the U.S. or the U.K.; Russia, the west’s favorite frenemy, ruled to force Telegram, another encrypted messaging app, to turn over its private keys in an effort to allow its intelligence agencies to snoop in on possible kompromat.

Suffice to say, the U.K.’s plan has drawn strong criticism.

The conversation on exceptional access is a non-starter until the pro- side actually can come up with schemes that work that would satisfy them… this is weak sauce: https://t.co/rYGBizvr9J

— Joseph Lorenzo Hall (@JoeBeOne) November 29, 2018

This proposal for an encryption backdoor by Ian Levy and Crispin Robinson is deeply troubling. Among other concerns, it will severely undermine trust in the services that are subject to any such order – an equity the authors claim to prioritize. https://t.co/zovrsXJFm6

— Robyn Greene (@Robyn_Greene) November 29, 2018

And NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, an outspoken commentator and critic of global surveillance, branded the move “absolute madness.”

Absolute madness: the British government wants companies to poison their customers' private conversations by secretly adding the government as a third party, meaning anyone on your friend list would become "your friend plus a spy." No company-mediated identity could be trusted. https://t.co/8CwoZfBM3K

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) November 29, 2018

“No company-mediated identity could be trusted,” said Snowden, suggesting that the move would effectively render the trust in any end-to-end encrypted messaging app redundant.

Exactly what the U.K.’s solution looks like isn’t entirely clear, but Mustafa Al-Bassam, a PhD student at University College London, said that the ability for users to verify their keys — which proves the identity of a person in a conversation — in an end-to-end messaging app is “is going to be increasingly important” to prevent government manipulation.

WhatsApp and Signal, for example, tell you when a user’s key changes, indicating that a new device is in use — and requires verification — or that a device has been manipulated by a third-party and that the conversation isn’t secure.

“They’re proposing to exploit the fact that users don’t verify each other’s public keys, and inject bad keys,” said Al-Bassam.

ACLU asks court to release a secret order forcing Facebook to wiretap Messenger

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‘Google You Owe Us’ claimants aren’t giving up on UK Safari workaround suit

Lawyers behind a UK class-action style compensation litigation against Google for privacy violations have filed an appeal against a recent High Court ruling blocking the proceeding.

In October Mr Justice Warby ruled the case could not proceed on legal grounds, finding the claimants had not demonstrated a basis for bringing a compensation claim.

The case relates to the so called ‘Safari workaround’ Google used between 2011 and 2012 to override iPhone privacy settings and track users without consent.

The civil legal action — whose claimants refer to themselves as ‘Google You Owe Us’ — was filed last year by one named iPhone user, Richard Lloyd, the former director of consumer group, Which?, seeking to represent millions of UK users whose Safari settings the complaint alleges were similarly ignored by Google, via a representative legal action.

Lawyers for the claimants argued that sensitive personal data such as iPhone users’ political affiliation, sexual orientation, financial situation and more had been gathered by Google and used for targeted advertising without their consent.

Google You Owe Us proposed the sum of £750 per claimant for the company’s improper use of people’s data — which could result in a bill of up to £3BN (based on the suit’s intent to represent ~4.4 million UK iPhone users).

However UK law requires claimants demonstrate they suffered damage as a result of violation of the relevant data protection rules.

And in his October ruling Justice Warby found that the “bare facts pleaded in this case” were not “individualised” — hence he saw no case for damages.

He also ruled against the case proceeding on another legal point, related to defining a class for the case — finding “the essential requirements for a representative action are absent” because he said individuals in the group do not have the “same interest” in the claim.

Lodging its appeal today in the Court of Appeal, Google You Owe us described the High Court judgement as disappointing, and said it highlights the barriers that remain for consumers seeking to use collective actions as a route to redress in England and Wales.

In the US, meanwhile, Google settled with the FTC over a similar cookie tracking issue back in 2012 — agreeing to pay $22.5M in that instance.

Countering Justice Warby’s earlier suggestion that affected class members in the UK case did not care about their data being taken without permission, Google You Owe Us said, on the contrary, affected class members have continued to show their support for the case on Facebook — noting that more than 20,000 have signed up for case updates.

For the appeal, the legal team will argue that the High Court judgment was incorrect in stating the class had not suffered damage within the meaning of the UK’s Data Protection Act, and that the class had not all suffered in the same way as a result of the data breach.

Commenting in a statement, Lloyd said:

Google’s business model is based on using personal data to target adverts to consumers and they must ask permission before using this data. The court accepted that people did not give Google permission to use their data in this case, yet slammed the door shut on holding Google to account.

By appealing this decision, we want to give affected consumers the opportunity to get the compensation they are owed and show that collective actions offer a clear route to justice for data protection claims.

We’ve reached out to Google for comment.

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