Category: Tech news

Apple has released a new beta of its iOS 7 software for developers today, and the big news is that the iPad version has arrived. Back when Apple announced iOS 7, it said the tablet version would follow the iPhone version a few weeks later, and they’ve stayed good to that promise. The iPad version support is available from the developer channel for those registered as iOS devs.

The other change that we’re seeing reported by users of the new beta is the return of Voice Memos to iOS. This was left out of the first beta, but reports said Apple just didn’t have it ready for inclusion in that version, so it’s no surprise to see it return here. The interface and icon are completely redesigned, as one might expect, getting rid of the skeumorphic rendition of a mic that dominated the previous version, and flattening out controls and interfaces. 9to5Mac also reports that Siri is now packing new voices, and that some visual tweaks have been made to things like Control Center. BGR has an image of the new Voice Notes interface:

The iOS 7 beta for the iPad contains interface differences vs. the version of iOS that’s been on offer for the iPhone. Apple generally tailors various elements of the OS for the larger screen of its tablet devices, and it’s not different this time around. Here are a selection of screens received by 9to5Mac, showing some of the main changes. You can check out their full post for even looks at the changes in store.

So I just got an iPad case in the mail. It’s for the iPad 5. That model is not out yet. But you can have this case anyway.

Of course I have no way of knowing if this will, for an absolute fact, fit the next iPad, but the chances are good. At best, you’ll win a case for the next iPad. Or, likewise, you could win a fun conversation piece.

As shown by this case and the dozens available on the Chinese bulk marketplace, Alibaba, the next iPad will feature a different factor. Reminiscent of the iPad mini, the next iPad will have a thinner side bezel and dual speakers flanking the center-mounted Lightning connector.

This particular case doesn’t have a space for a back-mounted camera flash. It’s also a quarter inch narrower than my iPad 2 — a rather telling fact about the size of the bezel considering this is a rugged case with large rubber pads.

Rumors state that the next iPad will come out later this year with fall the most likely timeframe. However, months before a device’s launch, Apple distributes the specs to several key accessory makers to ensure that the device launches with a large assortment of accessories. This has happened for years. But this is the first time a mainstream accessory maker (who will remain nameless unless they email me) has sent one to us.

Please note, you’re winning the case I have in my possession. I ripped the box when opening it. Sorry. The contest will end on July 1st.

To enter, all you have to do is follow the simple steps below.

1) “Like” our TechCrunch Facebook Page:

2) Then do one of the following:

– Retweet this post (including the #TechCrunch hashtag)
– Or leave us a comment below telling us why you deserve this case.

Google Reader is slowing down. Over the past few days, buttons have broken, marking feeds as read seemed to take a bit longer than usual, and the Android mobile website on some devices shifted over to the desktop view with no way to change things back. As users up until the bitter end, we can no longer complain about these events because Google doesn’t care – it’s shutting down Google Reader on July 1 and we all have to leave.

It’s the digital equivalent of bringing up the house lights when the rock concert is over. You don’t have to go home, folks, but you can’t stay here.

No one cares about RSS feeds, except for maybe 50 million of the Internet’s most voracious news readers*. Journalists, bloggers, programmers, technically savvy IT workers, researchers, students, startup founders, and anyone else who has grown accustomed to a simple product that lets you – not algorithms or tweets – be in control of which news sources to track and which stories to read.

In the wake of the impending shutdown, a number of alternatives have sprung up to offer a “replacement” for Google Reader. Though some come close, none have completely nailed the experience yet.

*50 million: Digg’s estimate of those who care about RSS.

The Only Real Contenders So Far: Feedly & Digg

Feedly

Feedly has been building its RSS product for years, which gives it a huge head start in this space. Last week, it announced a reach of 12 million users as it officially launched “Feedly Cloud,” a backend infrastructure to power the ecosystem of RSS reader client applications like Reeder, Press, Nextgen Reader, Newsify, gReader,  and more, left abandoned by Google’s exit from RSS. These apps had only offered a front-end RSS browsing experience, which means they needed someone else’s API to function. Feedly is one of the few to step in and serve that need.

Why Feedly: Google Reader users will love Feedly because it comes closest to mirroring the Google Reader experience, and it offers a number of settings that can be tweaked to your liking. The service’s “Titles Only” view (which can be set globally in Preferences) offers the same sort of compact view, perfect for headline-scanning action, that Google Reader once provided. It also supports a number of Google Reader’s features, including support for many of the same keyboard shortcuts, tagging, favorites (“Saved for Later”), and “Mark as Read” functionality to quickly plow through categories.

What’s wrong: Feedly currently pulled out its “search” functionality, which lets you pull up content by keyword or topic — something that’s one of the top user requests today. That’s still in the works, the company says, but it’s a big undertaking to deliver upon. In addition, though the company offers clients for web and mobile, the mobile apps are still somewhat over-designed with big, colorful category headers instead of the basic list of folders like Google Reader.

That being said, it’s hard to find a lot of fault with Feedly, and the company is quickly working to add the few missing pieces. There will be little things here and there that you’ll need to get used to, of course (like the “t” shortcut no longer lets you tag items, but rather tweets them). However, in some cases, they’re changes for the better (like the option to set the default view by category).

Digg Reader

Betaworks’ quickly built take on Google Reader is the new kid on the block, and has a lot of potential to be a viable Feedly competitor. Though initially, the team has been working to launch something that offers the core RSS reading experience, the plan is to bring the RSS reader into the modern age by alerting users to what’s most popular among their network and better connect users with Digg.com. In Digg Reader’s “popular” section, the service scans your feeds and then ranks them with one, two or three dots to help you discover trending articles. In practice these recommendations were hit or miss at times, but the beta build we’ve been testing is unfinished.

Why Digg Reader: Like Feedly, the app lets you organize content into folders, view unread counts, move around with Google Reader shortcuts, save posts for later, and share to social networks. With the above-described “Popular” section, it also offers something similar to Feedly’s “Today” for an at-a-glance list of what’s trending. Ex-Google Reader users will also appreciate Digg Reader’s minimalistic look-and-feel, which is almost entirely black, white and shades of gray (outside of the RSS content itself).

What’s Wrong: Most of what’s wrong with Digg Reader is a function of time: The team had a limited number of weeks to build this service, having only started after Google’s shutdown announcement went live. That being said, there are still a number of features that ex-Google reader users likely relied on that aren’t ready in the new reader’s product at launch (planned for this Tuesday). Search is also missing here, for example, as is the ability to tag content or share to other social services beyond Facebook, Twitter or Digg. (“Read later” services like Pocket, Readability and Instapaper are supported, however.)

Digg Reader offers just two views, “list” and “expanded.” While the former is meant to give users a headline-scanning option, Feedly’s “Title Only” view is even more compact, which means its more like Google Reader’s “compact” view.

At launch, Digg Reader will have an iOS app, but the Android version will not be ready for another few weeks.

The Startups

Offering a full Google Reader replacement is no simple task, so it’s notable that some startups have tried to take on this job without the resources of a larger company like Facebook or Betaworks behind them. That being said, for power users of Google Reader, none of these smaller companies will be able to replace what is about to be lost.

NewsBlur (unlimited feeds, $24/year): This cross-platform news reader offers Reader import, compact views, saving stories, and even an interesting “training” feature that’s meant to help teach the reader what sorts of stories you like best. But NewsBlur’s interface is too busy and cluttered, it lacks search, and can be slow when you have a lot of feeds to load.

Feedbin ($2/month): Feedbin’s paid web app is another good alternative for tracking feeds, viewing unread counts, subscribing and tags, and it uses Reader-like navigation via keyboard shortcuts. However, while it supports Reader data import, it lacks a number of key features like search or Feedly’s wide variety of layouts. But most importantly, it’s not a fully cross-platform product on its own. If you use Feedbin on the web, then to keep data in sync across mobile, you’ll need to use an app powered by its API like Reeder, Press, Favs, Tafiti, or others, or beta test the newer Feedbin Reader for Android.

The Old Reader and Hive (previously HiveMined): These two startups sounded promising in theory as both are focusing on simply rebuilding the original Reader – the former working to bring the social aspects back, as well. Unfortunately, neither of these have made it yet, and won’t be solid replacements by the time Google Reader shuts down.

Both apps have issues with speed at times (The Old Reader is far better on this front than Hive, though). Though The Old Reader does have search, it’s title-only, not full keyword search. Hive meanwhile has no search, and struggled to import Reader subscriptions. Sometimes Hive’s buttons are so slow to register clicks that you’re unsure if the app has gone down. Sharing to outside services is either limited or non-existent. Neither service offers a mobile app.

Reeder (paid): Until recently, Reeder was not a Google Reader replacement, it was only the front-end interface for viewing feeds hosted by Google. Since the Reader shutdown announcement, the company said it’s now making plans to continue development, but this involves major changes on its part. Today, Reeder uses Feedbin and Feedly’s APIs on mobile, and is also working to support standalone RSS (introduced in the iPhone app, but not yet the iPad or Mac apps). Because Reeder was built on top of others’ infrastructure, it’s not ready to replace Google Reader at this time. That said, it is one to watch given it has an engaged Apple user base and some traction.

 

NetNewsWire: Released just today, a beta build of NetNewsWire (ver. 4, beta) became available, and it sports a number of Google Reader-like features, including keyboard shortcuts, limited sharing options, favoriting, mark as read functionality, and more. However, it defaults to an inbox-like view, and its mobile client apps are only for iOS, and not yet updated to the new iOS 7 style.

The Rest: Me-Too’s, Flipboard Alternatives And Aol’s Disastrous Attempt

Ever since the Google Reader shutdown announcement, our inboxes have been filled with pitches for “replacements” nearly every day. It would almost be a disservice to TechCrunch readers to list these here, because real replacements are huge investments in infrastructure and APIs and show an attempt to honor the needs of Google Reader refugees with features like compact views, keyboard navigation, tagging and search. Simply offering an RSS-based product DOES NOT make a service an alternative to Google Reader, and attempting to position it like that is band-wagon jumping at best and dishonest at worst.

Many of these pitches look cobbled together overnight as weekend projects. None are any good. (And yes, I got your email.)

Also, several of these “me too” products tend to look more like watered-down versions of Flipboard, not Google Reader. Really, if you just want a news magazine, use Flipboard then, or wait to see what Facebook has in store with its forthcoming “newspaper for mobile” product.

Aol Reader 

Even Aol (disclosure: TechCrunch parent) bungled its RSS reader debut, and launched a product that the lot of us here at TechCrunch can’t even get to work properly. Aol’s RSS reader claims to offer Google Reader import, but refuses to upload Google Reader’s XML file in a multitude of browsers, according to several of us here who gamely tested the service anyway.

Aol’s Reader had intermittent issues in Chrome especially this morning, refusing to ever add the TechCrunch feed, for example (thanks Aol), and taking a good 30 seconds or so to do the same in Safari. This slowness may have been a launch bug, but it wasn’t promising. The reader is also missing search, but does offer tagging, limited sharing, favoriting, four different viewing options (which are suspiciously identical to Feedly though), and oh, giant Aol On Originals video ads in the sidebar…

Well, at least they have a monetization plan.

There Is No Google Reader Replacement

In each of the products listed above, and the dozens of those we haven’t linked to which are still promoting themselves as a home to Reader refugees, there are huge gaps in functionality – like Search, for example, which no one has fully fleshed out just yet. Because of this, users will also lose their ability to search and uncover content from older websites which have long since shutdown, taking their RSS archive with them. Google Reader let you time travel into the web’s past, a personal Way Back Machine of sorts. Unless you’ve diligently been tagging or starring this older content over the years, it will essentially disappear into the ether without a search feature like Google’s, which once dug into seemingly infinite RSS archives.

Reader was also more than a web service. It was a mobile website, a mobile app and an API that allowed an ecosystem of RSS clients to flourish.

It was a quantified-self tracker, whose “Trends” section told you about your news reading habits, including which sites you read, clicked, shared and emailed the most and when, and one that kept track of the feeds that stayed fresh or had become inactive.

It was also a discovery service that connected you with friends, let you package bundles of subscriptions and share them, search for content by keyword, and browse through posts that others found interesting. And it was an alerting tool that could track whenever a person, topic or keyword was mentioned on Google News, Blog Search, Twitter or eBay.

For anyone looking for a Google Reader replacement, the saddest news of all is that there really isn’t one yet.

There are only alternatives.

Leap Motion is about a month away from shipping its 3-D gesture controller to consumers, and it wants to make sure that there are plenty of apps for users to play with once it does. With that in mind, the company is opening up access to its Airspace app store for any developers who are already testing out the device, and it will further open its developer portal to those who don’t already have access to it.

In preparation for its launch, Leap Motion had more than 65,000 people apply to be part of its developer program. It gave early access to about 10,000 developers, shipping out units and letting them sign up for its developer portal. Now those lucky 10,000 will be able to try out the first apps that will be available through its Airspace app store.

Later this week, developers will get access to Airspace and the first apps that have been developed and approved for use with the Leap Motion gesture controller. To do so, they’ll need the Airspace Home desktop launcher, which will house all the apps that users download that are compatible with the controller.

In addition to providing early access to its first generation of apps, Leap Motion is also opening up its developer portal to interested parties who weren’t part of the early access program. That will allow those who haven’t yet played with the device to at least familiarize themselves with the company’s developer tools and maybe start building apps ahead of the public launch next month.

Leap Motion has clearly been putting a lot of effort into getting developers — and apps — ready on the platform ahead of its consumer release. There are currently about 50 apps available on Airspace, and Leap Motion CEO Michael Buckwald says he expects that number to double by the time consumers get their hands on the device.

In addition to the company’s own internal developer program, Leap Motion investor Highland Capital Partners is looking to court developers for the device as well. The venture firm has established a $25 million Leap Fund, which it will use to invest in entrepreneurs and startups building interesting applications that take advantage of the 3-D motion controller.

Pre-order units of Leap Motion are expected to ship on July 22, and the device will also be available in Best Buy stores for $79 about a week after that. While he wouldn’t go into specifics about the number of units that have been pre-ordered, Buckwald said the company expects to have “hundreds of thousands” of users from around the world at launch. Indeed, initial interest has been truly global, with more than 100 countries represented in its pre-orders.

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is in political limbo as he seeks asylum with any country that will help him escape from U.S. extradition. On a press call today, Wikileaks Editor Julian Assange assured journalists that he is “healthy and safe,” meaning that they still have no idea where he’ll eventually end up. “I cannot give further information as to the whereabouts or present circumstance except to say that the matter is in hand,” added Wikileaks spokeswoman, Sarah Harrison.

Yesterday, it was reported that Snowden was bound for the sunny skies of Ecuador, the very same country protecting Assange in their London Embassy. But, as the U.S. seeks to get him into custody, it’s unclear what obstacles he’s facing to secure safe passage.

Assange teased the idea that Wikileaks might publish the rest of Snowden’s documents. “Of course, Wikileaks is in the business of publishing documents suppressed by governments.” As of yet, Snowden has been pretty loyal to The Guardian, which has been judicious about disclosing the other 37 top-secret slides.

Google’s Cloud Platform is slowly becoming ay fully featured environment for running complex web apps, but it’s not easy to just give it a quick try. To get started with Cloud Platform, after all, you have to first install the right SDK and other tools on your local machine. Today, however, Google is launching its browser-based Cloud Playground, which is meant to give developers a chance to try some sample code and see how actual production APIs will behave, or to just share some code with colleagues without them having to install your whole development environment.

Cloud Playground, Google says, is meant to be a place “for developers to experiment and play with some of the services offered by the Google Cloud Platform, such as Google App Engine, Google Cloud Storage and Google Cloud SQL.”

For now, Cloud Playground only supports Python 2.7 App Engine apps, and Google considers it to be an experimental service (so it could shut it down anytime).

To get started, you simply head for the Cloud Playground or, if you just want to see it at work, head for Google’s getting started documentation, which now features green Run/Modify buttons that allow you to run any of the sample code on these sites. The Cloud Playground itself features numerous sample apps and also gives you the option to clone other open source App Engine template projects written in Python 2.7 from GitHub.

The project itself is open source and consists of a basic browser-based code editor and mimic, a Python App Engine app that serves as the development server.

Even though its startup scene is still nascent, Sub-Saharan Africa continues to grow pools of capital and entrepreneurial know-how in hubs like Nairobi, Kenya.

Today, the Nairobi-based Savannah Fund, which is raising up to $10 million for startups in the region, just graduated its first batch of companies at PivotEast, a Disrupt-like competition for African mobile startups. They include a Ghanaian e-commerce startup called Ahonya that sells electronics, a Ugandan mobile game developer called Kola Studios that’s popularized a local card game and SafariDesk, a site that helps travelers find off-the-beat experiences and places for luxury camping.

Mbwana Alliy, who returned to East Africa after business school at Stanford University, said he picked these companies out of about 170 applicants across the continent. He then puts them through a three-month accelerator in Nairobi, where he’s arranged sessions with mentors like Aardvark’s Max Ventilla or other Silicon Valley-based or foreign entrepreneurs who come through the region.

They take about a 15 percent equity stake for about $25,000, which does sound steep. But Alliy says he’s seen a fair amount of deals where other angels might have taken 40 percent of a company for as little as $10,000.

The reality is, with a much lower per-capita GDP, the economics of founding a company in Kenya or Nigeria are very different than they are in the Valley.

Alliy says the whole process of setting up the fund, for which he’s still raising funding, has been a big learning experience. When he announced the fund last year, he set it up with i/o Ventures managing director Paul Bragiel and Erik Hersman, who co-founded Ushahidi, a mobile platform that’s been used to crowdsource information during disasters and elections.

“When I started, people asked me, ‘Mbwana, are you going to copy and paste i/o onto Africa?’ And I was well aware that it couldn’t be like that.”

Certain things have gone well. “The biggest thing I was surprised by was that we put together quite a few solid mentor sessions over the past three to four months,” he said, noting that big names in tech like Eric Schmidt have passed through Nairobi on visits to the local iHub. “A lot of global talent shows up here.”

Schmidt’s Tomorrow Ventures followed on with an early Savannah investment in biNu, a platform that optimizes app use on basic feature phones.

He’s also taken initial funding from angels like Yelp’s Russ Simmons and venture capitalist Tim Draper, over going for institutional investors like other, more established venture firms.

But investing in the region is also naturally more risky and takes more gut-checking. Two-thirds of Savannah’s companies originally weren’t even incorporated at all and Alliy had to get the proper paperwork established.

“To be honest, we take risks. I kind of laugh when I think about what Valley VCs are doing,” he said. “All entrepreneurs there are so educated. They can read about what to do on VentureHacks. Everyone is so knowledgeable about everything. It feels so easy compared to Africa,” he said. “So I guess the thing is, we take more risks and we’re much more comfortable taking a bet.”

When they flew in the Ghana-based team from Ahonya, they went through Skype interviews and pure online vetting. The company has so far sold about 600 products online in about nine months, with an average transaction size of $350 (which is pretty big for Sub-Saharan Africa).

“We got a good feeling from them,” Alliy said. “We liked their traits. They were doing growth hacking in Ghana without even knowing what the term means.”

You can’t really keep a good entrepreneur from continuing to launch companies. That appears to be the case once again with Stephen Rapoport. Rapoport previously built and sold the apartment-sharing site Crashpadder to Airbnb, but has since got itchy feet once again after exiting a few months ago. And what started out as a hobby business to keep him interested before the next big thing has turned into a much bigger project.

YourGrind launched in October last year, with the objective of making specialty coffee accessible to the mass market. But today it relaunches as Pact after closing a £500,000 ($768,600) first round of seed funding with Connect Ventures, Rowan Gormley (Naked Wine, Virgin Wine) and Ian West (Naked Wine, BSkyB).

Pact joins a competitive marketplace in the subscription coffee business in the U.K., which includes more established subscription coffee players such as HasBean and Kopi.

Much like the U.S. market, the U.K. market features numerous coffee clubs that focus on a bag per month/bag per fortnight model.

However, the big difference with Pact is that they plan to be the first to offer free, next-day delivery six days per week. In other words, by saving customers from ever running out of coffee they are competing for share of wallet with major supermarkets and shops, not the bag-per-month guys.

What we’re dealing with here is more a sort of “Zappos for coffee”-style play.

Rapoport’s ‘pitch’ is that by keeping a small selection of world-class coffees and shipping within seven days of roasting “we have been able to focus on removing friction from the first purchase (by matching bean selection and grind to brew method) and retention rates.” In other words, they plan to make their customers very happy.

“Our visit to subscription conversion has stayed over 20 percent for the past four weeks, and the average user buys over two bags per month,” Rapoport tells me.

Like Zappos, they are looking to create very strong bonds with their community, and it seems to be paying off. Last week, faced with 200kg of excess coffee, they asked customers to tell any friends who may be interested in their coffee. The result was 120 percent customer growth in just 24 hours, says Rapoport. Bang goes the wastage, literally.

Numbers are small but Rapoport is unfazed and quite open about it. They have 1,700 users and are shipping 100-350 packs of coffee per day, but the focus remains “on retention not growth.”

So does he plan to be the Zappos of coffee then?

“Yes and no. I am inspired by Tony Hsieh and his approach to customer service. Our product is roughly twice the price of supermarket coffee. Whilst we know this is great value for fresh-roasted, most people don’t, so trust is central to our business. The only way to nurture real trust is to stamp openness and honesty into the culture of the company and pair it with a passion for making customers happier.”

Admittedly this is more commerce than tech but it will be very interesting to see if they can scale this model in much the same way Zappos did.

iOS 7 is getting a lot of mixed reaction from blogs, critics and the Twitterverse, but it’s actually winning over a lot of people, according to polls created by Polar, a mobile polling tool built by Input Factory to gauge user and community sentiment. Polar’s results find that in general, its users prefer iOS 7 versions of system icons almost two to one vs. the existing versions, with over 46,401 people total chiming in on the subject.

Those numbers represent the cumulative totals for all votes gathered on individual iOS 7 icons by the service since their unveiling at WWDC, and the data reveals that not only do people tend to prefer the iOS 7 versions overall, but they strongly prefer them in most cases. The redesigned Phone icon, for instance, garnered 80 percent pro-votes, with just 20 percent preferring the older design, and the Messages app icon was preferred by 84 percent of respondents, vs. just 16 percent for the older edition.

The iOS 6 equivalent won out in just a few cases, including the Reminders, Safari, Game Center, Camera and Calculator app, and even in those cases the margin was much smaller than it was for those preferring the iOS 7 design of other apps, generally speaking.

iOS 7 is still fresh, and it was always bound to be divisive in terms of how people accepted the significant new changes in appearance it brings to Apple’s mobile OS. Consider that even small changes in Facebook’s website and mobile app design prompt massive upheaval, petitions and general revolt, and yet also don’t seem to do much in terms of affecting the social network’s engagement or user growth.

Most assuredly, iOS 7 will have its vocal critics and its vocal defenders, and the icons themselves are already a huge subject of debate. But this survey is a good reminder that there’s a vocal minority paying a lot of attention to the changes now while they’re new, but that’s not necessarily reflective of how anyone will actually see the shift. Polar’s users seem firmly in the corner of the new look, and I’d suggest that’s probably about where we see general consumer taste fall, as well, if the average user even cares enough to share an opinion.

The latest Facebook data breach – which exposed personal contact information that Facebook had harvested on 6 million of its users – is a reminder that even if you’re not handing over all your contact data to Facebook, it is obtaining and triangulating that data anyway. And even if you’re not on Facebook yourself, your contact data likely is because the social network is building a shadow profile of you by data-mining other people.

You might never join Facebook, but a zombie you — sewn together from scattered bits of your personal data — is still sitting there in sort-of-stasis on its servers waiting to be properly animated if you do sign up for the service. Or waiting to escape through the cracks of another security flaw in Facebook’s systems.

Facebook is a crowd-fueled, data-mining machine that’s now so massive (1.11 billion monthly active users as of March 2013) that it doesn’t matter if you haven’t ever signed up yourself to sign over your personal data. It has long since passed the tipping point where it can act as a distributed data network that knows something about almost everyone. Or everyone who leaves any kind of digital/cellular trace that can be fed into its data banks.

Chances are someone you have corresponded with — by email or mobile phone — has let Facebook’s data spiders crawl through their correspondence, thereby allowing your contact data to be assimilated entirely without your knowledge or consent. One such example was flagged to TechCrunch on Saturday when one of the users was informed by Facebook they had been affected by its latest breach found it had harvested an email address they had never personally handed over.

This behaviour casts Facebook as the Borg of the digital world: resistance is futile. It also underlines exactly why the NSA wants a backdoor into this type of digital treasure trove. If you’re going to outsource low-level surveillance of everyone, then Facebook is one of a handful of tech companies large enough to have files on almost everyone. So really, forget the futuristic Borg: this ceaseless data-harvesting brings to mind the dossier-gathering attention to detail of the Stasi.

Does this matter? That depends on whether you care about privacy — your own or other people’s. Since Facebook is not immune to data leaks and security imperfections, as the latest bug illustrates (which has apparently been a puncture-hole in its systems since last year), the fact that it is harvesting and storing your data means there is an ongoing risk that data could be exposed to others without your consent. And that’s ignoring the primary lack of consent in Facebook storing your data without asking you in the first place.

Apparently it’s okay for your friends to consent to sharing your data on your behalf. Better choose your friends carefully then. Except it’s not even just your friends — it’s likely anyone you have had cause to correspond with in any capacity, friendship or otherwise. It seems unlikely Facebook’s algorithms are discerning enough to determine which contacts are friends, were once friends or have always only ever been passing/fleeting acquaintances and therefore have zero claim to be custodians of your personal data. Not that your real friends are likely aware they are acting as guardians of your data either.

Facebook says it uses the data it mines on you from others to power its friend recommendation feature. Which means the friend suggestion thumbnails that periodically crop up to help you build out your Facebook network, based on people its algorithms think you might know. This feature is helpful to Facebook, allowing it to encourage rapid growth of its users’ networks — by cutting down on the legwork required to find friends on the service — and therefore fuel overall user growth of its service. Sure, it’s also handy for individual Facebook users but is it useful enough to justify holding on to a vast mountain of personal contact data without consent?

The key issues here — beyond the overarching privacy theme — are transparency and consent. Facebook is very coy about explaining what it is doing. Do your friends even know they are consenting to your contact details being stored in Facebook’s cloud when they hook Facebook up to their contacts’ books? It’s highly unlikely they’re aware that that is what is happening. All they’re likely thinking is: ‘this feature will help me find more friends’. Facebook is certainly not going out of its way to explicitly say how its digital matchmaking service works.

You could argue that the average user won’t care or likely understand a technical explanation. But that does not excuse Facebook treating your personal data as the property of another person who may or may not care where that data ends up. It’s your data — and you are the one affected if it’s leaked. But Facebook is sidestepping that reality by being opaque about its processes and failing to acknowledge there are wider privacy implications to its data-grabbing ways (Packet Storm goes into one possible unpleasant scenario of the current Facebook data-harvesting process here).

In its blog post detailing last week’s data breach, Facebook skimmed over the surface of its processes (see quotation below). It focused, instead, on explaining why it harvests data, rather than making it clear it is storing users’ friends’ phone numbers and email addresses to do this. Why avoid spelling that out? Because it inevitably sounds creepy. Because, well, it inevitably is creepy.

When people upload their contact lists or address books to Facebook, we try to match that data with the contact information of other people on Facebook in order to generate friend recommendations. For example, we don’t want to recommend that people invite contacts to join Facebook if those contacts are already on Facebook; instead, we want to recommend that they invite those contacts to be their friends on Facebook.

Because of the bug, some of the information used to make friend recommendations and reduce the number of invitations we send was inadvertently stored in association with people’s contact information as part of their account on Facebook. As a result, if a person went to download an archive of their Facebook account through our Download Your Information (DYI) tool, they may have been provided with additional email addresses or telephone numbers for their contacts or people with whom they have some connection. This contact information was provided by other people on Facebook and was not necessarily accurate, but was inadvertently included with the contacts of the person using the DYI tool.

Note Facebook’s phrasing: “This contact information was provided by other people on Facebook”. In other words, ‘your personal contact info was shared with us — but not by you’. That’s the root issue here, and Facebook is cloaking it with anodyne language — and burying it five paragraphs into the post. Transparent? Not even close.

Of course Facebook is not the only tech giant intent on amassing data dossiers on as many Internet users as possible. Google has drawn the attention of European data protection regulators, for example, after it consolidated more than 60 individual product privacy policies into one joined up policy — allowing it to join the dots of usage of its different products to sketch more detailed profiles of those users. Mountain View’s Google+ social layer is also designed to function as a data harvester, pushing people to tie their usage of multiple Google products back to a single public profile. As the Guardian‘s Charles Arthur has argued, Google+ is not really a social network at all; it’s more like The Matrix.

But despite Google’s consolidated privacy policies drawing the attention of data protection regulators the company has not (yet) altered its data-knitting course. It remains to be seen whether the investigation by six European Union member states will force it to make changes. The possibility of fines is on the table. But when you’re dealing with a company with such massive resources as Google — and one which pours so much effort into political lobbying — it likely requires a commensurately joined up, global approach to have any hope of changing its behaviour. A handful of EU countries aren’t going to be able to turn this juggernaut around.

There is also the argument that the cat is out of the bag. That these huge data-mining operations are now so mature, extensive and well used that any kind of regulatory unpicking is futile. Not least because the quantity of data being gathered on human behaviour is only going to grow — likely becoming even more personal and intimate, with wearable devices enabling the harvesting of physical data points, too. And yet that actually sounds like a lot more weight for the argument that these huge data-harvesting operations really need proper scrutiny stat.

It has to be said that data-protection regulators have been extremely flat-footed in their response to the implications of systematic consolidation and cross-referencing of personal data. The lack of transparency about how these algorithms work has certainly helped the companies that created them to grow their user-data mountains in carefully crafted shade.

But a little more light is now being directed onto those darkened places, and onto the control-minded organisations (such as the NSA) inevitably attracted by the scale of the data-mining operations going on behind some of the shiniest consumer facades in tech town. So, even if we as personal Internet-using individuals can’t now hope to claim absolute ownership of all our data online, it’s worth asking what other kind of data-fuelled Frankensteins are lurking in the darkness — besides Facebook’s zombie army of shadow profiles.

Most of us employ weak passwords and should know better. Blah blah blah. But actually, as boring as the topic of password security is, get found wanting and the repercussions can be anything but dull (and extremely costly). Just ask the Associated Press.

Aiming to help users double-down on their password security is 1mylogin, which offers a cloud-based password manager. Today the UK startup has announced that it raised an additional $500,000 or so in funding that it will use to market its relatively new business offering soft-launched last month.

This brings the total raised by my1login to approximately $1.5 million via a mixture of grants and equity financing. This latest seed round comes from previous backers Scottish Investment Bank, the investment arm of Scottish Enterprise, and TRI Capital and Equity Gap, in addition to a number of unnamed angel investors.

Launched early last year, my1login’s freemium-based consumer product offers 1-click login for a user’s various online accounts by storing and making accessible all passwords via the cloud, encrypted with banking-grade security. Like other password managers, the idea is that you have a master password that unlocks access to your other passwords. That master password should (obviously) be strong and unique, but then so can the others since you won’t need to remember them.

Taking that proposition and dialling up the security notch further, my1login’s business product adds features, such as 2-factor authentication (key phrase-based), a central admin panel for managing access to passwords across an organisation, and analytics to help a business keep tabs on its various passwords and their usage. Thus my1login is setting out to help businesses prevent the use of weak passwords and what it calls weak password practices, where employees use the same password across multiple websites. Blah blah blah.

Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer, its Azure chief Satya Nadella and Oracle’s president Mark Hurd are holding a joint press conference next week, just two days before Microsoft’s Build developer conference is scheduled to kick off in San Francisco. The press event follows Oracle’s earnings call that featured remarks by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison about a series of major partnership announcements next week, including one with Salesforce.com.

“Next week we will be announcing technology partnerships with the largest and most important SaaS companies (software-as-a-service) and infrastructure companies in the cloud,” Ellison said during the call.

With this press conference slated for Monday, questions are bubbling about what these companies have planned. Adding to the speculation: Oracle is starting to promote its 12c database technology, which the company announced last October and which Larry Ellison said today that companies will use for years to come. 12c is a pluggable in-memory database, which sounds strikingly similar to SAP HANA.

Industry observers I talk to say that it’s possible the two companies are planning their own big data initiative to compete with Pivotal and its mega-partnership with GE. Would that emerge as a separate company? That’s the path that EMC followed when it spun out several of its product groups and those from VMware. Cloud Foundry was part of that spin-out.

But the SAP angle has interesting possibilities. SAP has aligned closely with Amazon Web Services. Oracle could be looking to Microsoft to be its partner for big data, in-memory computing. For Pivotal, its effort is as much about big data as it is about application development. They also face SP as a competitor in the space.

In any case, it’s going to be an interesting week.

In other video news this week, the video editing app Givit has announced its integration with Dailymotion, the second largest social video site globally after YouTube. It is the first U.S. app to be built into the France-based Dailymotion’s API.

This comes after news in late April that the French government struck down Yahoo’s bid for a $200 million majority stake in Dailymotion in order to prevent a U.S. company from taking a controlling stake in one of France’s leading technology companies. Carrier France Telecom / Orange has put between 50 and 60 million Euro into Dailymotion as it waits for someone else to bite.

The Yahoo shutdown sent a bad message to the French marketplace and to foreign investors. This Givit integration is a way for Dailymotion to reach out to U.S. partners from a different angle, tech, while growing their American user base.

When I spoke with Dailymotion’s US Managing Director Roland Hamilton and Givit CEO Greg Kostello today, the two emphasized the commonality of their platforms with respect to fostering creative communities. Givit allows users to stitch together videos of any length, add music and special effects, and “give it” away on YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter. Hamilton called Dailymotion a “young, hip community” that supports independent filmmakers.

This is a push by Dailymotion to scale up stateside and is especially strategic given recent grumblings from YouTube creators about the site’s revenue shares.

“Dailymotion is becoming a true alternative to YouTube,” said Hamilton. “From articles over the last few weeks, people are looking for another platform, and we want to be there.”

Dailymotion has a public API, and it’s looking for more U.S. mobile and social developers to tap into it. The site is currently reporting 20 million unique monthly visitors for the U.S. versus 112 million globally although a spokesman would not give numbers on Givit’s traction. Even though the Yahoo deal fell through, it seems Dailymotion is still fighting for a bigger toe-hold in the U.S. video scene.

A rare, severe charge w higher bar – not only leaking, but intent to harm US. WashPo: Snowden charged for espionage washingtonpost.com/world/national…

—
Ari Melber (@AriMelber) June 21, 2013

According to the Washington Post, the U.S. government has brought the hammer down on NSA leaker Edward Snowden, charging him with one of the most serious offenses: espionage. Snowden, who is holed up in Hong Kong, is currently searching for asylum with the help of fellow leak-enthusiast, Julian Assange of Wikileaks.

Ironically, The Post and USA Today report that charging Snowden with a heavy political crime could make it harder to extradite him. “The treaty, however, has an exception for political offenses, and espionage has traditionally been treated as a political offense. Snowden’s defense team in Hong Kong is likely to invoke part of the extradition treaty with the United States, which states that suspects will not be turned over to face criminal trial for offenses of a “political character,” explains The Post.

The extradition process could drag on for months. “Prosecutors now have 60 days to file an indictment, probably also under seal, and can then move to have Snowden extradited from Hong Kong for trial in the United States… Any court battle is likely to reach Hong Kong’s highest court, and could last many months”.

The harsh indictment should worry those who fear Snowden will face the same treatment as Wikileaks source Bradley Manning who was reportedly driven to suicidal thoughts from “extreme” 23-hour-a-day solitary confinement.

In an interview with Charlie Rose, President Obama refused to comment on how Snowden would be punished.

For good measure, we’ve included a screenshot of live Google search results that show the world still has its priorities straight with regard to the most important “bradley.”

In this week’s episode of Ask A VC, Mayfield Fund Managing Director Navin Chaddha sat down in the hot seat to answer reader questions.

In particular, Chaddha addresses a trend he calls the “consumerization of health care,” in which technology is empowering patients to become consumers of their medical and health care. Mayfield has invested in a number of startups in the space, including dental services marketplace Brighter, wearable health tracking device developer Basis, and health network HealthTap.

Chaddha also talks about the next innovations in mobile marketplaces, and more.

Tune in above!