French startup Deepomatic has raised a $10.5 million (€10 million) Series B funding round. While the founding round is relatively small, the startup has managed to convince some large-scale clients to use its visual automation platform. For instance, telecom companies use Deepomatic on the field to check that tasks have been completed successfully.

EnBW New Ventures and Orbia Ventures are leading the newly announced funding round, which Deepomatic closed in October. Existing investors Alven, Hi-Inov Dentressangl and, Swisscom Ventures are participating once again in a new round.

The startup has been around for a few years already as I first covered Deeepomatic back in 2015. The company has always been focused on deep learning for computer vision applications. The main issue is that it has been a long journey to find the right clients for this technology.

With the telecom industry, it seems like Deepomatic has finally unlocked its true potential. “We discovered an industry that very much needed what we were working on — and that was telecom companies,” co-founder and CEO Augustin Marty told me.

When a field worker is installing optical fiber cables or rolling out a new 5G tower, they have to fill out complicated forms to make sure that they followed some specific processes. It can be quite tedious as workers can be working for contractor companies. And those companies can be working with multiple telecom companies with different requirements.

It’s also easy to make a mistake when you are filling out a form. Sometimes, field workers can also say that something is working fine when it’s kind of working. It can create some QA issues, as we have seen in fiber concentration points.

That’s why many field service companies are also working with photos. When they are done installing something, they have to take a photo of their installation and their instruments proving that some new equipment is up and running with the right parameters. It means more work.

With Deepomatic, field service companies mostly use photos as their benchmark. Photos are automatically analyzed to extract some knowledge. Deepomatic can then send some alerts if something feels off and should be double-checked.

“We started with the most complicated part, which is identifying mistakes,” Marty said. On top of that, Deepomatic now sells an end-to-end platform so that field workers only have to use Deepomatic to get something done. It also integrates with specific enterprise tools like ERPs.

When the startup works with a new client, there is some integration work so that Deepomatic works exactly as expected. It involves adding control points, reusing some of the existing tasks in its computer vision library or training its algorithm on a new set of photos. Deepomatic algorithms are trained on the startup’s own infrastructure. But its product can run on the client’s own cloud infrastructure and in some cases on premise.

The company currently has around 20 large accounts, such as Bouygues Telecom, Swisscom and Movistar, as well as a bunch of smaller clients. As this is enterprise software, clients usually pay hundreds of thousands of euros per year to use Deepomatic.

Every month, Deepomatic monitors more than one million on-field operations. More than 20,000 field workers are taking photos with their phone and uploading them to a Deepomatic backend every day.

Up next, Deepomatic and its team of 70 employees want to enter new markets and new industries, such as renewable energy, electric mobility, construction, insurance, etc. Deepomatic wants to work with companies in Europe, the U.S. and South America.

Many governments and big companies are currently investing heavily to overhaul their infrastructure for the next few decades. At the same time, there is a talent shortage for field workers. It seems like Deepomatic is arriving at the right time on the market to become an essential tool for this infrastructure overhaul.

Deepomatic wants to build the AI-based computer vision companion for field workers by Romain Dillet originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/28/deepomatic-wants-to-build-the-ai-based-computer-vision-companion-for-field-workers/

The UK government has said it will further expand the scope of online safety legislation by criminalizing the encouragement of self-harm — in a bid to tackle what it describes as “tragic and avoidable deaths caused by people seeing self-harm content online”.

The latest amendment to the controversial but populist Online Safety Bill will mean in-scope platforms will be required to remove content that deliberately encourages somebody to physically injure themselves — or else risk penalties under the legislation.

Individuals posting such content online could also face prosecution under the new offence of encouraging self harm and the secretary of state for digital said the government wants to target “abhorrent trolls encouraging the young and vulnerable to self-harm”.

The government said the maximum penalties will be set out in due course.

It is already illegal to encourage or assist suicide, online or offline, in the UK so the creation of the new offence is intended to bring self harm content in line with an existing prohibition on communications encouraging suicide.

The Online Safety Bill’s passage through parliament remains on pause following an interruption this summer linked to political turmoil in the governing Conservative Party. But the reshuffled UK government has said it will bring the bill back to parliament next month after making tweaks to the legislation.

Just last week the Ministry of Justice announced some incoming additions to the Online Safety Bill, which are focused on tackling abuse of intimate imagery. However further changes are slated around ‘legal but harmful’ content so the full shape of the legislation remains tbc.

The latest changes — making it illegal to send online communications encouraging self harm — come a few months after the government said it would respond to concerns over the bill’s impact on freedom of expression online, with the (new) secretary of state, Michelle Donelan, saying in September she would be “editing” the bill to reduce concern about its impact on ‘legal but harmful’ speech for adults.

Since then child safety groups, which have been campaigning for years for the government to pass online safety legislation, have raised concerns about the bill being weakened — so the government’s move to make encouraging self harm an offence looks intended to respond to that concern.

Yesterday the BBC reported Donelan saying the latest changes were influenced by the case of Molly Russell: The 14-year-old schoolgirl who took her own life five years ago after viewing thousands of pieces of online content about self-harm and suicide on platforms including Instagram and Pinterest.

An inquest into Russell’s death concluded in September that social media had been a factor in her demise. While, last month, the coroner’s ‘prevention of future deaths’ report recommended a series of measures be taken to regulate and monitor minors’ access to social media content.

The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport said the move to add an offence of encouraging self harm will make illegal “one of the most concerning and pervasive online harms that currently falls below the threshold of criminal behaviour”.

In a statement, Donelan added:

“I am determined that the abhorrent trolls encouraging the young and vulnerable to self-harm are brought to justice.

“So I am strengthening our online safety laws to make sure these vile acts are stamped out and the perpetrators face jail time.

“Social media firms can no longer remain silent bystanders either and they’ll face fines for allowing this abusive and destructive behaviour to continue on their platforms under our laws.”

Other priority illegal offences already listed in the bill include hate crimes; provisions around revenge porn (and sharing deepfake porn without content); harassment and cyberstalking.

Following the coroner’s report into Russell’s death, Donelan said measures for safeguarding children would be beefed up as part of tweaks being made to the bill. So by making encouraging self harm illegal the government will — on paper — remove that particular type of problem content out of the ‘legal but harmful’ bucket, which may make it easier for ministers to reduce the level of regulation applied to this type of speech without being accused of undermining essential child protection provisions.

However, regardless of what the bill says on paper, huge questions remain over how platforms will respond to legal duties being placed on them to regulate all sorts of speech — and whether it will boost safety for web users as claimed.

Meanwhile, major freedom of expression concerns remain over a regime with penalties that scale up to 10% of global annual turnover — and even the risk of jail time for non-cooperative senior execs — with critics worried it will have a chilling effect by setting up platforms as defacto speech police and encouraging them to overblock content to shrink their legal risk of a hefty fine.

Since the controversial speech regulation legislation was published in full last year, kicking off over a year of parliamentary scrutiny, the government’s approach has faced plenty of criticism and concern from inside parliament that the bill falls short of its stated aims and claims, even as mainstream child safety groups and campaigners (and a majority of lawmakers on both sides of the house) continue to press for online safety legislation to be passed.

Outside parliament, rights campaigners, legal and technical experts are among those continuing to warn of a looming mess which they argue will apply the biggest penalties to UK web users faced with access restrictions like age verification pop-ups and and homegrown startups faced with impossibly fuzzy demands and expensive compliance costs, with many also arguing the bill won’t do what’s claimed and protect kids either.

The a tug of war between controversy over the government’s entire approach and loud populist support for child safety claims attached to the bill has not reduced ministers’ claimed commitment to passing the legislation — despite the rebooted UK government expressing some freedom of expression qualms — but it remains to be seen how extensively it will rethink the regulation of ‘legal but harmful’ speech.

The bill is due to return to parliament on Monday December 5.

Another growing controversy attached to the bill relates to the potentially disastrous impact on messaging apps’ use of end-to-end encryption — since another recent government amendment puts a requirement on private messaging apps to be able to detect and remove child sexual exploitation and abuse (CSEA) content in both public and private communications between users which raises questions about how they can do so if they have implemented E2EE on the service — and, therefore, what the legislation will do to the strong security that exists to protect all users?

Last week a legal opinion written by a leading UK barrister, commissioned by the free speech campaign group Index on Censorship, also questioned whether the bill is compatible with the UK’s human rights obligations — warning over the extent of the proposed surveillance of app users’ communications being mandated on the private sector by a government appointed regulatory body and without independent oversight.

UK expands Online Safety Bill to criminalize encouraging self harm by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/28/online-safety-bill-self-harm/

WhatsApp has started rolling out a feature to let you chat with yourself. Sending messages to your own account can be a way to keep a piece of information easily accessible, right next to your other WhatsApp conversations.

Called ‘Message Yourself’, the feature lets users send notes, reminders and shopping lists to themselves on WhatsApp.

On Monday, the Meta-owned instant messaging app announced the rollout of the new messaging feature that will reach all its Android and iPhone users in the coming weeks. It was initially tested with some beta testers, WhatsApp beta tracker WABetaInfo reported in late October. The company has confirmed to TechCrunch that the feature has begun rolling out globally.

Users will see their contact at the top of the contacts list on WhatsApp when they create a new chat. Tapping that contact will take them to the chat screen they can use to send messages to themselves.

Although the native feature to message yourself is new on WhatsApp, some users have already been using a workaround for some time. You could already send messages to yourself using the app’s ‘click to chat’ feature. Nonetheless, the new offering removes the additional steps that users needed to self-chat using the wa.me URL.

Users can also pin their self-chat messages to the top of the conversation list if they don’t want to search them in their widely polluted chats list.

WhatsApp rival Signal has a feature named Note to Self that addresses the same use case — it lets you create messages for personal use. However, unlike WhatsApp’s newly launched feature that is accessible from the top of the contact list on the app, Signal doesn’t suggest your own profile at the top of the recipient list. Users need to search and select the contact entry ‘Note to Self’ to use the feature.

Similarly, community platform Slack has a dedicated space titled “Jot Something Down” to let users send notes to themselves.

Telegram also offers a similar feature called Saved Messages that lets users bookmark any important messages as well as save their notes and reminders that can be accessed in the future. Messages once saved can be accessed from the top of the chats screen. However, Telegram users initially need to access the feature by tapping the hamburger menu on Android or through the settings menu on iOS.

WhatsApp rolls out a feature that makes it easier to message yourself by Jagmeet Singh originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/28/whatsapp-rolls-out-a-feature-that-makes-it-easier-to-message-yourself/

Search any major Chinese city on Twitter, and you will see a cascade of spam tweets showing porn, escort services, and gambling content that are published every few seconds, making it impossible to get any legitimate results.

There has been a “significant uptick” in these tweets over the last three days, according to a China-focused data analyst. The surge in such bot content coincides with an unprecedented wave of protests that have swept across major Chinese cities and universities over the weekend.

The demonstrations are largely a result of China’s zero-tolerance approach toward COVID-19, a rare show of defiance amongst the people. The country’s stringent COVID restrictions have led to prolonged lockdowns across the country, obstructing life, business, and manufacturing activities.

Protests erupted last week at Apple’s biggest iPhone factory in China as workers were roiled by delayed bonuses and concerns over COVID spread.

Discussion of the new nationwide protests is strictly censored on Chinese social media and protestors have turned to foreign platforms like Twitter and Telegram for communication. All major Western social networks are banned in China and access requires the use of VPNs, which are also nearly extinct in local app stores.

The bot content on Twitter, which is thought to be government-connected, makes it even harder for Chinese citizens to organize demonstrations. As part of his massive layoff plan, Elon Musk abruptly axed Twitter’s anti-propaganda staff. That’s a stark contrast to 2019 when Twitter took down around 1,000 accounts that it determined were part of a state-directed effort to undermine protests in Hong Kong.

Chinese-language location-based escort ads aren’t new on the social media platform, but the frequency at which they are obscuring searches of Chinese cities in the last few days is unusual, as the data analyst noted:

Twitter “was aware” of the spam issue and “was working to resolve it,” The Washington Post reported on Sunday evening, ET. And so should Musk be paying heed to the problem, given the billionaire was clearly concerned about Twitter bots, which prompted him to temporarily put the acquisition deal on hold in May. Of course, the world is still waiting to see how he plans to fix the issue after removing the key teams responsible for battling misinformation.

Great Wall of porn obscures China protest news on Twitter by Rita Liao originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/28/great-wall-of-porn-obscures-china-protest-news-on-twitter/