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UK parliament seizes cache of internal Facebook documents to further privacy probe

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg may yet regret underestimating a UK parliamentary committee that’s been investigating the democracy-denting impact of online disinformation for the best part of this year — and whose repeat requests for facetime he’s just as repeatedly snubbed.

In the latest high gear change, reported in yesterday’s Observer, the committee has used parliamentary powers to seize a cache of documents pertaining to a US lawsuit to further its attempt to hold Facebook to account for misuse of user data.

Facebook’s oversight — or rather lack of it — where user data is concerned has been a major focus for the committee, as its enquiry into disinformation and data misuse has unfolded and scaled over the course of this year, ballooning in scope and visibility since the Cambridge Analytica story blew up into a global scandal this April.

The internal documents now in the committee’s possession are alleged to contain significant revelations about decisions made by Facebook senior management vis-a-vis data and privacy controls — including confidential emails between senior executives and correspondence with Zuckerberg himself.

This has been a key line of enquiry for parliamentarians. And an equally frustrating one — with committee members accusing Facebook of being deliberately misleading and concealing key details from it.

The seized files pertain to a US lawsuit that predates mainstream publicity around political misuse of Facebook data, with the suit filed in 2015, by a US startup called Six4Three, after Facebook removed developer access to friend data. (As we’ve previously reported Facebook was actually being warned about data risks related to its app permissions as far back as 2011 — yet it didn’t full shut down the friends data API until May 2015.)

The core complaint is an allegation that Facebook enticed developers to create apps for its platform by implying they would get long-term access to user data in return. So by later cutting data access the claim is that Facebook was effectively defrauding developers.

Since lodging the complaint, the plaintiffs have seized on the Cambridge Analytica saga to try to bolster their case.

And in a legal motion filed in May Six4Three’s lawyers claimed evidence they had uncovered demonstrated that “the Cambridge Analytica scandal was not the result of mere negligence on Facebook’s part but was rather the direct consequence of the malicious and fraudulent scheme Zuckerberg designed in 2012 to cover up his failure to anticipate the world’s transition to smartphones”.

The startup used legal powers to obtain the cache of documents — which remain under seal on order of a California court. But the UK parliament used its own powers to swoop in and seize the files from the founder of Six4Three during a business trip to London when he came under the jurisdiction of UK law, compelling him to hand them over.

According to the Observer, parliament sent a serjeant at arms to the founder’s hotel — giving him a final warning and a two-hour deadline to comply with its order.

“When the software firm founder failed to do so, it’s understood he was escorted to parliament. He was told he risked fines and even imprisonment if he didn’t hand over the documents,” it adds, apparently revealing how Facebook lost control over some more data (albeit, its own this time).

In comments to the newspaper yesterday, DCMS committee chair Damian Collins said: “We are in uncharted territory. This is an unprecedented move but it’s an unprecedented situation. We’ve failed to get answers from Facebook and we believe the documents contain information of very high public interest.”

Collins later tweeted the Observer’s report on the seizure, teasing “more next week” — likely a reference to the grand committee hearing in parliament already scheduled for November 27.

But it could also be a hint the committee intends to reveal and/or make use of information locked up in the documents, as it puts questions to Facebook’s VP of policy solutions…

That said, the documents are subject to the Californian superior court’s seal order, so — as the Observer points out — cannot be shared or made public without risk of being found in contempt of court.

A spokesperson for Facebook made the same point, telling the newspaper: “The materials obtained by the DCMS committee are subject to a protective order of the San Mateo Superior Court restricting their disclosure. We have asked the DCMS committee to refrain from reviewing them and to return them to counsel or to Facebook. We have no further comment.”

Facebook’s spokesperson added that Six4Three’s “claims have no merit”, further asserting: “We will continue to defend ourselves vigorously.”

And, well, the irony of Facebook asking for its data to remain private also shouldn’t be lost on anyone at this point…

Another irony: In July, the Guardian reported that as part of Facebook’s defence against Six4Three’s suit the company had argued in court that it is a publisher — seeking to have what it couched as ‘editorial decisions’ about data access protected by the US’ first amendment.

Which is — to put it mildly — quite the contradiction, given Facebook’s long-standing public characterization of its business as just a distribution platform, never a media company.

So expect plenty of fireworks at next week’s public hearing as parliamentarians once again question Facebook over its various contradictory claims.

It’s also possible the committee will have been sent an internal email distribution list by then, detailing who at Facebook knew about the Cambridge Analytica breach in the earliest instance.

This list was obtained by the UK’s data watchdog, over the course of its own investigation into the data misuse saga. And earlier this month information commissioner Elizabeth Denham confirmed the ICO has the list and said it would pass it to the committee.

The accountability net does look to be closing in on Facebook management.

Even as Facebook continues to deny international parliaments any face-time with its founder and CEO (the EU parliament remains the sole exception).

Last week the company refused to even have Zuckerberg do a video call to take the committee’s questions — offering its VP of policy solutions, Richard Allan, to go before what’s now a grand committee comprised of representatives from seven international parliaments instead.

The grand committee hearing will take place in London on Tuesday morning, British time — followed by a press conference in which parliamentarians representing Facebook users from across the world will sign a set of ‘International Principles for the Law Governing the Internet’, making “a declaration on future action”.

So it’s also ‘watch this space’ where international social media regulation is concerned.

As noted above, Allan is just the latest stand-in for Zuckerberg. Back in April the DCMS committee spend the best part of five hours trying to extract answers from Facebook CTO, Mike Schroepfer.

“You are doing your best but the buck doesn’t stop with you does it? Where does the buck stop?” one committee member asked him then.

“It stops with Mark,” replied Schroepfer.

But Zuckerberg definitely won’t be stopping by on Tuesday.


Source: Tech Crunch

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Glimpses of China’s parallel tech universe

What can we learn from DETECTIVE CHINATOWN 2? Quite a lot, actually. The 11th biggest box-office hit of the year, it vastly outgrossed the likes of SOLO: A STAR WARS STORY, A STAR IS BORN, and CRAZY RICH ASIANS. You may never have heard of it, though; like OPERATION RED SEA, the 10th biggest hit of the year, it made all of its money in China.

What can a slapstick-meets-Sherlock-Holmes comedy tell us about technology? Quite a lot, if we read its subtext. One striking thing: it’s hard to think of any big recent American movie in which smartphone apps are so woven into the plot. The movie’s characters are brought together, and constantly reference, are brought together by one smartphone app; when imprisoned, our young genius Chinese detective laments, most of all, the loss of his phone; and when its blue-haired woman hacker asks the protagonist, “add me on WeChat?” early on, it seems like a cute throwaway line, but their WeChat conversations are fundamental to the plot as the movie progresses.

It’s also striking that Western tech has become so hegemonic that it actually seems slightly jarring to see characters using a chat app which is not iMessage / FB Messenger / WhatsApp. The Internet proper may be globally pervasive, at the TCP/IP level, but we live in two different online worlds; one of Facebook / Google / Amazon, and one of Tencent / Baidu / Alibaba, with Apple as the only company which seems to be bridge both worlds. This extends to payments, too; I was in China earlier this year, and was struck by in how many places — including McDonald’s! — Visa and Mastercard were useless, and the only viable Western-origin payment method was Apple Pay.

It’s easy and obviously somewhat correct to blame the Great Firewall for this. (Although the West is not without its own firewalls; I’m in Paris as I write this, and my attempt to read some back-home San Francisco news was just met with the “451 Unavailable for Legal Reasons” response pictured above, presumably courtesy of the GDPR.) But Chinese apps, and Chinese hardware, have long since transcended being knockoff copies of Western technology; they do their own things now, and they often do them better.

It’s been a remarkable rise. Back in 2011, while traveling in Ethiopia, I noticed with surprised curiosity that my hotel’s wi-fi was all run by a stack of Chinese hardware and software; seven years later, here in Paris, I keep passing glittering posters twenty feet tall extolling Huawei’s latest smartphone.

As China rises in power, it and America seem to increasingly see one another as a threat. (Again, it’s just a movie, but you can learn a lot about default cultural assumptions from movies, and OPERATION RED SEA, which is basically “BLACK HAWK DOWN meets chest-beating hagiography of the Chinese military,” ends with a cliffhanger standoff between the Chinese and American navies.) And certainly China’s government does horrifying things beyond its infamous censorship, such as interning an estimated million Muslims essentially because they are Muslim.

But from a purely technical point of view, Western online technology has — unexpectedly — become so hegemonic itself that the rampant growth of a whole different stack of apps and services is an interesting development in and of itself. For now, China’s parallel universe exists primarily within China, and doesn’t affect the rest of the world — but that’s already beginning to change, as this WeChat-in-San-Francisco-politics story indicates. As China engages more and more with the West, we’re going to see its tech overlap with ours in curious ways. May you live in interesting times, indeed.


Source: Tech Crunch

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Bitcoin sinks below $4,000 as the crypto market takes another hefty beating

As we hang out with family and friends this holiday season, it’s interesting to look back on the Bitcoin mania that we endured one Thanksgiving ago. Aunts and uncles asking about internet money as you passed the mashed potatoes while trying to explain the concept of decentralization in a way that made it seem like you knew your stuff.

Well, as we near a year since many of the top tokens hit their all-time-highs, we’ve seen the prices come crashing down as more manageable expectations of the crypto market have seemed to prevail. You probably didn’t have quite as many relatives picking your brain this year for crypto investment tips.

Today, we saw another hit to the market. All but 8 of the top 100 cryptocurrency tokens are down for the 24-hour period with most losses averaging around 13 or 14 percent.

Notably, Bitcoin has now fallen beneath the $4,000 threshold, a number it reached in August of last year as its trajectory pointed sharply upward. Ethereum is trading just over $111, while Litecoin has fallen below $30, far cries from their former glory.

The cryptocurrency space is a volatile one but the year-long downward trend has been consistent and unrelenting leaving many to wonder where and when some of these top tokens settle down.


Source: Tech Crunch

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Cards Against Humanity is selling diamonds and TVs for 99% off and totally winning (?) Black Friday

Half of my family (and half of the Internet, it seems) all has eyes and phones locked on the same Black Friday sales page right now — and, likely to the disappointment of the big retailers, it’s not any of theirs.

In the latest in a streak of wild Black Friday stunts, Cards Against Humanity (the wonderfully offensive fill-in-the-blank “party game for horrible people”) is selling a different ridiculous item for 99 percent off every 10 minutes. It could be a life-size cut out of Orlando Bloom for 75 cents… or it could be a 1.5 carat diamond for $32.

Some of the other things they’ve put on sale this morning:

  • A $20 bill for 20 cents
  • An 85-Inch Sony TV for $35
  • A five-day Fiji vacation for two for $71.60
  • 600 live ants for 66 cents
  • A 2015 Ford Fiesta for $97.50
  • A Poncho toilet, which is… well, a “poncho you can poop in,” for 9 cents
  • An $800 Applebees Gift Card for $8 which tbh I’m still not 100 percent certain I’d want.
  • Bill Pullman’s actual flight suit from Independence Day

In many of these cases the items are one-of-a-kind, going to whoever managed to hit the buy button and answer a trivia question (to “prove you’re not a robot”) first.

“But wait!” you say. “How is CAH making money here?”

They’re not. From their FAQ:

Is this real?
Yes. All of these products are actually available for 99% off, and if you purchase something we will actually ship it to you.

But the deals seem too good to be true!
We’ve chosen to make them true. That’s the miracle of Black Friday.

Can the global financial system handle these deals?
Most economic indicators suggest “no.”

Surely you must be losing a lot of money on this promotion.
Oh dear yes. This is a financial catastrophe for our company.

If it was anyone else doing this, no one would believe it, but over-the-top Black Friday stunts are sort of Cards Against Humanity’s MO. Part protest, part publicity stunt, and part joke, the stunts always manage to highlight the absurdity of Black Friday while making everyone laugh.

Last year they pivoted into a potato chip company, temporarily dropping out of the game biz to instead focus on selling “Prongles.” For Black Friday of 2016, they convinced people to spend $100,000 to dig a hole so that in coming years you might think back and chuckle about that time you spent money digging a hole. In 2015, they made over $70,000 selling nothing — literally, you give them $5 for nothing (and they made it very clear it really was nothing and they weren’t going to surprise you by actually sending something).

And to prevent anyone from walking away empty handed just because they weren’t first to click the “buy” button on Dan Aykroyd’s Cone Head from the movie “Coneheads” (another actual item they sold this morning), they’ve also got a (gasp) actual product of their own for sale starting today. Called the “Absurd Box,” it’s a pack of 200 new cards for $20 — which, they note, would otherwise go for $2,000.


Source: Tech Crunch

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New US report says that climate change could cost nearly $500B per year by 2090

A new report from the U.S. government on the impacts of climate change on society indicates that unless action is taken, climatological events could cost the country nearly half a trillion dollars annually by 2090.

The National Climate Assessment is a Congressionally mandated report on the impacts of climate change and was culled from the work of 300 authors in a dozen federal agencies. The 1,000-page report covers the effect of climate change on agriculture, labor, geography and health in the United States.

It’s the second volume of a report intended to give federal policymakers information on how global warming will impact the United States. 

It also comes at a time when the current administration is doing everything to refute the mounting evidence coming from inside its own agencies and shirk its national and international commitments to mitigating the effects of global climate change.

As its own reports reveal the disaster of climate inaction, Trump proposes climate inaction

In the absence of more significant global mitigation efforts, climate change is projected to impose substantial damages on the U.S. economy, human health, and the environment. Under scenarios with high emissions and limited or no adaptation, annual losses in some sectors are estimated to grow to hundreds of billions of dollars by the end of the century. It is very likely that some physical and ecological impacts will be irreversible for thousands of years, while others will be permanent.

There is hope that the world can still change course and reverse the effects associated with climate change. In fact, the study says that near-term mitigation efforts should begin showing results by the middle of the century. Ideally, it’ll let scientists know what steps they’re taking are working and what aren’t.

Many climate change impacts and associated economic damages in the United States can be substantially reduced over the course of the 21st century through global-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, though the magnitude and timing of avoided risks vary by sector and region. The effect of near-term emissions mitigation on reducing risks is expected to become apparent by mid-century and grow substantially thereafter.

But for the scientists that collected the data and assembled the report, the evidence of the human impact of climate change is now incontrovertible.

Observations from around the world show the widespread effects of increasing greenhouse gas concentrations on Earth’s climate. High temperature extremes and heavy precipitation events are increasing. Glaciers and snow cover are shrinking, and sea ice is retreating. Seas are warming, rising, and becoming more acidic, and marine species are moving to new locations toward cooler waters. Flooding is becoming more frequent along the U.S. coastline. Growing seasons are lengthening, and wildfires are increasing.

While the federal government may not be willing to take action to curb the emissions that contribute to global warming, states, led by California, increasingly are developing legislation to mitigate or reduce carbon emissions and to create adaptation strategies for dealing with a warming climate.

Venture capitalists also are beginning to commit significant capital to technologies focused on alternative energy generation, energy storage, emissions reduction and energy conservation that all fall under the category of sustainable solutions.

Indeed, the public offering for the vegetarian consumer food company, Beyond Meat, shows that there’s a growing market for investments in companies that promote a more sustainable lifestyle.

And early-stage accelerator programs like Y Combinator are getting into the game, calling for startups that are developing technologies to reduce the emissions that are contributing to global warming.

Y Combinator issues a request for geo-engineering startups because climate change is real and we’re all going to die

The new report from the government paints a dire picture for the future if nothing is done, but, as the investment and technology community once again mobilizes to develop potential solutions, there’s a chance that things may not be completely hopeless yet.

The critical step will be if the U.S. government will heed the advice of its own scientists and take steps to encourage greater action to what is increasingly looking like the biggest threat to human welfare.


Source: Tech Crunch

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Daily Crunch: Black Friday’s online sales are projected to hit $5.9B

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. (This one’s a little shorter than usual — it’s a holiday weekend in the United States.) If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here:

1. Black Friday predicted to hit $5.9B in online sales, $645M spent so far

After a record-breaking Thanksgiving with $3.7 billion in digital sales across desktop and mobile devices, it looks like Black Friday will also pull in a bumper year for e-commerce. Adobe — which tracks trillions of transactions across a range of retail sites — says that as of 7am Pacific Time, there has already been $645 million spent online.

Shopify, which provides a real-time sales visualisation for some 600,000 merchants on its platform, notes that the average sales per minute for those merchants is hovering at just over $400,000 per minute.

2. Amazon warehouse workers in Europe stage ‘we are not robots’ protests

They’ve timed the latest protest for Black Friday, one of the busiest annual shopping days online as retailers slash prices and heavily promote deals to try to spark a seasonal buying rush.

3. Be a Thanksgiving security hero with these family-friendly tips

If you’re reading this, chances are you’re: Pretty good at tech stuff, spending time with your family for Thanksgiving and bored because you’re reading this newsletter right now.

4. Silentmode’s PowerMask is a $200 connected relaxation mask

Someone described the PowerMask as a kind of small scale take on a sensory deprivation tank — and sure, why not?

5. BlueCargo optimizes stacks of containers for maximum efficiency

Under current sorting methods, yard cranes end up moving a ton of containers just to reach a container sitting at the bottom of the pile. BlueCargo wants to optimize those movements by helping you store containers at the right spot.

6. Gift Guide: 16 fantastic computer bags

Yep, it’s another TechCrunch gift guide, this one focused on Matt Burns’ favorite subject.


Source: Tech Crunch

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Facebook policy VP, Richard Allan, to face the international ‘fake news’ grilling that Zuckerberg won’t

An unprecedented international grand committee comprised of 22 representatives from seven parliaments will meet in London next week to put questions to Facebook about the online fake news crisis and the social network’s own string of data misuse scandals.

But Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg won’t be providing any answers. The company has repeatedly refused requests for him to answer parliamentarians’ questions.

Instead it’s sending a veteran EMEA policy guy, Richard Allan, now its London-based VP of policy solutions, to face a roomful of irate MPs.

Allan will give evidence next week to elected members from the parliaments of Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Ireland, Latvia, Singapore, along with members of the UK’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) parliamentary committee.

At the last call the international initiative had a full eight parliaments behind it but it’s down to seven — with Australia being unable to attend on account of the travel involved in getting to London.

A spokeswoman for the DCMS committee confirmed Facebook declined its last request for Zuckerberg to give evidence, telling TechCrunch: “The Committee offered the opportunity for him to give evidence over video link, which was also refused. Facebook has offered Richard Allan, vice president of policy solutions, which the Committee has accepted.”

“The Committee still believes that Mark Zuckerberg is the appropriate person to answer important questions about data privacy, safety, security and sharing,” she added. “The recent New York Times investigation raises further questions about how recent data breaches were allegedly dealt with within Facebook, and when the senior leadership team became aware of the breaches and the spread of Russian disinformation.”

The DCMS committee has spearheaded the international effort to hold Facebook to account for its role in a string of major data scandals, joining forces with similarly concerned committees across the world, as part of an already wide-ranging enquiry into the democratic impacts of online disinformation that’s been keeping it busy for the best part of this year.

And especially busy since the Cambridge Analytica story blew up into a major global scandal this April, although Facebook’s 2018 run of bad news hasn’t stopped there…

Everything you need to know about Facebook’s data breach affecting 50M users

Facebook under pressure over Soros smear tactics

Internal Facebook memo sees outgoing VP of comms Schrage take blame for hiring Definers

Read the mud-slinging pitches Facebook’s PR firm sent us 

The evidence session with Allan is scheduled to take place at 11.30am (GMT) on November 27 in Westminster. (It will also be streamed live on the UK’s parliament.tv website.)

Afterwards a press conference has been scheduled — during which DCMS says a representative from each of the seven parliaments will sign a set of ‘International Principles for the Law Governing the Internet’.

It bills this as “a declaration on future action from the parliaments involved” — suggesting the intent is to generate international momentum and consensus for regulating social media.

The DCMS’ preliminary report on the fake news crisis, which it put out this summer, called for urgent action from government on a number of fronts — including floating the idea of a levy on social media to defence democracy.

However UK ministers failed to leap into action, merely putting out a tepid ‘wait and see’ response. Marshalling international action appears to be DCMS’ alternative action plan.

At next week’s press conference, grand committee members will take questions following Allan’s evidence — so expect swift condemnation of any fresh equivocation, misdirection or question-dodging from Facebook (which has already been accused by DCMS members of a pattern of evasive behavior).

Last week’s NYT report also characterized the company’s strategy since 2016, vis-a-vis the fake news crisis, as ‘delay, deny, deflect’.

The grand committee will hear from other witnesses too, including the UK’s information commissioner Elizabeth Denham who was before the DCMS committee recently to report on a wide-ranging ecosystem investigation it instigated in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

She told it then that Facebooks needs to take “much greater responsibility” for how its platform is being used, and warning that unless the company overhauls its privacy-hostile business model it risk burning user trust for good.

Also giving evidence next week: Deputy information commissioner Steve Wood; the former Prime Minister of St Kitts and Nevis, Rt Hon Dr Denzil L Douglas (on account of Cambridge Analytica/SCL Elections having done work in the region); and the co-founder of PersonalData.IO, Paul-Olivier Dehaye.

Dehaye has also given evidence to the committee before — detailing his experience of making Subject Access Requests to Facebook — and trying and failing to obtain all the data it holds on him.


Source: Tech Crunch

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BlueCargo optimizes stacks of containers for maximum efficiency

Meet BlueCargo, a logistics startup focused on seaport terminals. The company was part of Y Combinator’s latest batch and recently raised a $3 million funding round from 1984 Ventures, Green Bay Ventures, Sound Ventures, Kima Ventures and others.

If you picture a terminal, chances are you see huge piles of containers. But current sorting methods are not efficient at all. Yard cranes end up moving a ton of containers just to reach a container sitting at the bottom of the pile.

BlueCargo wants to optimize those movements by helping you store containers at the right spot. The first container that is going to leave the terminal is going to be at the top of the pile.

“Terminals spend a lot of time making unproductive or undesired movements,” co-founder and CEO Alexandra Griffon told me. “And yet, terminals only generate revenue every time they unload or load a container.”

Right now, ERP-like solutions only manage containers according to a handful of business rules that don’t take into account the timeline of a container. Empty containers are all stored in one area, containers with dangerous goods are in another area, etc.

The startup leverages as much data as possible on each container — where it’s coming from, the type of container, if it’s full or empty, the cargo ship that carried it, the time of the year and more.

Every time BlueCargo works with a new terminal, the startup collects past data and processes it to create a model. The team can then predict how BlueCargo can optimize the terminal.

“At Saint-Nazaire, we could save 22 percent on container shifting,” Griffon told me.

The company will test its solution in Saint-Nazaire in December. It integrates directly with existing ERP solutions. Cranes already scan container identification numbers. BlueCargo could then instantly push relevant information to crane operators so that they know where to put down a container.

Saint-Nazaire is a relatively small port compared to the biggest European ports. But the company is already talking with terminals in Long Beach, one of the largest container ports in the U.S.

BlueCargo also knows that it needs to tread carefully — many companies already promised magical IT solutions in the past. But it hasn’t changed much in seaports.

That’s why the startup wants to be as seamless as possible. It only charges fees based on shifting savings — 30 percent of what it would have cost you with the old model. And it doesn’t want to alter workflows for people working at terminals — it’s like an invisible crane that helps you work faster.

There are six dominant players managing terminals around the world. If BlueCargo can convince those companies to work with the startup, it would represent a good business opportunity.


Source: Tech Crunch

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Amazon warehouse workers in Europe stage ‘we are not robots’ protests

Amazon warehouse workers in several countries in Europe are protesting over what they claim are inhuman working conditions which treat people like robots. It’s the latest in a series of worker actions this year.

They’ve timed the latest protest for Black Friday, one of the busiest annual shopping days online as retailers slash prices and heavily promote deals to try to spark a seasonal buying rush.

In the UK, the GMB Union says it’s expecting “hundreds” to attend protests timed for early morning and afternoon at Amazon warehouses in Rugeley, Milton Keynes, Warrington, Peterborough and Swansea.

At the time of writing the union had not provided details of turnout so far. 

Protests are also reported to be taking place in Spain, France and Italy today. Although, when asked about strikes at its facilities in these countries, Amazon claimed: “Our European Fulfilment Network is fully operational and we continue to focus on delivering for our customers. Any reports to the contrary are simply wrong.”

The demonstrations look intended to not only apply pressure on Amazon to accept collective bargaining but encourage users of its website to think about the wider costs involved in packing and despatching the discounted products they’re trying to grab.

Spanish newspaper El Diaro reports that today’s protests by workers at Amazon’s largest logistics center in the country, in San Fernando, Madrid, mark the fourth round of strikes over working conditions in Spain.

Protestors in Madrid this morning reportedly chanted: “We will not accept discounts to our rights.”

A report by AP quotes the spokesman of the protest group in Spain, Douglas Harper, claiming that around 90 percent of workers at a logistics depot in near Madrid joined the walkout — leaving just two people at the loading bay. Though Amazon reportedly diverted cargo deliveries to its other 22 depots in the country.

Update: Amazon disputes the 90% figure. A spokesman told us: “The numbers released by the unions are categorically wrong. Today, the majority of our associates at Amazon’s Fulfillment Center in San Fernando de Henares (Madrid) are working and processing our customers’ orders, as they do every day.”

French press also reports warehouse workers striking locally, and a union representing Amazon logistics workers calling for a national strike.

In the UK the GMB Union is calling on Amazon to recognize its representation of workers, and has attacked the company for what it dubs “Victorian working practices”. 

This summer an investigation by the Union revealed ambulances had been called to Amazon’s UK warehouses 600 times during the past three financial years.

Earlier this month the Union also revealed a total of 602 reports have been made from Amazon warehouses to the Health and Safety Executive since 2015/16 — with workers reported to have suffered fractures, head injuries, contusions and collisions with heavy equipment.

It added that one report detailed a forklift truck crash caused by a ‘lapse of concentration possibly due to long working hours’.

In a statement on Wednesday announcing the Black Friday protest, Tim Roache, the GMB’s general secretary, said: “The conditions our members at Amazon are working under are frankly inhuman. They are breaking bones, being knocked unconscious and being taken away in ambulances. We’re standing up and saying enough is enough, these are people making Amazon its money. People with kids, homes, bills to pay — they’re not robots.”

“Jeff Bezos is the richest bloke on the planet; he can afford to sort this out,” he added. “You’d think making the workplace safer so people aren’t carted out of the warehouse in an ambulance is in everyone’s interest, but Amazon seemingly have no will to get round the table with us as the union representing hundreds of their staff. Working people and the communities Amazon operates in deserve better than this. That’s what we’re campaigning for.”

In a further update today the GMB Union said Amazon has not replied to a joint plea, backed by a shadow minister, for a health and safety review to reduce the hundreds of ambulance call outs to its warehouses.

Two UK MPs wrote to Amazon’s director of public policy for UK and Ireland last week to suggest a joint audit with the union and also a meeting hosted by them in parliament — to discuss the issues. But the union said Amazon has so far failed to respond.

Responding to today’s protest action, a spokesman for Amazon UK provided us with the following statement:

Amazon has created in the UK more than 25,000 good jobs with a minimum of £9.50/hour and in the London area, £10.50/hour on top of industry-leading benefits and skills training opportunities.

All of our sites are safe places to work and reports to the contrary are simply wrong. According to the UK Government’s Health and Safety Executive, Amazon has over 40% fewer injuries on average than other transportation and warehousing companies in the UK. We encourage everyone to compare our pay, benefits, and working conditions to others and come see for yourself on one of the public tours we offer every day at our centers across the UK uk.amazonfctours.com.

The spokesman declined to respond to additional questions.

In October, facing rising political pressure on its home turf after senator Bernie Sanders introduced legislation targeting low rates of pay at the coal face of Amazon’s business, the ecommerce giant said it would raise the minimum wage of its US workers to $15 per hour. That change went into effect at the start of this month.

In another change to its business announced yesterday, also just before the Black Friday spending binge kicked off, Amazon reversed a decision that had been triggered by a change in Australian tax law earlier this year, when it had shuttered its US store to shoppers in the country to avoid paying a 10% levy — deciding to suck up the charge to lift a geoblock that had proved unpopular with customers.


Source: Tech Crunch

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Equity podcast: A Thanksgiving-ish special episode

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

It’s the day after Thanksgiving, so if you are reading this in America I hope there is a pet leaned up against your legs and that you are sitting next to a fire while staring down one more plate of leftovers.

We made this episode for just such a moment. Welcome to our take on a relaxed episode of Equity, a show normally featuring four people arguing about this or that. This week, it’s just TechCrunch’s Kate Clark and myself digging into some of the strangest and most interesting rounds of the year. Thus far, at least.

So what made our cut?

We hope that you are well and that the holidays are as delightful and full of joy as they can be. And if you are having a bad run of the end of the year, big hugs from the Equity crew. We think you are just perfect.

Stay warm!

Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Downcast and all the casts.


Source: Tech Crunch