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The Technology 202: Influencers are evading TikTok’s political ad ban, researchers say

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The Technology 202 Mozilla TikTok tiktokzakrzewski

In the Internet sector, The Technology 202 Mozilla TikTok tiktokzakrzewski  has one of the strongest prohibitions on political advertising. However, partisan influencers are slipping between the cracks on the social network, researchers claim, exposing a crucial gap in the company’s regulations.

More than a dozen instances of platform influencers posting without even the most basic disclosures that their posts were sponsored were found by a recent Mozilla report. These individuals appeared to have financial ties to political organisations. According to the researchers, both liberal and conservative influencers were abusing a “loophole” in TikTok’s policies and enforcement.

As influencers play a larger role in politics, there are more questions than ever concerning the internet transparency of political advertisements.

After Russian actors used targeted social media ads to influence the 2016 election, lawmakers have been calling for more regulation of political advertisements on social media for years. Since then, businesses all around Silicon Valley have tightened their advertising regulations, but academics are worried that paid material from influencers may bring up a whole new set of issues.
To address their findings, the Mozilla researchers claim TikTok has to make significant modifications.

According to the experts, TikTok must provide better tools to make sure influencers are appropriately reporting that postings are produced through paid collaborations or sponsored content. TikTok claims to be working on ways to better inform creators on how to submit sponsored content and make sure they’re adhering to FTC regulations. In order to help influencers upload branded content on the social network, the company has released a video with instructions.

The researchers also recommend that TikTok develop tools for ad transparency, such as a database, that would make it easier for them to monitor the substance of paid political advertisements.

In addition to continuing to keep an eye on how social influencers use TikTok during elections in other nations this year, Mozilla plans to begin a campaign today advocating for reforms to the app.

Because it can be challenging to tell sponsored material from a regular post in the social media ether, sometimes known as “sponcon,” it has long been a contentious topic. According to some analysts, businesses should handle sponsored content the same way they would traditional political commercials.

According to the Mozilla researchers, their findings demonstrate that TikTok is not adhering to standard business procedures for declaring sponsored material or political advertising.

Brandi Geurkink, senior manager of advocacy at Mozilla, said in an interview that platforms that came before them had to deal with this issue and had to deal with a lot of criticism for not dealing with it sooner. When it comes to ad transparency, TikTok hasn’t implemented even the most fundamental changes, according to our investigation. In that area, TikTok is seriously lagging.

Examples of influencers with connections to groups from all political spectrums are provided in their report.
The liberal political action committee The 99 Problems is said to have funded the House of US account, which was used to disseminate pro-Biden material, according to the report. On one account, which did not state it was sponsored, researchers discovered a call to “vote blue.”

A paid contributor account with the well-known conservative youth organisation Turning Point USA is also mentioned in the report, along with posts from a self-described “political influencer” who shared content from a Turning Point USA event that she claimed the group had flown her out to attend.

Turning Point USA disagreed with the report’s conclusions, but The 99 Problems did not respond to a request for comment.

The organisation has thousands of activists posting naturally on TikTok, but Andrew Kolvet, a TPUSA spokesman, said in a statement that “the organisation has not paid for a single sponsored post—full stop.” Students can receive travel reimbursements from the organisation to attend its events, but it claims that posting about the events on social media is not a requirement.

Given TikTok’s popularity among young Americans who may be first-time voters, sponsored content there is especially sensitive.
On TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese corporation ByteDance, there hasn’t been as much activity from national political candidates as there has been on other significant social networks. But as the pandemic has spread, the app’s popularity has risen, giving it a more alluring platform for political organisations looking to spread their message.

In an article published on its blog in October 2019, TikTok declared that it will not accept paid election, advocacy, or issue advertisements. According to the business, that holds true for influencers who produce and publish compensated content. TikTok is looking into Mozilla’s findings and has removed one video that was mentioned in the complaint for breaking company rules.

Ashley Nash-Hahn, a spokeswoman for TikTok, told The Technology 202 that the company “continues to invest in people and technology to consistently enforce this policy and build tools for creators on our platform.” “As we refine our strategy, we value input from experts, including academics at the Mozilla Foundation, and we look forward to a continuous debate as we seek to build fair laws and tools that support accountability, creativity, and transparency.”

Contrasting sharply with other businesses like Facebook, Google, and Snap that do permit political ads is TikTok’s policy. Due to the potential for regulation, these businesses have created databases and tools for ad transparency that will make it easier for academics and journalists to follow them.

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Customer engagement analytics startup Retain.ai nabs $23M

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Customer engagement analytics startup Retain.ai nabs $23M

With participation from Baseline Ventures, Upside Partnership, and Afore Capital, Retain.ai, a platform that offers businesses a perspective of customer engagement across teams, processes, and apps, has raised $23 million in a funding round led by Emergence Capital. By the end of 2021, Retain.ai headcount would have more than doubled thanks to the fresh funding, according to co-founder and CEO Eric Chernoff. The company has now raised more than $27 million in total, thanks to this round.

It can be challenging for businesses to comprehend how each of their divisions is providing customer service as they expand. This may result in expending excessive effort on the incorrect clients while underinvesting in the appropriate ones. Customers who aren’t paying their bills, for instance, may consume the most time from the product, engineering, marketing, and other teams. Sadly, compiling the data required for customer interaction research frequently necessitates lengthy, account-specific timesheets, process and time studies, or analyses employing data from many sources of record.

The Prospects for AI-based By giving a breakdown of client data, Customer Service Retain.ai attempts to automate the process. The platform uses browser-based applications to build an image of customer engagement and gives managers and customer-facing teams measurements of internal process effectiveness.

The engine behind Retain.ai, which Chernoff and Vlad Shulman cofounded in 2020, “delivers a trusted, adaptable system for discovering and sharing the habits that drive client retention and income,” Chernoff, a former LiveRamp employee, said in an email to VentureBeat. Every employee across the client lifecycle deserves a copilot, driven by billions of data points each month, who can make suggestions such, “Relative to accounts that increase three times, we saw you should be doing more of the things that work for other accounts. Organizations may spread the best practises throughout whole teams and processes using Retain as their copilot, improving everyone’s performance at work.

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Retain admins create a “allow list” of applications, websites, and attributes during setup in order to capture data and execute workflows. Retain is a browser extension that users can download, and it gathers comprehensive session information such as page URLs, start and end times, page properties, process categories, and more. The platform uses visualizations and summaries to transform this data into usable information, acting as a single source of truth for all team, customer, and app interactions within an organisation.

The Retain platform, according to Chernoff, may respond to inquiries about return on investment in relation to customer expenditure, which can be utilised to develop new revenue sources for customer success. According to Chernoff, firms can use Retain to capture engagement time on certain accounts outside of the period allotted for it to do so.

In addition to providing visibility into client connections, retention serves as an early churn indicator. With the help of these “relationship scorecards,” brands can track consumer interactions and make any necessary course corrections.

Through information on the efforts [and] activities that go into servicing customers throughout their lifecycle, [Retain] helps firms understand overall cost-to-serve clients, according to Chernoff. “[Most] leaders struggle to concentrate on the highest value customers and processes and are unsure on how to fix the problem,” Our background is in data networking, therefore we recognized a chance to use adtech-related methods. to assist businesses in determining whether or not their financial commitment in a certain customer’s growth was profitable.

Retain.ai, a company with 20 workers based in San Francisco, California, claims that thousands of people at more than a dozen Fortune 500 firms, including Google, Nielsen, and Salesforce, are currently using its software. According to reports, annual recurring revenue has increased by 8 times in the past year, while growth among Retain’s current clients has increased by 36 times on average.

“My vision is for Retain to be the next generation of customer experience data, replacing all the time-consuming consultancy and spliced-together self-reporting data,” the author says. In order to maximise customer-facing interaction and increase revenue by 25% by raising engagement with high-value customers and strengthening retention, [for our clients] we are returning the 23,000 hours per year spent on time-consuming internal processes, Chernoff stated. The adoption of work-from-anywhere and hybrid models by businesses has led us to the conclusion that every employee at a company has a remote interaction with their team and customers. Enterprises now more than ever require visibility and to make sure nothing slips between the gaps.

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Anti-Secrecy Activists Publish a Trove of Ransomware Victims’ Data DDoSecrets

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Anti-Secrecy Activists Publish a Trove of Ransomware Victims' Data DDoSecrets

In the interest of openness, the WikiLeaks successor DDoSecrets has gathered a contentious new collection of business ddosecrets wikileakslike 1tbgreenbergwired.

Radical transparency advocates like WikiLeaks have been fusing hacking and whistleblowing for years. No matter how dubious the source, they frequently publish any data they deem to be of public importance. However, one leak-focused organisation is currently mining a contentious new source of information: the enormous data caches that ransomware teams steal and release online when victims refuse to pay.

The transparency group of data activists known as Distributed Denial of Secrets today released a sizable new amount of data on its website, all of which were gathered from dark web sites where the material was initially disclosed online by ransomware hackers. About 1 terabyte of the information, which includes more than 750,000 emails, pictures, and documents from five companies, has been made public by DDoSecrets. With selected journalists or university researchers, the organisation is also offering to confidentially share an extra 1.9 gigabytes of data from over a dozen other firms. The massive data gathering covers a wide range of businesses, including manufacturing, finance, software, retail, real estate, and oil and gas.

All of that data, along with the gigabytes more that DDoSecrets claims it will provide in the upcoming weeks and months, comes from a trend among ransomware operations run by cybercriminals that is becoming more and more widespread. Ransomware hackers now frequently steal huge quantities of victim data and threaten to publish it publicly unless their hacking targets pay, going beyond simply encrypting victim PCs and demanding a payment for the decryption keys. The victims frequently reject that extortion, and the cybercriminals often carry out their threat. As a result, dozens or even hundreds of terabytes of private corporate information are exposed and posted on dark web servers, the web addresses of which are known to hackers and security experts.

Co Founder of DDoSecrets

Emma Best, co-founder of DDoSecrets, asserts that the data dump trails that ransomware operations leave in their wake frequently contain information that should be examined and, in some cases, made public. In a text message discussion with WIRED, Best said, “Ignoring critical data that can educate the public about how companies operate isn’t something we can afford to do.” Given that there is too much data for DDoSecrets to look through on its own, Best, who uses the pronoun they, was unable to state in many instances with certainty what secrets of possible public interest those enormous data sets may contain. But they contend that any proof of corporate wrongdoing revealed by those records, or even intellectual property that can benefit the public, should be regarded as fair game.

According to Best, “we have a duty to make that information available to researchers, journalists, and scholars so they can learn about how typically opaque industries (many of which control significant aspects of our lives and the future of the planet) operate.” This could be a pharmaceutical company, a petroleum company, or any other business with technical data and specs.

Exploiting data leakage left behind by cybercriminal hackers, however, raises significant ethical dilemmas for those battling the spreading global scourge of ransomware attacks. In his opinion, amplifying the leaks from ransomware groups only encourages them to threaten those leaks against more victims. Allan Liska is an analyst and researcher for the security firm Recorded Future. He claims to have personally witnessed the devastating effects of ransomware attacks on businesses of all sizes. Personally, I believe it to be incorrect, says Liska. “I believe you are taking advantage of someone who has a crime committed against them, even if you believe your motives are good,”
The best defence is that DDoSecrets isn’t disclosing any information that those hackers haven’t already made available. They claim that all of the information was previously published by ransomware hackers. “We don’t collaborate with them in any manner or receive anything from them directly. We are making data available that journalists are unable or frightened to access. Best adds that DDoSecrets will often discuss the majority of the leaks in private with journalists and scholars rather than publishing the material themselves. In those circumstances, they will request that anyone publishing the data redact anything that is excessively sensitive and doesn’t serve the public interest, including personally identifiable information. However, if the organisation decides that revealing such private information would be in the public interest, they reserve the right to do so. They also intend to grant the journalists and academics they share data with the same freedom to publish their findings.

DDoSecrets further points out that, whether or not it obtains personally identifying information, cybercriminals who might use it in ransomware leaks are already searching those breaches. The bogeymen that everyone enjoys worrying about? best authors. “They already have the information.”

Best cites the instance of Perceptics, a company that makes technology for license-plate readers. Perceptics experienced a breach in the spring of last year, and as per tech news site the Register, a ransomware hacker likely released its files onto the black web. In order to demonstrate how Perceptics had lobbied Congress for Customs and Border Protection contracts and downplayed security and privacy issues with its tech—even as the delicate license-plate data it was collecting was left vulnerable to hackers—journalists at the Intercept dug through the leaked data.

We cannot afford to ignore important data that can educate the public about how various sectors function.

BEST, EMMA; DDoSecrets

DDoSecrets released their own explosive collection of breached documents in June of this year. The group received BlueLeaks, a sizable collection of law enforcement information, from a hacker affiliated with Anonymous. The DDoSecrets account was suspended by Twitter, and all tweets including links to its website were even blocked, as a result of the 269 GB collection of papers from 200 state and local police organisations. The r/blueleaks subreddit was blocked by Reddit. Shortly after, DDoSecrets suffered a huge setback from which it is still trying to recover when German prosecutors in the town of Zwickau ordered police to take a server belonging to the organisation that housed many of its files and the search engine for its data gathering. It now intends to store its data on Tor-protected.onion sites that conceal the physical location of servers, making future seizures much more challenging.

DDoSecrets is still committed to completing its bigger objective in spite of those obstacles. It has also tapped into a large new stream of leaks thanks to its new malware trove. According to Liska of Recorded Future, more than 1,000 ransomware victims had their data leaked onto dark web sites just last year. He calculates that the total amount of stolen data posted to numerous dark web sites during a single year of ransomware outbreaks is between 100 and 200 gigabytes.

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According to Thomas Rid, a professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University who wrote extensively about hack-and-leak operations in his book Active Measures, the ethics of searching through that deluge of leaked data for information of public interest is dependent on more than just whether the data was leaked by an insider or stolen by a hacker, or even the intentions of whoever might have stolen it. It would be significantly different from WikiLeaks’ widely criticized decision to release previously unpublished emails taken from the Democratic National Committee by Russia’s military intelligence agency in 2016 if the data had actually been made public by hackers prior to DDoSecrets obtaining it.

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But Rid points out that DDoSecrets’ decision to keep the data forever is more morally dubious because, in many situations, the material may only be accessible on a dark web site for a little period of time. When you are the sole source, Rid explains, “you are essentially the publisher at that point.” “These ethical edge scenarios must be acknowledged by Emma and their colleagues. They cannot simply act as though they are not in uncharted territory.”

Best claims that ignoring the existence of ransomware data merely permits hackers to take advantage of it, leaving its value as a source of newsworthy muckraking or other benefits to the general public. Terabytes of data are “inundating the dark web and being utilised almost exclusively by hackers and the kind of people security experts and commentators love to wring their hands over,” says Best. “But they’re virtually wholly unavailable to the public and to journalists.” Our main objective has always been to help and inform the people.

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Paymentus to Acquire Payveris in $152.2 Million Deal

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cloudbased Paymentus payveris crowdfundinsider

A legally binding agreement has been struck by Paymentus, a provider cloudbased paymentus payveris crowdfundinsider cloud-based bill payment technology, to acquire Payveris, which also offers cloud-based bill payment services. $152.2 million is the purchase price, with roughly 56 percent being paid in cash and 44 percent being paid in Paymentus Class A common stock.

With real-time capabilities, improved electronic bill presentation, and more payment alternatives for banks, credit unions, and financial institutions of all sizes, the combination is anticipated to increase the addressable market opportunity for Paymentus’ current offerings.

The president and CEO of Paymentus, Dushyant Sharma, said, “We started our connection with Payveris as a multifaceted partnership and it immediately became evident that their technology and team are best-in-class and would be immensely additive to our platform and goal. “This purchase helps us give additional value to our billers, strategic partners, and financial institutions while also accelerating our potential to disrupt the old bill pay paradigm. We are eager for the Payveris team to join Paymentus’ rapidly expanding team.

Once the agreements are fulfilled, Paymentus will provide Payveris‘ bank and credit union clients access to the Instant Payment Network as well as its omni-channel bill presentation and payment platform to Payveris clients who service loans in order to modernize their loan payment operations. The Paymentus platform can be made available to business and commercial clients of Payveris’ bank and credit union clients so that they can present and pay bills.

The acquisition should benefit Payment us clients since their consumers will soon be able to view bills and make real-time payments at the more than 265 banks and credit unions that Payveris supports. By enabling better control, quicker payments, and greater transparency when paying bills and moving money from any account to any end point, the combination of Paymentus and Payveris will simplify money management for consumers.

“Paymentus is the ideal place for Payveris to live. A real-time payment network connecting customer accounts at their financial institutions and their billers is created when the companies’ highly complementary technologies are joined, according to Ron Bergamesca, CEO of Payveris. “This network will serve as the cornerstone for providing financial institutions with quick innovation in digital payments.”

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