Cyber Saturday—Meet Vero, a Lebanese Billionaire’s Anti-Facebook

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Good morning, Cyber Saturday readers.

While Mark Zuckerberg ran the Congressional gauntlet this week, Ayman Hariri opportunistically toured the media circuit with a contrary message.

I met the Lebanese billionaire and brother of that nation’s on-again, off-again prime minister at a coffee shop in Brooklyn where he pitched me on his social network. Hariri’s 3-year-old app, Vero, has a novel value proposition: privacy. He designed the service as an alternative to Facebook and Instagram. Unlike those mass-market mainstays, Vero does not track people, Hariri claims. It does not build profiles of users (or non-users, for that matter) for marketers to exploit, he says. And it certainly does not use endless data mining, AI-driven tweaking, and A/B testing, he asserts, to personalize the content in one’s feed so as to maximize engagement.

No, Vero is a safe space, he says.

“When you choose to share a private moment with your close friends, only they get to see it,” Hariri told me. He showed off four gradations of privacy one can set on any post, with the others, in order of decreasing level of intimacy, tailored to “friends,” “acquaintances,” and “followers.” Hariri drew an analogy to the physical world, noting that when a person visits your home “you let them in and they only go into the living room, they don’t have to go all the way to the bedroom.”

Hariri’s sleek app has been garnering attention amid Facebook’s parade of screw-ups and scandals. The service now boasts 4 million accounts–including, as of Friday, one registered by actress Susan Sarandon. Offering a glimpse of his profile, Hariri enthusiastically scrolled through photos of himself backstage on the set of Batman v Superman, access he gained after winning a charity auction. (He is an avowed comic book geek.) The app has a Tumblr vibe, a touch of what might have been if that service had doubled down on catering to creatives, instead of selling out to Yahoo and futilely attempting to challenge Facebook and Google at their own game.

Hariri has a checkered past. The heir has faced allegations of mismanaging his family’s construction conglomerate, Saudi Oger, and failing to pay workers. Even so, I find myself rooting for an alternative to Facebook, whose stranglehold on the social networking market is evident in the company’s ownership of three of the top five free apps in Apple’s app store.

Hariri says he plans to monetize Vero by charging people the equivalent of “a couple cups of coffee per year,” a fee that will no doubt prove a turn-off for many prospective users. But Hariri doesn’t need scale; he just needs enough subscriptions to get by. “People understand the cost of free and you can’t un-understand that,” he says.

Maybe Vero is the next Snap, or maybe it will go the way of the Ello. Either way, it’s nice to see some experimentation with consumer-oriented business models that buck today’s Internet surveillance standard.

Have a great weekend. I’ll be brunching with friends on this fine spring day.

Robert Hackett

@rhhackett

robert.hackett@fortune.com

Welcome to the Cyber Saturday edition of Data Sheet, Fortune’s daily tech newsletter. Fortune reporter Robert Hackett here. You may reach Robert Hackett via Twitter, Cryptocat, Jabber (see OTR fingerprint on my about.me), PGP encrypted email (see public key on my Keybase.io), Wickr, Signal, or however you (securely) prefer. Feedback welcome.

THREATS

Ride failing. A 2016 data breach that Uber failed to disclose affected some 20 million users, U.S. authorities said Tuesday. The full rundown of exposed data: 25.6 million names and email addresses, 22.1 million names and mobile phone numbers, and 607,000 names and driver’s license numbers, by the Federal Trade Commission’s count. As part of a revised settlement with the FTC, the ride hailing firm must submit data security audits and it faces the prospect of steeper fines.

Behind (Genius) Bars. Apple warned its employees that they may face legal action if they leak confidential information, such as news of upcoming product releases, outside the company. “Leakers do not simply lose their jobs at Apple. In some cases, they face jail time and massive fines for network intrusion and theft of trade secrets both classified as federal crimes,” Apple said in a memo posted to an internal blog, obtained and published by Bloomberg. Guess someone didn’t get the memo…

This message will self-destruct. A Google Gmail redesign reportedly set to roll out in coming weeks contains several enhanced security features. According to screenshots leaked to TechCrunch, the revamped version of the email service offers a “confidential mode” that prevents message recipients from copying, pasting, downloading, forwarding, or printing email messages. Gmail users will also apparently be able to set expiration times on their dispatches.

Making diamonds. Cybersecurity firm Carbon Black is planning to go public, a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission revealed Monday. The company reported $162 million in revenue and $55.8 million in losses last year. It plans to list as “CBLK” on the Nasdaq exchange with Morgan Stanley and J.P. Morgan as underwriters. Carbon Black will follow the lead of Zscaler and Dropbox, other tech companies that recently went public.

Daesh dashed. Jeremy Fleming, the director of GCHQ, the British version of the U.S.’s National Security Agency, said in his first public speech that the UK waged a cyberattack against the self-described Islamic State, or “Daesh.” While the details of the operation were “too sensitive to talk about,” he said the campaign disrupted communications networks and destroyed computer equipment.

Secrets secrets are no fun unless you share with everyone.

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ACCESS GRANTED

Do as the Swedes do. Increasingly, we’re subject to the whims of machines that feast on our data, the fuel for their artificially intelligent algorithms. In the U.S., Facebook’s mishandling of a leak of user data has provoked intense scrutiny. But does it have to be this way? In an op-ed for Fortune, James Scott, a data science professor at the University of Texas at Austin and coauthor of the forthcoming book AIQ: How People and Machines are Smarter Together, proposes alternative regulatory model for data privacy: Sweden.

Imagine a hospital that’s as cavalier with your data as Facebook. Or a college admissions officer who’s as lax about algorithmic bias as Google’s ad-targeting system–which, according to a recent study from Carnegie Mellon University, showed online ads for high-paying executive jobs five times as often to men as to women. That’s the treacherous path we’re walking now.

It does not need to be this way. We might, for example, look to Sweden as a model. Witness Spotify, a notably scandal-free Swedish company built on data science and AI. Sweden has some of the world’s strictest data-privacy laws, but also one of the world’s most advanced digital economies. The law gives people the right to opt out of the use of their digital data for marketing purposes. It treats digital firms like Facebook much more like old-economy professionals, such as lawyers or accountants, who hold sensitive personal information on their clients, and who therefore have specific fiduciary duties to protect that information. It is surely no coincidence that 80% of Swedes express positive views about robots and artificial intelligence–and that 75% believe that AI requires careful oversight.

ONE MORE THING

A bug by any other name. This entertaining Wall Street Journal piece delves into the psychology of cybersecurity researchers as they name security vulnerabilities. “Like astronomers who discover new stars,” writes the Journal’s Robert McMillan, bug hunters have the honor of christening their findings. Often these monikers consist of inside jokes and hacker jargon. There’s even a not-so-serious industry award for the best-branded bug: the Pwnies, which present the winner with a statuette in the form of a toy pony.

Learn more https://ift.tt/2GY20D7

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