Technology

Security is in everything, iteverywhere, and iteveryoneresponsibility. What part are you playing?

At TechCrunch Disrupt SF on October 2-4, we&re proud to have some of the smartest security executives and highest-ranking officials ready to talk shop on stage. Security will be front and center of Disrupt SF with our panels and experts to discuss a range of topics. You can&t afford to miss out.

If you haven&t booked your ticket to Disrupt SF in two weeks, here are three reasons why you should.

On stage we&ll talk to Homeland Security assistant director Jeanette Manfrato understand some of the greatest threats that face the United States today. As one of Homeland Securitymost senior cybersecurity officials, Manfra will discuss election hacking, how to defend against nation state attackers, and what companies can do to be prepared.

We will also have former NSA director Mike Rogers and Team8 founder Nadav Zafrir on stage to dive into the murky world of intelligence. Rogers, a career-long cybersecurity official and former head of the National Security Agency, will discuss his time at NSA and how the landscape of cybersecurity threats has changed, and what he brings to the private sector as a senior advisor to Team8, a cybersecurity think tank and company creation platform. Zafrir, a former Israeli intelligence chief who now heads the think tank, will join Rogers to talk about their most recent venture — security startups.

And, talking of which, how do you build a secure startup without slowing growth? Companies are hungry to launch and grow, but scale often comes with a tradeoff — security, or lack of. We have three leading experts who will join us on the Extra Crunch stage to discuss how to build a secure startup without compromising on scale.

Heather Adkins, Googledirector of security and privacy, will join IOActive chief executive Jennifer Sunshine Steffens and DuoDug Song to talk security. How do you keep your customer data safe? How do you defend against unknown threats? How do you stay ahead of the bad guys?

Whether you&re a security professional, a founder or investor, or a startup decision maker, theresomething for everyone.

Disrupt SF runs October 2 to October 4 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Need tickets? Head on over here to pick some up.

Itbeen another hard week at MIT. Our campus has been divided by revelations of inappropriate fundraising, coverups, and the harboring of far too many tech geniuses who seemingly put their own interests and careers over the safety of women, among other marginalized groups.

As a chaplain to students and faculty at the Institute, but also as an opinion writer on the ethics of technology who is supposed to be on sabbatical from the chaplaincy to focus on the writing, I&ve been torn all week as to what to say. If you don&t know what a chaplain is, and you would hardly be alone in any ignorance there, it is a position that emphasizes confidentiality and trust. I know there are a lot of people on MITcampus who are scared, sad, and hurting for various reasons, and I wouldn&t want any of them to feel less able to speak with someone like me because I&ve chosen to speak out publicly.

At other times, in the midst of other campus controversies, I&ve personally opted to remain relatively silent, leaning into the part of my job that is, officially, one of quiet service to a university as a whole. I&ve been critical of a lot of big institutions over the years, including much of religion, but also a lot of organized atheism.

But as a chaplain at big educational institutions, I&ve rarely felt comfortable being too critical of those institutions, the universities, which at least in my judgement have more power and influence (not to mention more money, though they don&t really pay it to me) than even the oldest and grandest of churches and temples.

Maybe I was wrong in some of those cases; at other times, maybe I was able to do some good by keeping quiet. I reflect on this out loud not because anyone reading it should particularly care about my situation or my inner conflict. You most likely shouldn&t.

I share my own ambivalence, however, because I know countless executives, administrators, and other kinds of leaders have been through similar thought processes. Itnot my place to speak. If I do speak, maybe they&ll fire me, and then I can&t do anyone any good. Even if they don&t fire me, I&m supposed to be ‘objective;& if I enter the fray, I&ll lose the trust and confidence of half the community.

But then I think about the students and faculty who need support the most. What they need are educators, peers, and administrators who are willing to join them in taking some risk to do what is right.

I was proud, last week, to share the first half of an exclusive interview with an MIT student named Arwa Mboya who brilliantly and bravely spoke out, helping bring about the resignation of one of the worldmost influential tech ethicists, former MIT Media Lab Director Joi Ito. As I said on Twitter, for my money Mboya has been the biggest of the many heroes in this Media Lab scandal.

For her efforts, Mboya was awarded a &Bold Prize,& and celebrating students for their bravery seems unequivocally good. Leaving them alone with their courage, however, by remaining silent in the name of &objectivity,& would be a moral failing.

I&m not sure itmy place to use this space to call on MIT President Rafael Reif to resign for his own role in allowing Jeffrey Epsteindonations to the Institute — a role Reif acknowledged this week at an MIT faculty meeting in which he said, &I understand that I have let you down and damaged your trust in me, and that our actions have injured both the Institutereputation and the fabric of our community.&

Maybe there are ways forward where MIT is able to heal with Reif still at the helm, though personally I have a hard time envisioning them. But at the very least, we must support students.

And by that I mean, people like me need to publicly and visibly support tech students who feel an ethical obligation to call for the resignation of their own universityleader over his publicly acknowledged role in not only tolerating but greenwashing human trafficking and serial pedophilia. Just like the drafters and 60+ signers of this powerful letter from women on MITfaculty have done.

Will Reif resign? Will more information come out that makes his resignation seem even more inevitable? Or will the &independent review& he has put in place exonerate him in some way? Time will tell.

Meanwhile, as MIT sought to distance itself from Jeffrey Epstein and the broader social questions his case raises, this hard week did bring at least one piece of good news: the resignation of Richard Stallman. A MacArthur &Genius& Fellow and major figure in the history of computing, Stallman has long been a stain on the reputation of institutions with which he has affiliated, for troublingly sexist comments and stances.

Richard Stallman of MIT, an Epstein defender, believes that pedophilia is fine if the child is willing. Hold on to that tidbit for a second. https://t.co/RiGvhJW9hR

— Angus Johnston (@studentactivism) September 14, 2019

The Overton Window on someone like Stallman has now shifted, however, once again thanks to outspoken students, most often young women of color. Like Selam Gano, a recent MIT graduate in robotics engineering, who &arguably set Stallmandeparture in motion,& by speaking out last week on Medium. Ganopost, entitled &Remove Richard Stallman and Everyone Else Horrible in Tech,& followed an email Stallman had sent to a Listserv affiliated with MITrenowned CSAIL research laboratory.

I forgot to share. Herethe latest. ⁦@selamjie⁩ a grateful MIT thanks you for your bravery. https://t.co/SLiBFuGVcN

— Amanuella (አማኑኤላ) (@AmanuellaM) September 18, 2019

&There is no single person that is so deserving of praise their comments deprecating others should be allowed to slide,& Gano wrote. &Particularly when those comments are excuses about rape, assault, and child sex trafficking.

Child.

Sex.

Trafficking.&

Ganodrawn-out emphasis on the nature of the crime in question is entirely appropriate. After all, &human trafficking is the single largest illegal industry in the world,& as the framers of this additional recent petition for resignations of prominent MIT officials made clear. Human trafficking, they wrote, far eclipses even the international drug trade, and continues to inflict incomprehensible suffering on women, children, and families around the world.

In calling for leaders to leave, Gano, like Mboya before her, is not harming MIT or damaging its reputation. To the contrary. Both women have expressed, publicly and privately, a great and ongoing love for the school and what it represents.

In fact, itnot coincidental that both of these whistleblowers have even described MIT as the best place in the world for them educationally, the site of some of their happiest memories and proudest moments. Itthat kind of true pride that leads morally upstanding people to say, &enough.& Because they want and need to continue to be proud. And because they understand that true pride is the opposite of a coverup. It is the opposite of clinging to power.

As Selam Gano wrote in her Medium post, &I know, now, that if prominent technology institutions won&t start firing their problematic men left right and center, we will do nothing. Ever.& Gano, Mboya, and other students and educators I admire are unwilling to allow an extraordinary institution like MIT to do nothing, or to do so little of consequence that it would essentially be nothing.

These people are, to the extent that a large research university is like a nation-state, true patriots. It might be scary to join them and walk alongside them publicly. Taking a stand might threaten our privilege and expose us to risk. Thatwhat being brave is all about.

Your move, President Reif and MIT.

&Okay, this girl was asked to change her religion at gunpoint and she didn&t do it,& MIT Media Lab student Arwa Mboya told me at the end of Part One of my interview with her, about a young woman she&d read about in a book called Beneath The Tamarind Tree. The book, by former CNN anchor Isha Sesay, is a skillful account of the 276 girls abducted from Chibok in Nigeria, which launched the &Bring Back Our Girls& campaign.

Mboyaoutspokenness in the face of the Jeffrey (no fucking relation, thank you!) Epstein scandal, inspired in part by her reading of Sesay, was among the bravest demonstrations I&ve seen by a student in 15 years as a university chaplain.

Previously, Mboya and I discussed her decision process for taking a leap which earned her a &Bold Prize& of, to this date, over $13,000 of crowd-funded money. But even more importantly, we discussed the life experiences which inspired Mboyacourage in the first place — namely her love and radical hopefulness for the youth of her native Africa, and her passion to inspire those young people with the best tech has to offer.

(Photo by Craig F. Walker/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

In this second and final portion of my conversation with Mboya, we pick up where Part One left off, discussing human trafficking in Africa and in the United States, and how the two phenomena are more closely related than many might imagine. We then get into reading (or not) the comments on her now-famous op-ed calling on Joi Ito to resign; her reaction to receiving the crowd-funded &Bold Prize;& her feelings toward Joi Ito today; and how radical imagination can breakthrough systematic oppression, in Africa and beyond.

&She believed that much,& Arwa said to me about the young woman from Chibok, &that even at gunpoint, even with a risk of rape, with a risk of death, with the risk of all the other nasty things, she stood up for what she believed in.&

Itnot hard to see how that kind of perspective and wisdom might have enabled Mboya to do something exceptional.

Arwa Mboya: The activist who started the Bring Back Our Girls Campaign hounded the government down & and the Nigerian government is scary. I was like, &Okay, these people can do that. I have power to just speak out. Am I really what I think I am? Am I as strong, as brave as I [think I] am?&

On Sundays in October, Tinder is launching an &interactive adventure& in its dating app called &Swipe Night& that will present a narrative where users make a series of choices in order to proceed. This sort of choose-your-own-adventure format has been more recently popularized by Netflix and others as a new way to engage with digital media. In Tindercase, its larger goal may not a dramatic entry into scripted, streaming video, as has been reported, but rather a creative way to juice some lagging user engagement metrics.

For example, based on analysis of Android data in the U.S. from SimilarWeb, Tindersessions per user, meaning the number of times the average user opens the app per day, have declined. From the period of January & August 2018 to the same period in 2019 (January & August 2019), sessions declined 10.8%, from 4.5 to 4.1.

The open rate, meaning the percentage of the Tinder install base that opens the app on a daily basis, also declined 5.9% during this time, going from 28% to 22.1%.

These sort of metrics are hidden behind what would otherwise appear to be steady growth. Tinderdaily active users, for example, grew 3.1% year-over-year from 1.114 million to 1.149 million. And its install penetration on Android devices grew by 1%, the firm found. (See below).

Drops in user engagement are worth tracking, given the potential revenue impact.

App store intelligence firm Sensor Tower found Tinder experienced its first-ever quarter-over-quarter decline in combined revenue from both the App Store and Google Play in Q2 2019.

Spending was down 8.8% from $260 million in Q1 to $237 million in Q2, the firm says. This was largely before Tinder shifted in-app spending out of Google Play, which was in late Q2 to early Q3. Tinder revenue was still solidly up 46% year-over-year, the company itself reported in Q2, due to things like pricing changes, product optimizations, better &Tinder Gold& merchandising and more.

There are many reasons as to why users could be less engaged with Tinderapp. Maybe they&re just not having as much fun — something &Swipe Night& could help to address. Sensor Tower also noted that negative sentiment in Tinderuser ratings on the U.S. App Store was at 79% last quarter, up from 68% in Q2 2018. Thata number you don&t want to see climbing.

Of course, all these figures are estimates from third-parties, not directly reported — so take them with the proverbial grain of salt. But they help to paint a picture as to why Tinder may want to try some weird, experimental &mini-series&-styled event like this.

It wouldn&t be the first gimmick that Tinder used to boost engagement, either. It also recently launched engagement boosters like Spring Break mode and Festival mode, for example. But this would be the most expensive to produce and far more demanding, from a technical standpoint.

In &Swipe Night,& Tinder users will participate by launching the app on Sundays in October, anytime from 6 PM to midnight. The 5-minute story will follow a group of friends in an &apocalyptic adventure& where users will face both moral dilemmas and practical choices.

You&ll have 7 seconds to make a decision and proceed with the narrative, Tinder says. These decisions will then be added to your user profile, so people can see what decisions others made at those same points. You&ll make your choice using the swipe mechanism, hence the series& name.

Every Sunday, a new part of the series will arrive. Tinder shot over 2 hours worth of video for the effort, but you&ll only see the portions relevant to your own choices.

The series stars Angela Wong Carbone (&Chinatown Horror Story&), Jordan Christian Hearn (&Inherent Vice&), and Shea Gabor, and was directed by Karena Evans, a music director used by Drake. Writers include Nicole Delaney (Netflix&Big Mouth&) and Brandon Zuck (HBO&Insecure&).

Tinder touts the event as a new way to match users and encourage conversations.

&More than half of Tinder members are Gen Z, and we want to meet the needs of our ever-evolving community. We know Gen Z speaks in content, so we intentionally built an experience that is native to how they interact,& said Ravi Mehta, TinderChief Product Officer. &Dating is all about connection and conversation, and Swipe Night felt like a way to take that to the next level. Our hope is that it will encourage new, organic conversations based on a shared content experience,& he said.

How someone chooses to play through a game doesn&t necessarily translate into some sort of criteria as to whether they&d be a good match, however. Which is why itconcerning that Tinder plans to feed this data to its algorithm, according to Variety.

At best, a series like this could give you something to talk about — but itprobably not as much fun as chatting about a shared interest in a popular TV show or movie.

Variety also said the company is considering whether to air the series on another streaming platform in the future.

Tinder declined to say if it plans to launch more of these experiences over time.

Despite the user engagement drop, which crazy stunts like &Swipe Night& could quickly — if temporarily — correct, the dating app doesn&t have much to worry about at this time. Tinder still accounts for the majority of spending (59%) in the top 10 dating apps globally as of last quarter, Sensor Tower noted. This has not changed significantly from Q2 2018 when Tinder accounted for 60% of spending in the top 10 dating apps, it said.