Technology

Auth0, a startup based in Seattle, has been helping developers with a set of APIs to build authentication into their applications for the last five years. Itraised a fair bit of money along the way to help extend that mission, and today the company announced a $55 million Series D.

This round was led by led by Sapphire Ventures with help from World Innovation Lab, and existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Trinity Ventures, Meritech Capital and K9 Ventures. Todayinvestment brings the total raised to $110 million. The company did not want to share its valuation.

CEO Eugenio Pace said the investment should help them expand further internationally. In fact, one of the investors, World Innovation Lab, is based in Japan and should help with their presence there. &Japan is an important market for us and they should help explain to us how the market works there,& he said.

The company offers an easy way for developers to build in authentication services into their applications, also known as Identification as a Service (IDaaS). Ita lot like Stripe for payments or Twilio for messaging. Instead of building the authentication layer from scratch, they simply add a few lines of code and can take advantage of the services available on the Auth0 platform.

That platform includes a range of service such as single-sign on, two-factor identification, passwordless log-on and breached password detection.

They have a free tier, which doesn&t even require a credit card, and pay tiers based on the types of users — regular versus enterprise — along with the number of users. They also charge based on machine-to-machine authentication. Pace reports they have 3500 paying customers and tens of thousands of users on the free tier.

All of that has added up to a pretty decent business. While Pace would not share specific numbers, he did indicate the company doubled its revenue last year and expected to do so again this year.

With a cadence of getting funding every year for the last three years, Pace says this round may mark the end of that fundraising cycle for a time. He wasn&t ready to commit to the idea of an IPO, saying that is likely a couple of years away, but he says the company is close to profitability.

With the new influx of money, the company does plan to expand its workforce as moves into markets across the world . They currently have 300 employees, but within a year he expects to be between 400 and 450 worldwide.

The companylast round was a $30 million Series C last June led by Meritech Capital Partners.

Exactuals, a software service offering payments management for the music industry, is debutingR.AI, a new tool that itdubbed the &Palantir for music.& Ita service that can track songwriting information and rights across different platforms to ensure attribution for music distributors.

As companies like Apple and Spotify demand better information from labels about the songs they&re pushing to streaming services, companies are scrambling to clean up their data and provide proper attribution.

According to Exactuals, thatwhere the R.AI service comes in.

The company is tracking 59 million songs for their &Interested Party Identifiers& (IPIs), International Standard Work Codes (ISWCs) and International Standard Recording Codes (ISRCs) — all of which are vital to ensuring that songwriters and musicians are properly paid for their work every time a song is streamed, downloaded, covered or viewed on a distribution platform.

Chris McMurtry, the head of music product at Exactuals, explained it like this: In the music business, songwriters have the equivalent of a social security number, which is attached to any song they write so they can receive credit and payment. Thatthe IPI. Performers of songs have their own identifier, which is the ISWC. Then the song itself gets its own code, called the ISRC which is used to track a song as itperformed by other artists through various covers, samples and remixes.

&Thereonly one ISWC, but there might be 300 ISRCs,& says Exactuals chief executive, Mike Hurst.

Publishing technology companies will pay writers and performers based on these identifiers, but they&re struggling to identify and track all of the 700,000 disparate places where the data could be, says McMurtry. Hence the need for R.AI.

The technology is &an open API based on machine learning that matches disparate data sources to clean and enhance it so rights holders can get paid and attribution happens,& says McMurry.

For publishers, Exactuals argues that R.AI is the best way to track rights across a huge catalog of music, and for labels itan easy way to provide services like Apple and Spotify with the information they&re now demanding, Hurst said.

Facebook this morning released its latest Transparency report, where the social network shares information on government requests for user data, noting that these requests had increased globally by around 4 percent compared to the first half of 2017, though U.S. government-initiated requests stayed roughly the same. In addition, the company added a new report to accompany the usual Transparency report, focused on detailing how and why Facebook takes action on enforcing its Community Standards, specifically in the areas ofgraphic violence, adult nudity and sexual activity, terrorist propaganda, hate speech, spam and fake accounts.

In terms of government requests for user data, the global increase led to 82,341 requests in the second half of 2017, up from 78,890 during the first half of the year.U.S. requests stayed roughly the same at 32,742; though 62 percent included a non-disclosure clause that prohibited Facebook from alerting the user & thatup from 57 percent in the earlier part of the year, and up from 50 percent from the report before that. This points to use of the NDA becoming far more common among law enforcement agencies.

The number of pieces of content Facebook restricted based on local laws declined during the second half of the year, going from28,036 to 14,294. But this is not surprising & the last report had an unusual spike in these sort of requests due to a school shooting in Mexico, which led to the government asking for content to be removed.

There were also 4646 disruptions of Facebook services in 12 countries in the second half of 2017, compared to 52 disruptions in nine countries in the first half.

And Facebook and Instagram took down2,776,665 pieces of content based on 373,934 copyright reports, 222,226 pieces of content based on 61,172 trademark reports and 459,176 pieces of content based on 28,680 counterfeit reports.

However, the more interesting data this time around comes from a new report Facebook is appending to its Transparency report, called theCommunity Standards Enforcement Reportwhich focuses on the actions of Facebookreview team. This is the first time Facebook has released its numbers related to its enforcement efforts, and follows its recent publication of its internal guidelines three weeks ago.

In 25 pages, Facebook in April explained how it moderates content on its platform, specifically around areas likegraphic violence, adult nudity and sexual activity, terrorist propaganda, hate speech, spam and fake accounts. These are areas where Facebook is often criticized when it screws up & like when it took down thenewsworthy &Napalm Girl& historical photo because it contained child nudity, before realizing the mistake and restoring it. It has also been more recently criticized for contributing to Myanmar violence, as extremists& hate speech-filled posts incited violence. This is something Facebook also today addressed through an update for Messenger, which now allows users to report conversations that violate community standards.

TodayCommunity Standards report details the number of takedowns across the various categories it enforces.

Facebook says that spam and fake account takedowns are the largest category, with 837 million pieces of spam removed in Q1 & almost all proactively removed before users reported it. Facebook also disabled 583 million fake accounts, the majority within minutes of registration. During this time, around 3-4 percent of Facebook accounts on the site were fake.

The company is likely hoping the scale of these metrics makes it seem like itdoing a great job, when in reality, it didn&t take that many Russian accounts to throw Facebookentire operation into disarray, leading to CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifying before a Congress thatnow considering regulations.

In addition, Facebook says it took down the following in Q1 2018:

• Adult Nudity and Sexual Activity: 21 million pieces of content; 96 percent was found and flagged by technology, not people
• Graphic violence: took down or added warning labels to 3.5 million pieces of content; 86 percent found and flagged by technology
• Hate speech: 2.5 million pieces of content, 38 percent found and flagged by technology

You may notice that one of those areas is lagging in terms of enforcement and automation.

Facebook, in fact, admits that its system for identifying hate speech &still doesn&t work that well,& so it needs to be checked by review teams.

&…we have a lot of work still to do to prevent abuse,& writesGuy Rosen, VP of Product Management, on the Facebook blog. &Itpartly that technology like artificial intelligence, while promising, is still years away from being effective for most bad content because context is so important.&

In other words, A.I. can be useful at automatically flagging things like nudity and violence, but policing hate speech requires more nuance than the machines can yet handle. The problem is that people may be discussing sensitive topics, but they&re doing it to share news, or in a respectful manner, or even describing something that happened to them. Itnot always a threat or hate speech, but a system only parsing words without understanding the full discussion doesn&t know this.

To get an A.I. system up to par in this area, it requires a ton of training data. And Facebook says it doesn&t have that for some of the less widely-used languages.

(This is also a likely response to the Myanmar situation, where the company belatedly & aftersix civil society organizations,criticized Mr. Zuckerberg in a letter & said it had hired &dozens& of human moderators. Critics say thatnot enough & in Germany, for example, which has strict laws around hate speech & Facebook hired about 1,200 moderators, The NYT said.)

It seems the obvious solution is staffing up moderation teams everywhere, until A.I. technology can do as good of a job as it can on other aspects of content policy enforcement. This costs money, but italso clearly critical when people are dying as a result of Facebooklacking ability to enforce its own policies.

Facebook claims ithiring as a result, but doesn&t share the details of how many, where or when.

&…we&re investing heavily in more people and better technology to make Facebook safer for everyone& wrote Rosen.

But Facebookmain focus, it seems, is on improving technology.

&Facebook is investing heavily in more people to review content that is flagged. But as Guy Rosen explained two weeks ago, new technology like machine learning, computer vision and artificial intelligence helps us find more bad content, more quickly & far more quickly, and at a far greater scale, than people ever can,& saidAlex Schultz, Vice President of Analytics, in a related post on Facebookmethodology.

He touts A.I. in particular as being a tool that could get content off Facebook before iteven reported.

But A.I. isn&t ready to police all hate speech yet, so Facebook needs a stop gap solution & even if it costs.