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Facebook said it has removed hundreds of Facebook and Instagram counts with links to an organization that peddled fake news. The world’s fourth largest country with a population of over 260 million, Indonesia is in election year alongside Southeast Asia neighbors Thailand and the Philippines. Facebook said this week it has set up an ‘election integrity’ team in Singapore, its APAC HQ, as it tries to prevent its social network being misused in the lead-up to voting as happened in the U.S . This Indonesia bust is the first move announced since that task force was put in place, and it sees 207 Facebook Pages, 800 Facebook accounts, 546 Facebook Groups, and 208 Instagram accounts removed for “engaging in coordinated inauthentic behavior.” “About 170,000 people followed at least one of these Facebook Pages, and more than 65,000 followed at least one of these Instagram accounts,” Facebook said of the reach of the removed accounts. The groups and accounts are linked to Sa...

A lapse in security has led to the leaking of over a hundred thousand Aadhaar numbers, TechCrunch can reveal. One of the web systems used to record attendance of government workers for the Indian state of Jharkhand was left exposed and without a password as far back as 2014 , allowing anyone access to names, job titles, and partial phone numbers on 166,000 workers as of the time of writing. But the photo on each record page used the file name as that worker’s Aadhaar number, a confidential 12-digit number assigned to each Indian citizen as part of the country’s national identity and biometric database. The data leak isn’t a direct breach of the central database run by Aadhaar’s regulator, the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), but represents another lapse in responsibility from the authority charged with protecting its data. Aadhaar numbers aren’t strictly secret but are treated similarly to Social Security numbers. Anyone of the 1.23 billion Indian citizens enrolled...

Facebook published an internal memo today trying to minimize the morale damage of TechCrunch’s investigation that revealed it’d been paying people to suck in all their phone data . Attained by Business Insider’s Rob Price , the memo from Facebook’s VP of production engineering and security Pedro Canahuati gives us more detail about exactly what data Facebook was trying to collect from teens and adults in the US and India. But it also tries to claim the program wasn’t secret, wasn’t spying, and that Facebook doesn’t see it as a violation of Apple’s policy against using its Enterprise Certificate system to distribute apps to non-employees — despite Apple punishing it for the violation. For reference, Facebook was recruiting users age 13-35 to install a Research app, VPN, and give it root network access so it could analyze all their traffic. It’s pretty sketchy to be buying people’s privacy , and despite being shut down on iOS, it’s still running on Android. Here we lay out the me...

Go-Jek, the Indonesia-based ride-hailing company that is challenging Grab in Southeast Asia, has announced the first close of its Series F round, as TechCrunch reported last week . The company isn’t revealing numbers but sources previously told us it has closed around $920 million. Go-Jek is planning to raise $2 billion for the round, as reported last year . Go-Jek said that the first close is led by existing backers Google, JD.com, and Tencent, with participation from Mitsubishi Corporation and Provident Capital. It didn’t provide a valuation but sources told us that week that it is around $9.5 billion. Starting out with motorbike taxis in 2015, Go-Jek has since expanded to taxis, private car and more. The company said it plans to spend the money deepening its business in Indonesia, its home market, and growing its presence in new market expansions Vietnam, Singapore and Thailand. It is also working to enter the Philippines, where it had a request for an operating license...

Screen time for kids, corporations allegedly not paying people from underrepresented groups and IBM offers some hope for the future of facial recognition technology: These are the topics that Megan Rose Dickey and I dive into on this week’s episode of Mixtape. According to research by psychologists from the University of Calgary, spending too much time in front of screens can stung the development of toddlers. The study found that kids 2-5 years old who engage in more screen time received worse scores in developmental screening tests.” We talk a bit about this then wax nostalgically about “screen time” of yore. We then turn to a filing against Oracle by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs that states the enterprise company allegedly withheld upwards of $400 million  to employees from underrepresented minority groups. The company initially declined to comment, but then thought better of itself and returned the very next day with i...

In the early 2000s, actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt was frustrated with the roles he was being offered. Instead of starring in critically acclaimed indies, he was typecast as “the funny kid on TV” due to roles like Tommy from “3rd Rock from the Sun.” So like anyone who matured alongside the internet, he created a website where he could ideate, produce and share his work. More than 10 years later, he wants to turn that pet project, called HitRecord , into a full-fledged technology company. Onstage at Upfront Venture’s annual summit outside of Los Angeles, Gordon-Levitt announced a $6.4 million Series A funding to do just that. Javelin Venture Partners has led the round, with participation from Crosslink Capital, Advancit Capital, YouTube co-founder Steve Chen, Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin and MasterClass co-founder David Rogier. Gordon-Levitt, known for starring in “Inception,” “Snowden” and, my personal favorite, “10 Things I Hate About You,” tells TechCrunch that HitRecord has a te...

Nintendo held off on building smartphone games for years, but now they just can’t stop. They started with a little stumble with the short-lived Miitomo, but then found an audience with Super Mario Run. Then came Fire Emblem Heroes. Then Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, and Dragalia Lost. Next up? Dr. Mario. Nintendo announced this afternoon that it’s working on a title called Dr. Mario World, built in collaboration with Line (as in the company that makes the Line chat app; they also make Disney’s mobile Tsum Tsum games) and NHN. The doctor is in! Mario puts on the white coat once again in the mobile game Dr. Mario World, targeting an early summer 2019 global release. #DrMario https://t.co/DTRBympHj0 pic.twitter.com/RfMZbbs3Mp — Nintendo of America (@NintendoAmerica) January 31, 2019 For anyone out there who might be too young to remember Super Mario’s stint as an M.D., Dr. Mario was a falling-tile style game that had the player quickly trying to arrange… pills. To kill viruse...