Reddit 2020

Megvii, a China-based facial recognition focused startup, files for a Hong Kong IPO; Megvii has raised $750M, reportedly at a $4B valuation, earlier this year (Arjun Kharpal/CNBC)

Pew study: smartphone users in emerging markets have more diverse social networks than those without smartphones (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Lunar Way, a Denmark-based banking app which raised €13M and expanded to Norway in February, raises €26M, says it has obtained a European banking license (Mary Loritz/EU-Startups)

Interview with Tobi Lütke, CEO of Shopify, as its market cap has surpassed eBay, and it sets its sights on Amazon, building out its own fulfillment network (Tim Bradshaw/Financial Times)

Inside PlusToken, a Ponzi scheme that collected ~$3B worth of cryptocurrencies from investors in China and SE Asia this year, and the efforts to trace the funds (Colin Harper/Bitcoin Magazine)

FireEye: China-linked hacking groups are increasingly targeting healthcare systems to obtain medical research data and the IP for medical devices (Matt Burgess/WIRED UK)

Tech Nation report: investments in UK tech startups hit a record $6.7B in the seven months of 2019, exceeding the total amount of investment in all of 2018 (Liam Tung/ZDNet)

Capacity, formerly Jane.ai, raises $13.2M Series B for its AI tech that can help companies maintain a searchable index by consolidating info from various apps (Kyle Wiggers/VentureBeat)

Ally, which makes goal-planning and execution management software for enterprises, raises $8M Series A led by Accel, bringing total raised to $11M (Taylor Soper/GeekWire)

Profile of Rodney Brooks, the Australian roboticist who in 1990 co-founded iRobot, which used to make robots for US army and is now popular for Roomba vacuums (Brian Bergstein/MIT Technology Review)

Profile of Carla Engelbrecht, the director of product innovation at Netflix, whose experiments with interactive kids programs were a precursor to Bandersnatch (Antonia Hitchens/Wired)

Chrome team's idea for a new, but still cookie-based, anti-tracking standard is technically disingenuous and aimed at protecting Google's business interests (Freedom to Tinker)

Carriers' agreement with state AGs to implement new robocall blocking tech does not impose any legally binding terms on them and there is no deadline to comply (Jon Brodkin/Ars Technica)

Court filing: AT&T and FTC reached a settlement agreement in a 2014 mobile data throttling lawsuit, which still needs to be reviewed and voted on by FTC (Nivedita Balu/Reuters)

A graphic look at a columnist's web activity during a typical workday shows how websites and tech firms track users via tracking scripts, unique IDs, and more (Farhad Manjoo/New York Times)

A look at the changing landscape of seed funding as more big VCs compete there, and pros and cons of raising a seed round led by a big VC vs a seed-focused fund (Kate Clark/TechCrunch)

Imposters are making as much as $10K in royalties at a time by uploading copyright-infringing content to streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music (Noah Yoo/Pitchfork)

Misinformation, spread by exploiting our eagerness to share content without thinking, has created a "new world disorder" that we need to safeguard against (Claire Wardle/Scientific American)

Academics are still waiting to receive key data originally promised in 2018 from Facebook, which has declined to provide some of the data citing privacy fears (Craig Silverman/BuzzFeed News)

Source: Xiaomi scans phones to track lifestyle changes like divorce or promotion for credit scores in Indonesia; Xiaomi plans to launch lending service in India (Reuters)

Riot Games has settled for an undisclosed sum a class action lawsuit alleging gender discrimination, sexual harassment, and retaliation for speaking out (Matt Kim/IGN)

A first look at the Disney+ app that Disney says will offer a heavily curated and personalized experience for users with a combination of human editors and AI (Edgar Alvarez/Engadget)

Cloud-based app performance monitoring startup DataDog files for IPO, says it had revenue of $198M in 2018, up from $101M in 2017, and a loss of $13M in 1H 2019 (Crunchbase News)

India exempts startups from a much criticised 30% "angel tax" when raising money at a rate higher than their "fair market value" as assessed by tax authority (Manish Singh/TechCrunch)

Seattle Police Department has maintained an anti-swatting registry since last October, allowing people who fear being swatted give the police advance warning (Emma Grey Ellis/Wired)

MDClone, which anonymizes patient information from databases it scans to provide on-demand, self-service access to doctors and researchers, raises $26M Series B (Shoshanna Solomon/The Times of Israel)