Daily Crunch - Amy Klobuchar discusses Amazon Halo concerns

Friday, December 18, 2020 • By Anthony Ha

We interview the senior senator from Minnesota about fitness trackers, Sony pulls “Cyberpunk 2077” from the PlayStation Store and Indian delivery startup Zomato raises a massive round. This is your Daily Crunch for December 18, 2020.

The big story: Amy Klobuchar discusses Amazon Halo concerns

Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar recently wrote an open letter to Alex Azar of the Department of Health and Human Services, in which she discussed Amazon’s Halo fitness tracker and expressed concern that “the Halo appears to collect an unprecedented level of personal information.”

Klobuchar elaborated on these issues in an interview with TechCrunch. HHS, she said, “should play a larger role in ensuring data privacy when it comes to health” and work with the FTC “to come up with some rules to safeguard private health information.”

Klobuchar added, “I think the Amazon Halo is just the ultimate example of it, but there’s a number of other devices that have the same issues.”

Free O'Reilly eBook: Infrastructure as Code

CD Projekt Red, Sony, Microsoft offer refund to Cyberpunk 2077 customers after bug complaints — Sony has pulled “Cyberpunk 2077” from its PlayStation Store after a flood of complaints.

The big Google DOJ antitrust case probably won’t go to trial until 2023 — In a status hearing Friday, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta set a tentative date for the case.

Twitter bots and memorialized users will become ‘new account types’ in 2021 — Twitter plans to add a way of distinguishing bots and other automated accounts.

Image Credits: CD Projekt Red

Startups, funding and venture capital

Indian food delivery giant Zomato secures $660M — The 12-year-old startup is also in the process of closing a $140 million secondary transaction.

Bumble reportedly filed confidentially for an IPO — The news that Bumble is pursuing an IPO is not a surprise.

Unfold launches lightweight, link-centric profiles called Bio Sites — Squarespace acquired social media startup Unfold last year.

Startups, funding and venture capital image

Image Credits: Nasir Kachroo/NurPhoto / Getty Images

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

From India’s richest man to Amazon and 100s of startups: The great rush to win neighborhood stores — After spending more than a decade disrupting neighborhood stores in the U.S. and other markets, Amazon and Walmart are employing a different strategy in India.

Watch Space Force commander Gen. John Raymond explain public-private partnerships for space defense — The Space Force commander explained how the new military service operates like a startup and how startups can learn from the Space Force.

Unpacking Poshmark’s IPO filing — From posting regular losses in 2019 to generating net income in 2020.

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which aims to democratize information about startups. You can sign up here.)

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch image

Image Credits: Frank Bienewald/LightRocket / Getty Images

Everything else

TechCrunch Early Stage is coming back in a big way in 2021 — TC Early Stage is all about providing founders access to the top experts across the core competencies involved in entrepreneurship.

Tips for applying an intersectional framework to AI development — What can we do to move away from using AI/ML models that demonstrate unfair bias?