Friday, March 6, 2020
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Facebook bans face mask ads to fight coronavirus price gouging
On Friday, Facebook announced that it would further attempt to limit coronavirus-related chaos on its platform by banning commerce listings and advertisements for medical face masks.
“We’re monitoring COVID19 closely and will make necessary updates to our policies if we see people trying to exploit this public health emergency,” Facebook Director of Product Management Rob Leathern said in an update on Twitter. “We’ll start rolling out this change in the days ahead.”
“We are temporarily banning advertisements and commerce listings that sell medical face masks,” a Facebook spokesperson told TechCrunch. “Our teams are monitoring the COVID19 situation closely and will make necessary updates to our policies if we see people trying to exploit this public health emergency.”
Facebook will also limit any ads for medical products that imply a limited supply or create a sense of urgency among potential buyers, as well as ads that make guarantees for COVID-19 “cures” or prevention. Along with those changes, in the next few days Facebook will begin blocking coronavirus-themed groups and pages from its algorithmic recommendations.
As fears of a novel coronavirus epidemic swell worldwide, online platforms have scrambled to stop price gouging and health misinformation. Amazon is working to eradicate “high priced offers” on products like hand sanitizer and face masks from its marketplace, while Ebay has banned all listings for N95 and N100 face masks, hand sanitizer and alcohol wipes. The online auction site will also reject any listings exploiting terms like “COVID-19” and “coronavirus.”
On Wednesday, Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) wrote an open letter to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos expressing concern over “continued reports of price gouging and a lack of transparency” on the site.
“No one should be allowed to reap a windfall from fear and human suffering,” Markey wrote, adding that online retailers have a “particular responsibility” to protect consumers in the midst of the coronavirus outbreak.
Earlier this week, Facebook announced that coronavirus-related searches on its platform would be greeted with an automatic pop-up featuring information from the World Health Organization and local health authorities.
“Given the developing situation, we’re working with national ministries of health and organizations like the WHO, CDC and UNICEF to help them get out timely, accurate information on the coronavirus,” Mark Zuckerberg wrote in an update on his company’s efforts. “We’re giving the WHO as many free ads as they need for their coronavirus response along with other in-kind support.”
The company is also focused on curtailing potentially life-threatening coronavirus misinformation, removing ads, conspiracy theories and treatment claims with no scientific basis. Facebook’s decision to disable ads for face masks comes at a time when health authorities are urging well people to forgo buying the masks, both because they are not necessary for healthy individuals to wear and because demand for the masks is constricting their supply for the medical workers who need them most.
Facebook is temporarily banning ads and listings that sell medical face masks, and outlines changes to keep Instagram users "safe and informed" on COVID-19 (Kang-Xing Jin/About Facebook)
Grindr's Chinese owner says to sell gay dating app for $608 million
Watch SpaceX launch the last of its original Dragon spacecraft to resupply the ISS tonight
SpaceX is launching its 20th resupply mission the International Space Station tonight, but this one has a bittersweet twist: It’s the last such mission that will use the first iteration of the Dragon spacecraft that has flown on all of the company’s missions for NASA thus far. Starting this summer, its successor will take its place.
Tonight’s mission will bring a variety of supplies, experiments, and new components to the ISS as usual. Launch is scheduled for 8:50 PM Pacific time, and you can watch it below.
The Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 first stage both flew on previous missions, the Dragon on two others, making it the third of its kind to make it to a third mission. And it will also be the last of its kind to do so.
Dragon has spawned two successor craft, Crew Dragon and Cargo Dragon (sometimes with a “2” appended), the former of which has understandably gotten the lion’s share of attention. But the revised cargo spacecraft very well see more use.
The exact differences between the old and new Dragon aren’t completely clear, but we know that there have been significant improvements to the avionics, power systems, onboard software, and of course the general shape of the thing. Naturally there won’t be life support or an escape system on the craft, which isn’t intended in this form to carry passengers.
This new, improved Cargo Dragon has its first commercial mission scheduled for August, and its sister craft, Crew Dragon, may very well by flying by then as well if everything goes according to plan.
DOJ indicts former DHS watchdog and a subordinate for software and data theft; prosecutors say they planned to use stolen info to sell software back to DHS (Derek B. Johnson/Federal Computer Week)
DOJ indicts former DHS watchdog and a subordinate for software and data theft; prosecutors say they planned to use stolen info to sell software back to DHS — The Department of Justice announced it has indicted Charles K. Edwards, a former acting inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security …
Postmates adds Drop Options amid COVID-19 concerns, letting users meet Postmates at the door, at curbside, or have no-contact, with deliveries left at the door (Nick Statt/The Verge)
Postmates adds Drop Options amid COVID-19 concerns, letting users meet Postmates at the door, at curbside, or have no-contact, with deliveries left at the door — The on-demand food delivery industry marches on — Food delivery platform Postmates is starting what the company is calling a …
Trying to make up for lost time, the CDC will distribute 1.1 million COVID-19 tests by this weekend
In a press conference late on Friday, Vice President Mike Pence said that the government will finally have the capacity to provide over 1 million tests for the novel coronavirus, COVID-19.
Joined by representatives of the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the vice president detailed the continuing efforts from the White House to coordinate a response to the spread of the coronavirus.
The CDC will distribute test kits capable of testing over 1.1 million people by the end of the weekend, and another 1 million tests will be in quality assurance testing by next week, according to Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Stephen Hahn.
Initially the White House had hoped to have distributed the test kits by the end of the week, but was not able to ramp up to meet that demand. Now, Pence is saying that the capacity to conduct at least 2.1 million tests will be available by next week — and that a consortium of private testing companies will add still more capacity as time goes by.
Yesterday the White House announced that it had established a consortium of the nation’s largest private testing companies, which are now mobilizing to provide test kits to commercial and private institutional testing facilities around the country. Attendees at the White House meeting yesterday included LabCorp, Quest Diagnostics, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Abbott Laboratories and the Mayo Clinic, according to reporting from Reuters.
Earlier this week Lab Corp said it would begin offering immediate tests for COVID-19, while Quest Diagnostics said it would start testing next week. The two private test manufacturers will be able to charge for their tests, while the ones conducted by the CDC and state run facilities are free.
On Wednesday, the Trump Administration declared that the COVID-19 test would qualify as an essential health benefit — which means Medicaid and Medicare would cover testing costs. Under the Affordable Care Act (which the administration is trying to unwind) large-employer health plans must cover the cost of health benefits like preventive testing — but those tests don’t have to be free, according to CNBC reporting.
Until last week, only labs that were approved by the CDC could administer tests for the coronavirus, but the CDC opened new testing facilities for people potentially infected with the virus after an outcry from state and local governments.
While the government is touting the capacity for testing, the actual numbers are falling far short of official claims, according to a report in The Atlantic.
The report claims that only 1,895 people have been tested for the coronavirus in the U.S., and about 10% of the people tested have contracted the disease. Even with the new tests available to states and local governments, the capacity only allows for several thousand tests to be conducted — not the tens of thousands the White House has hoped for, according to the report.
Meanwhile, official reporting at the CDC is lagging behind other indicators, painting a far different official picture of the spread of the disease than the one that’s reflected by realities in the aggregation of local government reporting. According to the latest data from a disease tracker provided by Johns Hopkins University, there are 299 cases of the coronavirus in the U.S. The CDC is only reporting 164.
The reason is that the government stopped reporting the total number of cases and has left that to the States. As the Atlantic reports:
In South Korea, more than 66,650 people were tested within a week of its first case of community transmission, and it quickly became able to test 10,000 people a day. The United Kingdom, which has only 115 positive cases, has so far tested 18,083 people for the virus.
Normally, the job of gathering these types of data in the U.S. would be left to epidemiologists at the CDC. The agency regularly collects and publishes positive and negative test results for several pathogens, including multiple types of the seasonal flu. But earlier this week, the agency announced that it would stop publishing negative results for the coronavirus, an extraordinary step that essentially keeps Americans from knowing how many people have been tested overall.
The CDC has justified its lack of tracking by saying that it couldn’t accurately reflect the number of tests conducted as states take responsibility for their own testing.
“States are reporting results quickly, and in the event of a discrepancy between CDC and state case counts, the state case counts should always be considered more up to date,” said Nancy Messonnier, who is responsible for overseeing CDC’s response and research into respiratory diseases.
Ultimately, the U.S. government seems to be [finally] ramping up its response to the spread of the virus here by providing health officials with the tools they need to accurately test for how widely the disease has spread in the population, while at the same time making it much harder to communicate the information the public would need to make educated choices on how to respond.
Trump admin demands that Beijing-based Shiji Group unwind its acquisition of StayNTouch, a cloud platform for hotels, because it threatens US national security (Sean O'Neill/Skift)
Trump admin demands that Beijing-based Shiji Group unwind its acquisition of StayNTouch, a cloud platform for hotels, because it threatens US national security — This is a highly unusual action. It's unclear why the U.S. government would believe a company would compromise the sensitive personal data …
PE firm Everstone combines India's Wingify, which helps A/B test sites, and France's AB Tasty, which improves e-commerce UX; Everstone bought Wingify for $200M (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)
Jagmeet Singh / TechCrunch : PE firm Everstone combines India's Wingify, which helps A/B test sites, and France's AB Tasty, which...
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Amrith Ramkumar / Wall Street Journal : An interview with White House OSTP Director Michael Kratsios, a Peter Thiel protégé confirmed by ...
