News

The fine relates to a data breach that took place in 2019 and may have affected over half a billion people

This week, the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) has issued Meta with another multi-million Euro fine, marking the latest in a series of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) woes to befall the US tech giant.

The €265 million fine comes in response to a data breach that Meta announced in April last year, which immediately sparked an investigation from DPC, the regulatory body in charge of overseeing Meta’s EU operations.

The breach itself took place back in 2019, with Meta reporting that the personal information of around 533 million people had been ‘scraped’ and made accessible on the internet.

The DPC investigation found that, during the period from the 25 May 2018 to September 2019, Meta had failed to live up to GDPR standards with regards to its Facebook Search, Facebook Messenger Contact Importer and Instagram Contact Importer tools.

Other EU regulators were consulted before the DPC issued the formal fine. The DPC has also ordered Meta to update various systems so that they comply with GDPR law.

“There was a comprehensive inquiry process, including co-operation with all of the other data protection supervisory authorities within the EU,” said Irish Data Protection Commissioner Helen Dixon. “The decision imposed a reprimand and an order requiring [Meta Platforms Ireland Ltd] to bring its processing into compliance by taking a range of specified remedial actions within a particular time frame. In addition, the decision has imposed administrative fines totalling €265 million on [Meta].”

This is the latest in a series of fines Ireland’s Data Protection Commission has imposed on Meta. Last October, the regulator fined Meta (then Facebook) €225 million over various violations related to its WhatsApp platform not fully informing users how it was using their data. More recently, Irish authorities fined the company €405 million after an investigation had found that teenagers had been allowed to set up business accounts displaying their phone number and email addresses on Meta’s subsidiary Instagram.

EU regulators have been cracking down on Big Tech in recent years, with Google, Apple, and Meta all facing fines in the hundreds of millions of dollars for breaches of GDPR and competition regulations.

How is the increasing role of hyperscale tech companies impacting the US telecoms industry? Join the experts in discussion at the upcoming Connected America conference

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STARTUP STORY

Leipzig based Vesputi are the startup behind Mobilitybox, a mobility-as-a-service (MaaS) offering that enables a scalable technology interface between transport operators and third-party providers including hotels, airlines, and more. The founders see their offering as a complimentary add-on to telco’s main product offerings.

Tell us about your start up
Vesputi is one of Europe’s leading B2B tech providers for sustainable mobility solutions.

Vesputi is building the Mobilitybox, a standardized, europewide B2B interface, that companies use to integrate public transport into existing apps and platforms. The Mobilitybox enables the Mobility-as-a-Service vision, as public transit becomes available, standardized and at scale.

Vesputi´s customers include, amongst others, hotels, airlines, and event organizers. By integrating public transport, these partners deliver additional value to their clients and increase traction and retention on their apps while decreasing their carbon-footprint.

What is your USP?
Vesputi is opening up a new digital B2B sales channel for public transit operators. The Mobilitybox comes with a state-of-the-art developer portal and allows a seamless integration with a single contract and without worrying about technological standards and politics in the public transit space.

Vesputi has developed its own backend system and hence adapts entirely to its public transit partners current tech set-up.

What is your relationship with the telecom sector?
The telecom sector is a route to market. By adding mobility to the service portfolio, telcos can complement their service offering and cover a wider range of its users daily lives. Vesputi enables the integration through its product – the Mobilitybox.

Additionally, the entire smart city and mobility sector is heavily dependent on digitalization and connectivity. In that aspect, our solution depends on reliable connectivity and smart digital offering by third party providers.

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How have you got to your current stage of development?
Vesputi is a trusted partner of public transit operators since 2016. At the beginning, Vesputi successfully implemented mobility projects with public utilities, transport companies and enterprises such as multimodal apps and simulation tools. Today, the company is fully focused on its product: the Mobilitybox. Vesputi is supported by different organizations and government bodies on national and European level, such as the BMDV and EIT Urban Mobility and is backed by a group of private investors.

Why did you establish the business?
We are mobility experts and enthusiasts from a private and professional background and want to use our strong technological background to not just improve user experience in the mobility space, but to create something with a real purpose. Climate change is one of the biggest challenges in today’s world and public transit is a major lever to reach the UN sustainable development goals in the transport space.

Who inspired you?
We are inspired by the vision of a sustainable mobility ecosystem and convinced of the potential that technology can enable a transition towards sustainable mobility behaviour.

What does the future hold for your business?
The future of mobility will be sustainable, connected and easily accessible for everyone. Vesputi will be a major technological enabler to reach that vision.

Vesputi´s technology reduces complexity and decreases the barrier to collaborate with public transit across different regions and countries. In consequence, public transit becomes easily available from the user perspective, ridership increases and sustainable mobility behavior becomes more attractive.

Vesputi aims at providing a Europe wide standardizes access to public transit.

COMPANY CV
HQ: Leipzig, Germany
Number of employees: 10
Last Funding Type: Pre-Seed
Website URL: https://www.vesputi.com/
Founders: Linus Frank and René Meye

Vesputi are one of the startups you can meet at Connected Germany on the 6-7 December 2022. We have a limited number of free tickets for telecom operators and public service organisations. Register at www.totaltele.com/connectedgermany

STARTUP STORIES

Startup DEVITY say their KEYNOA Engine enables you to automatically establish an encrypted connection of any IoT device to any data platform.

Tell us about your start up
DEVITY is your expert for IT security and cloud connectivity in large scale Internet of Things projects. Based on our team members’ research in cryptography, identity management and OT security at the University of Paderborn, we have developed into a reliable partner for manufacturers, integrators, and operators in industrial automation. The team of experts supports in building scalable IoT infrastructures with our core product KEYNOA as well as in designing and developing IoT security architectures.
Our product KEYNOA simplifies the configuration and installation of IoT devices such as sensors, industrial computers, and machines to unravel the access to secure operation of IoT infrastructures for organizations across Europe.

What is your USP?
Fundamental to KEYNOA are unique identities that are assigned to each device produced. KEYNOA ensures that these identities are transferred throughout the supply chain and used for trustworthy mass enrolments. A unique feature is its capability to bind devices to IoT clouds and data platforms at a late stage – just before physical installation – in the device life cycle. The configurations and credentials can also be created or chosen at a late stage. Therefore, the device owner can choose the configuration and operation purpose of a device fleet at any point of time. This results in a major advantage for operators – in addition to IT security. Until now, experts have had to configure each device individually and in a time-consuming manner. With KEYNOA there no difference in the programmatic configuration effort for 10 or 10,000 identical sensors or gateways.

What is your relationship with the telecom sector?
We enable the telecom sector to accelerate installations of devices as well as IT security operations in large scale projects for critical infrastructures, industrial manufacturers, and energy plants.

How have you got to your current stage of development?
DEVITY was supported from day on by garage33, the start-up centre of the University of Paderborn. Besides that, we worked with Founders Foundation in Bielefeld and KASTEL in Karlsruhe.

Why did you establish the business?
In his research at University of Paderborn and work for IoT solution providers Sven Uthe recognized that IT security was not considered at all or inoperable for non-experts in IoT projects. He decided to change that und make IT security available for every user of Industrial IoT technology.

What is your motivation?
Our motivation is that many companies don’t understand how dangerous their IoT security gaps are. We want that cyberattacks don’t become a disadvantage for any company.

What does the future hold for your businesS?
DEVITY is on the mission to reduce manual tasks and enable IT security in every IoT use case. In 2023, we want to triple the number of partners and deploy fife time more devices.

COMPANY CV
HEADQUARTERS: Paderborn, Germany
NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES: 7
LAST FUNDING TYPE: Research Funding
WEBSITE URL: https://devity.eu/
FOUNDERS:
Sven Uthe – Co-Founder, CTO
Christoph Milder – Co-Founder, CEO

You can meet DEVITY in the Startup Village at Connected Germany on the 6 – 7 December 2022 at Mainz Congress, Germany. You can still grab a free ticket on the website

News

The operator hopes to leverage its mobile network to gain a stronger market share in the fixed broadband market

This week, Vodafone Spain has announced that it will launch a 5G fixed wireless access (FWA) service offering by the end of the month.

The service will originally be available in parts of Madrid, Barcelona, ​​Valencia, Seville, Zaragoza, Malaga, Bilbao, and A Coruna, with Vodafone intending to increase this availability to 65 cities in future.

Customers will be able to receive speeds of “up to 1Gbps” according to Vodafone, though average speeds are likely to be lower.

The motivation for this push into 5G FWA is clear enough. While Vodafone’s share of the Spanish mobile market is around 23%, its share of the broadband market is much smaller. This is largely due to Vodafone’s fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) network itself being dwarfed by those of its closest rivals, only passing around 3.5 million homes, compared to 27 million for Movistar and 17 million for Orange.

Vodafone’s 5G network, by contrast, is much more competitive, set to cover around 46% of the Spanish population by the end of the year. Couple this availability with the quick and easy installation process of the FWA hardware and it becomes a very attractive prospect for businesses and consumers, especially in relatively remote locations.

Vodafone already offers 5G FWA in various European markets, including Italy, Germany, and the UK.

Also in the news:
SKT takes its Ifland metaverse platform global
CMA probes Apple and Google over browser “duopoly”
Vodacom launches National Relay Service to boost digital inclusion