space invaders, bots
Cyber security

Data-scraping bot blocker backed by Malcolm Turnbull pockets $30 million

- December 11, 2025 2 MIN READ

 Data-scraping bot blocker Kasada has raised US$20 million (A$30m) in a round that values the business at $300 million. The round was backed by Swedish private equity giant EQT, with support from existing investors, including Malcolm Turnbull’s Turnbull & Partners, Westpac’s VC fund Reinventure, CSIRO-backed Main Sequence and OIF Ventures, and in the US, New… Read more »

Mark Zuckerberg
Data

Facebook admits it scraped data from Australian users without letting them opt out. Here’s how to protect yourself

- September 13, 2024 3 MIN READ

Facebook acknowledged in a Senate inquiry yesterday that it is scraping the public photos of Australian users to train its artificial intelligence (AI) models. Facebook’s parent company Meta claims this excludes data from users who have marked their posts as “private”, as well as photos or data from users under the age of 18. Since… Read more »

Cyber security

A Chinese data company profiled Atlassian co-founders Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brookes among 35,000 Australians

- September 14, 2020 4 MIN READ

National security is like sausage-making. We might enjoy the tasty product, but want to look away from the manufacturing. Recent news that Chinese company Zhenhua Data is profiling more than 35,000 Australians isn’t a surprise to people with an interest in privacy, security and social networks. We need to think critically about this, knowing we… Read more »

Topic

Australian social media marketing startup Stackla is suing Facebook over being blocked from using its data

- September 24, 2019 < 1 MIN READ

Australian marketing startup Stackla is suing Facebook after the US social media giant banned the business from the site’s data in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The AFR reports that Stackla, co-founded in 2012 by Damien Mahoney and Peter Cassidy, lodged proceedings in the US District Court in San Francisco last week. Meanwhile,… Read more »