Sandberg wrote in a Facebook post that "it is time for me to write the next chapter of my life."

Sheryl Sandberg announced Wednesday she is stepping down as chief operating officer of Meta after 14 years. Sandberg announced her departure in a Facebook post, saying that she will spend the next few months transitioning before leaving the company in the fall.

"When I took this job in 2008, I hoped I would be in this role for five years. Fourteen years later, it is time for me to write the next chapter of my life," Sandberg wrote. "I am not entirely sure what the future will bring – I have learned no one ever is."

Sandberg joined Facebook from Google, tasked with transforming Mark Zuckerberg's wildly successful dorm room experiment into a going business. Sandberg led Facebook's efforts to develop an advertising business, and quickly became one of the most well-known female tech executives in the US. But in recent years, Sandberg's once sterling reputation has become tarnished, particularly in the wake of the Internet Research Agency scandal following the 2016 election.

More recently, The Wall Street Journal reported that Sandberg personally intervened in negative reporting about her ex-boyfriend Bobby Kotick. The Journal reported that Sandberg was facing an internal investigation over the matter.

Sandberg's post did not lend much clarity into why she decided now is the time to leave, instead, focusing primarily on her history at the company and her fondness for Zuckerberg, who she first met during a chance encounter at a holiday party.

"Mark is a true visionary and a caring leader. He sometimes says that we grew up together, and we have," Sandberg wrote. "He was just 23 and I was already 38 when we met, but together we have been through the massive ups and downs of running this company, as well as his marriage to the magnificent Priscilla, the sorrow of their miscarriages and the joy of their childbirths, the sudden loss of Dave, my engagement to [Tom Bernthal], and so much more."

In his own statement on Facebook, Zuckerberg wrote, "I'm sad that the day is coming when I won't get to work as closely with Sheryl. But more than anything, I'm grateful for everything she has done to build Meta."

Sandberg said she now plans to spend more time on philanthropy and family.

In recent years, there have been ample signs that she was taking a less prominent public role at the company. Recently, Nick Clegg was promoted to president of public affairs, a role that made him Meta's point person in conversations with world leaders and global governments.

Shortly after the news broke, former Meta employees began sounding off on Twitter. "I have no real thoughts on Sheryl as a person/leader but this will be an incredibly non-shocking departure to basically everyone inside the company," wrote former spokesperson Drew Pusateri.

Sandberg will continue to serve on Meta's board, but Zuckerberg said he will not be replacing her with anyone who does precisely what she does. "I'm not sure that would be possible since she's a superstar who defined the COO role in her own unique way," Zuckerberg wrote. "But even if it were possible, I think Meta has reached the point where it makes sense for our product and business groups to be more closely integrated, rather than having all the business and operations functions organized separately from our products."

Instead, Javier Olivan will become chief operating officer, but with a different set of responsibilities, which Zuckerberg described as more akin to a traditional COO role, focused on making the company "more efficient and rigorous."

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Issie Lapowsky ( @issielapowsky) is Protocol's chief correspondent, covering the intersection of technology, politics, and national affairs. She also oversees Protocol's fellowship program. Previously, she was a senior writer at Wired, where she covered the 2016 election and the Facebook beat in its aftermath. Prior to that, Issie worked as a staff writer for Inc. magazine, writing about small business and entrepreneurship. She has also worked as an on-air contributor for CBS News and taught a graduate-level course at New York University's Center for Publishing on how tech giants have affected publishing.

Three of the four top congressional negotiators working on privacy have released a draft bill that would require companies to collect the least amount of data necessary to provide a service, end ad-targeting to kids up to age 16 and mandate annual civil rights assessments of algorithms used by the largest companies.

in addition, the draft would allow users to opt out of targeted advertising, and would permit individuals to sue over certain prohibited data uses. While it would also overrule many state privacy provisions, the draft bill would dramatically increase the Federal Trade Commission's power to make rules in certain areas of privacy.

The text, known as the American Data Privacy and Protection Act, represents a bipartisan, bicameral agreement after years of stalled talks on data protection. It also lays out compromises on issues, such as lawsuits, that had stymied lawmakers even as industry, consumer groups and political leadership pushed Congress to act.

Despite the existing bipartisan agreement, the proposal still faces significant hurdles to becoming law this year. Foremost among them: It does not have sign-on from Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell, who chairs the Senate Commerce Committee and is the most powerful legislator in the process. Although Cantwell reportedly is aiming to hold a hearing on privacy legislation in coming weeks, she dismissed the draft on Friday as doing too little to ensure companies "act in consumers’ best interests," according to the Washington Post.

Congress also is trying to tackle major hot-button issues such as guns and abortion, while also moving forward with tech antitrust legislation. Lawmakers are also running against the clock, hoping to finish much of that work in the dwindling number of days left before the unofficial kickoff of the midterm campaign season in August and the election itself in November.

In addition, while some tech industry groups welcomed the progress, they also hinted they hoped for further concessions. And the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the most powerful business lobby, said earlier this week it would use its firepower to oppose a text with "a blanket private right of action" allowing consumers to sue.

"In the coming weeks, we will be working with our colleagues on both sides of the aisle to build support and finalize this standard to give Americans more control over their personal data," said a statement from Reps. Frank Pallone and Cathy McMorris Rodgers and Sen. Roger Wicker. Pallone chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, while McMorris Rodgers serves as its top ranking Republican member. Wicker is the highest-ranking Republican on the Senate Commerce panel.

The proposed bill would also offer consumers rights to access, correct, delete and move their data, and to opt out of its transfer to third parties — abilities that have become increasingly common under international or state privacy statutes. It would also put greater transparency requirements on companies, although some critics say those notices induce fatigue with consumers more than they empower consumer choices.

The bill includes a long list of provisions — such as those on data minimization and the handling of teens' information — that could alter the workings of tech giants as well as data brokers, smaller firms in the industry and brick-and-mortar companies that use data and algorithms, whether public-facing or B2B.

The measure, for instance, would designate categories of sensitive data to receive heightened protections, including information on health, finances, location and biometrics. The sensitive category would also include "information revealing" race, religion, union membership and sexual orientation, among other classifications that are sometimes evident not just from users' direct statements about themselves but also through an easy analysis of their interests, home addresses, travel patterns and more.

In addition to the civil rights assessments for big companies' algorithms, the draft forbids data uses that discriminate "on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, or disability."

The text would also require companies to obtain express consent to collect and use most biometric and genetic information, and ban most handling of revenge porn. It would also require reasonable security practices and force CEOs of big companies to certify their firms have procedures in place to comply with the law, which could potentially put them on the hook personally for lapses.

The crypto craze keeps getting bigger — with fraudsters.

Consumers lost more than $1 billion in crypto to scammers between the beginning of 2021 and March 31 of this year, according to the Federal Trade Commission. The problem is accelerating, too: An FTC report released Friday found that people were scammed out of $329 million in just the first quarter of 2022, nearly half of what they lost during all of the prior year.

Most of the duping — totaling $575 million — came in the form of phony investments, frequently guaranteeing eye-popping returns. Some even came with fake dashboards to track "growth" or offered of small test withdrawals designed to fool consumers into trusting the schemes, the FTC said.

Often these scams started on social media, and nearly 40% of all money lost on social media went out the door in the form of crypto. After investment scams, people lost the most crypto to fake romances. (Seriously, stop paying your web crushes.)

Overall, the median loss among 46,000 reports to the FTC was $2,600. People between the ages of 20 and 49 were three times more likely to have reported falling for crypto frauds than older consumers, although the median loss for people in their 70s reached nearly $12,000.

Other reports worldwide have found similar stark increases in scams. Last year, the losses were 60 times what they were in 2018, the FTC said. In a similar report a year ago, the FTC found that losses were just $80 million over the period from the last quarter of 2020 into the first of 2021. One swindle detailed by the FTC at the time involved scammers posing as celebrities like Elon Musk.

The FTC isn't alone in its concerns about crypto, even when it's legitimate. On Friday, New York Attorney General Letitia James warned would-be investors that cryptocurrencies are volatile assets that can "yield more anxiety than fortune.”

Tesla is cutting about 10% of salaried workers, Elon Musk told employees on Friday. The Tesla CEO told fellow executives earlier that he had a "super bad feeling" about the economy and the company would need to lay off employees, Reuters reported.

"Tesla will be reducing salaried headcount by 10% as we have become overstaffed in many areas," Musk wrote in a note to employees, which was obtained by CNBC. "Note this does not apply to anyone actually building cars, battery packs or installing solar. Hourly headcount will increase."

Almost 100,000 people work at Tesla and its subsidiaries, according to an SEC filing late last year. That means 10,000 employees could lose their jobs.

Dozens of tech companies have announced layoffs in recent weeks, but Tesla is one of the biggest — and one of the only — EV companies to make such a move. Musk said at a recent conference that the U.S. is in a recession and blamed President Biden and his administration for the issue. "I've been through a few [recessions]," he said. "And what tends to happen is if you have a boom that goes on too long, you get a misallocation of capital. It starts raining money on fools, basically."

Musk is not the only person worried about the U.S. economy. JPMorgan Chase's Jamie Dimon warned of an economic "hurricane" in the near future after the Federal Reserve indicated it may reverse its emergency bond-buying programs, and as the war in Ukraine drags on.

Tesla and SpaceX are calling employees back to the office for 40 hours a week. A Microsoft recruiter already put out a notice to Tesla workers that there's room for them at the company (although the post has since been deleted).

Tesla shares dropped 8.5% on the news that Musk planned a hiring freeze.

The company didn't return Protocol's request for comment.

Atlassian said early Friday that it was aiming to release a fix for a critical vulnerability in its Confluence collaboration software by the end of the day. Later in the day, it confirmed that it released updated versions of Confluence that include the patch for the flaw.

The vulnerability could enable execution of code by an unauthenticated remote user and has seen active exploitation, according to an advisory from Atlassian on Thursday. The flaw, tracked at CVE-2022-26134, affects every version of Confluence Server and Confluence Data Center that is currently supported.

Atlassian said that it has released a number of versions of the Confluence software containing the patch (specifically, versions 7.4.17, 7.13.7, 7.14.3, 7.15.2, 7.16.4, 7.17.4 and 7.18.1). The company recommended upgrading to one of the fixed versions of Confluence, but also provided a temporary workaround in the event that customers can't upgrade right away.

Confluence is a team workspace designed to offer a "secure and reliable way to collaborate on mission-critical projects," Atlassian said on its website. The Confluence software, which competes with alternatives such as Microsoft SharePoint and Google Docs, is used by more than 75,000 customers, according to the site.

The zero-day Confluence vulnerability was discovered by researchers at Volexity, who said in a blog post that they reported the flaw to Atlassian on Tuesday. "When Atlassian provides a fix for this vulnerability, users should immediately patch, as this vulnerability is dangerous and trivially exploited," Volexity researchers said in the post.

"This is 10/10 on the badness scale," tweeted Steven Adair, president at Volexity.

Versions 1.3.0 and up of Confluence Server and Confluence Data Center are impacted, said Atlassian, which is also the maker of Jira and Trello.

The vulnerability follows a weeks-long outage for Atlassian's Jira issue-tracking software in the spring, which the company blamed on a communication error between teams that led to the accidental deletion of hundreds of customer sites.

This story was updated after Atlassian released a patch for the Confluence flaw.

New York Attorney General Letitia James is warning would-be investors that cryptocurrencies are volatile assets that can "yield more anxiety than fortune.”

The attorney general, who ran a brief campaign for governor late last year, has been an aggressive enforcer of crypto regulations and a powerful skeptic of the industry. Last year, she warned New Yorkers about scams using virtual currencies.

This alert, published Thursday, goes a step further, asserting that even the most legitimate players in the industry are exposing their customers to extreme risk.

"Even well-known virtual currencies from reputable trading platforms can still crash and investors can lose billions in the blink of an eye," James said. "Too often, cryptocurrency investments create more pain than gain for investors."

James' warning follows a period of particular volatility in the crypto market, coming weeks after the collapse of the TerraUSD stablecoin and its related luna token left investors with billions in losses. Bitcoin and ether — listed among the well-known, reputable currencies James cited — have both lost half their value since reaching high points in November, prompting even staunch boosters to declare the arrival of a new crypto winter.

The notice detailed a long list of issues James sees with crypto investing: the prices "swing wildly" and crash without warning; there is no guarantee you can cash out during bad times; trading costs are high and there are no federally regulated exchanges, with trading platforms operating all over the globe.

James has also used New York's century-old Martin Act, among the most potent securities laws in the country, to take legal action against crypto firms. Most notably, the state AG's office last year reached a settlement with Tether and Bitfinex over what James said were misrepresentations of the assets backing the tether stablecoin. The organizations were barred from doing business in New York, and Tether also agreed to produce regular reports on the assets backing the tether stablecoin.

The window in which regulators could object to Elon Musk's planned $44 billion takeover of Twitter has now ended, according to the company, removing one hurdle from the long path between now and the transaction's eventual scheduled closing later this year.

Thanks to the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act of 1976, companies planning a merger or acquisition above a certain threshold — $101 million, for 2022 — must file their plans with the Federal Trade Commission before doing the deal. That kicks off a 30-day waiting period when regulators can do one of three things: They can grant early termination, meaning they have no issues with the transaction; they can file a second request for information, kicking off an actual probe; or they can do nothing at all, and simply let the waiting period expire.

That last one is what the FTC did, Twitter said in a press release. The waiting period closed without fanfare at midnight, ending the opportunity for regulators to throw themselves on top of the deal with a slow-motion, "Nooooooooo." That said, realistically there was very little chance that they actually would: HSR and other antitrust laws exist to preserve competition between businesses in a sector. There's not much template for individuals purchasing $44 billion companies on their own, because that's not historically a thing that happens.

Although competition regulators have declined to intervene, the road to closing is still filled with metaphorical potholes. Chief among those is Musk himself, who, in addition to facing multiple lawsuits from Twitter shareholders, recently appeared to be trying to find a way either to reduce his offer price for Twitter or potentially even wriggle out of the deal entirely. The Securities and Exchange Commission also has some questions for Musk about how he acquired his existing Twitter shares.

Musk's influence over Twitter already runs deep, though, and the company has seen turnover in response. Twitter itself also plans to hold Musk to the deal: The company recently asked its shareholders to vote in favor of the transaction at an as-yet unscheduled special meeting.

Live social audio was once a hot trend. Platforms were racing to develop audio tools that could compete with pandemic darling Clubhouse. But the best days of Clubhouse and its competitors seem to be behind them.

Several Clubhouse executives have headed for the exit recently. In late April, Stephanie Simon left as the company’s head of Brand Evangelism and Development. Simon joined Clubhouse just a couple of months after launch in 2020. Then this week, three more leaders announced their resignations, including Nina Gregory, Aarthi Ramamurthy and Anu Atluru; the trio led News, International and Community, respectively.

“Clubhouse wouldn’t be where it is today without them,” a spokesperson told Protocol of the departed executives. “We’re immensely grateful for everything they have done and we know that they’ll do great things in the future.”

Ramamurthy’s departure is particularly notable. She’s married to Sriram Krishnan, a partner for a16z, a major Clubhouse investor. The pair used to host the "The Good Time Show" on Clubhouse, but they’ve recently turned to broadcasting it live on YouTube instead. Ramamurthy and other departed leaders did not return requests for comment.

Atluru's exodus is also eyebrow-raising, as she was one of Clubhouse's earliest employees. She was an investor in the app's series A round, and more recently provided seed funding to the buzzy social media platform BeReal. Gregory came to Clubhouse from NPR, where she was a senior editor on its arts desk.

The social audio platform has been struggling for some time, and the departures are another sign that Clubhouse is in trouble — but they're hardly the only one. The platform is also struggling to hold an audience. Between Jan. 1 and May 31, Clubhouse saw 3.8 million installs globally compared to 19 million installs during the same period last year, according to SensorTower data. That's an 80% drop year-over-year.

When the company was riding high a year ago, Clubhouse was valued at $4 billion after a round of series C funding. It's unclear, though, how much the company is worth today.

Many of the platforms that followed Clubhouse into the realm of live audio are also losing steam. Facebook shut down its short-form audio Soundbites feature and its Audio hub. Meanwhile, the company integrated its Live Audio Rooms feature into its live video offering. Twitter is scaling back resources for Spaces and other long-term projects. Reddit’s social audio feature launched in April 2021, and it's still in pilot mode. Whether it ever takes off is TBD, but the state of live audio right now certainly doesn't bode well for it.

But some companies aren’t giving up. Spotify Greenroom, for example, just rebranded to Spotify Live; Discord just launched a Clubhouse clone called Stage channels; and VC David Sacks’ new social audio app, Callin, raised $12 million last fall.

Still, there are no clear winners in the live social audio race: only losers and new contenders. And unless those new entrants can attract and hold onto a substantial post-lockdown audience, social audio may end up as nothing more than a pandemic fad.

Coinbase announced Thursday that it was rescinding accepted job offers to new hires, in addition to its previously announced hiring freeze, Chief People Officer L.J. Brock wrote in a blog post.

The company seemed to be determined to triple its workforce even after weak first-quarter earnings, which resulted in its stock plummeting. However, it changed its mind almost immediately, announcing a hiring freeze just a week after its analyst call.

Now, two weeks later, Coinbase is taking another step further to “reprioritize [their] hiring needs against [their] highest-priority business goals,” which includes extending the hiring pause for the foreseeable future and rescinding a number of accepted offers for people who have not started yet, via email.

Coinbase also said that it was also establishing a “talent hub” for individuals impacted by its decisions.

The slew of hiring freezes and layoffs aren't just limited to fintechs; companies across all sectors of tech have been slowing hiring and letting go of staff. Both Twitter and Meta froze hiring last month, and Twitter also rescinded job offers.

As the New York state legislature entered the eleventh hour, its first-in-the-nation crypto mining moratorium bill passed with little time left to spare. Its passage by the state Senate Thursday could define what happens with the burgeoning crypto mining industry taking over upstate New York and how the state meets its climate goals.

New York has become a major hub for crypto mining, particularly following a crackdown in China last year. In an effort to stem the opening of a slew of mines, members in both houses of the state legislature introduced legislation last year that would put a two-year moratorium on mining that uses proof of work, an energy-intensive computational technique that keeps the blockchain secure. That bill passed the state Senate but not the Assembly.

The legislation was reintroduced and passed with modified language this session, and will now go to Gov. Kathy Hochul's desk. The governor will have 10 days to sign or veto the law.

“This is Gov. Hochul and the administration’s new fracking moment,” Liz Moran, Earthjustice’s New York public advocate, told Protocol, referring to a similar showdown that happened over fracking eight years ago that ended in former Gov. Andrew Cumo banning the practice.

Miners generally seek out cheap energy to maximize returns, and they found a little slice of heaven in upstate New York, where natural gas and hydropower are abundant. A number of shuttered or nearly shuttered power plants have proven to be particularly attractive as sites to construct vertically integrated bitcoin mines.

But while miners have found heaven, residents have seen places they love become hell. The epicenter of the battle over crypto mining is on the shores of Seneca Lake, the largest of the Finger Lakes. There, Greenidge Generation revived a dormant coal plant built in the 1960s. Retrofitted to burn natural gas, the power plant sends a tiny amount of juice onto the grid and spends the rest of its operating time mining bitcoins.

Residents nearby have complained of noise pollution from the mining rigs' cacophony. They've also said the plant destroys the bucolic character of the region and its burgeoning wine industry. That would all be problematic enough, but the plant will also make it harder for the state to reach its climate goals, particularly if other aging power plants are also retrofitted the same way.

“Instead of cowering to cryptomining cash, Governor Hochul must follow the legislature’s lead by signing this bill into law and then denying Greenidge Generation’s air permit renewal,” Yvonne Taylor, vice president of Seneca Lake Guardian, said in a statement.

That pollution permit is up for renewal, and the state Department of Environmental Conservation has punted on it for months. With the moratorium in the governor’s hands and the DEC itself previously saying Greenidge “has not shown” it wouldn’t affect the state’s ability to meet its climate goals, the pressure to reject it will ratchet up further. (The state is also hosting a gubernatorial primary later this month.)

“With this legislation in particular, it put forwards a simple question: In the face of New York’s ambitious climate law, should we be allowing an industry to repurpose fossil-fuel power plants when we’re trying to move away from fossil fuels entirely?” Moran said.

The now-passed moratorium, if signed into law, would put the brakes on that. It would allow mines with the proper air pollution permits to stay open but forbid new ones from being constructed during a two-year pause. That would allow the state to study the impacts and decide if a full-on ban or other approach makes more sense.

This story has been updated Thursday to reflect the bill's passage. Advocates' reactions and more details were added on Friday.

Inflation and supply chain woes are making the costs of everything skyrocket. Just don't tell that to Chevy. The automaker announced that it's lowering the price of the Bolt by nearly $6,000 next year, which will make it the cheapest electric vehicle in all the land. (Well, in all the U.S. anyways.)

If you've lived through 2022 so far, first: Congratulations. And second, you've surely experienced the fact that most everything is more expensive. But there's been perhaps no better example of how inflation, supply chain hiccups and the Russian war in Ukraine have created a perfectly hellacious storm than the price of vehicles.

Despite that, Chevy announced on Wednesday that it's slashing the cost of the Bolt, its flagship EV. The cheapest model will cost $26,595 in 2023, down from $32,495. Other model prices will also come down, some by as much as $6,300. That stands in sharp contrast to automakers new and old, including Tesla, Rivian and Ford, which have jacked up prices of EVs. (Rivian did an about-face and promised to honor lower-priced reservations after customers got big mad.) They've done so in part due to the aforementioned reasons, particularly the spike in critical mineral prices over the past year, which has made batteries more costly.

A GM — which owns Chevy — spokesperson told the Verge that the price drop "reflects our ongoing desire to make sure Bolt EV/EUV are competitive in the marketplace. As we’ve said, affordability has always been a priority for these vehicles.”

The EV wanters of the world will surely take heart in this news, even if the Bolt doesn't exactly move the needle like the various models of Teslas or the F-150 Lightning do in the public imagination. It also doesn't help that the Bolt faced a recall last year due to issues that could [checks notes] cause the battery to catch on fire. Uh, hmmmm.

While getting people pumped about EVs because they look cool and/or don't catch on fire is certainly great, ensuring EVs are affordable (and, again, not prone to catching on fire) is vastly more important. Chevy recently put the Bolt back into production following the aforementioned recall that was accompanied by a plant shutdown. Whether the price drop and promises of a non-flammable EV are enough to get people to take the plunge remains to be seen.

The Bolt also doesn't qualify for the EV tax credit since Chevy has sold more than 200,000 EVs. While the Bolt being the cheapest new EV on the market is certainly a leg up on the competition, its price tag may still be beyond the means of some would-be EV buyers, even if the monthly cost of ownership still makes it more attractive than its gas-powered brethren. That's all the more reason why the federal lawmakers could step in to kill the 200,000 EV limit or raise the tax credit to make it and other EVs even more attractive options.

And hey, there’s always walking.

Microsoft has broken rank with its peers in the tech industry and said it will not combat employee unionization efforts. The news was announced on Thursday in a blog post authored by Microsoft President Brad Smith.

"Recent unionization campaigns across the country — including in the tech sector — have led us to conclude that inevitably these issues will touch on more businesses, potentially including our own," Smith wrote. "This has encouraged us to think proactively about the best approach for our employees, shareholders, customers, and other stakeholders."

Smith said the company has outlined four principles it's committing to in order to guide how it handles labor organizing at Microsoft and its many subsidiaries, which include countless divisions and offices around the world spanning its software, hardware, gaming and cloud businesses. The post is similar in style to one Microsoft published earlier this year in which it pledged to follow pro-competition principles around software distribution and app stores in an effort to avoid regulation.

The principles could have a major effect on the corporate structure of Microsoft's business. The company does not currently have any labor unions, but it is in the process of acquiring game publisher Activision Blizzard. Raven Software, a video game studio owned by Activision, last week became the first major game developer with a recognized labor union after nearly two dozen quality-assurance testers voted to unionize with the National Labor Relations Board.

At the time, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer said the Xbox division would respect the union. “Once the deal closes, we would absolutely support [an] employees’ organization that’s in place,” Spencer told employee during an Xbox all-hands meeting, according to Kotaku. “We think it is a right of employees and something that can be a part of a relationship between a company and people who work at the company.”

Smith's blog post Thursday, however, goes far beyond those comments by pledging not to actively combat union efforts, as its competitors Amazon and Apple are now doing. "We respect this right and do not believe that our employees or the company’s other stakeholders benefit by resisting lawful employee efforts to participate in protected activities, including forming or joining a union," Smith said of one of the four principles titled, "We recognize that employees have a legal right to choose whether to form or join a union."

The other principles indicate that Microsoft may be open to supporting more unions within its workforce. "We are committed to creative and collaborative approaches with unions when employees wish to exercise their rights and Microsoft is presented with a specific unionization proposal," reads another of the four principles. Smith said of that principle that it gives the company an opportunity to work with existing unions and to foster "collaborative approaches that will make it simpler, rather than more difficult, for our employees to make informed decisions and to exercise their legal right to choose whether to form or join a union."

The other two principles involve committing to working with labor unions both in the U.S. and Europe and having an open-door policy for discussing issues in the workforce that may be facilitating labor organizing efforts.

"We acknowledge that this is a journey, and we will need to continue to learn and change as employee expectations and views change with the world around us. And we recognize that employers and employees will not always agree on all topics — and that is okay," Smith concluded. "Perhaps as much as anything, we bring a sense of optimism grounded in an appreciation that success in a competitive global economy requires that businesses and labor strive to work together well."

On the same day it announced layoffs, Gemini was hit with a lawsuit by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The agency claims that the crypto exchange, run by brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, misled it during conversations in 2017 about a bitcoin futures contract product, according to a complaint filed in federal court in Manhattan Thursday.

Gemini, founded in 2014, has long proudly marketed itself an exchange that plays nice with regulators. But, according to the CFTC, Gemini's leadership made misleading statements on a product that "was significant because it was to be among the first digital asset futures contracts listed on a designated contract market." The complaint focuses on conversations between the crypto exchange and regulators in 2017.

The alleged false statements were about efforts by Gemini to prevent manipulation, according to the CFTC.

A Gemini spokesperson said the company "has been a pioneer and proponent of thoughtful regulation since day one. We have an eight-year track record of asking for permission, not forgiveness, and always doing the right thing. We look forward to definitively proving this in court.”

The company also published a letter to employees Thursday detailing plans to cut 10% of its staff of more than 1,000 in response to what its leadership deemed the start of "crypto winter."

The CFTC under Chairman Rostin Behnam has said it will push for a larger role in regulating crypto. The commission is generally the industry's preferred regulator over the SEC. A forthcoming bill backed by Sens. Cynthia Lummis and Kirsten Gillibrand would designate the CFTC as crypto’s lead regulator, according to a draft leaked to The Block last week. Lummis has called that version "outdated" and pledged to release the bill next week, but she has spoken publicly about advancing the CFTC's role in crypto regulation on other occasions.

Justice Samuel Alito earlier this week signaled that some Supreme Court conservatives might want the First Amendment to work differently with online platforms than it does today. He may also have dropped some hints that he and his colleagues feel the same way about antitrust.

In a dissent released Tuesday, Alito wrote for himself and two of his fellow conservatives that he would let a Texas law proceed during an appeal. The law in question punishes big social media companies for their treatment of particular viewpoints in a way that most scholars think violates those corporations' free speech rights. A majority of the Court blocked the law.

But Alito also was clear to refer to "the power of dominant social media corporations" and gave a shoutout to Justice Louis Brandeis, the progressive icon of the early 20th century. That framing of the might of services like Facebook, and the approving reference to a jurist who's more or less the patron saint of the hipster antitrust movement, suggested to some that a bloc of Supreme Court conservatives may be sympathetic to the strange-bedfellows push to beat back the companies through antitrust enforcement.

"We have no doubt that champagne bottles were being popped at the law firm of Wu, Khan and Kanter," Blair Levin and Matt Perault wrote in a research note, referring to three high-profile competition-law reformers in the administration.

Lina Khan, the chair of Federal Trade Commission, is pursuing the agency's competition case against Meta, while Jonathan Kanter heads up the Justice Department's Antitrust Division, which is pursuing a lawsuit against Google. Both are expected to go through lengthy appeals — or even potentially end up before the Supreme Court — and both have fans among certain prominent Republicans who view antitrust enforcement as a way to punish Big Tech for how it handles right-wing speech.

Tech policy watchers have, in fact, often labeled the movement to use competition law against Big Tech as "Neo-Brandeisian" in reference to the justice's longtime skepticism of Big Business and his work to help build the FTC.

Brandeis, then, would seem to be an odd choice for avowed contemporary conservatives such as Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas, who joined his colleague's dissent, to cite. After all, the two had previously been viewed as reliable votes to limit the government's reach on antitrust. Yet in his dissent, Alito appealed to Brandeis' writings from way back in 1932 about states' ability to tackle “changing social and economic” times without overly hasty interference from the federal government — even though Brandeis himself was writing in dissent and wasn't forming court precedent.

Conservatives and state lawmakers of all stripes do routinely bring up a concept Brandeis formulated in the same text: that states can function as policy laboratories. Alito eschewed that line, though, and instead grabbed for the less-cited notion about the changing of society and the market. The latter does seem to share an outlook with Khan's frequent meditations on the evolution of business models as a reason she wants to push antitrust law in new directions.

In their note, Levin, a longtime tech industry analyst and former FCC staffer, and Perault, a onetime top policy official at Facebook, said all this intellectual winking and quoting seemed to add up to an interest by Alito, Thomas and others in anti-tech antitrust lawsuits, whether by the federal government or states.

"Alito’s dissent suggest to us that several Justices will be open to novel antitrust arguments in the future," they wrote.

Even after aggressively trimming its tech portfolio in recent months, Tiger Global hasn’t been able to staunch the losses. The hedge fund has seen its assets shed more than half their value since the start of the year, according to Bloomberg.

In response to the sharp 52% decline, Tiger Global cut management fees and revised its client lock-up policy. It also dropped its management fee from 1.5% to 1% through December 2023. And even though some investors agreed to lock-up deals that would limit withdrawals to 25% from the hedge fund and 20% for the long-only product, Tiger Global bumped the allowable cash-out rate to 33%.

Those closely tracking the VC firm may have seen this coming. Just two weeks ago the firm’s 13F filings revealed that the company cut its entire stake in startups like Bumble, PayPal and Affirm this year. It also cut significant stakes in Spotify, Zoom and Robinhood. At the time, it was already known that the hedge fund’s value had dropped 34% in the first quarter alone. But apparently, Tiger Global’s cuts weren’t enough for some LPs.

The moves are part of a broader push by Tiger Global to appease investors contending with the tech downturn. In a letter obtained by Bloomberg, the firm managers told investors “our recent performance does not live up to the standards we have set for ourselves over the last 21 years and that you rightfully expect.” Even so, the firm has reportedly seen five times more inflows than redemption requests, a sign that investors are still bullish on the long-term prospects of Tiger.

Those investors, however, are on one side of a controversial trade. Tiger Global is known for taking risky big bets on late-stage startups, something that other, more conservative VCs consider risky. The firm began shifting toward investing in earlier-stage startups this year, but the shift may have come too late.

The question now is whether Tiger Global’s fall from financial grace will prompt a reconsideration of the firm’s historically bullish approach, or prove to be just a blip.

Square announced Thursday that Apple’s two-way “Tap to Pay” feature, which turns iPhones that can already transmit payment-card numbers into terminals that can receive them, will become available to some Square sellers this summer. Apple announced a similar partnership with Shopify and Stripe in February.

Currently, iPhone users can pay in stores or on the go by tapping their iPhones to dedicated NFC-reading hardware made by companies like Square. The forthcoming Tap to Pay feature will allow sellers to collect payments directly through an app on their phone that makes use of newly activated hardware included in iPhones, eliminating the need for separate hardware.

The feature is an effort to embrace growing customer preference for touchless payment, and builds on expanded NFC features Apple first began introducing in 2019. Apple has faced criticism for being slow to unlock NFC features for developers, and Tap to Pay addresses one area where its closed-off approach drew official attention. The European Union accused Apple of violating antitrust law last month by not opening up its NFC features to mobile wallets that competed with Apple Pay.

The agreement by Square to use Apple's Tap to Pay will provide businesses with "more flexibility to adapt their commerce experiences to evolving consumer preferences,” Square head of Financial Services David Talach said in a press release.

The feature will first become available to select Square merchants through an early-access testing program this summer. Square will then roll it out to all sellers later this year.

When the Shopify and Stripe partnership with Apple was announced in February, Apple said that Stripe would be the “first payment platform to offer Tap to Pay on iPhone to their business customers.” Apple did not respond to requests for comment as to whether the product would still be made available to Stripe and Shopify customers before those using Square.

The inclusion of Square in Tap to Pay could address overblown perceptions that the new feature is a "Square killer." As Protocol noted when it was first released, Apple's unlocking of NFC hardware didn't provide the range of payment services required to make it useful. It did, however, help Stripe and Shopify — which have ambitions to grow their in-person retail payments — leapfrog the investment Square has made in card-reading hardware.

The strategy also helps Apple as the tech giant wades more deeply into payments. For one thing, it makes iPhones more useful to retail businesses as mobile check-out terminals. Even Apple itself has had to use add-on hardware to take payments in Apple Stores. And it potentially adds to the number of venues that accept Apple Pay. Apple gets a tiny cut of Apple Pay transactions, but keeping customers locked into their iPhones is likely far more valuable.

Gemini, the crypto exchange run by brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, is slashing 10% of its staff, the firm said in a letter to employees Thursday.

Job cuts are spreading rapidly throughout the tech industry as a result of a recent downturn, but Gemini's layoffs mark the most significant among cryptocurrency companies — a sign that sagging digital asset values are cooling what was a red-hot hiring market. Coinbase said last month it would slow hiring plans.

The layoffs are the first in Gemini's eight years in business, according to Bloomberg, which first reported the job cuts. Gemini did not disclose how many total jobs were cut, but the company employs just over 1,000 people, according to LinkedIn.

“This is where we are now, in the contraction phase that is settling into a period of stasis — what our industry refers to as ‘crypto winter,’” the Winklevoss brothers wrote in the memo. “This has all been further compounded by the current macroeconomic and geopolitical turmoil. We are not alone.”

The value of bitcoin and ether have been chopped in half from highs in November 2021. People tend to trade less when crypto values cool, cutting into revenue for exchanges.

Gemini will conduct the layoffs through individual remote conversations and hold a companywide meeting to discuss its future on Friday, according to Bloomberg. The company plans to focus “only on products that are critical to our mission."

In November, Gemini raised $400 million in new funding at a $7.1 billion valuation.

Payments company Square suffered a two-hour outage Wednesday, prompting outrage from merchants about losing out on business during peak hours. Shares of its parent company, Block, fell 6% amid a broader market pullback.

Multiple Square services were operating at “degraded performance,” including its payment processing services, according to its systems status page. Only its banking services appeared unaffected during the widespread outage. While the issues were eventually resolved, merchants took to Twitter to express their concerns, noting they were losing sales due to the outage. Some called for Square to refund fees to make them whole.

“So much lost business throughout our locations because of this. Will you guys consider providing free processing to offer some sort of relief for all of the $ we lost (and keep losing) due to this situation?” Arepa Zone, a restaurant, tweeted at Square's support account.

The outage was the second incident in a week, after Square encountered sign-in issues with its Seller Community on Monday. Incident histories on Square's status page suggest widespread outages have been rare, with isolated problems more typical among the scattered outages.

The Department of Justice has charged Nate Chastain, a former OpenSea executive, with insider trading in a case that could set a precedent for NFTs and other areas of crypto more broadly that have not previously been subject to insider trading enforcement.

Chastain is alleged to have traded on NFTs using confidential business information about which NFTs were to be on OpenSea's home page. Chastain, who was arrested in New York this morning, is charged with wire fraud and money laundering.

As part of Chastain's job, he was responsible for selecting NFTs that were featured on OpenSea's home page. When those NFTs were featured on the site, their prices would rise, the DOJ alleged. The DOJ said it was the first-ever insider trading charge involving digital assets.

From June to September 2021, Chastain used the information to buy dozens of NFTs before they were on OpenSea. He then sold them for two to five times his purchase price.

OpenSea is the largest NFT marketplace and was valued at $13.3 billion in January. OpenSea was also the subject of controversy when it froze the sale of 16 NFTs on its platform that were allegedly stolen.

Amazon allegedly told workers it would lower pay and benefits if they unionized in Staten Island, according to Vice. The new complaint from the National Labor Relations Board accuses the company of breaking federal labor laws in the run-up to the first successful election for a union at Amazon.

The complaint alleges that in the months before the vote, Amazon held "captive-audience meetings" at the JFK8 facility where the company threatened to reduce worker salaries and change benefits, according to Vice. In the complaint, the NLRB demands that Amazon train its managers about workers' union rights and post signs and text workers about those rights.

If Amazon doesn't agree to settle the new complaint from the NLRB, labor administrators will file the complaint with an administrative law judge and the case will go to trial. Though captive-audience meetings have been permitted under past NLRB precedents, NLRB general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, a Biden administration appointee, changed course in April by asking the NLRB to make those meetings illegal.

The workers at the Staten Island warehouse secured the first successful union election in Amazon's history on April 1. Amazon immediately challenged the results of the election, accusing both the Amazon Labor Union and the NLRB itself of breaking labor laws before the election. The NLRB will hold hearings on those challenges before the union win can be officially certified.

"Our focus remains on working directly with our team to make Amazon a great place to work. The allegations in NLRB complaint are without merit, and we look forward to showing that through this process," Kelly Nantel, an Amazon spokesperson, wrote in an email to Protocol.

This story was updated on Jun 1 with a statement from Amazon.

Blockchain technology is "poorly suited for just about every purpose currently touted as a present or potential source of public benefit" and must be approached with skepticism, a group of 26 high-profile computer scientists, software engineers and technologists wrote in a letter to U.S. lawmakers Wednesday.

The letter offers a tech industry counter to a growing lobbying effort from the cryptocurrency industry in Washington and comes as Sens. Cynthia Lummis and Kirsten Gillibrand are expected to offer a bill proposing new federal regulations for digital assets.

"We urge you to resist pressure from digital asset industry financiers, lobbyists and boosters to create a regulatory safe haven for these risky, flawed and unproven digital financial instruments and to instead take an approach that protects the public interest and ensures technology is deployed in genuine service to the needs of ordinary citizens," the authors wrote.

Harvard lecturer and privacy-focused technologist Bruce Schneier, Google cloud principal engineer Kelsey Hightower and Web3 Is Going Great creator Molly White are among the signatories. The letter is adddressed to Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and several committee chairs and ranking members in the House and Senate.

Crypto lobbying spending jumped to $9 million last year, from $2.2 million in 2018, according to consumer advocacy group Public Citizen.

“We’re counter-lobbying, that’s what this letter is about,” signatory and software developer Stephen Diehl told the Financial Times, which was first to report the letter.

While advocates for cryptocurrency say it can serve as a tool for financial inclusion and transparency, the letter counters that the industry has only recently latched onto those concepts and better solutions are already available.

A draft version of the Lummis-Gillibrand bill, published by the The Block, designates the CFTC as crypto’s lead regulator — something supported within the industry. While Lummis said the published draft is outdated and the actual version will be released on June 7, she has generally been supportive of the industry.

The letter does not reference to any legislation directly but encourages Congress to "look beyond the hype and bluster of the crypto industry" when setting its legislative priorities.

Get ready to revamp your Slack profile. As of today, you’ll be able to add name pronunciations, hover over profiles more easily and add “smart tags” to indicate special characteristics and areas of expertise.

People will be able to record audio of their name spoken aloud and attach it to their profile, eliminating guessing games when it comes to pronunciation, and helping to foster a more inclusive workplace. You can also pair this with the phonetic spelling of your name. Slack profiles will also now contain contact information, your position in an organization chart and an “About Me” section that can host anything from pet names to languages spoken. You’ll be able to hover over names to start huddles, calls or messages and search through profiles with “smart tags” highlighting specific criteria.

The updates are meant to let people more fully represent their “authentic self at work,” according to Slack’s blog post. “People's names have so much significance — from their ancestors, families, religions. They have such connection and bearing on their identity," Rita Kohli, associate professor and equity adviser at the University of California, Riverside told The Society for Human Resources.

Slack is the communication hub for at least 177,000 paying customers and continues to be essential for the scores of people on geographically distributed teams. Bridging the gap between remote workers is still a big question mark for productivity tools, even years into the pandemic — it’s just not as seamless as interacting in person. At least now, even if you’ve never heard your co-worker’s name spoken aloud, their Slack profile can do the work for you.

The Supreme Court has blocked Texas’s social media “censorship” law, HB 20, after two tech industry groups, NetChoice and CCIA, filed an emergency application asking the court to take the case up on its shadow docket last week.

The emergency filing came after a 5th Circuit court lifted an injunction on the law, allowing it to go into effect with potentially catastrophic consequences for the tech industry. More than 30 groups filed amicus briefs in support of NetChoice and CCIA since last week, and the court has sided with them.

The court decided to overturn the 5th Circuit's decision by a 5-4 vote, with Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch writing a dissent.

“Despite Texas’s best efforts to run roughshod over the First Amendment, it came up short in the Supreme Court,” said Chris Marchese, counsel at NetChoice.

“We are encouraged that this attack on First Amendment rights has been halted until a court can fully evaluate the repercussions of Texas’s ill-conceived statute,” CCIA president Matt Schruers said in a statement.

HB 20 bans social media platforms from moderating content based on users' “viewpoint.” The statute is aimed at punishing online services for what Republicans insist is censorship of conservative content — an approach that has raised significant constitutional concerns and could undermine platforms’ years of efforts to tackle hate speech and harmful misinformation.

Texas has argued that it is seeking to ensure its residents can speak freely on popular forums by forcing those platforms to “carry” all views or face a flood of lawsuits from users who can claim they have been “censored.” But a broad coalition of legal scholars have concluded that it is the state that’s trying to impose punishments on private actors for their handling of content, in clear violation of U.S. free speech protections.

NetChoice and CCIA, which both represent social media companies, sued to stop the law, and a federal district court had paused the rollout over the likelihood that the statute violates the First Amendment. An appeals court, however, allowed the measure to go into effect earlier this month while the lower court proceeding is ongoing. The appeals court judges cleared the way for the law after a hearing at which they appeared to struggle with basic tech concepts, including whether or not Twitter is a website.

“The Supreme Court noting the constitutional risks of this law is important not just for online companies and free speech, but for a key principle for democratic countries,” Schruers said. “No online platform, website, or newspaper should be directed by government officials to carry certain speech. This has been a key tenet of our democracy for more than 200 years, and the Supreme Court has upheld that.”

The Court's decision to block the law came from an unusual coalition: Chief Justice John Roberts, as well as Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, Sonia Sotomayor and Stephen Breyer. Justice Elena Kagan, a vocal critic of the shadow docket, denied the application to vacate the Fifth Circuit's decision, but notably did not join with the conservative justices in their dissent, authored by Justice Alito.

Although NetChoice and its allies cited cases from as recently as 2019, Alito wrote that he, Thomas and Gorsuch weren't sure how "existing precedents, which predate the age of the internet, should apply to large social media companies." Thomas, in particular, has previously voiced support for treating social media platforms as common carriers.

Alito argued it was plausible the Texas law's disclosure requirements are constitutional and that the law was too novel to evaluate at this stage. In his dissent, Alito also suggested he agreed with Texas that, by invoking Section 230 and seeking not to be held as publishers of user posts, the platforms forgo the kinds of robust free-speech protections that speakers normally get.

The dissent also signaled that the high court may not be done with the issue. Shortly after NetChoice sought its emergency ruling from the Supreme Court, another appeals court upheld most of an injunction on a similar Florida law. A potential circuit split could result in the Supreme Court having to take up the issue once again. "This application concerns issues of great importance that will plainly merit this Court’s review," Alito wrote.

Thousands of Salesforce employees are pressing the company to cut ties with the National Rifle Association, according to a letter seen by Protocol and first reported by SF Gate. The letter comes after the shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, that left 19 children and two adults dead.

A Salesforce employee, who spoke under the condition of anonymity, said the company has not responded to the letter. The employee said Salesforce is expected to hold an all-hands with company executives next week, but it's unclear if the letter will be addressed during that meeting. A company spokesperson did not return Protocol's request for comment.

The letter, addressed to co-CEOs Marc Benioff and Bret Taylor and other company leaders, urges the company to end its "commercial relationship" with the NRA. "The NRA uses Salesforce products to drive their marketing and fundraising efforts," the letter states.

It also cites a recent CNBC interview where Benioff said "we need to take direct action" on social issues. Benioff has spoken out on several social issues, including expressing support for LGBTQ+ people and abortion rights. He's also called for stricter gun control laws, and Salesforce announced in 2019 that the company would no longer work with vendors that sold semi-automatic and 3D-printed guns online.

Tech companies have been called on to end their relationship with the association before. Apple, AT&T, Amazon and Roku were asked to take down NRATV from their products after the mass shooting in Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Roku and Apple publicly stated that they would not remove the channel at the time. Those calls were renewed in a recently launched petition.

Here is the full text of the letter:

"It takes a monster to kill children. But to watch monsters kill children again and again and do nothing isn't just insanity-it's inhumanity." — National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman

Marc, as you said today on CNBC regarding gun violence, "We obviously need to do something ... We need to take direct action."

It's not in our power to get background checks or other gun control measures passed by Congress — but we can effect change by ending our commercial relationship with our customer, the National Rifle Association.

The NRA uses Salesforce products to drive their marketing and fundraising efforts. It is unconscionable to consider their use of Marketing Cloud to capitalize on mass shootings.

[Nineteen] children and two teachers were killed yesterday. Based on past history, it is likely the NRA is already upping, or preparing to up, their Marketing Cloud usage in response to this tragedy, not to prevent future tragedies from happening, but to sow fear, sell guns, and abet future atrocities.

Netflix has been testing ways to crack down on password sharing in markets outside of the U.S., and early reports indicate that the A/B tests have resulted in a haphazard experience for users.

Netflix said in its recent earnings call that it would start charging an additional fee for users who share passwords with people who live outside of their household. Those tests have begun in South America. According to global tech publication Rest of World, those changes have not been communicated to users in Peru in a uniform way, causing confusion about the new policy and how it's being applied.

While many continue to share their Netflix accounts at no extra cost, the crackdown on only some subscribers has caused a few cancellations, according to Rest of the World. Netflix confirmed to the publication that different subscribers may be paying differing charges.

Netflix's varied rollout is a sign that the company is testing different versions of its password sharing policy as a way to nail down which is the most effective, which is expected given the way the company's well-known A/B testing works. Even something as simple as an icon to express how much a user likes a show took nearly a year of testing to figure what will resonate with users the most.

Netflix first announced it was testing this feature in March in Chile, Costa Rica and Peru, through which users would be able to "add an extra member" for roughly $2 or $3 per month, depending on the country. Netflix said that extra members would get a separate login and password. The new policy is the first time that Netflix is defining “household" as people who live exclusively in the same vicinity as the subscriber, according to Rest of World.

Netflix is testing its password-sharing and pricing changes as it struggles to grow its user base. The company reported that it lost 200,000 subscribers in the most recent quarter, causing its shares to plunge and analysts to question whether Netflix has peaked.

Microsoft has released mitigations for a zero-day vulnerability in Office that could enable execution of code by a remote user.

The flaw, which security researcher Kevin Beaumont dubbed "Follina," affects the Microsoft Support Diagnostic Tool (MSDT) in Windows and has reportedly been exploited.

The vulnerability affects the majority of versions of Windows in use today — including Windows 7 and above, as well as Windows Server 2008 and above.

In a blog post, Microsoft provided a workaround for the remote code execution flaw, which "exists when MSDT is called using the URL protocol from a calling application such as Word."

"An attacker who successfully exploits this vulnerability can run arbitrary code with the privileges of the calling application," Microsoft said in its post. "The attacker can then install programs, view, change, or delete data, or create new accounts in the context allowed by the user’s rights."

The vulnerability is being tracked as CVE-2022-30190. Microsoft has ascribed a "high" severity level to the vulnerability with a score of 7.8 out of 10.