Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, August 26

• Four years and $22 billion later, WhatsApp has decided ads aren’t awful, after all: First rule about being bought by an advertising company: You’re probably going to end up selling advertising.  WhatsApp to share user data with Facebook for ad targeting. Facebook-owned messaging giant WhatsApp has announced a big change to its privacy policy which, once a user accepts its new T&Cs, will see it start to share some user data with its parent company — including for ad-targeting purposes on the latter service. “[B]y coordinating more with Facebook, we’ll be able to do things like track basic metrics about how often people use our services and better fight spam on WhatsApp,” WhatsApp writes in a blog on the change today. “Facebook can offer better friend suggestions and show you more relevant ads if you have an account with them. For example, you might see an ad from a company you already work with, rather than one from someone you’ve never heard of.” WhatsApp will also be sharing the data with the “Facebook family of companies” — so presumably its user data could also be fed to VR firm Oculus Rift, another Fb acquisition, and photo-sharing network Instagram. WhatsApp data that will be shared under the new T&Cs includes the phone number a user used to verify their account, and the last time they used the service. Two pieces of data which — on a creepiness scale of ‘personal intel you’d rather not hand over to a data-mining tech giant’ — are both right up there.

• Google Fiber is pulling back on its broadband rollout as pressure grows to cut costs: For the past year, Ruth Porat, the CFO of Google and its parent Alphabet, has told Wall Street that Google Fiber is her most expensive unit outside of the core business — and is well worth the costs. Her bosses may be telling Fiber employees the opposite. According to a report in The Information, Alphabet chiefs Larry Page and Sergey Brin recently instructed Fiber to severely trim staff and expenses, frustrated with mounting costs of delivering high-speed internet by digging up dirt. Creating broadband networks via traditional pipes is enormously expensive. And Fiber still hasn’t proven that it has figured out a better way to do it. The Information story comes on the heels of reports that Fiber has put plans to build broadband networks on hold in two cities as it ponders ways to roll out experimental wireless tech. Fiber, like the “Other Bets” businesses outside of Google, is facing ongoing scrutiny about its operations. Here are the key parts of The Information’s report. The unit initially shot for five million broadband subscribers in its first years, but has fallen short of that. Last month, Page told Craig Barratt, the CEO of Fiber (or Access, as it’s known), to halve his staff down to 500. Porat, who has developed a reputation as a cost cutter, interceded on Fiber’s behalf, arguing to Page that Fiber’s business model is defensible. Barratt considered leaving earlier in the year, reportedly irked by the changes at Alphabet. If he did, he would not be the first “Other Bets” exec to do so.

• Uber Loses at Least $1.2 Billion in First Half of 2016: The ride-hailing giant Uber Technologies Inc. is not a public company, but every three months, dozens of shareholders get on a conference call to hear the latest details on its business performance from its head of finance, Gautam Gupta. On Friday, Gupta told investors that Uber's losses mounted in the second quarter. Even in the U.S., where Uber had turned a profit during its first quarter, the company was once again losing money. In the first quarter of this year, Uber lost about $520 million before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, according to people familiar with the matter. In the second quarter the losses significantly exceeded $750 million, including a roughly $100 million shortfall in the U.S., those people said. That means Uber's losses in the first half of 2016 totaled at least $1.27 billion. Subsidies for Uber's drivers are responsible for the majority of the company's losses globally, Gupta told investors, according to people familiar with the matter. "You won't find too many technology companies that could lose this much money, this quickly," said Aswath Damodaran, a business professor at New York University who has written skeptically of Uber's astronomical valuation on his blog. "For a private business to raise as much capital as Uber has been able to is unprecedented." Bookings grew tremendously from the first quarter of this year to the second, from above $3.8 billion to more than $5 billion. Net revenue, under generally accepted accounting principles, grew about 18 percent, from about $960 million in the first quarter to about $1.1 billion in the second. Uber also told investors during the call that it was changing how it calculates UberPool's contribution to revenue in the second quarter, which had the effect of increasing revenue. Uber's losses and revenue have generally grown in lockstep as the company's global ambitions have expanded. Uber has lost money quarter after quarter. In 2015, Uber lost at least $2 billion before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. Uber, which is seven years old, has lost at least $4 billion in the history of the company.

• First driverless taxi hits the streets of Singapore: The first driverless taxi began work on Thursday in a limited public trial on the streets of Singapore. Developer nuTonomy invited a select group of people to download their app and ride for free in its "robo-taxi" in a western Singapore hi-tech business district, hoping to get feedback ahead of a planned full launch of the service in 2018.The trial rides took place in a Mitsubishi i-MiEv electric vehicle, with an engineer sitting behind the steering wheel to monitor the system and take control if necessary. The trial is on an on-going basis, nuTonomy said, and follows private testing that began in April. Parker, whose company has partnered with the Singapore government on the project, said he hoped to have 100 taxis working commercially in the Southeast Asian citystate by 2018.