Pushpa Ithal may not fit the stereotype of the typical Silicon Valley CEO — she’s female, foreign-born, and a mother.

Nevertheless, Ithal is an entrepreneur, living the Silicon Valley dream of running her own startup.

Like her, many foreign-born tech women are finding a place in the Valley — as tech companies have become more and more dependent on foreign-born workers to create their products and services.

Silicon Valley, the global center for high-tech innovation, could be renamed “Immigrant Valley.” When it comes to technical talent, the engine of Silicon Valley is fueled by foreign-born workers, many of whom are from humble roots. And having worked hard to get here, many have ambitions beyond their day jobs.

One of them is Ithal.

On Sundays, she and her two children, ages 5 and 10, pick out the clothes the kids will wear the coming week. Each outfit is placed on a labeled hanger. Then she does the same with the week’s snacks.

“So there are no surprises for the kids,” Ithal said.

Being organized is one of Ithal’s strategies for juggling parenting and running her own startup. And while that juggle is commonplace in Silicon Valley, Ithal is part of a distinct club — foreign-born women in tech. 

Hailing from countries such as India and China, these women make up the majority of all women in certain Silicon Valley fields and are often the only females on male-dominated teams in tech companies. 

Their uniqueness does not stop there. Foreign-born women in tech are more likely to be married and have children than their U.S.-born female coworkers.

​Immigrant Valley

Born in Bangalore, India, Ithal has worked for big tech companies and startups. Her husband, also from India, has built successful startups. Starting her own firm, however, was a leap.

“I came here all the way, let’s risk it,” recalled Ithal, founder and CEO of a company called MarketBeam, which is an AI-driven social marketing company.

More than 60 percent of tech workers in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, home to Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and other U.S. tech firms, are immigrants, according to the Silicon Valley Institute of Regional Studies. Immigrants work at all levels of the industry. Many are executives, company founders and venture capitalists.

But foreign-born women stand out. In an industry where women make up about 20 percent of the technical workforce, many of these jobs are filled by foreign-born women.

Technical roles

Nearly three-quarters of all women in their prime working year and in technical occupations in Silicon Valley are foreign-born, according to the institute. In computers and mathematics, foreign-born women make up nearly 80 percent of the female workforce.

The numbers surprised Rachel Massaro, vice president of Joint Venture Silicon Valley and senior researcher at the institute. It’s her job to contribute to an annual index of Silicon Valley that looks at housing, transportation and population.

“I double-checked, triple-checked the number just to make sure it was even real,” Massaro said.

Many things contribute to foreign-born women dominating tech — the dearth of women seeking a technical education in the United States, and an emphasis on tech education for girls in other countries, with many seeing technical skills as a path to financial independence and possibly a work visa in the U.S.

There are also stereotypes of what women can and should do with their lives both in the U.S. and overseas.

​Working and raising children

Looking more closely at these women, Massaro found a few other surprises — 71 percent of foreign-born female tech workers ages 25-44 are married, compared to 39 percent of native-born female tech workers.

And they are more likely to be mothers — 44 percent have children, compared to 27 percent of U.S.-born female workers.

One of those women is Lingling Shi, who was born in China. She saw studying computer science as her ticket.

“Computer science, for most of us, it’s easier to apply for a green card,” she said. “It’s not my main interest, I’ll be honest.”

But Shi has succeeded in each of her jobs — she brushes up on any new technical areas online in the evenings — and is now vice president of digital banking technology at East West Bank. With her husband, who is also from China and in tech, she is raising her son.

“I guess for Chinese, the family building is most important thing,” she said.

No amount of career success would fulfill her parents’ desire for grandchildren. The message from family is clear, Shi said — “Oh, you are VP of Engineering now, but you don’t have a kid?”

Many women from India and China are “under a set of cultural expectations and norms that they will have a family right away — and they will excel in their careers,” said AnnaLee Saxenian, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Information, who has written about immigrants in tech.

“These women are really kind of super women in the tasks that they take on,” she added.

As Silicon Valley looks to bring more women into the technical workforce, these women provide a model of how to thrive.
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“She had so much to offer.”

Ian Russell is speaking of his 14-year-old daughter Molly, the youngest of three sisters, who committed suicide in 2017, leaving a note that read, “I am sorry. I did this because of me.”

After Molly’s suicide, her parents examined the teenager’s social media use and discovered she was interacting with other teenage users caught in the grip of depression and who were suicidal and self-harming. The users were almost grooming themselves and goading each other to take drastic action.

“I have no doubt that Instagram helped kill my daughter,” Molly’s father told the BBC in an explosive interview that drew a public apology from U.S. social media giant Facebook, owner of the photo sharing site Instagram, as well as a promise to do more to tackle suicide and self-harming posts.

“We’re going to look at this from top to bottom and change everything we’re doing, if necessary, to get this right,” Nick Clegg, a former British deputy prime minister and now Facebook’s head of global affairs, said in a statement.

The promise, though, has done little to tamp down criticism.

In the past eight years, the suicide rate among British teenagers has nearly doubled. Last year around 200 schoolchildren killed themselves. Tech giants do not bear all of the responsibility for the deaths, their critics say, but they are abetting them by not doing enough to help stop them.

Amid growing public uproar, the British government has said next month, it will unveil groundbreaking legislation designed to enforce a legal duty of care on such firms.

“Social media companies clearly need to do more to ensure they are not promoting harmful content to vulnerable people,” said a government official.

The British plan to order social media providers to protect users against material that promotes suicide methods and self-harm will be watched closely by policymakers in other European countries, who are also grappling with how to cope with malign consequences of social media use.

Germany is cracking down on what Facebook does with users’ personal data. In France, the government is “embedding” regulators inside social media companies to investigate how they combat online hate speech.

Since January, Facebook, in particular, has been targeted for criticism in the United States. The company operates a unique suite of apps, but U.S. critics say the social media giant is too casual about social responsibilities.

U.S. lawmakers accuse Facebook of doing too little to stop Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential race, and along with YouTube and Twitter, it has been attacked for being slow in taking down jihadist posts and videos.

Laying the groundwork for the British measure, the country’s chief medical officer will announce this week that Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and WhatsApp figure as important links in a dangerous chain leading from self-harm to suicide.

Sally Davies will urge parents to be more alert and to limit, as well as monitor, their children’s screen time.

The legislation is likely to be based on recommendations from a British parliamentary committee which wrapped up an inquiry last week and concluded social media use is disrupting young users’ sleep patterns, distorting their body image and leaving them exposed to bullying, grooming and sexting.

The panel said that self-regulation will no longer suffice.

“We must see an independent, statutory regulator established as soon as possible, one which has the full support of the government to take strong and effective actions against companies who do not comply,” the committee said.

Clegg said some of the criticism is over-wrought. In a television interview last week, he said the company had “saved the lives” of thousands of potentially suicidal users by flagging them to authorities.

Recent academic studies, including one by psychologists at Oxford University, suggest that social media use has no major adverse impact on mental health. The Oxford University study concluded that “wearing glasses has more negative effect on adolescent mental health.”

But the academic studies are not assuaging critics, and some lawmakers cast doubt on their overall accuracy, saying they do not look closely enough on teenage girls, who seem the most vulnerable.

“Worryingly, social media companies — who have a clear responsibility toward particularly young users — seem to be in no rush to share vital data with academics that could help tackle the very real harms our young people face in the virtual world,”  said lawmaker Norman Lamb.

More than 30 British families have complained that social media giants have blocked or hindered their access to social media data after their children’s suicides. A requirement on firms to share data which can help identify and protect teenagers at risk will likely be among the new legal requirements the government unveils, officials said.

 
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The growing use of mobile phones, computers, and televisions in Africa has left the continent with huge amounts of electronic waste. According to the United Nations Environment Program, 40 percent of the world’s electronic dumpsites are found in Africa. To reduce the growing problem, a group in Kenya is helping manage E-waste through local and exported recycling. Mohammed Yusuf reports from Nairobi.
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A new report says the world produces at least 50 million tons of electronic waste each year, and that number is expected to double 30 years from now. The impact of all that electronic junk is especially felt in Africa.

Mobile phones are increasingly common gadgets across Africa. You can get a phone for as little as $10 in the streets of Nairobi.

Most Kenyans, however, don’t know how to safely dispose of their old phones when they get a new one. 

“I have a spoiled phone. I have kept at home maybe for future use or dispose it one day…mostly if it’s not working, I can decide to throw it away. It depends on how it has spoiled. I throw it away,” Winnie says.

It’s this kind of behavior that has environmentalists concerned, as many phones, once thrown away, end up in rivers and oceans.

The U.N. Environmental Program estimates that 50 million tons of electronic waste was produced in 2018. It says that number could climb to 120 million tons by the year 2050.

One half of so-called e-waste comprises personal devices like computers, smartphones and tablets. 

Simon Omengo uses unorthodox means to dispose of his electronic gadgets.

“Since its motherboard failed then automatically I disposed it. I threw it in the toilet. I burn it, I break into pieces because it’s useless to me now,” Omengo says.

Winnie says the government needs to come up with ways to safely dispose of old devices.

“Our government (needs) to come up with a place where we can take all the gadgets, especially the phones which are spoiled. We go and dispose them there and they will know how they will dispose them, rather than just scattering around because some of the people they just throw them in the dust pin and its hazard to the environment,” Winnie says.

Experts say electronic devices are becoming complicated to repair and some don’t last long.

With more devices being thrown away, one Kenya-based group, Enviroserve, is trying to change how Africa’s e-waste is managed by stripping down re-useable metals and plastics from phones. Some materials remain in Kenya, while other parts like batteries are shipped abroad. 

Shaun Mumford, the head of the company, says old phones have been simply dumped in Kenya for years. 

“It wasn’t done in a way that is useful, and also it was staying here. So what we are able to do instead of Africa being the dumping ground, which historically been the case, we are able to deal with what makes sense here and send back out of the country things that need to be dealt with properly,” Mumford says.

More than half the population is under the age of 30 and the demand for the latest electronics – and dumping the old ones – is only growing. 
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Owners of a new café in the Hungarian capital Budapest are using robotics as a way of giving their customers a new experience. VOA’s Mariama Diallo reports.
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In December 2018, Apple announced its plans to build a new campus in Austin. Texas is rapidly becoming more and more attractive for tech companies and is often called a second Silicon Valley, thanks to affordable housing, highly qualified workers and the abundance of universities that train IT professionals. Mariia Prus traveled to Dallas to see how universities help their students become entrepreneurs. Joy Wagner has her report.
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Researchers and doctors are using incredibly tiny particles — fluorescent nanoparticles — in a quest for new ways to fight cancer. Some nanoparticles, just billionths of a meter across, are engineered to carry special dye that glows when it hits cancer cells. Oregon State University scientists say this makes it easier for surgeons to find and remove tumors. Iryna Matviichuk visited Portland and learned the new procedure is closer to testing in human patients. Anna Rice narrates her report.
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The trade dispute between the U.S. and China is disrupting Silicon Valley.

What had been a steady flow of Chinese money into tech firms appears to be slowing. Investors are concerned about the “headline risk” of doing business with Chinese investors.

And in some cases, U.S. startups are shunning Chinese investment.

These changes come after years of investment and collaboration between China and Silicon Valley. But the trade dispute, coupled with U.S. policymakers’ concerns about Chinese investments in sensitive technologies, such as artificial intelligence, have increased scrutiny of cross border deals on all sides.

A drop in investment

In 2018, Chinese firms invested more than $2 billion in U.S. technology firms, but that was a drop of nearly 80 percent from the year before, according to a Forbes report citing S&P Global Market Intelligence.

While Chinese investors took stakes in roughly the same number of U.S. tech deals — 80 compared to 89 in 2017 — that was off from the peak in 2016 when Chinese investors were part of 107 deals. Among the biggest recipients of Chinese investment in 2018 were Farasis Energy, a battery maker, and Epic Games, a gaming company, according to the Rhodium Group.

While deals continue to come together in 2019, the recent indictment of a Huawei executive has added to a new chill between the two regions, according to observers in Silicon Valley.

​A technology war

In China, the battle is seen as less about Huawei and its alleged wrongdoing and more as a proxy for a “technology war” between countries over technological supremacy.

“The Huawei incident seems like an action against an individual corporation, but it is actually bigger than this,” said Hu Xingdou, a Beijing-based scholar. “This is about one state’s technology war against another state, about which one will occupy the technology high ground in the future.”

One recent change in the U.S. has been the expansion of a government program that reviews foreign investment in areas deemed sensitive.

Despite the expanded U.S. regulatory reviews, Chinese investments in U.S. tech firms are mostly getting through, said Chuck Comey, a partner at Morrison Foerster, a law firm.

As for Chinese companies buying or merging with U.S. tech ones? 

“It ain’t happening,” he said.

​Saying ‘no’ to Chinese investment

The increased tensions have given investors — and even some potential recipients of investment — some pause. One U.S. company, which had accepted Chinese investment in the past, told Reuters that it declined investment from Chinese investors in its most recent round.

“We decided for optical reasons it just wouldn’t make sense to expose ourselves further to investors coming from a country where there is now so much by way of trade tensions and IP tensions,” said Carson Kahn, CEO of Volley, an artificial intelligence training firm.

At a recent event in Silicon Valley about China and U.S. investments, speakers on a panel discussed how the geopolitical tensions affected their business. While several predicted that in the long run, the current friction between the two countries will have a minimal effect on cross-border business between China and Silicon Valley, there was a sense that an era has ended.

“We’ve kind of taken for granted,” said Kyle Lui, a partner at DCM, a global venture capital firm, “that the prior decade plus there’s been lots of strong collaboration between the U.S. and China.”
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Tech companies and nearly two dozen U.S. states clashed with the government in federal court Friday over the repeal of net neutrality, a set of Obama-era rules aimed at preventing big internet providers from discriminating against certain technology and services. 

Judges challenged arguments made by both sides in the face-off in an appeals court in Washington.  

Lawyers for the states and the companies tried to persuade the three-judge panel to restore the net neutrality regime, set in 2015 but repealed in December 2017 at the direction of a regulator appointed by President Donald Trump. The companies challenging the FCC action include Mozilla, developer of the Firefox web browser, and Vimeo, a video-sharing site. 

The net neutrality rules had banned cable, wireless and other broadband providers from blocking or slowing down websites and apps of their choosing, or charging Netflix and other video services extra to reach viewers faster. 

The practice of slowing down transmission is known as “throttling.” 

The action by the Federal Communications Commission rolling back the neutrality rules “is a stab in the heart of the Communications Act,” said attorney Pantelis Michalopoulos, referring to the Depression-era law that established the FCC. 

Information vs. telecom service

The FCC wrongly classified the internet as an information service rather than a telecom service, using that as a rationale for not cracking down on misconduct by big internet providers, Michalopoulos said, who represents Mozilla and the other companies in the case.  

Government lawyers, as well as big internet providers such as AT&T, Verizon and Comcast, argued to keep net neutrality repealed. 

Thomas Johnson, the FCC’s general counsel, said the agency’s “light-touch” regulatory scheme, requiring the internet providers to disclose their practices and operations, provides adequate safeguards. The internet — used more extensively to transmit information — is different both in nature and function from phone service, Johnson maintained. It therefore should be regulated as an information service and not subject to the utility-style oversight of phone companies, he said.   

The politically charged issue has emerged from its origins as an engineering challenge to become an anti-monopoly rallying point and even a focus for “resistance” to the Trump administration.  

Once Trump took office, net neutrality became one of his first targets as part of broader government deregulation. The FCC chairman he appointed, Ajit Pai, made rolling back net neutrality a top priority. 

On the other side, support for net neutrality comes from many of the same people who also are critical of the data-vacuuming tech giants that benefit from it. Politicians have glommed on to the cause to appear consumer-friendly. 

The Democratic takeover of the House in November’s midterm elections could revive efforts to enshrine net neutrality in federal law, though Trump likely would veto any such attempts. 

At the hearing in the U.S. Appeals Court for the District of Columbia, Judge Stephen Williams questioned Michalopoulos’s assertions that the FCC had wrongly classified the internet as an information service. Telephone services, too, offer an array of customer products, he said. On the question of broadband providers charging premiums for faster service, Williams said a large majority of consumers prefer cheaper, lower-speed options, citing polls. 

Judges’ views

The judges are weighing whether the FCC had the authority to nix the 2015 rules and get out of the business of enforcing net neutrality. It appeared that Williams was sympathetic to the FCC’s arguments, while Judge Patricia Millett raised possible legal avenues for the companies and states suing the agency, and Judge Robert Wilkins was the swing vote, said Doug Brake, director of broadband and spectrum policy for the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a Washington think tank.  

The judges could decide to can the repeal or send it back to the FCC for a redo if they have specific objections.  

“Today we fought for an open and free internet that puts consumers first,” Mozilla Chief Operating Officer Denelle Dixon said after the hearing. “We believe the FCC needs to follow the rules like everyone else.”
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A United Arab Emirates senior diplomat denied Thursday the country had targeted “friendly countries” or American citizens in a cyberspying program that a Reuters report said involved a hacking team of U.S. mercenaries.

The Reuters investigation published Wednesday found that the UAE used a group of American intelligence contractors to help hack rival governments, dissidents and human rights activists. The contractors, former U.S. intelligence operatives, formed a core part of UAE’s cyber hacking program called Project Raven.

Project Raven also targeted Americans, and the Apple Inc iPhones of embassy staff for France, Australia and the United Kingdom, according to former operatives and program documents reviewed by Reuters.

Apple has declined to comment and did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday.

When asked about Project Raven by reporters at a briefing in New York, UAE Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Anwar Gargash acknowledged the country has a “cyber capability,” but denied targeting U.S. citizens or countries with which it has good relations.

“We live in a very difficult part of the world. We have to protect ourselves,” Gargash said. “We don’t target friendly countries and we don’t target American citizens.”

The French and U.K. embassies in Washington have declined to comment. A spokeswoman for the Australian ministry of foreign affairs has declined to comment. The U.S. State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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Facebook said Thursday it took down hundreds of “inauthentic” accounts from Iran that were part of a vast manipulation campaign operating in more than 20 countries.

The world’s biggest social network said it removed 783 pages, groups and accounts “for engaging in coordinated inauthentic behavior tied to Iran.”

The pages were part of a campaign to promote Iranian interests in various countries by creating fake identities as residents of those nations, according to a statement by Nathaniel Gleicher, head of cybersecurity policy at Facebook.

The announcement was the latest by Facebook as it seeks to stamp out efforts by state actors and others to manipulate the social network using fraudulent accounts.

“We are constantly working to detect and stop this type of activity because we don’t want our services to be used to manipulate people,” Gleicher said.

“We’re taking down these pages, groups and accounts based on their behavior, not the content they post. In this case, the people behind this activity coordinated with one another and used fake accounts to misrepresent themselves, and that was the basis for our action.”

The operators “typically represented themselves as locals, often using fake accounts, and posted news stories on current events,” including “commentary that repurposed Iranian state media’s reporting on topics like Israel-Palestine relations and the conflicts in Syria and Yemen,” Gleicher said.

“Although the people behind this activity attempted to conceal their identities, our manual review linked these accounts to Iran.”

The operation dating back to as early as 2010 had 262 pages, 356 accounts, and three groups on Facebook, as well as 162 accounts on Instagram and were followed by about two million users.

Facebook said the fake accounts were part of an influence campaign that operated in Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Mexico, Morocco, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, South Africa, Spain, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, U.S., and Yemen.

Facebook began looking into these kinds of activities after revelations of Russian influence campaigns during the 2016 U.S. election, aimed at sowing discord.
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Apple says Facebook can no longer distribute an app that paid users, including teenagers, to extensively track their phone and web use.

In doing so, Apple closed off Facebook’s efforts to sidestep Apple’s app store and its tighter rules on privacy.

The tech blog TechCrunch reported late Tuesday that Facebook paid people about $20 a month to install and use the Facebook Research app. While Facebook says this was done with permission, the company has a history of defining “permission” loosely and obscuring what data it collects.

“I don’t think they make it very clear to users precisely what level of access they were granting when they gave permission,” mobile app security researcher Will Strafach said Wednesday. “There is simply no way the users understood this.”

He said Facebook’s claim that users understood the scope of data collection was “muddying the waters.”

Facebook says fewer than 5 percent of the app’s users were teens and they had parental permission. Nonetheless, the revelation is yet another blemish on Facebook’s track record on privacy and could invite further regulatory scrutiny.

And it comes less than a week after court documents revealed that Facebook allowed children to rack up huge bills on digital games and that it had rejected recommendations for addressing it for fear of hurting revenue growth.

For now, the app appears to be available for Android phones, though not through Google’s main app store. Google had no comment Wednesday.

Apple said Facebook was distributing Facebook Research through an internal-distribution mechanism meant for company employees, not outsiders. Apple has revoked that capability.

TechCrunch reported separately Wednesday that Google was using the same privileged access to Apple’s mobile operating system for a market-research app, Screenwise Meter. Asked about it by The Associated Press, Google said it had disabled the app on Apple devices and apologized for its “mistake.”

The company said Google had always been “upfront with users” about how it used data collected by the app, which offered users points that could be accrued for gift cards. In contrast to the Facebook Research app, Google said its Screenwise Meter app never asked users to let the company circumvent network encryption, meaning it is far less intrusive.

Facebook is still permitted to distribute apps through Apple’s app store, though such apps are reviewed by Apple ahead of time. And Apple’s move Wednesday restricts Facebook’s ability to test those apps — including core apps such as Facebook and Instagram — before they are released through the app store.

Facebook previously pulled an app called Onavo Protect from Apple’s app store because of its stricter requirements. But Strafach, who dismantled the Facebook Research app on TechCrunch’s behalf, told the AP that it was mostly Onavo repackaged and rebranded, as the two apps shared about 98 percent of their code.

As of Wednesday, a disclosure form on Betabound, one of the services that distributed Facebook Research, informed prospective users that by installing Facebook Research, they are letting Facebook collect a range of data. This includes information on apps users have installed, when they use them and what they do on them. Information is also collected on how other people interact with users and their content within those apps, according to the disclosure.

Betabound warned that Facebook may collect information even when an app or web browser uses encryption.

Strafach said emails, social media activities, private messages and just about anything else could be intercepted. He said the only data absolutely safe from snooping are from services, such as Signal and Apple’s iMessages, that fully encrypt messages prior to transmission, a method known as end-to-end encryption.

Strafach, who is CEO of Guardian Mobile Firewall, said he was aghast to discover Facebook caught red-handed violating Apple’s trust.

He said such traffic-capturing tools are only supposed to be for trusted partners to use internally. Instead, he said Facebook was scooping up all incoming and outgoing data traffic from unwitting members of the public — in an app geared toward teenagers.

“This is very flagrantly not allowed,” Strafach said. “It’s mind-blowing how defiant Facebook was acting.”

 
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