Lime Launches $3M Campaign to Increase Scooter Safety

$3 Million

E-scooters have been a divisive form of micro-transit in cities across the country, in part because of the safety issues they pose. To encourage users to follow rules that keep them safer on two wheels, scooter-share company Lime is launching a $3 million campaign called Respect the Ride aiming to get riders to obey local laws, wear helmets and park appropriately. The effort is managed by the company’s new Head of Trust and Safety, and there’s an extra incentive for the first 25,000 users to pledge to Respect the Ride: a free Lime-brand helmet.
Source: Engadget

Handy Hacks

Everyone’s fingerprint is unique — mostly. A team of researchers at New York University have found a way to create artificial fingerprints that were able to imitate real biometric IDs in more than one in five cases in trials. Called “DeepMasterPrints,” the system takes advantage of the fact that most scanners pick up only a portion of the fingerprint, and many of those portions are very similar among populations. The researchers gave those common portions to a neural network, which then generated new fingerprints likely to match a large number of real ones. While hackers likely couldn’t use the fake prints to break into a single smartphone, it’s possible they could get into a system with many fingerprint access points.
Source: Gizmodo

Damn Fine Data

Tech behemoths like Facebook basically operate on a simple principle: Users get to access the service in exchange for giving the company their data. Facebook then uses that data to target advertising, which allows them to generate revenue. Shiru Café is essentially doing the same thing — with coffee. The company sells cups of coffee on college campuses, but instead of using cash or card, customers pay by giving up information like their name, school, major and more. Shiru then sells that information to corporations that will use it to direct their advertising efforts. It’s an idea that seems to be taking off: A location opened on the Brown University campus earlier this year, and Shiru estimates that more than 75 percent of students will sign up for free coffee in the fall semester.  Source: Digital Trends