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Ashton Kutcher invests in Berlin start-up Gidsy

Hollywood heartthrob Ashton Kutcher has invested in yet another Berlin start-up, taking a stake in event marketplace Gidsy.

Published: 14 January 2012 09:46 CET

Ashton Kutcher invests in Berlin start-up Gidsy

Photo: DPA

The company confirmed on Friday that it had closed its seed round and had secured funding from a number of investors, including Kutcher, who has already invested in Berlin-based companies Amen and SoundCloud.

Founded by Dutch brothers Edial and Floris Dekker and Austrian Philpp Wassibauer in May 2011, Gidsy allows people to host different activities and make money in the process. The site hosts any kind of event, from photography workshops to yoga classes to walking tours. Their website posts the activity and handles bookings and customer service, and takes a 10 percent surcharge.

The company is already operating in Berlin, New York and Amsterdam and is launching in London and San Francisco within the next two weeks.

In total Gidsy raised $1.2 million in seed investment from Sunstone Capital, Index Ventures, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, Peter Read and Kutcher.

“Since our launch, two months ago, we have seen the platform grow to something very special. We had a few assumptions, but the feedback and activities organized on Gidsy have surpassed all our expectations,” CEO Edial Dekker announced in a press release on Friday.

“Today is a big day for us. We’re super excited to have some of the best investors in the world backing us.”

The Local/smd

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Cookie fight: Austrian activist in tough online privacy fight

The 35-year-old Austrian lawyer and his Vienna-based privacy campaign group NOYB (None Of Your Business) is currently handling no fewer than 800 complaints in various jurisdictions on behalf of internet users.

“For an average citizen, it’s almost impossible right now to enforce your rights”, Schrems told AFP. “For us as an organisation, it’s already a lot of work to do that” given the system’s complexity due to the regulators’ varying requirements, he added.

The 2018 General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) imposes strict rules on how companies can use and store personal data, with the threat of huge fines for firms breaching them.

While hundreds of millions of euros in fines have been imposed following complaints filed by NOYB, Schrems said the GDPR is hardly ever enforced. And that’s a “big problem”, he added.

He said the disregard for fundamental rights such as data privacy is almost comparable to “a dictatorship”. “The difference between reality and the law is just momentous,” Schrems
added.

‘Annoying’ cookies

Instead of tackling the problems raised by the GDPR, companies resort to “window dressing” while framing the rules as an “annoying law” full of “crazy cookie banners”, according to Schrems.

Under the regulation, companies have been obliged to seek user consent to install “cookies” enabling browsers to save information about a user’s online habits to serve up highly targeted ads.

Industry data suggests only three percent of internet users actually approve of cookies, but more than 90 percent are pressured to consent due to a “deceptive design” which mostly features “accept” buttons.

Stymied by the absence of a simple “yes or no” option and overwhelmed by a deluge of pop-ups, users get so fed up that they simply give up, Schrems said. Contrary to the law’s intent, the burden is being “shifted to the individual consumer, who should figure it out”.

Even though society now realises the importance of the right to have private information be forgotten or removed from the internet, real control over personal data is still far-off, the activist said. But NOYB has been helping those who want to take back control by launching
privacy rights campaigns that led companies to adopt “reject” buttons.

Shift of business model

Regulators have imposed big penalties on companies that violated GDPR rules: Facebook owner Meta, whose European headquarters are in Dublin, was hit with fines totalling 390 million euros ($424 million) in January.

One reason why tech giants like Google or Meta as well as smaller companies choose against playing by the GDPR rules is because circumventing them pays off, Schrems said.

Thriving on the use of private data, tech behemoths make “10 to 20 times more money by violating the law, even if they get slapped with the maximum fine”, he added.

Contacted by AFP, both companies said they were working hard to make sure their practices complied with the regulations.

Schrems also accuses national regulators of either being indifferent or lacking the resources to seriously investigate complaints. “It’s a race to the bottom,” Schrems said. “Each country has its own way of not getting anything done”.

Buoyed by his past legal victories, Schrems looks to what he calls the “bold” EU Court of Justice to bring about change as it “usually is a beacon of hope in all of this”.

Meanwhile, the European Commission is considering a procedures regulation to underpin and clarify the GDPR.

In the long-run, however, the situation will only improve once large companies “fundamentally shift their business models”. But that would require companies to stop being “as crazy profitable as they are right now,” Schrems said.

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