eBay Acquires Fraud Sciences For $169 Million

eBay through Paypal has acquired fraud detection provider Fraud Sciences Ltd for $169 million.

Israel and Palo Alto based Fraud Sciences offers automated anti-fraud systems including SpotLight VFX and SpotLight T2T, merchant solutions the provide transaction verification with fraud prevention. In an October 2007 profile, Israelplug said that Fraud Sciences products “help online retailers verify the identity of buyers and accept orders that they would have seen as suspicious in the past - thus enabling them to increase their sales.”

eBay said the acquisition will assist them in significantly improving trust and safety across its sites in 2008. Fraud Sciences’ risk tools will be integrated with PayPal’s fraud management system.

Personnel from Fraud Sciences, including Yossi Barak, Fraud Sciences’ COO, and founders Shvat Shaked and Saar Wilf, will join PayPal’s technology and fraud management teams.

This acquisition is expected to be completed within 30 days.

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Safe Self-driving Cars

Autonomous cars are here now, driven by a gold-rush opportunity for transportation-related industries to reduce or even eliminate the high economic cost of human drivers. Self-driving cars also create a significant side benefit to internet-related industries: capturing six billion additional minutes of concentrated click-time per day, in the U.S. alone.

The industries pushing this transportation revolution from the top down claim they are doing so altruistically to save lives, but too often that claim reveals itself to be pre-textual--either because their actions belie their words, or because we could adopt less-disruptive, less-expensive life-saving options today if reducing deaths were the actual goal. Most press and government regulation covering autonomous technology is fawning and accommodating, respectfully, not healthily skeptical nor productively adversarial. This still-experimental technology is now deployed on pubic streets based on misleading statistics, conflicting relationships between technologists and elected officials, and without sufficient critical review by state agencies, potentially placing people in harm's way.

SafeSelfDrive.org was created not to stifle this technology, but to honestly address law and policy related to consumer-side interests of autonomous car safety first, as well as implications for privacy, liability & accountability, economics, and insurance.

J.S. McPherson, founder of SafeSelfDrive.org is an attorney and legal consultant in the San Francisco Bay Area with 21 years experience in large and small firms, representing people and businesses in both litigation and transactions, now devoted full-time to the advancement of autonomous car safety, manufacturer accountability, and the formation of a body of law that fairly balances responsible innovation and consumer protection. Follow on Twitter @SafeSelfDrive, or inquire regarding services to jsm@safeselfdrive.org.