Across the US, people are marching to protest the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other Black people who have been killed by police.

In response, tech companies have jumped on board, crafting blog posts and tweets to show their support for the Black Lives Matter movement. But while their messages say they stand against racism, employees within those companies have often told a different story.

Silicon Valley has long been a mostly-white boys club: Underrepresented minorities like Black and Latinx people still only make up single-digit percentages of the workforce at many major tech companies. When you look at the leadership statistics, the numbers are even bleaker. 

Making a corporate statement opposing racism should just be an initial step, says Aparna Rae, the cofounder of Moving Beyond, which helps companies make diversity, equity, and inclusion part of their business operations.

Companies should immediately "acknowledge the pain, suffering, and secondary trauma experienced by people of color employees, especially Black employees," she said, while equipping managers to offer time off, mental health resources, and no-meeting days. They can also support Black employees by providing white employees with resources to become better-informed allies, she said. 

Beyond the systemic racism they may deal with in their everyday lives, underrepresented minorities face barriers to breaking into tech that their white counterparts are less likely to face. 

Word choice in job postings can deter underrepresented minorities and women from applying in the first place, and if they do apply, tech interviewers may have unconscious biases that lead them to gravitate towards candidates like themselves (which can mean white males only hiring white males).

Once women and people of color are hired, they may face pay gaps and harassment. According to a Glassdoor survey, 43% of US employees have seen or experienced racism at work. While it's become common for major tech companies to hire diversity and inclusion executives, many startups don't make it a top priority early on, which can affect the way the company grows. 

And when the culture of a company is unwelcoming to underrepresented minorities, it affects their retention rate. In the past year, the tech industry has seen memos circulate from employees at Google and Facebook describing the racism and discrimination they have faced at work. In one memo, a former Black Google employee wrote that they "never stopped feeling the burden of being black at Google," and current Black engineering director Leslie Miley also shared shared how he was accosted at least once a week while wearing his badge because he doesn't look like the employee his coworkers expect.

Women and people of color have also been disproportionately impacted by layoffs during the coronavirus, says Evelyn Carter, director of Paradigm, which works with companies to improve their diversity and inclusion efforts. She says it's partly because layoff decisions are often based on tenure, and, for the aforementioned reasons, women and people of color are more likely to be in junior positions instead of leadership. 

"That influx of diversity is going away if folks aren't intentional about all their decisions in the employee life-cycle," Carter told Business Insider.

In recent years, companies have published their diversity statistics and pledged to increase hiring of people of color and women. In many cases, progress for these companies has been slow. 

Moving Beyond's Rae also said that companies should be publicly and explicitly detailing their plans to diversify company leadership and boards of directors, and focus on approaches grounded in data. 

"We are reading, 'We support Black Lives Matter," and, 'We don't condone racism,' but ultimately, when this dies down, is it going to be business as usual?" Rae said.

The value of making plans public is that it invites feedback and suggestions, and helps employees and outsiders hold the company accountable.

In that spirit, Business Insider put together a list detailing what 17 enterprise tech companies have said publicly about the ongoing protests, along with the diversity statistics at each one. We included statistics both for the company overall and in leadership. In addition, we asked each company what it plans to do in order to improve diversity and inclusion within the company:

Despite a surprisingly good jobs report for May, the layoffs in the tech industry keep rolling, with more than half a dozen tech companies cutting employees so far in June, according to Layoffs.fyi. All told, 490 startups have cut 63,580 employees since March, when COVID-19 hit the US in force.

The good news is that there are still over 800 tech companies on Layoffs.fyi who say they are hiring for thousands of jobs.

But competition to land a job is fierce, for the first time in years.

Dave Fano, founder of career coaching startup Teal, believes the difference between the people who immediately get a new job and those who struggle is tactics.

"There's so many people that need help right now and there's basic tactical stuff like how to write a resume (a lot of the old advice is wrong), and things like LinkedIn, which makes it more like SEO and content management than it is job searching," he says.

Teal offers a 6-week job-search workshop done in a cohort. It covers things like writing a modern resume, interviewing tactics, and how to search-engine-optimize (SEO) your LinkedIn profile to show up for recruiters. Doing the training in a group also helps with the hardest parts of job searching, loneliness and accountability, he says.

Job searching is "not a skill that most people get," he says, because most of us "just don't do it often enough."

Fano is best known for his years at WeWork as Chief Growth Officer, where he led multiple departments and grew his team from 300 to 3,500, during the office sharing company's heyday. He left about five months before WeWork attempted to go public and then imploded.

He left because he had an itch to turn all of that hiring experience into a new kind of company, he said, a subscription-based career coaching company. It came out of stealth just as COVID-19 struck, so Teal is currently specializing in job searching. The six-week course is supposed to cost $400, but it's half-price for anyone who's lost their job because of COVID-19.

For those who lose a job either through a layoff or, in these troubled political times, quit in protest, Fano teaches his job-searching students that these are the first things you should do:

1. Tell your networks on LinkedIn and elsewhere that you lost your job and are looking for a new one. 

"Once you've grieved and gone through the emotional process, say, 'Hey, I'm looking for work," Fano says.

Some people are ashamed of being laid off and fear that announcing their job hunt publicly will reflect badly on them. But you shouldn't be, "especially in this economy," he says. By writing a public announcement about your situation and your search, you are allowing people to reach out and help you.

"Make it easy for your network to help you. Don't assume that people know," Fano says.

2. Mine your network. Your network isn't just the people who follow you on LinkedIn. It is everyone in your whole career "you've ever had an interaction with," says Fano. "Have the courage to reach out."

He says one of his students reached out to an executive the person knew 10 years earlier, as the executive's dog walker. The exec listened and gave the person a lead on a great job. 

"When you reach out, people want to help," he says, especially in times of crises like today.

3. Do the work. Don't just "spray and pray." Don't just take a standard resume and cover letter and apply to a ton of jobs. "You need to put in the work and apply to each job with care and quality and a tailored application. And you should put it into a person's hands," he said. "Only apply online as last resort."

Think of yourself like a prospective investor. You may wind up investing a lot of your time and energy into this company, so do the research, including meeting connections.

4. "SEO" your LinkedIn resume. Include words that will help your profile be found by recruiters. This includes using keywords in your Headline, About section, and Experience section. Find the right keywords by examining job descriptions, looking at LinkedIn profiles of others, and using a Google keyword tools.

"Make sure your LinkedIn Profile has exact titles and permutations of titles," he says, such as associate product manager and lead product manager.

"We're seeing people get more job interviews, from zero — just crickets — to having inbound recruiters hit them up on LinkedIn, all by fixing their LinkedIn profiles," Fano says.

5. "Don't rely on tricks. Rely on showing why you are awesome," Fano says.

For instance, some people are worried about ageism and think they should hide dates like their college graduation. Recruiters see right through that. Focus on creating "good content. Don't do tricks," he says. Remember that content can include blog posts, videos and other ways you can show off your skills and your passion for your career.

The Buick Encore is a young-person's car that wears a badge long associated with more mature individuals. It shouldn't work, but it does, yielding impressive sales for the brand and cementing Buick's crossover-driven comeback from near-death during the financial crisis.

As a one-time Buick owner — my parents gave me their Regal in the 1980s — I've approached the Encore with skepticism since the "cute ute's" debut over half a decade ago. I'll never forget the first time I drove one, in 2014. Man, is this thing small, I thought.

But over the years, the Encore has stood out because it's part of a brand that's thought of as "near luxury" and is supposed to rise above the mass market and prepare buyers, in the General Motors' logic, to graduate to a Cadillac someday. 

That old brand ladder doesn't apply anymore, but for the Encore to make good on its brand promise, it needs to be comparable to a small BMW utes, even though one might want to match it up against Mazda and Kia.

For 2020, Buick has rolled out the all-new GX level of the Encore, and I spent a week testing it in New Jersey and New York. Here's how it went.

 

Welcome to Wall Street Insider, where we take you behind the scenes of the finance team's biggest scoops and deep dives from the past week. 

If you aren't yet a subscriber to Wall Street Insider, you can sign up here.

It was another tough week for the nation, with an outpouring of anguish and frustration continuing through days of protests. You can keep up with our newsroom-wide coverage here. 

Business Insider took a look at how execs at big companies around the country are responding to the deaths of George Floyd and other black people in America and addressing protests against police brutality, and wrote about how leaders can use their visibility to join broader conversations about race and racism and promote actions for change. Business Insider has also spotlighted some of the most influential leaders who are fighting inequality and driving changes in corporate diversity and inclusion.  

Despite social unrest across the US, investors were largely optimistic about the country's economic prospects after months of setbacks due to the coronavirus pandemic. 

US stocks surged this week, boosted by early signs of a labor-market recovery. And the IPO market came roaring back, with Warner Music Group raising $1.9 billion in the biggest initial public offering of the year. Other companies including marketing-software firm ZoomInfo as well as Shift4 Payments priced shares above their expected ranges and skyrocketed in their first day of trading. 

Shift4 Payments was the first company to appear in-person to celebrate a market debut at the New York Stock Exchange since the pandemic took hold. Shannen Balogh talked with Jared Isaacman, the payment-tech firm's CEO, about what it was like live-streaming a bell-ringing to Shift4's over 700 employees and how the company pitched itself to investors without meeting them in person. 

Read the full story here: 

It was a busy week for real-estate news as well.

Silver Lake added to a string of bets in the struggling travel sector by leading a $108 million investment in vacation-property startup Vacasa. WeWork cofounder Miguel McKelvey is out, and his job as chief culture officer at the coworking giant won't be replaced. And Neiman Marcus's flagship store in the glitzy Hudson Yards mega-mall is now being marketed as office space.

Thanks for reading, and enjoy the weekend, 

-Meredith 

PayPal power players

The venture capital industry has a dismal track record funding black founders, but a recent flurry of specialized funds devoted to underrepresented entrepreneurs risks creating a segregated startup landscape, according to a prominent VC investor.

As protests rage across the country over the death of George Floyd, numerous venture capital firms have issued statements condemning racial injustice and police brutality. Some have gone further and rolled out new programs.

 SoftBank and Andreessen Horowitz, for example, announced new venture and donor-advisory funds this week that will be charged with backing startups founded by African-Americans or people from other under-invested communities.

But at a gathering hosted by BLCK VC on Thursday, venture capitalist Monique Woodard cautioned against a venture firm establishing such a fund as a substitute for committing money to black founders from its existing funds — in other words, only setting aside a small sum of money and resources to avoid dealing with systemic issues in the firm pipeline.

Such thinking, she warned, could lead to a "separate but equal" mentality in the VC industry. 

"Black entrepreneurs don't need a separate water fountain," Woodard said."You have to fix the systemic issues in your funds that keep black founders out and keep you from delivering better returns."

Andreessen Horowitz has already pushed back against similar criticisms, and pointed toward a track record of funding diverse founders as proof that the new fund simply compliments those efforts.  

Just 3% of venture capital partners and 1% of startup founders are black, statistics that are being used to illustrate a damning lack of opportunity for startup founders and VCs outside Silicon Valley's traditional networks. 

Woodard, a former partner at 500 Startups who has actively tried to grow diversity in the industry for years, noted that the push to donate to charities or commit money to donor-advised funds was helpful.

But venture capitalists could drive even more meaningful change by acting in their capacity as investors, and writing checks for often-overlooked black founders who enter the startup ecosystem with more barriers to accessing seed capital from family and friends. 

"Not having startups led by black founders in your portfolio is a failure that can't be donated away," said Woodard, who now leads Cake Ventures.

Venture capitalists opening up their calendars for office hours with black founders should also be ready to offer more than their time, Woodard added. 

"Black founders are often overmentored and underinvested. Check your desire to open up office hours and mentor exclusively, versus your ability to write a check," Woodard said. 

With the same token, Woodard said that LPs should also seek out black venture fund managers, who often choose to start their own funds because partnerships at a blue-chip VC firm aren't often available. Putting money in those funds could be an invaluable boost to the community, Woodard said. 

Someday, your packages might be delivered by a robot that stands, walks, and hands things over to you.

Agility Robotics announced its newest model, Digit, in 2019. Digit has legs, a torso, and arms, designed to complete many of the same tasks human workers do in warehouses and factories. Agility says that it specifically envisions Digit being part of last-mile deliveries.

Ford became Digit's first buyer, with plans to use it for package delivery. Researchers are working on ways for Digit and Ford vehicles to communicate with each other. Adding arms is a major improvement over Agility's last bipedal robot, Cassie, according to the company. "Arms are simultaneously a tool for moving through the world — think getting up after a fall, waving your arms for balance, or pushing open a door — while also being useful for manipulating or carrying objects," CTO Jonathan Hurst explained. 

Digit will start shipping later this year, for a price in the "low-mid six figures."

Take a look at how it works. 

In the past four months, Discord's app has become faster and its engineers have been able to write code more efficiently, too.

How? It's all thanks to a programming language called Rust. 

After first using the language to build a game downloader tool in early 2018, Discord decided earlier this year to completely ditch the Google-created programming language Go to embrace Rust, instead.

"When people want to play a game, they want to play it as quickly as possible," Jesse Howarth, staff software engineer at the gaming chat company, told Business Insider. "When you're developing something, you want to develop as quickly as possible."

That's where Rust comes in. Rust is known for being easy to write, secure, and memory efficient, and developers see it as an alternative to Go or legacy programming languages like C++ and C.

"You can get the performance, but it is easier to write code without having bugs," Howarth said, comparing Rust to C++. "You don't have the mental burden of thinking about memory management and pointers that turn people off of C++."

Discord is only one of many companies that have picked up Rust in the past few years, which Mozilla originally developed for its Firefox browser. It's widely used by companies like Amazon Web Services, Dropbox, Fastly, Microsoft, Facebook, and more. Facebook is even using it to build its new cryptocurrency project, Libra, and Rust's adoption grew 235% in the past year, according to data from Microsoft's GitHub, making it one of the fastest growing programming languages. 

"It's by developers, for developers," Fastly CTO Tyler McMullen told Business Insider. "Rust is clearly one of the most loved programming languages out there. We're pretty jazzed to be supporting it."

As McMullen says, developers are not only using Rust more, they adore it too: Rust topped Stack Overflow's list of favorite programming languages, according to its recent survey of 65,000 developers — for the fifth year in a row.

And knowing how to code in Rust pays well, too: According to the same survey, Rust developers in the US make a median salary of $130,000. 

How Rust began

Mozilla first launched Rust in 2010 when it was building a new browser core for Firefox. Most browsers, including Google Chrome, Safari, and Microsoft Edge are written in C++, but Mozilla was dissatisfied with it, and wanted to build a completely new programming language that was more efficient. But Mozilla didn't want to just keep a budding language to itself or create it for a single purpose: It also wanted to build a community.

"We didn't want Rust to only be a language for building browser engines," Nicholas Matsakis, principal research engineer at Mozilla, told Business Insider. "We knew if we wanted to build a new language, it had to be widely usable."

Initially, Matsakis says the team thought of Rust as a more efficient replacement for C++. Most browsers, including Google Chrome, Safari, and Microsoft Edge are written in C++. However they also put careful consideration and focus into figuring out how to solve another major pain point for developers: that they spend a disproportionate amount of time weeding out bugs. 

"That was the problem we were trying to solve," Matsakis said. "Could we get a level of control while protecting ourselves from those kinds of bugs so developers can focus on building the thing they're building?"

Besides Firefox, Mozilla also uses Rust for projects like Stylo, used for designing web pages, and its monitoring server.

Mozilla made Rust an open source language, meaning it was free for anyone to use, download, or modify. As more developers began experimenting with it and learning to use it, the positive reviews started spreading and companies like Facebook, Dropbox, and AWS started adopting it. 

Why companies like using Rust: 'Things kind of just work'

Discord decided to start using Rust because the company had issues with memory and speed when using Go.

Go, like many other programming languages, uses a memory management process called "garbage collection" that systematically runs through a program to free up memory that's not currently being used. Rust does not use garbage collection. Instead, it allows developers to encode "ownership" to keep track of memory. When memory is no longer being used, it's immediately freed up, which is faster and more efficient than waiting for a garbage collector to check that it's free. 

After Discord switched over to Rust, Howarth says that its app worked faster, and its engineers are able to develop more quickly as well.

The memory efficiency drew Dropbox to Rust as well. Since 2016, Dropbox has used it for building file uploading features, storage, code libraries, back end servers, and more. Dropbox software engineer Sujay Jayakar says that Rust has been a "huge success" for Dropbox and "a delight to program," because it gives programmers more control. Rust combines the best pieces of many long standing programming languages like C++, but adds innovations of its own, he says. 

"The benefits of Rust have been a huge, huge win for us," Jayakar said. "We've been able to move quickly. We don't need to spend as much time hunting down bugs."

Why the decrease in bugs? 

Beyond its memory management model, developers like that Rust's type system — how programming languages assign properties to different software components — prevents variables from being null (or having no value attached to them). This avoids the dreaded null pointer exception which occurs when a program references something that doesn't have a value — and has been referred to the "billion dollar mistake." Null pointers often crash programs, and Rust prevents them.

"You've heard of the 'billion dollar mistake' before," Facebook software engineer Mark Thomas told Business Insider. "Rust doesn't have that."

Facebook first started using Rust two and a half years ago with projects called Mononoke and Mercurial, which help engineers at the company track and monitor code changes. Facebook software engineer Thomas Orozco estimates that it made Facebook's programs about 10 times faster. 

"Things kind of just work when you do them in Rust," Orozco told Business Insider. "You can do the simplest thing you can do, and you get good performance out of it."

Most recently, Facebook picked Rust to implement core features for its new cryptocurrency Libra because of its security features – something that's especially crucial for that project. 

Rust has a steep learning curve, but it pays off 

One challenge of Rust is that it has a steep learning curve, developers say. However, once engineers understand it, it pays off quickly. 

"Over the past year, we've found that even though Rust has a high learning curve, it's an investment that has paid off," Ben Maurer, tech lead for the Libra-focused Facebook subsidiary Calibra, told Business Insider. "Rust has helped Libra build a clean, principled blockchain implementation."

Dropbox's Jayakar echoed that once a few people became proficient, they could make quick progress. 

"It paid off very very quickly," he said. "We were able to get our server in production and in our performance budget with a very small team at a very accelerated schedule." 

Another challenge, according to Cloudflare CTO John Graham-Cumming, is that since it's a newer language, some libraries — which include code needed to support and run an application — are not as developed. Engineers need to stay on top of new updates as the language matures. Still, he adds, these challenges are minor. 

"I think it's going to be one of the major languages that people use to write fast, safe code," Graham-Cumming told Business Insider. "I think it will coexist with other languages like Go for a very long time."

Why Rust has grown so fast

Rust has been able to grow in large part because of its open source developer community.

That's what originally drew AWS to it. 

AWS started toying with Rust in 2012, and it got more serious about it in 2015 and 2016 because more of its customers were talking about it as their preferred language, says Peder Ulander, general manager of open source at Amazon Web Services. 

"It's a way for us to go after that developer community early on," he said. "While it started within our infrastructure, it started to make its way into other teams."

Today, AWS uses Rust for its storage and compute platform, as well as its serverless product Lambda, which allows developers to run and scale their code without having to manage the servers. Rust is also core to AWS's open source virtualization-technology project Firecracker. 

"It's a very friendly and safe programming language," Ulander adds. 

Since Rust is open source, developers have also built a plethora of tools to help support Rust. It's still maintained by Mozilla, and other companies have said that the Mozilla team is especially supportive.  

Discord, for example, has a symbiotic relationship with Mozilla's Rust team. The Rust team itself uses Discord, so Discord's team can hop on their shared chat if they have any questions about Rust. 

"One thing worth noting is the Rust community is really doing a great job," Howarth said. "There's a lot of community libraries out there that people are working hard to work really well and a lot of thought that goes into it."

Fastly's McMullen agrees that the developer community around Rust is very welcoming. 

"It doesn't matter if you don't know C: The Rust community is welcoming to people of all these different backgrounds," McMullen said. "The community around the languages are indicative of the people who started the language."

Mozilla's Matsakis works with the Rust open source community, and he says one of the first things the team did was create a process for submitting changes and improvements to the language. Today, he sees developers using it for servers, embedded systems, cryptocurrency, and more.

"The community drives and helps us steer and ensure the language and meeting people's needs," Matsakis said. 

Finally, developers say Rust has grown so fast simply because developers love it.

"Rust is growing very fast to a large degree because people really enjoy writing it. It shifts the mental model in how you program," Armin Ronacher, director of engineering at Sentry, told Business Insider. "People that start working with the language, they develop a new sense of how to write code and it's very appealing."

The future of Rust

Today, developers use Rust in web applications, servers, game engines, operating systems, virtual reality, and other systems-intensive tasks. And now, Rust is increasingly being used for embedded devices – where before, the older programming language C has reigned supreme – as well as with WebAssembly, which is used for running modern web browsers.

Other languages have come and go, Facebook's Thomas says Rust is here to stay, thanks to its reliability, robustness, and ability to stop prevalent bugs. 

"You don't need to be on your toes when you're coding in Rust," Thomas said. "Rust is the first language in a long time that brings something new to the table. Other languages promise a lot but don't bring real improvement to the developer ecosystem."

AWS's Ulander predicts that companies will increasingly pick Rust as a default language for infrastructure projects. He says the last few years have been the "awkward teenage years" where more people are paying attention to it and starting to learn it. Now, Rust is in the middle of a "growth spurt."

"It's easy to use, extremely well put-together, the community is engaging and very easy to participate in, and you have all the needs of documentation that makes for a very good developer experience," Ulander said. "That's usually the biggest challenge. Rust gives them that sense of security and fun."

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Netflix's "Lucifer" is back on the audience demand charts this week.

The streaming giant had renewed the series for a fifth and final season, but TV Line reported this week that star Tom Ellis has signed a new deal that could lead to a sixth season.

Every week, Parrot Analytics provides Business Insider with a list of the nine most in-demand TV shows on streaming services in the US.

The data is based on "demand expressions," Parrot Analytics' globally standardized TV-demand measurement unit. Audience demand reflects the desire, engagement, and viewership weighted by importance. The list is ranked by how much more in demand the top series are than the average TV show in the US.

Below are this week's nine most popular original shows on Netflix and other streaming services:

Some programming languages are known to cause massive headaches for developers.

Sometimes it's because these languages hard to learn. Sometimes it's because they're older and more likely to have bugs in the code, or even crash. Or sometimes, writing in a certain language is simply frustrating. 

Stack Overflow, a Q&A site for developers with 50 million unique monthly visitors, is especially well-positioned to identify the top languages that developers are coding in. Last week, it released its annual survey where it asked over 65,000 developers about themselves and their programming habits. That included the languages they love the most, and the languages they dread.

To find out the "most dreaded" languages, Stack Overflow asked developers what language they use, but have no interest in continuing to use. 

Sadly for many developers with headaches, some of their most dreaded languages are also the most popular in terms of how widely they are used.

Notably, this survey was conducted in February, before the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak to be a pandemic. Different routines and challenges around remote work may have affected developers' choices, but we'll just have to wait until the next survey to see how, if at all. 

For now, here are the "most dreaded" programming languages, according to Stack Overflow, in descending order. You'll find the top source of dread at the bottom of the list.

Thousands of Americans are protesting police brutality and systemic racism across the nation following the police killing of Minneapolis resident George Floyd.

Of the precautions that protesters should consider to stay safe is how to prepare for your phone being broken or lost. It could also be confiscated by authorities, who could then potentially access information about you and those you communicate with. Scores of data are located in the apps on your phone, and your smartphone can also be used as a tracking device.

All of which is to say safeguarding your phone against external forces might be a good step to take before attending a protest.

Here's how to prep your phone before joining a demonstration.

1. Leave your phone at home if you can.

As Vice reports, perhaps one of the most surefire ways to prevent your phone from falling into the hands of someone you don't want it to is to participate in the protest without it.

You can instead coordinate with others by word of mouth. Establish meeting places and contingency plans for regrouping in case the crowd is dispersed and you lose track of each other. Familiarize yourself with the city grid and streets. 

You could also buy a burner phone to use solely for the demonstration, The Verge reports. They expire after a certain number of days and can cost anywhere between $1 and $100 — Digital Camera World rounded up some in February.

2. If you do take your phone, back up your photos, contact numbers, and other data beforehand.

Losing or breaking your phone could mean thousands of photos, notes, and other data could be lost. Consider backing up your phone's contents to a computer or to the cloud, according to Gizmodo.

As PC Mag notes, you can also temporarily delete apps from your phone and then reinstall them at a later date.

3. Encrypt your phone.

By using an encryption key, or password, to unlock your phone, you're creating a barrier between your phone data and anyone that could potentially take advantage of it.

For iPhone users, if you use a passcode to get into your device, then you're set — it's already encrypted.

4. But consider relying on a password to unlock your phone instead of a fingerprint or facial recognition.

If law enforcement asks you to punch in your password to unlock your phone, you retain your Fifth Amendment right to refuse, as Gizmodo reports.

But biometric methods, such as unlocking with your fingerprint or face scan, aren't as protected in case you're taken into police custody. Officers could still potentially hold your phone up to your face or press your finger to the device to unlock it.

Consider deactivating Face ID and use a strong password instead. 

5. Consider disabling WiFi, Bluetooth, and location services on your phone.

These functions can track your location, a feat that some companies and brands are able to take advantage of for advertising purposes, according to Consumer Reports.

If you don't need Wifi, GPS, or Bluetooth, you can switch them off to prevent your exact location from being monitored. As CR notes, some smartphones are designed to switch these settings back on by default, so be sure to keep tabs on whether or not they stay disabled.

You can read how to stop your iPhone from tracking your location here.

You can also put your phone in Airplane Mode to prevent tracking, which shuts off WiFi, Bluetooth, and cell data in one fell swoop. As The Verge notes, doing so prevents cellphone carriers from communicating with cell towers to locate you. It also shields against stingray attacks, which is when a device masquerades as a cell tower to connect and gain access to phone data. In 2018, the American Civil Liberties Union found 75 law enforcement agencies across 27 states in the US that owned these types of tools, as The Markup notes.

But Airplane Mode differs depending on what phone you have, so disabling it isn't always an airtight solution.

You can also simply turn your phone off and only use it when you need it. But that can make it more difficult to quickly take photos, record videos, or be able to quickly make an urgent call. 

6. Use anonymous messaging apps to communicate.

Phone message encryption has its limits, such as in the case of an iPhone user messaging with an Android user — the text automatically converts to SMS, which isn't encrypted. So experts have recommended using secure chat apps such as Signal or WhatsApp, according to The Markup.

Signal has seen a spike in user downloads as protests have been held across the US.

As Consumer Reports notes, the app provides a setting that deletes messages soon after the recipient reads it, which can help protect both parties on either end of the conversation in the event that one of them loses their phone.

7. You should also disable notifications.

If you don't do so, and your phone is lost or confiscated, others may be privy to the messages and alerts that appear on your home screen, as The Markup points out.

You'd be protecting both you and the people sending you messages by preventing their texts from appearing.

A renowned Silicon Valley futurist says Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's refusal to take any kind of action on President Donald Trump's aggressive posts is an omen of the decline of the iconic social network.

Paul Saffo, the veteran forecaster who has predicted major tech trends over the past three decades, said Zuckerberg's refusal to flag or delete Trump comments that many — including some of the social network's own employees — feel were inciting violence towards protesters has caused serious harm to the 16-year-old company. Facebook could not be reached for comment.

Saffo is well-known for predicting major trends in technology, including the expanded role of sensors and robotics, and the  transformation of the global economy. He predicted the rise of a world dominated by a company like Facebook. In 1994, a decade before the social network was born, he described a future dominated by "those who control the filtering, searching and sense-making tools we will rely on to navigate through the banal expanses of cyberspace."

Facebook quickly emerged as the dominant social media platform and a tech powerhouse now worth $645 billion. But the social network also became controversial as a massive platform notorious for spreading hate speech and misinformation.

Saffo compared Facebook to AOL. the once dominant portal at the dawn of the Internet age in the 1990s whose influence and reach subsequently shrank as it was overtaken by new players including Google and Facebook.

"This is Facebook's AOL moment," Saffo told Business Insider. "Its forward advance is going to be stalled."

'It's a complete mystery to me that he would do that'

President Donald Trump is better-known for his use of Twitter, though his tweets there are usually also posted on his official Facebook page. Twitter, however, recently began fact-checking some of the president's posts. That prompted Trump to issue an executive order intended to crack down on social networks.

Zuckerberg appeared to take Trump's side, slamming Twitter's decision and saying "that Facebook or internet platforms in general shouldn't be arbiters of truth."

That triggered a wave of criticism against Zuckerberg. "It's a complete mystery to me that he would do that," Saffo said. "It just totally puzzles me."

The controversy escalated on May 28th, when Twitter placed a label on a Trump tweet that threatened violence against George Floyd protesters in Minneapolis, requiring users to click through a warning that it was "glorifying violence" before viewing the post.

Facebook chose to leave the post alone entirely, prompting a backlash that included a virtual employee walkout. Late on Friday evening, Zuckerberg pledged to revisit Facebook's rules on posts related to state violence.

'We're right on the cusp'

This all comes amid growing worries about Facebook's role in the spread of misinformation and hateful content, and its impact on democracy in the US and other countries.  Last year, cofounder Chris Hughes said Facebook should be broken up as he criticized Zuckerberg's "unprecedented and un-American power."

Facebook, which now has 2.6 billion users, continues to expand although the pace of growth has slowed. Saffo says Facebook is wrestling with mounting criticism as new social platforms and technologies are emerging.

"We're right on the cusp," he said. "The current social media order is more or less 20 years old and we change social media about every 20 years."

Saffo predicts the rise of new immersive platforms based on virtual reality technologies. Facebook is pushing into that market with Oculus, its suite of virtual reality hardware and software products.

But Saffo said he doesn't see Facebook, given its internal turmoil and the controversial policies Zuckerberg has embraced, leading that trend.

"Can a company like Facebook cross over into that world?" he said. "I think the answer's no." He added: "I would say Facebook is going to start down the path of AOL, a long slow slide into oblivion."

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Where top VCs are investing in D2C

Amy and I, along with Techstars, were Executive Producers for Robin Hauser‘s film “bias“.

It’s an extremely helpful documentary around understanding unconscious bias. When Robin made the film, she concentrated on examples around gender and race, but the principles apply to all aspects of bias.

I’ve always felt the final wording on the overview captured the film well.

bias is a film that challenges us to confront our hidden biases and understand what we risk when we follow our gut. Through exposing her own biases, award-winning documentary filmmaker Robin Hauser highlights the nature of implicit bias and the grip it holds on our social and professional lives.

Throughout the film, Robin gives voice to neighbors concerned about profiling in their communities, CEOs battling bias in their businesses, and those of us hesitant to admit our own biases. After confronting her unconscious bias, Robin turns to action by engaging with innovative experiments – from corporate strategies to tech interventions and virtual reality – that are reshaping our understanding of implicit bias and attempting to mitigate it.

On Thurday, June 25th at 11am PST (2pm EST) there will be an online panel discussion around Bias. In advance of the panel discussion, you’ll get a link to watch the film online.

Along with Robin, the panelists are Kate Mitchell (Scale Venture Partners), Heather Gates (Deloitte & Touche), and Elliott Robinson (Bessemer Venture Partners).

I appreciate the sponsors – NVCA, Salesforce Ventures, Deloitte, and SVB – for hosting. I’m an enormous fan of Robin’s work (Amy and I also were Executive Producers for her documentary Code: Debugging the Gender Gap) and I learned a lot from both films.

I encourage you to sign up for the discussion and the free screening of the film online. I just did …