🔎 Cheater apps = privacy nightmare

Plus: An AI-powered contact lens, the shrinking remote job pool, and more.

Share The Hustle: https://thehustle.co/join?ref=7598767985 Check your referral progress & prizes here 👋  Boo! Did that scare you? Probably not as much as government corruption does. For the 10th year in a row, corrupt government officials topped the list in Chapman University's annual Survey of American Fears. A spooky government beat out fears of a loved one becoming seriously ill and financial collapse for 1k+ respondents. Anyway, have a good day — and maybe check under your bed for corrupt politicians tonight.   🎧  On the pod: How two family operations turned Halloween costumes into a big business. STARTING UP Is a smart contact lens the answer to better glaucoma care? ❌  The problem: Around 80m people have glaucoma globally, but testing for the condition is imperfect. Eye pressure — the key indicator of the disease — fluctuates throughout the day, and can be easily missed during a clinic visit.   💡  The pitch: Smartlens developed miLens, a contact lens that continually monitors eye pressure and is paired with an AI-powered smartphone imaging platform to track and analyze data.  🚀  The outlook: The future is looking bright and clear for the Silicon Valley-based startup. It just raised $5.2m of funding, and the market interest is certainly there — in a Market Scope survey of 166 ophthalmic practitioners, over 96% said they'll use the lens when it's available. NEWS FLASH Airbnb's wet blanket: The company will implement its "anti-party system" Halloween weekend, which uses machine learning to redirect suspected party hosts to party-unfriendly options instead. Last year, it blocked ~38k attempted entire home bookings in the US. Nostalgia play: PGAV Destinations, which has created attractions for Disney World and SeaWorld, announced RetroEscapes, a forthcoming Las Vegas theme park with a '50s diner, '70s disco, '80s arcade, and '90s skate park. Risky business: Half of US holiday shoppers plan to use BNPL services this year, per PayPal data, which result in a higher average order value of 91% for enterprises and 62% for small businesses. But ~50% of US adults who've used them have had at least one financial hardship and 16% reported missing a payment, per a recent YouGov survey. Microsoft, maker of Xbox, announced an updated version of "Halo: Combat Evolved" for the game's 25th anniversary, and for the first time, it'll be available on Sony PlayStation, Microsoft's rival. Weird. YOUR SECRET AGENTS 12 ways you should be using AI With your gifted guiding hand, AI tools like Jasper are capable of great creative feats.    If you're not employing agents like this… Turn pain points → value propositions Generate reusable content "recipes" Turn long-form stuff → snackable bites  Whip up AI scripts and storyboards …then your efficiency is suffering, but we've got just the fix: 36 Jasper AI prompts for hacking your workflow. Ideate with AI   THE BIG IDEA Catch-a-cheater apps vs. anti-facial recognition tech Bad news for anyone who likes their personal life private: apps designed to catch cheaters are using facial recognition tech to surface dating profiles.    Such apps may appeal to paranoid partners or spouses, but data privacy experts are definitely not fans, while other companies are offering solutions for people who don't want their faces scanned.  How it works Apps like Cheaterbuster and CheatEye, marketed through platforms like TikTok, charge a fee to try to match a user-supplied photo of someone's face to their potential dating profiles on apps like Tinder. 404 Media's test of such apps found them to be accurate.  While you may not feel bad for an attempted cheater, these apps provide no context as to why someone might have a profile — maybe they forgot to deactivate it, or are the victim of a catfisher — and can be used by anyone, including stalkers, scammers, or other bad actors. They can also turn up inaccurate results, resulting in unnecessary drama.  Beyond that, they're a privacy nightmare. Tech advisor Mark Weinstein told The Verge these apps are "really just vigilante surveillance," data mining and building databases of profiles — which also typically contain names, ages, locations, and other info — without consent.  Meanwhile… … online glasses retailer Zenni has begun selling a new lens coating designed to reflect infrared light and block some facial recognition cameras. 404 Media also tested these lenses and found you couldn't open an iPhone while wearing them, but they didn't work across all cameras or in all types of light.  Trying to beat surveillance systems isn't a new endeavor. Activists have used makeup and companies have released anti-facial recognition clothing, including one Italian startup that sold a sweater designed to trick cameras into thinking the wearer was a giraffe.  Yet most people are probably going to upload very ordinary photos of themselves to dating apps, LinkedIn, and social media, so they're not likely to thwart the cheating apps.  Legislation making such apps illegal could. Weinstein told The Verge that they would violate the EU's data protection policies, but US law has no such federal protections, though efforts are underway.  We could also just all agree to not use invasive apps, but it seems like that ship has already sailed. 🔗 HIGHLY RECOMMENDED   Calling it now: Your startup's growth problem is actually a sales problem. Good thing we've got The Science of Scaling for you. Our newest newsletter, which you can subscribe to here, covers the data-backed tactics that actually drive revenue. NEWSWORTHY NUMBER Share of paid US jobs advertised on LinkedIn in September that were for remote positions. So, yeah, a small number… and yet, those posts drew 35% of applicants. Companies that have embraced remote work are flooded with hopeful candidates and therefore may choose from a larger talent pool. They have fewer geographic boundaries, and may better accommodate talented workers who have at-home caregiving obligations or disabilities that make in-office work difficult. Alex Bouaziz, CEO and co-founder of HR payroll platform Deel, told Business Insider that companies requiring workers to return to the office are "leaking talent to us, whether or not they want to admit it." Deel hired 2k+ employees in 2024, but received 1.5m applications. AROUND THE WEB 📅  On this day: In 1965, St. Louis, Missouri's Gateway Arch was completed. 🌦️  Haha: The weather report, but retro. 👀  That's cool: A website for promoting your digital side projects. 🔬  Wow: See the winners of Nikon's photomicrography contest (that means everything was shot under a microscope). 🐱  Aww: Grooming fight. QUOTE OF NOTE Well, that's one (very intimidating) way to pick your next project... and for Stu Landesberg, who formerly led and IPO'd Grove Collective, the unfathomably large issue of choice was defeating wildfires, per Fast Company.   Landesberg's answer to dousing fire may go over your head. And we mean that very literally: His startup, Seneca, which launched last week, has designed firefighting drones that autonomously fly to the front lines when a fire is detected.   Each drone can drop about 100 pounds of fire suppressant and listen, it's too early to say if it'll work but you're either rooting for this startup or you're rooting for the fire and that's a really easy pick. Godspeed, Seneca.   SHOWER THOUGHT Your parents become less older than you, proportionally, every year after you're born. SOURCE Today's email was brought to you by Juliet Bennett Rylah, Sara Friedman, and Singdhi Sokpo. Editing by: Ben "A big 'yes' to every item on the Survey of American Fears" Berkley.   Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here. Working on something big? We've got a whole library of business-building resources for you. 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