Stay in your lane? Not in the shipping industry.

Xeneta, a shipping data aggregator, announced on September 13 that it had raised $80 million in a round of funding, cash that the company intends to use to build out existing datasets and grow its customer base.

The company takes information from cargo owners and shipping companies on rates and gives customers an average from which they can negotiate. It’s part of what company CEO Patrik Berglund told TechCrunch is a necessary step forward in how the shipping industry uses data: “Whether it’s a new digital freight forwarder, or a legacy player, they are all in need of better data to run their businesses more efficiently.”

More than meets the eye. Xeneta is sitting on 300 million data points from hundreds of the world’s largest shipping companies, which makes for $40 billion in value on the site as it is.

But the actual value of what the company has is far higher—between $600 billion and $900 billion seasonally, Berglund told TechCrunch—they just need to figure out how to use all of it.

Xeneta’s chief marketing officer, Katherine Barrios, told IT Brew that the company is sitting on a huge reservoir of data, all of it gleaned from rate sheets. Figuring out what to do with that information—how to deploy it—is the company’s next challenge.

“In the rate sheets that we collect from our customers, we’re just extracting the rate component,” Barrios said. “But we get a lot of other stuff that we’re not using yet. We’re looking at, how else can we create more intelligence?”

Read about it here.—EH

Do you work in IT or have information about your IT department you want to share? Email [email protected] or DM @EoinHiggins_ on Twitter.

Police IT workers have been conscripted to help fuel mass arrests in El Salvador amid President Nayib Bukele’s campaign to suppress violent gangs, according to a report from Rest of World.

The ongoing crackdown, which Bukele ordered after 87 people were killed in just three days in March, has resulted in over 55,000 arrests. At least 80 detainees have died in custody without ever being convicted of a crime, NBC reported, and judges are managing up to 300 defendants at a time. These arrests do not require warrants, the right to a legal defense is suspended, and human rights groups have denounced arbitrary detentions and civil liberties restrictions.

Salvadoran Police Workers’ Union representative Marvin Reyes told Rest of World that arrest tips were flowing through Facebook and Twitter accounts that are staffed by IT department workers and—at least officially—are meant to distribute rather than collect official information. Rest of World also spoke to three different human rights groups, each of which raised red flags about hundreds of arrests in the country arising from social media tips.

The groups also expressed concern that Salvadoran police are enlisting IT department workers to help them make arrest quotas by pursuing bogus leads. Unlike the staff that pick up phones at police departments, Reyes told the site, the IT workers handling social media tips aren’t trained to vet criminal allegations. Reuters reported that multiple officials confirmed that police supervisors have imposed daily arrest quotas based on dubious statistics about the number of active gang members throughout El Salvador.

Read more here.—TM

Do you work in IT or have information about your IT department you want to share? Email [email protected] or DM @thetomzone on Twitter. Want to go encrypted? Ask Tom for his Signal.

Today’s top IT reads.

Stat: 20.7%. That’s the level of growth that Gartner predicts for public cloud spending in 2023. (ZDNet)

Quote: “Negative productivity can be hidden when everything is going great.”—Mark Stoeckle, CEO of investment firm Adams Funds, discussing the tech sector’s economic downturn (the Wall Street Journal)

Read: Thinking of walking home? Consider the fact that data from your Uber app could save a bridge. (The Daily Beast)

Builder’s paradise: Every company is a software company now, and with over 90 million developers, GitHub is the place for anyone from anywhere to build anything. Find a plan that works for your team here.*

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