Tech Roundup: Apple's Slowing iMessage App Growth, YouTube Uptime & More

[A recurring feature on the latest in Science & Technology.]

• Computing giant Intel acquires Mobileye, a leader in computer vision for autonomous driving technology, for US$ 15.3 billion — the biggest-ever acquisition of an Israeli tech company.
• European Commission launches tool for anonymously reporting antitrust violations in the EU.
• Facebook clarifies its developer policy to explicitly prohibit the use of Facebook or Instagram data for building surveillance tools.
• Google launches experimental Uptime app for collaborative social watching on YouTube; also unveils a new voice messaging app (ahem!) called Supersonic that converts voice messages to text (no keyboard needed!).
• German Justice Ministry introduces a draft law that would impose fines of up to €50 million (US$ 53.2 million) on social media companies that fail to quickly remove hate speech and other illegal content from their platforms; European Commission gives Google, Facebook and Twitter one month to amend their terms of service to allow users to seek redressal in their country of residence, to identify better sponsored content or else risk fines.
• Pandora unveils Premium service for US$ 9.99 as it readies to compete with Apple Music, Spotify, Amazon Music, Tidal and Google Play Music.
• Google integrates money transfer service Google Wallet into Gmail for Android (the feature was introduced for the web in 2013).
• Microsoft officially releases business communication tool Teams for Office 365 users worldwide.
• Google rolls out support for offline reading in chrome for iOS (Chrome for Android gained the support back in December, but strangely it's still not cross platform!); adds option to add any search engine e.g. DuckDuckGo by just visiting them.
• US indicts two Russians and two hackers in Yahoo! data breach in 2014 that affected at least 500 million user accounts; 1 billion user accounts breached earlier in 2013 still available for sale for as low as US$ 200,000.
• Google brings tighter parental controls to Android through Family Link; lets children below 13 years of age have Google accounts under the supervision of their parents.
• Google confirms it has no plans to bring its smart voice Assistant to tablets anytime soon.
• Amazon brings intelligent voice assistant Alexa to its main shopping app as the race for voice assistants reach a feverish high.
• Google introduces new JPEG image compression algorithm that reduces image size by 35%.
• Apple users and developers said to be losing interest in iMessage apps as growth plateaus, according to new data from app analytics firm Sensor Tower. (The main reason, according to me, is a poor interface design as TechCrunch rightly puts.)
• Internet Service Providers in the US, as part of a broader initiative to eliminate broadband privacy rules, say say users' web browsing and app usage data should not be classified as "sensitive" information.
• Artist Chance the Rapper got paid US$ 500,000 in exchange for granting exclusive rights to stream the album Coloring Book on Apple Music for two weeks.