Tech Roundup: E.U. Copyright Directive, Instagram Shopping & More

[A wrap-up of everything that Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and others announced in the last few weeks.]

Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp:

• Reports 1.47 billion daily active users and 2.23 billion monthly users for the second quarter of 2018, its slowest quarterly growth since 2011.
• Begins sharing user activity (under "Group Insights") in Facebook Groups associated with a brand or business comprising of more than 250 people.
• Finds evidence of coordinated inauthentic behaviour from Iran and Russia; takes down more pages and groups spreading malicious propaganda.
• Said to be working on a shopping-focussed Instagram app (Pinterest, watch out!) even as it launches a dedicated Shopping channel in Explore section; adds support for third-party authenticator apps in the wake phone number hijacking incidents that locked users out of Instagram.
• Rolls out its video-streaming platform Facebook Watch globally.
• Tests a new Instagram feature that groups users into college community lists, and suggests posts from accounts you don't currently follow once you're caught up on posts from the ones you do in its ongoing quest to make users spend more time interacting with its content.
• Strikes a new partnership with Google that allows users to back up WhatsApp chats, photos and videos to their Google Drive accounts without counting towards their storage.
• Acquires RedKix to improve Workplace by Facebook, acqui-hires Vidpresso, buying the six-year-old Utah startup's seven-person team and its technology but not the company itself, which works with TV broadcasters and content publishers to make their online videos more interactive with on-screen social media polling and comments, graphics and live broadcasting integrated with Facebook, YouTube, Periscope and more.
• Launches Mentorships to match people within Facebook Groups to help them guide each other.
• To begin showing ads in WhatsApp Status starting next year in its latest attempt to monetise the service, months after announcing the launch of business chat features on the chat platform.

In other news:

• Astronomers discover 12 new moons around Jupiter (with one of them on a collision course that could create a crash large enough to be visible from Earth), bringing the total number of Jovian moons to 79.
• 23andMe and other DNA-testing firms promise not to share data without consent after the companies invite criticism for their plans to share genetic data of 5 million people with GlaxoSmithKline to develop medical treatments.
• European Union approves Copyright Directive, a controversial piece of legislation that forces platforms (like Google News and Facebook) to pay a "link tax" for sourcing content from publishers and mandates them to check uploaded content for copyrighted content (dubbed “upload filter”) or else risk fines; proposes instant fines for social media websites if they fail to take down hate speech and other terrorist-related material.
• Brave files complaint against Google and other ad companies for using real-time ad placement software that violates E.U. GDPR regulation by sharing people's personal data, including what sites they're accessing, information about their devices, their locations or IP addresses, and market segment identifiers with potentially hundreds of companies involved in bidding on ads.
• Startup Miles launches a new iOS app that tracks users' every move in exchange for deals and discounts.
• Ad-blocker, disk-cleaners and other utilities installed by 11 million+ iOS, Android, Chrome and Firefox users (all acquired by Big Star Labs) found to be surreptitiously keeping a list of every website ever visited and sending it to servers operated by the developers.
• Eight-year-old mobile social network Path announces its plans to shutter service on October 18.
• Singapore suffers from a serious data breach, compromising outpatient medical data of 1.5 million healthcare patients (a quarter of the country's population).
• New research makes use of AI to estimate an area's obesity levels by analysing its buildings.
• Interest-based social media service Pinterest balloons to 250 million monthly active users.
• Mozilla removes 23 Firefox add-ons for tracking monitoring user browsing habits and covertly sending data to remote servers; to block tracking scripts in Firefox by default, starting in 2019
• Pro-privacy search engine DuckDuckGo gets US$ 10 million in fresh funding from Canadian pension fund Omers' VC arm.
• Oath's Yahoo! Mail and AOL face privacy concerns after it emerges that the services scan emails for advertising purposes.
• Venmo allows users to pay for Uber and Uber EATS; says default public transactions are a social feature in response to privacy concerns.
• FiftyThree, maker of apps Paper and Paster, gets acquired by cloud-based file transfer company WeTransfer.
• GIPHY launches own take on stories with curated GIFs in new homepage refresh.
• Online dating service Tinder begins rolling out a college-only service, Tinder U (needs to be geolocated to the campus and an .edu email address to sign up to use it for the first time).
• U.S. retail giant Walmart reportedly planning a video streaming service to compete with Netflix and Amazon; partners with Microsoft to deploy Azure cloud as its backend, and completes its $16 billion acquisition of Flipkart (has now 77% stake in the Indian retailer).
• Office communication service Slack buys Atlassian HipChat and Stride with plans to shut them down and migrate users to its platform.
• SmartNews reaches more than 10 million monthly active users in the U.S. and Japan for its news discovery experience curated by machine language and trusted journalism sources.
• Chipmaker Qualcomm to pay US$ 2 billion in breakup fees to end failed acquisition of NXP.
• Warner Music Group acquires multimedia-focussed digital media outlet Uproxx.
• India's Uber rival Ola heads to Europe with ride-hailing launch in the U.K.
• Musica.ly merges all user data with Toktok, a sister app owned by ByteDance, the Chinese company that acquired the music-based social media app for around US$ 1 billion last year.
• Japanese electronics giant Sony announces 48 megapixel camera sensor.
• Huawei ships more smartphones than Apple in the second quarter, with sales of 54 million phones.
• Cisco pays US$ 2.35 billion in cash to buy Michigan-based cybersecurity firm Duo Security.
• Menswear startup Eison Triple Thread recommends clothes based on users' Spotify music tastes by pairing the music streaming service to its app.
• U.S. cellular service provider Verizon introduces its own mobile VPN called Safe Wi-Fi for US$ 3.99 per month.