Tech Roundup: Mozilla Subscription Plans, Superhuman Privacy Scare & More

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

• Apple CEO exclusively sends an email to NBC News to refute The Wall Street Journal's report — based on year-long interviews with dozens of employees in Ive's orbit — that said outgoing design chief Jony Ive had grown frustrated with Cook's leadership and his alleged lack of interest in the design production process; calls the story absurd, that it does not match reality and fails to understand how Apple's design team actually works.
• Europe's Climate Change Service says average temperature for June 2019 in the continent was higher than for any other June on record; average temperatures were more than 2°C above normal, making it the hottest June ever recorded.
• Facebook-owned Instagram adds a new Stories sticker "join chat" lets users ask followers to join a new group chat, and giving the initiator the ability to select who can join.
• U.K. government begins investigation into TikTok's data privacy practices for young users shortly after the U.S. FTC fined the app US$ 5.7 million for child privacy violations; says it's looking into how the app handles the personal data of its young users, and whether it prioritises the safety of children on its social network.
• Sony's portable music/tape player Walkman turns 40 years old — the first edition of the Walkman that came out in 1979 weighed almost a pound, cost about US$ 200, and featured two headphone jacks and a button where the the two people listening on headphones could talk to each other, or sing along with each other, on a microphone.
• China's border guards close to Xinjiang install Android malware app called Fengcai on tourists' devices that scans for 70,000 different files, and downloads texts, calendar entries, phone logs, a new investigation by VICE reveals.
• Facebook updates News Feed ranking algorithm to reduce the distribution of sensational health claims or promotion of questionable products with health-related claims; resolves nine-hour-long outage across News Feed, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger that caused issues loading images, videos, stories, and sending messages.
• Chinese handset maker clones Apple's AR-based Memoij 3D avatars with a new feature called "Mimoji"; says "We have conducted internal audits and found no evidences that our Mimoji characters have [been] plagiarised from any of our competitors including Apple."
• Google outlines plans to turn robots exclusion protocol (REP) — better known as robots.txt — into an internet standard after 25 years; makes its C++ robots.txt parser that underpins the Googlebot web crawler available on GitHub for anyone to access.
• Google begins syncing users' payment options saved to their Google Accounts with Chrome browser, making it easy to fill in checkout forms.
• Popular third-party email client Superhuman draws privacy scrutiny after it's found embedding tracking pixels in emails to determine if they have been read and from what geographic location without explicit consent from its users; founder Rahul Vohra issues an apology, saying it will remove location logging altogether, get rid of all existing location data, build an option to disable remote images, and turn off read receipts by default and make them an opt-in feature for users.
• The incident once again highlights the power of default settings, while also undermining and eroding the expectation of privacy, which in 2019, is looking more and more like an endangered species. By enabling the feature by default, in a privacy climate in which people are much more averse to monitoring, the move feels both dangerous and invasive.

Sony Walkman turns 40 (Image: The Verge)

• California-based automaker Tesla sets delivery records; says it produced a record 87,048 vehicles in the second quarter, and delivered around 95,200 vehicles during the same period.
• Germany's Federal Office of Justice fines Facebook US$ 2.3 million for under-reporting complaints about illegal content on its social media platform in breach of the country's law on internet transparency.
• Ireland's Data Protection Commissioner opens third new investigation into Apple to probe whether the company has complied with relevant provisions of the E.U.'s new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) privacy law in relation to an access request from a customer.
• Apple reportedly planning a new iPhone for the budget-conscious Chinese market that features an under-display fingerprint sensor instead of expensive Face ID technology, according to Chinese media reports in an attempt to arrest declining sales in the domestic market.
• Apple publishes the number of requests it's received from governments to take down apps from its app store for the first time; says it has received 80 requests from 11 countries to pull 634 apps from its app stores from July 1 to December 31, 2018.
• Nonprofit organisation Electronic Frontier Foundation raises privacy concerns about enterprise chat app Slack; says the company retains all messages forever by default and does not give individual users, particularly those using its free accounts, enough options to control their data.
• Microsoft begins rolling out a new update to its Android-compatible phone mirroring Your Phone app on Windows 10 that will allow it to mirror notifications from Android smartphones onto Windows PCs.
• U.K. competition watchdog, the Competition and Markets Authority, launches an investigation into the way Google and Facebook collect and exploit personal data and have used their power to dominate the UK digital advertising market; says it will "look at whether "consumers are able and willing to control how data about them is used and collected," and if "making this data available to advertisers in return for payment is producing good outcomes for consumers."
• Samsung gets in hot water over allegations it misled customers over the nature of Galaxy phones' water resistance; Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) says "Samsung's advertisements falsely and misleadingly represented Galaxy phones would be suitable for use in, or for exposure to, all types of water, including in ocean water and swimming pools, and would not be affected by such exposure to water for the life of the phone, when this was not the case."
• Google reportedly readying a new feature in Chrome browser called Heavy Ad Intervention that blocks ads which use too much network or CPU resources, according to 9to5Google.
• Seattle-based retail behemoth Amazon turns 25 years old — Jeff Bezos incorporated the company on July 5, 1994.
• Mozilla unveils plans for a new subscription plan for US$ 5 per month that offers ad-free browsing, audio readouts, and cross-platform syncing of news articles from a number of websites; also plans a new VPN service called "Firefox Private Network" for either US$ 5, US$ 10, or US$ 13 per month.
• Facebook open-sources its deep learning recommendation model DLRM, and PyRobot framework for robotics research and benchmarking open source.
• Google acknowledges that it retains a copy of every purchase made using Gmail, even after the emails are deleted, in a separate Purchases page with no option to turn it off; says the data is used to "help you get things done, like track a package or reorder food."
• Samsung confirms it plans to unveil Galaxy Note 10 phablet at an Unpacked event on August 7; launches Bixby Marketplace in the U.S. and South Korea, a dedicated app store where third-party developers can offer their own Bixby-compatible services, in an attempt to better compete with Amazon Alexa and Google Home.
• Samsung to slash about 1,000 jobs in India as it faces fierce competition from Chinese companies like Xiaomi, Oppo, and OnePlus, forcing it to cut prices of smartphones and televisions; shuts down AI-powered Samsung Mall a year and a half after launch that helped users identify objects around them and locate it on shopping sites to make the purchase.
• Samsung reportedly has redesigned the Galaxy Fold foldable smartphone/tablet to address the screen durability issues that forced its delay earlier this year, with the device set to enter production soon.