Tech Roundup: California Gig Economy Bill, Firefox VPN & More

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

1. Google changes its page-rank search algorithm to help better identify and elevate original news reporting that "provides information that would not otherwise have been known had the article not revealed it." (Before the change, Google surfaced more recent and more comprehensive versions of news stories in search without taking into account if the article was from the publication that originally broke the news.)
2. Current and former employees say Google still conceals issues like sexual harassment; internal document details stories of retaliation for reporting harassment, according to Vox.
3. California passes landmark Assembly Bill 5 bill (to go into effect starting January 1 next year) that requires gig-economy companies like Uber, Lyft and other digital marketplaces to treat contractors as employees, giving them access to improved wage and benefit protections; Uber says drivers will remain contractors under AB5, as they aren't core to its business.
4. Facebook explains about how its app uses location data as Android 10 and iOS 13 brings privacy tweaks to allow/reject individual apps from accessing users' precise location (iOS 13 also has an additional option called "allow once," which lets an app access your device's precise location information only once, in addition to alerting users about when an app is using your precise location in the background and how many times an app has accessed that information along with a map of the location data an app has received and an explanation of why the app uses that type of location information); says it may "still understand your location using things like check-ins, events and information about your internet connection."
5. Mozilla pilots a virtual private network (VPN) called Firefox Private Network in beta for logged-in Firefox desktop users in the US that's accessible through a browser extension; launches Premium Support for Firefox enterprise customers starting at US$ 10 per supported installation, with benefits like critical bug fixes with SLA, private bug submission, and contributing to Firefox and its roadmap.
6. Chief executives of 51 companies, including Amazon, AT&T, Dell, IBM, Qualcomm, SAP, Salesforce, Visa, Mastercard, JP Morgan Chase, State Farm, and Walmart, sign an open letter asking the U.S. government to pass a "comprehensive consumer data privacy law," so that consumers are not faced with confusion about their rights and protections based on a patchwork of inconsistent state privacy laws, forcing companies to comply with an ever-increasing number of regulations across different states and jurisdictions. (While this news is welcome, it has also led to a belief that companies are trying to aggregate any privacy lawmaking under one roof, where lobby groups can water-down any meaningful user protections that may impact bottom lines. Probably it's time for GDPR-like clone in the U.S. and elsewhere?)
7. Federal judge Vince Chhabria of California orders Facebook to face most of a nationwide lawsuit seeking damages for letting third parties such as Cambridge Analytica access users' private data, calling the social media company's views on privacy "so wrong"; rejects Facebook's arguments that users suffered no "tangible" harm and had no legitimate privacy interest in information they shared with friends on social media.
8. Apple to handicap its own apps in App Store search results after analysis finds they were ranked first for at least 700 search terms; comes months after reports by the Wall Street Journal which found Apple's first-party apps to gradually begin dominating search results. (The change comes as Apple has become one of the largest competitors on a platform that it controls, suspicions that the company has been tipping the scales in its own favour are at the heart of antitrust complaints in the U.S., Europe and Russia.)
9. Privacy International finds popular period tracking apps, including MIA Fem and Maya, to be sending monthly timings, contraception use, symptoms, and other sensitive sexual health information to Facebook through the company's software development kit (SDK).
10. Google to unify Shopping Search and Google Express under a new brand called Google Shopping in coming weeks and to integrate relevant products under search results in Google Images, Google Feed, and even YouTube; brings YouTube Music/Premium to eight new markets in the Middle East, including Bahrain, Israel, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates.
11. France and Germany say they will block the development of Facebook's Libra quasi-cryptocurrency in the European Union as it poses a threat to "monetary sovereignty."
12. Apple back-pedals its App Store guidelines for kids apps; now states that, in limited cases, third-party analytics may be permitted in such apps provided that the services do not collect or transmit any identifiable information about children, such as their name, date of birth, email address, location, or unique device identifier.
• Apple has also said Sign in with Apple is not required if an app uses an exclusive account setup and sign-in systems, requires users to sign in with an existing education or enterprise account like G-Suite, a government or industry-backed citizen identification system or electronic ID to authenticate users, and the app is a client for a specific third-party service and users are required to sign in to their mail, social media, or other third-party account directly to access their content.
13. Google begins rolling out live word count in Docs; confirms plans for Play Pass, a subscription based service that lets users access hundreds of premium apps and games, without any ads or in-app purchases.
14. Google begins rolling out Memories in Google Photos, a tool that brings back old photos and videos on their anniversaries in an Instagram Stories-like format; starts allowing Google One subscribers, a subscription service that offers expanded cloud storage, to take advantage of a whole-phone backup solution for Android that automatically copies videos, multimedia messages (MMS), and uncompressed photos to the cloud.
15. Chromium-based Vivaldi browser (created by the same developers of Opera) arrives on Android with dark mode, cross-platform sync that saves tabs, bookmarks, and passwords, advanced tab management, notes, screenshots, no-tracking, and more.
16. Microsoft revamps its to-do list app To Do with support for background wallpapers (the app has been rename from To-Do to simply To Do), as Wunderlist creator Christian Reber offers to buy back the app from the company to avoid it being shut down. (Microsoft purchased 6Wunderkinder, the team behind Wunderlist, in 2015. Back then, the company had said it planned to continue the app's operation — but in 2017, it released To-Do, built by the same team that made Wunderlist, and said that it planned to retire Wunderlist once it had "incorporated the best of Wunderlist into Microsoft To-Do.")
17. Apple TV+ video on demand service to cost 99 Rupees in India when it launches in November. (Any service that increases the stickiness of Apple's hardware and keeps users upgrading is a win for Apple. The low price points and one-year promotion for Apple's new media services highlight how the company is positioning content as a marketing vehicle, deepening the overall appeal of the Apple brand to not only keep customers in the iOS ecosystem, but also entice new ones. Should it be successful, it will be able to earn even more revenue from its services.)
18. Spotify adds the ability to allow users share the music they are listening to with a snap on Snapchat, years after it rolled out similar integrations with Instagram; acquires SoundBetter, a music production marketplace for artists, producers, and musicians to connect on specific projects, and for people who are looking to distribute music tracks to those who want to license them, as it seeks to diversify itself away from a business model predicated on paying music streaming royalties to labels.
19. Purism begins shipping privacy-focused Librem 5 smartphone built on PureOS, a fully free, ethical and open-source operating system that is not based on Android or iOS.
20. Amazon.com launches Prime subscription service in Brazil for 9.90 reais (US$ 2.42) a month as it seeks to broaden its footprint in Latin America's largest economy, where it has struggled against tough local competition.
21. Jack Ma steps down as the chairman of Alibaba's board after 20 years since starting the company, which has now gone from being a traditional e-commerce company to a conglomerate that has businesses from logistics to food delivery and cloud computing, taking the company's valuation over US$ 460 billion; to be replaced by current CEO Daniel Zhang.
22. Mobile app downloads of Facebook down 15 percent year over year, with combined downloads of Facebook and Instagram down 13 percent year over year, according to a new analysis by Bank of America, when compared to rivals like Twitter, Snapchat and Pinterest. (The development comes Facebook has faced consumer backlash following the Cambridge Analytica scandal that revealed user data obtained without explicit consent on Facebook's platform was accessed by a data analytics company for purposes voter profiling. But criticism against the company doesn't seem to have had any real impact on Facebook's business, which has continued to grow.)
23. More than 900 Amazon employees pledge to walk out September 20 to protest against the company's huge carbon footprint, demanding a commitment to get to zero emissions by 2030.
24. Facebook and Google face more antitrust scrutiny in the U.S. as state attorneys general in the country launch investigation to determine if the companies are abusing their power as dominant players to stifled competition and put users at risk. (Meanwhile, let's not forget that the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission are conducting their own antitrust investigations into big tech companies. The DOJ's investigation reportedly includes Apple and Google, while the FTC looks into Facebook and Amazon.)
25. Australian government officials reportedly advised India to ban Chinese technology maker Huawei from supplying parts for 5G high-speed telecommunications network rollout in the country, citing national security risks.
26. Microsoft-owned LinkedIn's efforts to stop data-analytics company hiQ from harvesting data from public profiles of its users faces setback after appeals court rules that web scraping of information that's available to the public is not equivalent to hacking, and not a violation of the U.S. Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
27. MoviePass shuts down and ends service for all subscribers effective September 14 after it runs out of money in its efforts to build a sustainable business model.