Tech Roundup: Amazon DeepComposer, Uber Safety Report & More

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

1. The European Commission opens a preliminary investigation into Facebook and Google in order to determine if the two companies are adhering to GDPR data protection regulations meant to give individuals more power over how the personal information is gathered, processed, used and monetised, including for advertising purposes.
2. Chinese officials revealed to gather blood samples from Uighur Muslim minorities in a mass DNA collection effort for use by scientists researching using DNA to map facial images for a process called DNA phenotyping.
3. Ride hailing platform Uber discloses 3,045 sexual assaults, 9 murders, and 58 people killed in crashes out of its 1.3 billion rides in the U.S. in 2018 in its first ever safety report; says it's "fully committed to unprecedented accountability and action on safety."
4. China's Cybersecurity Centre penalises 100 apps, across a range of verticals including e-commerce (Weidian, Kaola), banking (China Everbright Bank, Bank of Tianjin), and home rentals (Fang.com), since November for incorrect collection of personal data, lack of privacy agreements and ambiguous rules amidst ongoing efforts to revamp existing data privacy laws in the nation state.
5. Apple reveals that iPhone 11 Pro shares location data even when the location settings are turned off due to ultra wideband technology (which Apple says gives its newer handsets "spatial awareness" to understand where other ultra wideband devices are located so as to wirelessly share files over AirDrop); says it will provide a new toggle to turn this off in an upcoming update.
6. Amazon's controversial smart doorbell subsidiary Ring allowed law enforcement in the U.S. access a heat map of installed Ring video doorbells that let users zoom in very close to street level, before it was removed in July; company denies it gave precise location access, adding "previous iterations of the video request feature included approximate device density, and locations were obfuscated to protect user privacy ... zooming into areas would not provide actual device locations."
7. Russia officially signs new legislation, effective July 2020, requiring all smartphones, computers, and smart TVs sold in the country to come pre-installed with Russian software; Apple says "A mandate to add third-party applications to Apple's ecosystem would be equivalent to jailbreaking. It would pose a security threat, and the company cannot tolerate that kind of risk."
8. Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin relinquish control of parent company Alphabet to Sundar Pichai in new leadership shuffle; Pichai to "be the executive responsible and accountable for leading Google, and managing Alphabet’s investment in our portfolio of Other Bets."
9. Facebook unveils new photo transfer tool, letting users transfer their photos and videos directly to other services starting with Google Photos.
10. Smartphone maker Xiaomi forays into financial services with launch of Mi Credit in India, a digital lending platform that offers users credit between US$ 70 and US$ 1,400, in partnership with ZestMoney, and others.
11. Amazon launches SageMaker Studio for AWS, a web-based IDE for machine learning that offers ways to organise, search, and share projects, datasets, notebooks, and code; unveils AI-powered Fraud Detector to find anomalies in transactions, Kendra enterprise search application, CodeGuru code evaluation tool to spot computationally expensive program code, and quantum computing as a service with Braket, letting developers get started on building quantum algorithms and basic applications and then test them in simulations on AWS, a month after Microsoft announced a similar Azure Quantum service.
12. Amazon unveils DeepComposer, an AI-enabled piano keyboard meant for devs that uses generational adversarial neural network (GANN) to compose music based on genre-specific models, a short initial tune, and other architecture parameters and hyperparameters; debuts a medical speech transcription tool Transcribe Medical that works without human intervention and features conveniences like automatic and "intelligent" punctuation (does not require users to explicitly say "comma"), allowing physicians to quickly dictate their clinical notes and speech into accurate text in real time.
• Consisting of two models, the "generator" (aka orchestra) creates the musical notes and phrases, while the "discriminator" (aka conductor) gives feedback to the generator to push it toward creating music that's more consistent with the genre).
13. Imgur reaches 300 million monthly active users; launches Melee, an iOS app where users see a feed of memes and gameplay clips for the games to which they subscribe.
14. WhatsApp users in the contentious territory of Kashmir, who are subject to an ongoing internet shutdown, begin losing access to their WhatsApp accounts because of the platform's policy on inactive accounts.
15. Samsung's upcoming Galaxy S11 flagship smartphone to reportedly have a 108MP rear camera sensor, ultrawide-angle lens, and 5x zoom.
16. Huawei's latest flagship smartphone, the Mate 30, ships with zero U.S. manufactured components, months following the Chinese company was added to the U.S. entity black list, prohibiting companies in the country from doing business with the electronics giant.
17. Chipmaker Qualcomm unveils 3D Sonic Max, a secure two-finger under-screen ultrasonic scanner that promises 17 times larger and can read two fingerprints at once for extra authentication.
18. Facebook-owned Instagram begins requiring birthdates from new users in order to improve safety features for minors and better target ads for age-restricted products.
19. Google reveals 80 percent of Android apps now encrypt network traffic by default since, due to a policy introduced in Android 9 that default to HTTPS connections, up from less than 20 percent a year ago; rolls out in-app messaging in Google Photos app, allowing users to share any number of photos and videos one-on-one or with certain groups.
20. Amazon launches a new battery-powered portable Echo speaker in India with an enclosed 4,800mAh battery, with up to 10 hours of continuous music playback.
21. Popular aggregation platform Reddit hits 430M monthly active users, up 30 percent YoY, with 199 million posts, 1.7 billion comments, and 32 billion upvotes in 2019.
22. Firefox and Opera browsers pull browser extensions from Avast and SafePrice after they were found to collect much more data than necessary, including a detailed web history beyond site addresses and search history, such as when and how long you visit a site, what you click, the number of open tabs and even when you switch to another tab, violating Mozilla's policies forbidding this kind of fine-grained collection.
23. Media organisation platform Plex forays into free streaming with ad-supported content ranging from "free movies, TV shows, extreme sports films, music documentaries, Bollywood musicals" in more than 200 countries.