Tech Roundup: ByteDance Resso, Xbox Series X & More

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

• China's viral app TikTok's owner ByteDance gets sued over allegations that it collected and exposed the personally identifiable data of children under 13 without their parents' explicit consent "since at least 2014" and sold the data to third-party advertisers in violation of child privacy protection laws in the U.S.; confirms its plans for a new paid music streaming app called Resso in Indian and Indonesian markets, adding "we are still very early in the process and only in a limited number of developing markets."
• The U.S. Federal Trade Commission reportedly considering seeking a preliminary injunction against Facebook over concerns about how interoperability between its family of apps — Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — could violate antitrust law; comes as Facebook and other tech giants are facing mounting criticism over privacy lapses, and how they handle vast quantities of consumer data.
• Uber reportedly in advanced talks to sell Uber Eats India to local rival Zomato in a deal that values Uber Eats India at US$ 400 million, as it cedes to local rivals Swiggy and Zomato. (Uber, which is already to looking at ways to trim losses, has already fired closed to 1,000 employees, and exited South East Asia business last year. Zomato, for its part, has cut its monthly loss to $20 million, while Swiggy is yet to turn a profit even as it continues to expand to new cities in the country.)
• India proposes new data protection bill similar to E.U.'s GDPR that requires companies to garner consent from citizens before collecting and processing users' personal data.
• Facebook contends it doesn't need to change its web tracking to comply with California's data privacy law CCPA; says its data collection doesn't count as a "sale" under CCPA.
• The Chinese government orders all government offices and public institutions to replace foreign hardware and software with Chinese alternatives within the next three years as part of a mass replacement process under the new "3-5-2" directive.
• India shuts down internet in states of Assam and Meghalaya — that are home to 32M people — after protests over controversial citizenship bill, as Kashmir shutdown continues into its fourth month.
• Google brings Incognito Mode to Google Maps for iOS, a month after rolling out the same feature for Android; adds new feature that lets users attach emails to conversations in Gmail, and rolls out Chrome 79 adding security features like notifications for data breaches affecting users' passwords, new phishing prevention tools, and tab freezing.
• Microsoft's next-generation Xbox officially called Xbox Series X; to come with custom-designed CPU based on AMD's Zen 2 and Radeon RDNA architecture, 8K gaming, frame rates of up to 120 fps, variable refresh rate support, and a new Xbox Wireless Controller.

• Microsoft to kill off Wunderlist, the to-do list app it acquired in June 2015, in May 2020, as it transitions to its full-fledged replacement Microsoft To Do; overhauls Windows and icons for many of the operating system's apps to match its Fluent Design principles.
• Photo sharing app VSCO acquires video editing startup Rylo, a video editing startup founded by the original developer of Instagram's Hyperlapse, for an undisclosed sum.
• Facebook updates its video calling device Portal to work with WhatsApp accounts, allowing users to make video calls to friends and family even if they don't have a Facebook account.
• Apple gets dethroned as the world's largest publicly traded company (valued at US$ 1.2 trillion) after oil giant Saudi Aramco goes for a US$ 1.7 trillion IPO.
• Amazon launches Audible Suno, an ad-free listening service featuring more than 60 original series in Hindi and English, in India for free.
• Facebook payroll data, including names, bank accounts, and pay info of 29,000 staff gets compromised after unencrypted hard drives were stolen from employee car.
• Google rolls out Verified SMS, which labels messages from legitimate businesses, on Android in nine countries — the U.S., India, Mexico, Brazil, the U.K., France, Philippines, Spain and Canada — as it expands spam detection in messages to the U.S. by warning users of suspected spam and unsafe websites it has detected.
• Google says it has photographed 10 million miles of Street View imagery and 36 million square miles of Google Earth imagery, adding it covers 98 percent of the places in the world where people live; halts Chrome 79 rollout on Android after the misconfigured update wipes user data from many apps using Android's native WebView.
• Apple acquires Spectral Edge, a UK startup whose tech improves the colours in photos by taking infrared shots and blending it with standard photos, for possible use in upcoming iPhones.
• Ride hailing company Lyft launches a rental option on its app that allows certain riders in San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles to rent cars.
• Chinese tech giant relaunches Pengyou that rolls Facebook, Instagram and Tinder into single app, as it fend off rivals and offset slower growth in flagships WeChat and QQ.
• Twitter forms a new engineering team — under an initiative called Bluesky — dedicated to building a new decentralised social media system, taking inspiration from email, an open "protocol" that anyone can implement to build their own email service capable of communicating with others.
• Apple rolls out iOS 13.3 with Communication Limits in Screen Time, allowing parents to whitelist contacts for their kids' accounts, and block their kids from communicating with anyone outside the list on Apple-made apps like Messages and FaceTime; suffers from a bug after it emerges that children can circumvent the restrictions when contacts are not synced with iCloud by default, letting them to text or call unknown numbers by add them as a local new contact. (Apple has had a rocky launch with iOS 13, with a plethora bugs resulting in the company releasing more bug fix updates since the iOS 13 launch than is usual after an annual update. The company reportedly plans to mitigate the problem by turning off buggy features in test builds of the operating system.)