Tech Roundup: Connected Home over IP, Location Privacy & More

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

• Google warns that it will no longer be able to collaborate with Turkish phone manufacturers to make its family of services available on their phones released in the country following a ruling by Turkish regulator in September 2018 ordering the search giant to allow consumers to choose different search engines in its Android mobile operating system; Turkey's competition authority says the changes made by Google are inadequate as they still did not allow changes to the default search engine.
• Chinese tech giant Tencent removes 32 games at the expense of profit for failing to prevent gaming addiction; comes after a new law that was introduced last month in the country that bans underage gamers from playing games for more than 90 minutes each day.
• Facebook acknowledges it targets ads based on the limited location information it receives even when users turn off or limit tracking, such as locations they tag in photos as well as their devices' IP addresses, along with alerting users when their accounts have been accessed in an unusual place and clamping down on the spread of false information.
• Leaked dataset from a location data company reveals a log of the movements of more than 12 million Americans with 50 billion location pings across major cities, including Washington, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles, between 2016 and 2017, per an investigation by The New York Times, once again highlighting the omnipresent surveillance that's becoming impossible in the location data economy that forms the backbone of targeted advertising.
• France's competition authority fines Google €150 million for abusing its dominance in online advertising to mistreat keyword advertisers by suspending them on its search engine in a random and unjustified fashion; says Google's rules governing how and when advertisers can show their ads next to search results are applied in an "unfair and random manner."
• Facebook acquires PlayGiga, a Madrid-based company that specialises in cloud gaming, as rivals Google (which has purchased Montreal-based game development house Typhoon Studios as part of its plan to create exclusive content for Stadia), Amazon and Microsoft, and other gaming companies begin to roll out cloud video gaming services; also buys video-shopping startup Packagd to help build live shopping for Marketplace.
• The Chinese government releases new rules for online content, requiring platforms and app operators to use AI-based content moderation effective March 2020, further tightening control over online content in the country.
• Twitter removes about 5,929 accounts for violating its "platform manipulation policies" to amplify messages favourable to Saudi authorities; Facebook gets rid of a global network of more than 900 accounts, pages, and groups from its platform and Instagram that allegedly used deceptive practices — such as fake accounts, artificial amplification, and, notably, profile photos of fake faces generated using artificial intelligence — to spread polarising, predominantly right-wing content to about 55 million users, in an alarming new development in the information wars and the first large-scale deployment of AI-generated images in a social network.
• Facebook says it will no longer use phone numbers provided for two-factor authentication for offering friend suggestions; comes months after the social network stopped using the numbers for targeting ads back in June.
• The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) rules that 'home sharing' platform Airbnb is merely an online platform that connects people looking for short term accommodation, rather than a full-blown estate agent, exempting it from being forced to comply with local property regulations.
• Ride-hailing service Uber courts further trouble in the European Union after German top court bans its services in the country, arguing the U.S. company lacks a necessary licence to offer passenger transport services using rental cars; marks another setback for the firm after it lost its licence to carry paying passengers in London last month, with the city’s regulator claiming it had put passenger safety at risk.
• Twitter fixes a vulnerability within Twitter for Android that could allow a bad actor to see nonpublic account information or to control your account (i.e., send Tweets or Direct Messages) by inserting malicious code into restricted storage areas of the app.
• Semiconductor chip manufacturer Intel acquires Israeli AI chipmaker Habana Labs for US$ 2 billion in what's the company's latest acquisition after Nervana Systems and Movidius.
• Facebook takes unsecured database offline after it was found to leak the names, Facebook IDs, and phone numbers of over 267 million Facebook users for a period of two weeks; data possibly stolen from Facebook's developer API used by app developers to add social context to their applications by accessing users' profiles, friends list, groups, photos, and event data before the company restricted access to phone numbers in 2018.

• Apple gets accused of engaging in anticompetitive practices after developers of BlueMail find their email app to have suddenly jumped from 143rd position to 13th place in the company's rankings for mail apps shortly after reports revealed that Apple had been favouring its own apps in the App Store search results; says "Apple changed its search algorithms in an apparent attempt to remove the techniques for manipulation and suppression that it had previously employed," as tech giants such as Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google come under more scrutiny than ever over whether they're engaging in anticompetitive business practices.
• Facebook begins testing music videos in Thailand and India as it works on licensing deals with record labels in a bid to boost its failing video streaming platform Watch; reportedly developing its own operating system from scratch, in order to stop relying on Android for products like Oculus and Portal.
• Apple and Google remove ToTok app — which became one of the most downloaded social apps in the U.S. last week — from their respective app stores after reports emerge that the app is a spying tool used by the government of the United Arab Emirates to try to track every conversation, movement, relationship, appointment, sound and image of those who install it on their phones; seen as an escalation in a digital arms race among wealthy authoritarian governments by leveraging apps to spy on foreign adversaries, criminal and terrorist networks, journalists and critics.
• Apple, Amazon, Google, Samsung SmartThings and the Zigbee Alliance form "Connected Home over IP" (aka CHIP), a partnership to create a new smart home networking standard as the companies compete in the smart home space, with an aim to ease interoperability and compatibility headaches for consumers and companies that make smart home products, and boost security and privacy.
• Apple reportedly working on internet satellites and related wireless tech to beam data directly to its devices, according to Bloomberg; open sources parts of its HomeKit Accessory Development Kit allowing anyone to prototype HomeKit devices.
• Facebook-owned Instagram expands its fact checking efforts by hiding false content behind warnings, except for politicians, and removing it from Explore and hashtag pages; will preemptively flag potentially offensive captions, in addition to comments, nudging users to reconsider their choice of words without censoring them.
• Uber to expand Uber Works, its marketplace for short-term jobs in hospitality, events, light industrial, and other sectors, to Miami after initial trials in Chicago; ordered to pay US$ 4.4 million to victims of alleged gender discrimination and strengthen sexual harassment defenses, following an Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) investigation.
• Microsoft opens up the Microsoft Edge Addons store for submissions ahead of Chromium-bade Edge browser launch on January 15; to automatically migrate existing Chromium extensions.
• Movie subscription service Netflix says 90 percent of its total subscriber growth came from outside the U.S. since 2017.
• Apple introduces a discounted annual subscription to its game streaming service Apple Arcade priced at US$ 49.99 as it lays out groundwork for an Amazon Prime-like subscription bundle in the future.
• Tinder, Netflix, Tencent Video, IQIYI, YouTube, Pandora Music, Youku, LINE, Kwai and LINE Manga emerge the top paid apps for 2019; Facebook Messenger, Facebook, WhatsApp, TikTok, Instagram, SHAREit, Likee, Snapchat, Netflix and Spotify pick up the top 10 slots of the most downloaded apps.
• Apple to face a showdown with activist shareholders over its human rights policies after criticism that it kowtowed to Beijing when it removed a controversial mapping app during the Hong Kong protests.
• Email cleanup service Unroll.me settles with FTC for misleading users about how it shared users' email data, to delete all personal information it collected as part of the settlement.
• Facebook-owned WhatsApp fixes bug that caused the app to get into a crash loop on phones of every member of a group by replacing the participant's parameter from the sender phone number to any non-digit character(s), resulting in the loss of all of the messages and media exchanged in the group chat.
• Music streaming service YouTube Music adds new personalised playlists, New Release Mix, Your Mix, and Discover Mix, to rival Spotify's playlists like Discover Weekly and Release Radar as it puts Google Play Music on death watch; rival Spotify begins prototyping Tastebuds, a social feature that allows users to interact with and discover music by searching the people they follow.