Tech Roundup: Cookie Consent Nightmare, Microsoft Project Artemis & More

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

• New study undertaken by researchers at MIT, UCL and Aarhus University finds that cookie consent pop-ups served to internet users in the European Union — seeking permission to track people's web activity — are flouting regional privacy laws through dark patterns by pre-ticking optional boxes, assuming implicit consent via non-affirmative user actions (such as the user visiting or scrolling on the website or a failure to respond to a consent pop-up or closing it without a response) and featuring no "reject all" buttons; follows a similar research from the University of Michigan and Ruhr-University Bochum that found a majority of websites offering no options other than a confirmation button that does not do anything, in addition to nudging users towards consenting by using dark pattern techniques.
• More than 50 organisations, including DuckDuckGo, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Privacy International, The Tor Project and other civil liberty, and consumer protection groups, urge Google to take action against Android smartphone vendors who ship devices with unremovable pre-installed apps aka bloatware; state it has an detrimental effect on user privacy, adding many bloatware apps cannot be deleted and leave users exposed to having their data collected by unscrupulous phone vendors and app makers without their knowledge or consent.
• India's Supreme Court rules that the indefinite shutdown of the internet in Kashmir, which has been on for more than 150 days, is illegal; urges the government to review the communications lockdown and consider immediately allowing the functioning of essential internet services such as for hospitals and limited e-banking.
• Controversial Emirati app ToTok returns to Google Play store with a new prompt about syncing contact info, after being removed amid reports that the app was a spy tool for the U.A.E.
• Facebook updates Privacy Checkup tool, the first significant update since its creation in 2014 that offers more granular account controls and making it a more convenient central hub for privacy settings.
• India's antitrust regulator, the Competition Commission of India (CCI), orders wider probe into Amazon and Walmart-owned Flipkart over allegations that the e-commerce giants were promoting some "preferred sellers" and in turn hurting business for other, smaller sellers.
• Amazon-owned Ring adds a privacy dashboard to its app after facing criticism for its poor security protections; to let owners manage third-party services and whether local police can make requests to access video from their cameras; strikes long-term partnership with India's second largest retail chain, Future Retail, to sell its goods on Amazon India marketplace.
• Tumblr launches World Wide What, a campaign that uses Tumblr-native language and imagery to educate users on topics like fake news and cyberbullying.
• Douyin, the Chinese version of the popular short video app TikTok owned by the world's most valuable startup Bytedance, reaches 400 million daily active users in January 2020, up from 250 million the same time a year ago; TikTok outlines more concrete global content moderation rules following criticism by banning election misinformation and videos glorifying terrorism on the platform, and fixes major security vulnerabilities that could have potentially allowed hackers to manipulate content, gain access to private videos, and extract personal data.
• Microsoft attracts scrutiny after new report from The Guardian reveals that contractors who vet Skype audio worked from home in China with "no security measures"; company says it now uses secure facilities outside the country for transcription.
• WeChat users spent US$ 115 billion in 2019, up 160 percent YoY, through WeChat mini programs that work within the chat app, as its owner WeChat looks to add more merchants and services, including live streaming.

• Popular social platform Reddit bans "impersonation of an individual or entity in a misleading or deceptive manner"; says the policy will also include "domains that mimic others, as well as deepfakes or other manipulated content presented to mislead, or falsely attributed to an individual or entity."
• Facebook tightens its policies around misleading manipulated media by banning videos that are either heavily edited or are deep fakes, but only if it meets specific criteria, including editing or synthesising a video with an intention to mislead and "it is the product of artificial intelligence or machine learning that merges, replaces or superimposes content onto a video, making it appear to be authentic."
• Google announces the list of four search engines (including Google) it will show to new Android users in the European Union effective March 1, with DuckDuckGo the most frequently offered choice and Bing tied for last place; the new option comes in the wake of an antitrust ruling last March which fined the search giant a record US$ 5 billion for “illegally tying” its search engine and browser to Android OS.
• Google responded to the ruling by announcing an auction system last August, which lets search providers bid for a spot in the list by stating how much they willing to pay the company every time a user selects their product as the default. The three highest bidders are then displayed to users, with the chosen provider paying Google the amount offered by the fourth-highest bid. This process is repeated every four months. It's worth noting that Ecosia, a search engine that uses its profits to plans trees, boycotted the auction entirely. It's impossible to know the finances involved, but Google sure found an ingenious way to profit from a ruling that was supposed to limit its monopolistic power.
• Uber open sources Manifold, a visual tool for debugging AI models that is used in analyzing Uber's Michelangelo ML platform; rival Lyft open sources Flyte, a platform for maintaining AI workflows that currently manages over 7,000 unique workflows at the company.
• Facebook officially begins testing the desktop redesign it announced last April for a small set of users, with plans to offer the new look more broadly sometime later this year.
• Alphabet's health arm Verily hires Deepak Ahuja, the former CFO of Tesla who helped take it public, as its new Chief Financial Officer; legal head David Drummond to retire later this month amid probe over employee concerns about his extramarital affair with a subordinate, whom he went on to marry, but will not receive severance package in a departure from the company's norm.
• Medical technology company Masimo sues Apple, claims it infringes on 10 patents and has stolen its tech related to blood oxygen level and heart rate monitoring.
• Microsoft releases "Project Artemis," a tool that scans online chats for patterns that may indicate a predator is grooming children for sexual abuse.
• Uber to switch to providing estimates as opposed to fixed prices for its rides in response to a new California law dubbed AB-5 that makes it harder to qualify its drivers as contractors; to end operations in Colombia on January 31, after courts side with the local competition authority, which found that Uber broke market rules by steering customers away from taxis and offering public transportation without a license.
• Twitter prototypes new feature that gives users more control over conversations as a new means to tackle harassment and hate speech on the microblogging service; lets users determine who's allowed to participate in the conversation by limiting replies to people users' follow and mention, only the people included in the conversation, or no one at all.
• Popular maker of home speakers Sonos sues Google (and Amazon, which it decided not to sue "because they couldn't risk battling two tech giants in court at once"), seeking financial damages and a ban on the sale of Google's speakers, smartphones, and laptops in US for allegedly infringing on five patents, including technology that lets wireless speakers connect and synchronise with one another.
• Mozilla releases Firefox 72 browser with new tracking prevention features that block fingerprinting scripts by default for all users and picture-in-picture video mode for macOS and Linux, and notification improvements; issues patch for an actively exploited Firefox zero-day flaw that could allow attackers to take control of computers by accessing sensitive memory locations.
• Google's Project Zero security initiative trials a new policy under which all vulnerabilities will be publicly disclosed after 90 days, irrespective of when the bug is fixed.
• Popular messenger app Telegram says it will not integrate TON Blockchain and its Gram cryptocurrency wallet into its service for now.
• Japanese electronics giant Sony unveils Vision-S electric self-driving car concept at CES 2020 that makes use of 33 embedded sensors to detect and monitor the presence of people and objects both inside and outside the vehicle; chipmaker Qualcomm ventures into advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving with new Snapdragon Ride platform that uses chips derived from Qualcomm's mobile products to help a vehicle drive, alongside offering software for localisation, perception, and behaviour prediction.
• Intel partners with Google to design chips for Chromebooks built on Intel's Project Athena framework, with the aim of building the high-performance laptops of tomorrow that can be used not just for work, but media streaming, gaming, and enterprise applications, as Google aims to expand Chromebooks beyond education sector to consumer and enterprise users.
• Google's virtual voice assistant Google Assistant hits 500 million monthly active users; announces new features features such as Scheduled Actions (turn on/off or start/stop a smart device at a specific time), privacy-focused voice controls, longform reading, and Sticky Notes for Google Nest smart displays.
• Upcoming short-form video streaming service Quibi details new features including Turnstyle, which lets videos play well in both portrait and landscape modes. (The biggest challenge Quibi faces is convincing people that they need yet another streaming service, but for what it's worth, it will cost $5 a month with ads, or $8 without, when it launches in April 2020.)
• Apple News reaches over 100 million monthly active users in the U.S., U.K., Australia, and Canada; touts over 800,000 shows on Apple Podcasts in 155 countries, and sales of US$ 1.42 billion in App Store customers during holidays, up 16 percent YoY, and US$386 million on New Year's Day, up 20 percent YoY, as 2019 emerges the biggest year for its Services division.