Tech Roundup: Google's Cookie Revamp, Verizon OneSearch & More

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

1. The European Commission said to be considering measures to impose a temporary ban on facial recognition technologies used by both public and private actors for a period anywhere between 3-5 years, during which it hopes to devise "a sound methodology for assessing the impacts of this technology and possible risk management measures could be identified and developed."
2. Turkey lifts two-and-a-half year ban on Wikipedia, restoring access to the site after the country's top court ruled that blocking it was unconstitutional.
3. Shanghai reportedly testing facial recognition at pharmacies to flag potential abusers and prevent pharmacists from helping patients obtain illegal drugs.
4. Google plans to phase out support for user-agent strings in Chrome, opting for a new technology called Client Hints, as part of its Privacy Sandbox project (Over the years, UA strings have been used by online advertisers as a way to track and fingerprint website visitors); to deprecate support for third-party cookies in Chrome within two years, following the footsteps of rivals Safari and Firefox, but confirms the new restriction would not go into effect until alternatives that Google considers more privacy-preserving are viable.
5. Cookies are small pieces of information stored in browsers that allow website operators to save data about users, so that for example, they can keep a particular user logged into a website over multiple days. But cookies also have given obscure software vendors, whose technology is used by website operators, a broad window into which webpages a user is visiting, and can be used to track users across multiple sites, and to target ads and see how they perform. When shared with advertisers, the data enable predictions about which ads the individual would find relevant.
6. Verizon Media debuts OneSearch, a privacy-focused no-tracking search engine that claims to serve ads based only on contextual info and keywords related to individual searches, with search results generated by Microsoft's Bing search engine.
7. It's interesting that Verizon is introducing a new search engine brand when it already owns Yahoo!. After all, why force users to use a brand that's well known for its string of massive data breaches and privacy blunders. Verizon had to deal with a privacy blunder of its own for so-called "supercookies" that tracked which websites users on its mobile network visited in order to deliver targeted ads, resulting in a US$ 1.4 million fine back in 2016. But it's also worth pointing out that OneSearch was previously used by Yahoo! as part of a mobile search product more than a decade ago.
8. Financial services firm Visa to acquire Plaid, which helps popular fin-tech apps such as Venmo, Robinhood and Coinbase connect to users' bank accounts through its APIs, for US$ 5.3 billion; comes a year after Visa and Mastercard each invested US$ 250 million into the company.
9. Twitter suspends Grindr from its ad platform as it investigates report that the dating app shared sensitive data with ad tech partners including Twitter's MoPub in violation of the EU's GDPR data protection legislation; also alleges that OkCupid sends a user's ethnicity and answers to personal profile questions — like "Have you used psychedelic drugs?" — to a firm that helps companies tailor marketing messages to users.
10. Facebook-owned Instagram officially begins testing direct messages for desktop web for a small percentage of the platform's users as the company increasingly pivots to private messaging across WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook; removes IGTV button from the app's home page, as the video platform's standalone version reaches 1.1 million downloads in the U.S. since its launch in June 2018 (TikTok, in comparison, received 80.5 million downloads during the same period), in what appears to be an admission of Facebook's continued failure to crack video.
11. Google acquires no-code app development platform AppSheet, with plans to migrate AppSheet services to Google Cloud; also purchases Dublin-based Pointy, a startup that helps brick-and-mortar retailers track which products they have in stock for reportedly US$ 163 million.
12. Popular web browser Opera gets accused of running four Android apps (CashBean, OKash, OPay and OPesa) aimed at India, Kenya and Nigeria that offer predatory loans in direct violation of Google Play Store practices; apps found to scrap phone contacts to harass family, friends and others with calls and texts in hopes this would pressure customers into paying up.
13. Microsoft officially rolls out Chromium-based Edge browser for Windows and macOS with improves privacy controls and and tracking prevention.
14. Apple acquires Xnor.ai, a Seattle startup specialising in low-power, artificial intelligence-based image recognition tools, in a deal worth US$ 200 million.
15. Google updates Smart Lock on iOS to leverage Apple's Secure Enclave to enable the iPhone's use as a physical 2FA key to sign in to Google apps via Chrome on nearby devices; enables users to browse and compare clothes from multiple retailers directly to search results, removes phone number requirement for Google Duo video chat service on the web, to remove hosted and packaged local web apps from Chrome Web Store starting this year, and to reportedly add native call recording for the Phone app on Android.
16. TikTok's parent ByteDance reportedly planning a foray into games, building a team of over 1,000 and buying game studios and title distribution rights, with first games slated for release this spring.
17. Retail giant Amazon to invest US$ 1 billion to bring small businesses online in India, amid increased regulatory scrutiny and concerns that the company is violating Indian law by offering deep discounts and discriminating against small sellers by promoting select big ones; purportedly working with Visa to test checkout terminals that let consumers link their credit cards to their pals to pay for purchases.
18. China's ubiquitous social media and do-everything app WeChat begins testing paywalls for official accounts, allowing blog-like platforms to charge readers either for selected original content or all posts (1 yuan-208 yuan), opening up more monetisation opportunities for its content creators as Chinese internet users show willingness to pay for online content.
19. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey once again shoots down idea of allowing users to edit tweets; says it wants to preserve the early days of the service when it started off as an SMS, text messaging service.
20. Xiaomi resolves privacy issue associated with its security cameras, which when connected to Google Nest Hubs showed feeds from random homes.
21. Alphabet, Google's parent company, hits trillion dollar in market value for the first time, making it the fourth U.S. firm after Apple, Amazon and Microsoft to hit the milestone.
22. Tesla unveils plans to open a design and research centre in China to make "Chinese-style" vehicles, as the electric car maker's stock market value hit nearly US$ 89 billion, eclipsing the sum of General Motors' and Ford's values for the first time.
23. Google's YouTube begins rolling out Profile Cards (only on Android for now) that lets users tap on the profile picture of a commenter to a view the user's public information and comment history on the current channel; removes popular Hong Kong pro-democracy mapping app WhatsGap — used to identify retailers that are in support of Hong Kong's democracy — from its app store for capitalising on ongoing conflicts and tragedies, joining a long list of companies like Apple, who have bowed down to growing pressure from China.