Tech Roundup: Avast Jumpshot Shutdown, Google's OpenSK & More

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

1. India lifts internet blockade in war-torn Kashmir after more than six months, allowing people in the union territory to regain internet access to around 300 whitelisted websites. (Social media platforms will continue to be blocked, with concerns remaining over "propagation of terror activities", the "circulation of inflammatory material," and the "coordination of activities inimical to the security of the state.")
2. The European Parliament overwhelmingly passes measure pushing for adoption of a common charging standard for mobile devices in a bid to reduce electronic waste, a move which Apple said would stifle innovation.
3. Over 160,000 data-breach notifications have been officially reported in the wake of European Union GDPR regulations (which came into force on 25 May 2018), with 278 notifications a day on average.
4. Antivirus maker Avast to shut down its marketing subsidiary Jumpshot after getting caught red-handed over collecting and selling user browsing data to third parties without their informed consent.
5. Facebook reaches 2.5 billion monthly active users (and 1.66 billion daily active users) as CEO Mark Zuckerberg says the company's goal for the next decade "isn't to be liked, but to be understood"; agrees to pay US$ 550 million to settle a class action suit over Illinois biometric law violations for tagging users in photos as part of its Tag Suggestions tool, which scans a user's face in photos and offers suggestions about who that person might be, storing biometric data without user consent, thereby violating the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act. (Facebook has also introduced a new measure, Family Average Revenue Per Person, in an attempt to mask its shifting revenues from Facebook to Instagram. As far as Zuckerberg's goal is concerned, it's never about liking Facebook. It's about trust. And the major problem is that people already know what Facebook stands for.)
6. Product Hunt, a website to find new tech products, launches YourStack, a social network for discussing various products, including apps, books, and cookware.
7. Apple reports 1.5 billion active iOS devices, with record revues of US$ 91.8 billion (US$ 12.7 billion from Services), fuelled by strong demand for our iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro models, and all-time records for Services and Wearables.
8. Google releases open-source 2FA security key platform called OpenSK that aims for a standardised implementation for security keys, supporting both FIDO U2F and FIDO2, as Apple submits new proposal to unify the format of SMS one time passwords for two factor authentication. (It's baffling why Apple would take this direction, since SMS is known to be an insecure means for 2FA. Even NIST, the U.S. government's technology standards body, has deprecated support for text message-based two-factor. Although SMS is still better than having no 2FA at all, if anything, it should be pushing for FIDO.)
9. Facebook officially launches "Off-Facebook Activity tool" (can be found here or by navigating to: Settings > Your Facebook Information > Off-Facebook Activity) which lets users "clear" all the data passed onto Facebook by other apps and sites, including third-parties that have shared user interactions with the social network, globally, almost two years after it was originally announced as "Clear History" in the wake of Cambridge Analytica data scandal.
• It's worth noting here that the tool won't actually delete the data collected about you from other apps and sites, only its connection to your Facebook account.
• Facebook has a pattern of data abuses, decimating competition and buying them outright, usurping users' privacy as it ascended the ladder of market dominance. The price of joining Facebook is nothing, but the cost of using it, quantified in terms of the data fed into the platform, is manifold, which it can use to its financial advantage. After all, data is the new currency.
• Even worse, users opting to leave Facebook are subjected to a variety of shadow profiling and tracking, with no option to manage the privacy settings. The only way to game Facebook, it seems, is to be on Facebook.
10. Google reportedly prototyping yet another communications app for businesses, which brings together functions from Gmail, Drive, Hangouts Meet, and Hangouts Chat all in one place, making it the tenth chat app developed by the search giant after Google Talk, Google Voice, Google Buzz, Google+ Messenger, Hangouts, Spaces, Allo, Hangouts Chat (and Meet), and Google Messages.
11. Amazon's Ring line of home surveillance products, which have come under intense scrutiny in recent months following a seemingly endless litany of worrying revelations about Ring's law enforcement partnerships, account security, vulnerabilities, employee snooping, and sharing of extremely detailed location data, faces further criticism after its Android app is found "packed with third-party trackers sending out a plethora of customers' personally identifiable information" without any meaningful user disclosure and consent. (Facebook, for example, gets users' time zone, device model, language preferences, and screen resolution tied to a unique identifier, and the data sharing happens regardless of whether the user has a Facebook account, adding the user identifier persists even when the advertiser ID is reset.)
12. Apple is ordered by to pay California Institute of Technology US$ 838 milllion and Broadcom US$ 270 million for infringing California Institute of Technology patents on Wi-Fi transmission technology; ruling comes weeks after Apple and Broadcom announced a joint US$15 billion deal to supply the iPhone maker with wireless chips for the next three and a half years.
13. An analysis of 11,430 Google Play Store apps by researchers and academics from North Carolina State University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and IBM Research ("PolicyLint: Investigating Internal Privacy Policy Contradictions on Google Play") finds that 14.2 percent of the apps use a privacy policy with contradicting statements about user data collection practices.
14. Popular macOS and iOS calendar app Fantastical switches to a premium subscription-based model, US$ 5 per month or US$ 3.33 per month for annual subscription, unifying the app experience across all platforms with weather, tasks (with Todoist, Google Tasks, and iCloud integration), meeting proposals. (While subscriptions are a fool-proof means to ensure app development in the long run, this rush to make everything a subscription is fast spinning out of control. In the end, it's not sustainable for most consumers, driving them to really choose what subscriptions they want to continue paying for.)
15. Google continues its product shutdown spree; to kill One Today service — used to help people donate to nonprofit causes — that it launched seven years ago next week due to "donors choos[ing] other products to fundraise for their favourite nonprofits"; previews Meena, a chatbot capable of near-human conversation, as the company's experimental incubator team Area 120 tests Pinterest clone Tangi that focuses on art, cooking, DIY and fashion.
16. Ride-hailing platform Lyft lays off 90 employees (approximately 1.6 percent of its 5,500 -person workforce) in marketing and enterprise sales departments as it attempts to turn profitable.
17. Retail giant Amazon's subscription bundle Prime reaches 150 million members worldwide, up from 100 million that the company announced 21 months ago, as revenue from subscriptions hit US$ 5.24 billion and that from ads goes up 41 percent YoY to US$ 4.78 billion.
18. Snapchat launches Bitmoji TV, 4-minute comedy cartoons with users' avatars, on a dedicated Snapchat Show that can be subscribed to by users.
19. Russian search engine Yandex launches Lavka, a new online service in Moscow called that delivers orders in 15 minutes using bike couriers and small warehouses spread across the city.
20. Facebook-owned WhatsApp drops support for Android devices running Android 2.3.7 or older, and iPhones with versions iOS 8 or older.