Tech Roundup: Apple's NextVR Purchase, Google RCS Rollout & More

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

• India's antitrust agency, the Competition Commission of India, is looking into allegations that Facebook's WhatsApp is abusing its dominant position by offering payment services to its users; comes as the company readies to launch a built-in digital payments solution within WhatsApp in competition to Google Pay and Paytm after extensive beta testing of the feature with 1 million users since 2018 in the country.
• France passes new law that compels social network platforms and online service providers to remove pedophile and terrorism-related content within an hour or face a fine of up to 4 percent of their global revenue in a bid to tackle illegal hate speech and other forms of illicit content.
• Facebook-owned Instagram and WhatsApp roll out Messenger Rooms integration, allowing users to initiate Messenger group chats from within the apps; discontinues Instagram Lite, a lightweight version of the Instagram app aimed at emerging markets in favour of a new version that's currently in development.
• For starters, in order to initiate a group chat using Messenger Rooms, your Instagram account must be connected to a Facebook account, although one isn't required to join another user's room.
• Dutch and Colombia privacy watchdogs to investigate Chinese-owned social media app TikTok with regards to its handling of personal data of teens and young users.
• More than 175 million people under the age of 18, or 93.1 percent of China's underage population, are online, according to a joint report released by the government-affiliated China Internet Network Information Center and the Chinese Communist Youth League.
• Music streaming service Spotify restores support for Safari web browser, two-and-a-half years after removing the compatibility in September 2017 and almost a month after Apple debuted Apple Music for the web; unveils a new feature called Group Session, which lets multiple Premium users control a listening session the music being played.
• Tencent-owned all-in-one chat app WeChat surpasses 1.2 billion monthly active users, with its mini apps used by more than 400 million users.
• Microsoft and Intel develop new approach to detect malware by first converting its binary form into a grayscale image then applying deep learning methods.
• Google faces fresh complaint from Austrian privacy activist Max Schrems's Noyb over concerns that the company tracks users of Android phones through a unique Advertising ID that "allows Google and countless third-parties to" monitor users.
• Although the identifier is unique, and user-resettable, this is only effective if users reset their IDs on a periodic basis to avoid tracking for advertising purposes.
• Apple too has a unique ID of its own, but when users enable "Limit Ad Tracking" option on iOS devices, "the Advertising Identifier is replaced with a non-unique value of all zeros to prevent the serving of targeted ads," in addition to "automatically reset to a new random identifier if you disable Limit Ad Tracking."
• Facebook agrees to settle for US$ 52 million to cover more than 11,000 content moderators who developed depression, addictions and other mental health issues while they worked towards moderating content on the social media platform following a series of investigations by The Verge last year. (Cognizant later pulled out of the content moderation market altogether following the expose.)

Google is testing a card-like layout for desktop search results

• Facebook-owned Instagram adds option to delete comments in bulk with added controls over who can tag or mention users (everyone, only people they follow, or no one) in a post, comment, caption, or story to help fight bullying, along with testing a new capability to pin comments.
• Google confirms plans to shut down Google Play Music later this year; urges users to transfer their music and podcasts library to YouTube Music and Google Podcasts respectively.
• Chat app Telegram abandons its Telegram Open Network (TON) blockchain project à la Facebook's Libra after the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission challenged the legality of its US$ 1.7 billion ICO and delayed the network's launch for violating the Securities Act by failing to register its cryptocurrency (called Grams) prior to the launch last October. (Telegram, however, argued against the ruling, stating American courts shouldn't have the power to stop the sale of cryptocurrency beyond U.S. borders.)
• Google begins widely rolling out iMessage-like emoji reactions in its RCS-based Messages app, as RCS chat features expand to more countries, including, Italy, Singapore, Portugal, Argentina, Pakistan, Poland, and Turkey. (If only RCS was widely available!)
• Microsoft Outlook for web gains Gmail-like support for text prediction and completion, allowing users to autocomplete sentences while typing, with a feature to schedule outgoing emails, and a redesign of the mobile web interface in the pipeline.
• Apple acquires NextVR, a California-based VR startup that supplies content to several existing VR headsets such as Facebook's Oculus, in a deal valued at around US$ 100 million as it works towards developing VR and AR devices.
• Google to start blocking battery-draining, resource-intensive ads (those that mine cryptocurrency, are poorly programmed, or are unoptimised for network usage) by default on Chrome browser effective August; announces a new tab grouping feature that lets users better organise their tabs with custom names and colours.
• Google's Pixel lineup faces a rocky road ahead after it's revealed that the company only shipped two million Pixel 4 units over the course of six months since its release last October.
• The fact remains that the software giant has struggled to distinguish itself in a crowded smartphone field despite its excellent hardware and software. Google previously explored the space through its Nexus partnerships, along with its short-lived Motorola Mobility acquisition, but none of them have helped the company rob the market share from the likes of Samsung and Huawei.
• Twitter to add labels and warning messages to tweets about COVID-19 with misleading or disputed content, as part of a new approach to tackle misinformation and hate speech that will eventually extend to other topics.
• While it's essential to make sure objectionable speech is identified, scrutinised and countered on social media platforms — which have been in the past weaponised to act as an accelerant for extremist behaviour — making them "arbiters of truth" will only consolidate their power further.
• Premium email app Newton Mail changes ownership from Essential Products to two fans of the service months after the phone maker announced plans shut the whole business down; to continue to charge users US$ 50 per year.
• Apple's HomePod smart speaker officially go on sale in India for ₹19,900 (US$ 263, below the normal $299 price).
• Sony develops the world's first image sensors, named IMX500 and IMX501, with built-in AI targeting retailers and industrial clients.
• Sony says "including AI processing functionality on the image sensor itself enables high-speed edge AI processing and extraction of only the necessary data, which, when using cloud services, reduces data transmission latency, minimises any privacy concerns, and reduces power consumption and communication costs incorporates both processing power and memory," thus eliminating the need for high-performance processors or external memory and allowing it to perform machine learning-powered "intelligent vision" tasks without extra hardware.
• With the Japanese electronics giant the largest player when it comes to supplying camera image sensors for smartphones, shipping about 1.6 billion sensors last year, counting the latest iPhone 11 models, you can be certain this technology will gain huge traction in the coming years.
• Personal information of people living in Wuhan, the original epicentre of COVID-19, are being shared on spreadsheets passed around in WeChat groups, including real names, national ID numbers, phone numbers and home addresses, resulting in spam calls and online harassment.