Tech Roundup: Facebook Blender, Firefox Private Relay & More

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

• India makes use of Aarogya Setu contact tracing app for coronavirus mandatory for all public and private sector employees as the country begins easing some of its lockdown measures in districts less affected by the coronavirus.
• While widespread adoption of contact tracing apps could prove vital to curbing the spread of the new coronavirus, the app's compulsory use has raised privacy concerns among privacy advocates, given the lack of lacking algorithmic accountability (the source code of the app is not openly available or audited for security flaws) and data protection laws in the country. The government has maintained that all data is collected anonymously.
• TikTok's Chinese variant Douyin tests new Connection feature that allows users to video call strangers and play interactive games with them as it jockeys with Tencent's WeChat for dominance; comes as TikTok and Douyin pass 2 billion downloads cumulatively on Google Play and Apple's App Store.
• Twitter officially turns off the ability to tweet via SMS across the world except a handful of countries; comes months after it disabled the feature following a spate of SIM-swapping attacks, including that of CEO Jack Dorsey. (It's worth noting that Twitter's original 140-character limit for tweets was originally established to tailor to the length of SMS messages.)
• Facebook-owned WhatsApp says there has been a 70 percent reduction in the number of highly forwarded messages sent after it began enforcing new forwarding limit that restricts the number of times a message can be forwarded to only one chat at a time.
• Google's second-generation Pixel buds go on sale for US$ 179 with improved sound quality, hands-free access to Google Assistant, five hours of listening time and up to 24 hours of total battery use.
• Smartphone maker Vivo surpasses Samsung to become the second largest seller in India after Xiaomi; ships 6.7 million units vis a vis Xiaomi's 10.3 million units, as Realme and Oppo round up the top five.

• Brave, a maker of a pro-privacy browser, reveals a shortage of tech expertise and budget resource among European data protection agencies to stringently enforce GDPR regulations in the region.
• Google's teleconferencing service, Meet, is adding 3 million new users per day, up from 2 million earlier this month, with 100 million daily active users compared to Zoom's 300 million daily meeting "participants" (and not users, implying one user could be a participant in five different meetings on the same day and would be counted five times as opposed to once) as the ongoing coronavirus pandemic pushes organisations to adapt or change their enterprise collaboration capabilities to meet telework requirements; Microsoft Teams hits 75 million daily active users, up from 44 million in mid-March.
• In a separate development to counter Zoom's meteoric rise, Google has also made Google Meet free for any user with a Google account and support for meetings of any amount of time (at least until October when they might be limited to 60 minutes) for up to 100 people, lifting an earlier restriction that limited its use to G Suite users. With Hangouts already on its way out, this might as well be a potential way to transition regular users from the app to Chat and Meet.
• Google and Microsoft aren's the only competitors looking to respond to Zoom — there's also Facebook which quickly scrambled to launch Messenger Rooms last week.
• The real test for Zoom and its competitors will be the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic. Will these teleconferencing solutions still continue to grow?
• British payments firm Checkout.com joins the Libra Association, the first payments processor to do so after Visa, Mastercard, and Stripe pulled out in October.

• Google's Area 120 experimental products group to shut down Shoelace, a hyper-local invite-only social networking app it had launched in New York City in July 2019, on May 12, stating that "now doesn't feel like the right time to continue investing in this project."
• Facebook announces Blender, an open source chatbot aimed at artificial intelligence research that it claims outperforms existing approaches to generating dialogue while "feel[ing] more human."
• Reliance Industries-owned e-commerce platform JioMart to partner with WhatsApp to build an ordering system in India that allows customers to shop for groceries from within the messaging app, hinting at the collaboration between Facebook and Reliance Jio following the former's 9.9 percent stake in the Indian firm last week.
• Browser-maker Mozilla previews new service called Private Relay that allows users to create email aliases to hide their email address from advertisers and spam operators when filling in online forms. (It still lacks options to send or reply to emails from aliases.)
• Hungarian competition watchdog GVH fines online reservation platform Booking.com 2.5 billion forints (6.1 million pounds) for unfair business practices, including misleading advertisements and exerting psychological pressure on consumers to facilitate faster bookings.
• Reddit disables Start Chatting, a new tool that lets users start a chat room with up to seven randomly selected users within a subreddit, after a buggy rollout that caused the chat button to appear on all subreddits without giving moderators an opportunity to opt out and oversee the chat rooms according to their community rules.

• Microsoft Xbox Live hits 90 million monthly active users, with Xbox Game Pass subscriber count crossing 10 million paid users.
• Music streaming service Spotify reports monthly active users of 286 million, its premium users jumping 31 percent to 130 million and ad-supported monthly active users rising 32 percent to 163 million.
• Facebook's family of products (Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp) surpasses 3 billion monthly active users, with daily active users using Facebook alone rising 11 percent YoY to 1.73 billion, and Messenger and WhatsApp now logging about 700 million daily calls. (Interestingly, Facebook's non-ad business, including its Oculus virtual reality headsets and Portal family of video chat devices, is up 80 percent this quarter from a year ago, to nearly US$ 300 million, implying people are indeed buying Facebook's hardware products.)
• Social media platform Twitter crosses 166 million monetisable daily active users, adding 32 million users since last year.
• Apple's Services division (apps, games, movies and music, as well as TV, gaming and music subscriptions and Apple Pay) hits record revenues of US$ 13.35 billion, with Apple News surpassing 125 million monthly active users. (There's no word yet on how many users are actually using the Apple+ news subscription service.)
• The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) rules that AI cannot be an inventor, as only "natural persons" can receive a patent, after two patents filed in 2019 had an AI system credited as inventor.

• The Netherlands-based smartphone manufacturer Fairphone partners with France's /e/OS to offer a "de-Googled" version of its latest handset, Fairphone 3. (It's worth noting that the partnership is the result of an E.U. antitrust ruling in 2018 that allows OEMs to sell devices running approved Android versions as well as forked variants regardless of which other devices they sell.)
• Global smartphone shipments drop 11.7 percent YoY to 276 million during the period January to March, the largest YoY decline ever, with Samsung, Huawei, Apple, Xiaomi and Vivo taking up the top five spots.
• The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) votes to reject US$ 1.1 billion sale of .org registry to private equity firm Ethos Capital after concerns over the prospect of an for-profit firm managing nonprofit domains.
• Google Messages for Android gains support for rich messaging (aka RCS) in Italy and Singapore months after U.S. rollout.
• Chinese handset maker Xiaomi defends its data practices over reports that it's collecting web history as well as phone data such as "unique numbers for identifying the specific device and Android version" (even in Incognito Mode) via its Mint Browser that could be connected to the person using the device; says it only gathers aggregated usage statistics like responsiveness and performance that can't be used to identify individuals, and that it syncs users' browser data if Mi Account holders have turned the sync feature on in their settings. (Xiaomi has begun rolling out an update to both Mint Browser and Mi Browser Pro that adds a setting to disable aggregated data collection while in Incognito Mode. However, the option is not enabled by default.)