Tech Roundup: India TikTok Ban, EncroChat Takedown & More

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

• Former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden urges tech workers to "think long and hard about how their labor is used by companies to amass power, surveil people, and fundamentally change society, and need to think about whether it is ethical to work at tech companies at all."
• India blocks as many as 59 Chinese apps, including popular ones such as TikTok, UC Browser, WeChat, Shareit, QQ Mail, QQ Music, ES File Explorer, and CamScanner, for "engaging in activities which are prejudicial to sovereignty and integrity of India, defence of india, security of state and public order"; comes on the heels of a deadly skirmish along the Indo-China border, resulting in the death of 20 Indian soldiers and a number of casualties on the Chinese side.
• With the exception of ByteDance, other Chinese internet firms have struggled to replicate their online services beyond their home turf.
• The move to curtail China's access to residents' data could derail TikTok's expansion plans in the country, which has over 200 million active users. When TikTok was banned briefly last year after a court said the app encouraged pornography, the company told the Supreme Court the blockade cost it roughly US$ 15 million a month.
• What's more, sideloading TikTok on Android won't do the trick as the app's servers are no longer active. But the other apps can be downloaded from third-party sources, potentially increasing the risk of malware.
• With India heavily dependent on China for consumer electronics and investors from the country funding major Indian companies and startups, like Zomato, Paytm, Ola, and Byju, it will be interesting how the boycott plays out.
• The ban, in the meanwhile, has proven to be a blessing in disguise for Indian apps such as Roposo, Mitron, and Chingari, which have seen a huge surge in popularity, with Roposo adding 22 million users in 48 hours.
• One service that might have been possibly caught in the crossfire is DuckDuckGo, which became unreachable after Indian ISPs blocked access to the privacy-oriented search engine via their respective DNS resolvers (although it remained accessible through most third-party DNS resolvers like Cloudflare). It has since been resolved.
• Law enforcement in the United Kingdom, France, and The Netherlands take down encrypted communications platform EncroChat in its "biggest ever" operation, resulting in the arrest of 746 individuals, and seizing of £54 million in cash, 77 firearms, and over two tonnes of drugs.

• The Indian government plans new e-commerce rules that would force online platforms to handover source codes and algorithms in a bid to impose government oversight and ensure against "digitally induced biases" by competitors, as the country's booming internet economy makes it a hotbed for tech battles spanning online retail and content streaming to messaging and digital payments.
• France pulls the plug on Minitel videotex online service which brought online banking, travel reservations, and porn to users in the 1980s prior to the World Wide Web.
• Facebook reveals new data incident that allowed 5,000 app developers to continue receiving user data even after their applications' access expired; fails to disclose how long the "issue" had been around before it was fixed, or how many users may have been impacted.
• Following the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, Facebook tightened its developer policies to prevent apps from accessing a user's data if the individual did not use the app for more than 90 days. The bug, in this case, allowed the apps to continue accessing user information even past the 90-day cutoff date.
• Facebook faces fresh trouble in a nine-year-old lawsuit over the company's use of Like buttons on websites to track users; the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, a U.S. federal court, rules that Facebook's ubiquitous online tracking could be considered a violation of anti-wiretapping laws, adding the Facebook widget collects information from people who don't click on it — which amounts to interception.
• Google sharply raises the price of YouTube TV subscription from US$ 50 to US$ 65 per month (it was US$ 35 when it launched in 2017), with access to new channels access to BET, CMT, Comedy Central, MTV, Nickelodeon, Paramount Network, TV Land, and VH1; says the "new price reflects the rising cost of content and we also believe it reflects the complete value of YouTube TV, from our breadth of content to the features that are changing how we watch live TV."
• Google discontinues its mid-range Pixel 3A and 3A XL smartphones ahead of Pixel 4A launch; brings AI-powered SmartReply feature to YouTube, and begins rolling out its AirDrop equivalent Nearby Sharing in limited beta, allowing users to share files between Android devices wirelessly.

• The U.K. Competition and Markets Authority takes aim at Apple's search engine deal with Google; says Safari's use of Google as its default search engine is "a significant barrier to entry" for rivals and recommends requiring "choice screens" in which users decide which search engine to set as a default during device setup or restricting Apple's ability to monetise default positions.
• Google pays Apple close to US$ 1.5 billion every year to be the default search engine option on Safari across iOS and macOS, and so do rivals Bing, Yahoo! and DuckDuckGo, all of which make payments to Apple in exchange for being search engine options on its devices.
• The antitrust regulator has also raised concerns that Facebook and Google have developed "unassailable" power in the market for advertising revenue, to the detriment of innovation and consumer choice in the U.K., and has suggested that the government urge Google to share anonymised data on people's clicks and queries with rival search engines to help them improve their own algorithms, in addition to suggesting Facebook increase its interoperability with other social media platforms, essentially enabling people to move their photos and other information off the social networking platform and onto competing services.
• A collective of 20 consumer and citizen advocacy groups call on antitrust authorities in the U.S., U.K., E.U., Canada, Australia, Mexico, and Brazil to closely scrutinise Google's proposed merger with wearable maker Fitbit; say "Google's proposed acquisition is not in the interest of citizens," raising concerns over how the search giant will handle users' health data.
• The merger is currently being examined by the Department of Justice in the U.S., while European regulators have set a July 20 deadline to decide whether the deal will go ahead, with the potential to extend the investigation by a further four months. Last month, Australia's antitrust regulator warned that the merger could hurt competition.
• Researchers at Salesforce and the University of Virginia propose a new way called "Double-Hard Debias" to mitigate gender bias in word embeddings, the word representations used to train AI models to summarise, translate languages, and perform other prediction tasks.

• India's Reliance Jio launches JioMeet, a Zoom-like video-conference service, offering unlimited free calls in 720p with up to 100 participants and no time limit.
• Apple rolls out new website for Apple Card customers to manage their accounts, view transactions, and pay bills online.
• Google acquires Canadian AR smart glasses manufacturer North Inc., reportedly to the tune of US$ 180 million, to shore up its own hardware, wearable, and "ambient computing" efforts.
• Handset maker OnePlus announces a new product line of cheaper phones called OnePlus Nord, with the goal of making the "premium OnePlus experience accessible to more users" in Europe and India.
• It's worth noting that the company was originally known for selling cheaper devices, but has since moved towards premium smartphones over the past few years, with the least expensive OnePlus phone starting at US$ 699.
• Facebook revises the way news stories are ranked to prioritise original reporting and transparent authorship, with stories from sources that don't provide transparent information about the publisher's editorial staff to be demoted, as it steps away from showing news content that has the most engagement.
• Facebook's New Product Experimentation (NPE) Team to shut down Hobbi, a Pinterest-like project to document hobbies and interests, and Lasso, a TikTok clone that let users record 15-second long videos and overlay popular songs, on July 10; subsidiary WhatsApp brings dark mode to its desktop and web apps, alongside new features to share profiles with others using a QR code and share animated stickers in chats.
• Dish purchases prepaid mobile carrier Boost Mobile for US$ 1.4 billion after Sprint divested the latter following T-Mobile's Sprint merger to quell antitrust concerns.