Tech Roundup: Instagram Reels, Uber's Postmates Acquisition & More

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

• Florida becomes first state in the U.S. to enact a DNA privacy law, blocking life, disability, and long-term insurers from accessing genetic data.
• Alphabet's balloon-powered internet service Loon officially begins operations in Kenya in partnership with local telecom provider Telkom Kenya, providing cellular service through their network to an area covering roughly 50,000 square kilometres.
• The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Justice open probe into allegations that TikTok failed to live up to a 2019 agreement to delete videos and personal information about users age 13 and younger to protect children's privacy in what's the latest setback for the company that's facing a string of regulatory setbacks and national security concerns over its data collection practices and ties to China.
• France to introduce a controversial nationwide age verification system for pornography websites in an attempt to safeguard children against adult content online.
• India's Supreme Court rules in favour of allowing summons and legal notices to be served via messaging apps, such as WhatsApp and Telegram, as well as by email, marking a huge step towards digitisation of Indian legal proceedings.
• The E.U. Court of Justice rules that online platforms like YouTube need not hand over to rights holders the email or IP addresses of users who upload pirated content.
• Google to ban advertisements for "stalkerware" apps and hardware starting August 11 that enable malicious actors to carry out intimate partner surveillance (Google will still allow ads for products or services designed to help parents monitor their children); comes as domestic violence cases rise worldwide following quarantine measures rolled out in the wake of COVID-19 pandemic.
• The U.K. and Australian data privacy watchdogs open a joint investigation of Clearview AI for scraping billions of people's pictures from across the internet to develop its facial recognition database.
• Google says it has shut down Isolated Region, a cloud project aimed at offering cloud services in countries like China that want to keep and control data within their borders, over geopolitical and pandemic-related concerns. (It's worth noting that reports emerged back in August 2018 about the search giant partnering with local cloud service providers to bring Google Drive and Google Docs to China.)

• Ride-hailing platform Uber to acquire U.S. online delivery service Postmates in a US$ 2.65 billion all-stock deal, months after selling its Uber Eats business in India to rival Zomato and a failed bid to take over GrubHub, which was scooped up by Europe's Just Eat Takeaway.com for US$ 7.3 billion. (I just hope the purchase doesn't go the way of JUMP!)
• Facebook expands Reels, an Instagram specific feature that allows users to create and post short, 15-second videos set to music or other audio, to India following TikTok's ban from its largest overseas market.
• India's order is already shifting the market in favour of local firms, several of which have rushed to cash in on the app ban, with a crop of recently launched short-form video sharing services, including Mitron, Chingari and Roposo, amassing tens of millions of users just this week.
• Google and Mozilla to add support for AVIF image format (AV1 Image File Format), a new optimized image compression format jointly developed in 2015 by Google, Cisco, and Xiph.org, in their respective web browsers. (Facebook, Microsoft's Windows 10, Netflix, and VLC video player have already rolled out support for the format over the years.)
• Google officially rebrands Google+ as Google Currents, a Facebook Workplace like social network for enterprise users, a month after announcing plans to enlist the platform as part of G Suite.
• In 2018, Google began a multi-phase process to shut down Google Plus, in part because it had "low usage and engagement," but also due to security vulnerabilities that factored into its plans to shut it down.
• Google then started to delete consumer accounts on Google Plus in April 2019, and it launched Currents in beta shortly after. Also worth noting is the fact that, the company briefly offered a magazine app under the name Google Currents until 2013, when it rebranded as Google Play Newsstand, which was eventually folded into Google News.
• Facebook-owned WhatsApp makes it easer for businesses on the chat service to share information with QR codes, making it easy to create and share links to their catalogs to post elsewhere; says WhatsApp Business has 50 million monthly active users, with India and Brazil amounting to over 20 million MAUs.
• Uber begins rolling out a new on-demand grocery delivery service in 19 cities across Latin America and Canada after its acquisition of Cornershop last November, with plans to expand it in the U.S. cities of Miami and Dallas "later this month"; to launch a commuter boat service this summer in London in partnership with Thames Clippers, branded as Uber Boat, allowing users to book rides through its namesake app.
• Google's Android 11 hits 400 million users (out of 2.5 billion Android devices) 10 months after launch, making it the fastest adoption rate in Android release history bolstered by work on Project Treble (which separated the OS from the hardware layer, enabling easier porting of Android across devices) and Project Mainline (updating components of the OS directly via Google Play system updates).

Google Docs for Android gains dark mode

• ByteDance-owned TikTok says it removed more than 49 million videos for violating its content policies in the second half of 2019, with India alone accounting for 16.5 million videos where it was banned last month; Google's YouTube gets rid of around 14.7 million videos during the same period.
• Music streaming service Spotify to launch in Russia on July 15 in what's the company's the next big expansion after landing in India in last year.
• Enterprise chat app Slack purchases corporate directory startup Rimeto for an undisclosed price; to beef up capabilities to help employees find people inside the organisation who match a specific set of search criteria from inside the platform.
• In a separate development, DocuSign announced it has acquired Liveoak Technologies for approximately US$ 38 million, giving the company an online notarisation service.
• The acquisition/consolidation spree in tech is partly the consequence of an acquisition trend fuelled by the pandemic, allowing larger public enterprise companies to swoop early-stage startups for relatively bargain prices.
• Amazon launches user profiles for Prime Video globally, allowing six profiles per account, giving access to a Watchlist, personalised recommendations, and viewing progress.
• Mozilla suspends its free file sharing service Firefox Send over concerns that the service is being abused by malicious actors to distribute malware; to require users to sign in with a Firefox Account to share content.
• Apple is reportedly working on a new feature in iOS that lets users make payments with QR Codes using Apple Pay.
• Online dating service Tinder unveils a new video call feature, making it easy for two people in a conversation who've explicitly enabled the setting have a face-to-face chat.
• Google teams up with Ubuntu's Canonical to bring open-source Flutter-based apps to Linux operating system; says "by making Linux a first-class Flutter platform, Canonical is inviting application developers to publish their apps to millions of Linux users and broaden the availability of high quality applications available to them."
• Microsoft acqui-hires Movial's team focussed on porting Android to Surface devices, as it readies development on second-generation Surface Duo, the company's dual-screen Android smartphone announced last October.
• Mobile-only streaming service Quibi reportedly looses 92 percent of its earliest who signed up for the platform back in April after a three-month trial period expires, as it struggles to differentiate in a market populated by YouTube, Apple TV Plus, and Disney Plus.