Tech Roundup: E.U. Right to Repair, Snapchat Spotlight & More

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

• South Korea's Personal Information Protection Commission (PIPC) slaps Facebook with a 6.7 billion won (around US$6.1 million) fine for sharing personal information of 3.3 million South Korean users (including names, addresses, dates of birth, work experience, hometowns and relationship statuses) to other companies without consent from May 2012 to June 2018 without their consent.
• The European Parliament overwhelmingly votes in favour of Right to Repair; calls on the E.U. Commission to "develop and introduce mandatory labelling, to provide clear, immediately visible and easy-to-understand information to consumers on the estimated lifetime and reparability of a product at the time of purchase."
• The E.U. proposes new data protection regulations aimed at creating a region-wide data marketplace to facilitate sharing of industrial and government information in a bid to take more control of its own data from U.S. companies. (It's worth noting that GDPR regulations only offers similar protection for personal data of individuals.)
• The U.K. government announces plans to create a Digital Markets Unit, a division of the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), in April 2021 to "govern the behaviour of platforms that currently dominate the market, such as Google and Facebook."
• India issues new rules for ride-hailing companies such as Ola and Uber, capping commissions at 20%, surge pricing at 1.5x the base fare, and limiting drivers to 12 work hours/day.
• China's National Radio and Television Administration issues new directive mandating live streamers in China and their gift-giving to register with their real names; bans children under 18 years from giving gifts to live streamers altogether.
• India bans 43 more Chinese-origin apps, such as Snack Video, AliExpress, Lalamove and Taobao Live, over security concerns, two months after banning 175 such apps; comes as PUBG Mobile registers a local entity in India in a return move with a promise of US$ 100 million investment in the country.

• Snap takes TikTok and Instagram Reels with new feature called Spotlight that features vertically-scrollable short-form video content from users.
• With the spread of Stories and TikTok clones, social media platforms are officially beginning to look alike. The homogeneity is an attempt to lure and retain users in their own respective spaces, and drive engagement, not to mention a key means to monetise the attention economy through targeted advertising.
• Twitter now has Fleets, a facsimile of Instagram Stories, originally copied from Snapchat. The format has since been reproduced by Spotify, Pinterest, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Netflix. Snapchat's Spotlight is similar to Instagram Reels, a feature brazenly stolen from TikTok. TikTok itself is rip-off of Vine, which was acquired by Twitter, which is now pursuing a concept called Audio Spaces, a carbon copy of Clubhouse. Aargh!
• Google to stop supporting peer-to-peer payments functionality from via the web starting January 2021 following a revamp of the service last week; adds 1.5% fee on instant transfers via debit card.
• Amazon begins rolling out fitness-tracking features to its Echo Buds, letting users track the duration of a workout, and estimated calories burned, among others; officially debuts Sidewalk, its low-bandwidth, long-range wireless protocol for Amazon devices, in the U.K.
• Apple makes yet another concession on charging App Store fees; to exempt companies that offer digital classes through iPhone apps from having to pay its usual 30% commission fee on in-app purchases through June 2021.
• Twitter to show prompt before users like tweets containing disputed information, as it says such warnings decreased quote retweets of misinformation by 29%; to relaunch account verifications in early 2021 for six categories, including government officials; companies, brands and nonprofit organizations; news; entertainment; sports; and activists, organizers and other influential individuals.
• Pinterest tests new feature that allows users to join online classes and connect with other attendees through a group chat option via Zoom.
• Enterprise software services company Saleforce reportedly in talks to acquire chat platform Slack, potentially making it the third largest purchase made by the firm after MuleSoft and Tableau.
• Microsoft reportedlt working on a software solution to let developers bring Android apps to Windows 10 with little to no change in code, via a project codenamed Latte.
• Facebook-led long-awaited Libra digital currency could launch as early as January, but in a limited format with a single coin, backed one-for-one by the U.S. dollar.