Tech Roundup: Diem, Stripe Treasury & More

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

• China's Cyberspace Administration of China drafts new rules to narrow the scope of user data collected by apps in what's the latest attempt by the government to strengthen personal privacy protection in the world's largest internet market; prohibits live-streaming and short video-sharing services from gathering necessary personal information for basic functions.
• The development comes after the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) criticised apps from Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi, Baidu and ByteDance for flouting government orders to tighten consumer data privacy and deceiving consumers.
• In October, China released a draft of what is likely to become the country's first comprehensive data privacy law (called Personal Information Protection Law or PIPL) that aims to restrict data practices not by both private entities and government departments.
• The Italian Competition Authority, Autorità Garante della Concorrenza e del Mercato or AGCM, fines Apple €10 million (around US$ 12 million) for making misleading claims about the waterproofing of its iPhones; rules that the company's claims about iPhones being water resistant for up to 30 minutes at depths of up to four meters only apply in certain circumstances like controlled lab tests with pure water.
• Researchers at Alphabet's DeepMind solve the "protein folding problem using a machine learning system called AlphaFold," cutting the job down from months to hours, thereby potentially speeding up drug discovery.
• Facebook-backed Libra Association is renamed as Diem, as the project distances itself from the initial Facebook-led vision debuted last year ahead of its expected 2021 stablecoin launch (backed by the U.S. dollar) in a much more limited form; follows Facebook's rebranding of its digital wallet earlier this year to Novi from Calibra.
• Amazon debuts Trainium, a custom chip for machine learning training in the cloud; announces Mac instances for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (powered by Mac mini), allowing AWS customers to run on-demand macOS workloads natively in the AWS cloud for the first time.
• Reddit hits 52 million daily active users, with the daily usage growing 44% year over year for the month of October. (In comparison, Twitter has 187 million daily users, Snap has 249 million, and Facebook has 1.82 billion daily users.)
• Samsung to reportedly discontinue its Galaxy Note phone series next year in the face of falling demand for expensive smartphones caused by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic; to shoft focus on foldable phones and its flagship Galaxy S lineup.

• Google rolls out a new community feed section within Explore tab in Google Maps, featuring posts from local experts, food and drink merchants, and publishers; adds ability to schedule sending messages in Google Messages app for Android, and
• Google updates Google Authenticator for iOS after two years with support for dark theme redesign and the ability to transfer 2FA accounts in bulk; to start offering access to paywalled content in partnership with select news publishers in Google News, officially discontinues Google Play Music and announces plans to shut down its 3D-object creation and library platform Poly on June 30, 2021.
• Google acquires Actifio, a data management company that offers backup and disaster recovery services, for an undisclosed sum; to be part of its Google Cloud offerings to help customers prevent data loss and downtime due to external threats, network failures, human errors and other disruptions.
• Google-owned YouTube debuts new feature that that will push users to reconsider when attempting to post hateful and offensive comments in a bid to introduce more friction and better tackle hate speech; parent Alphabet transitions its navigation system for its fleet of Loon high-altitude balloons to a deep reinforcement learning-based flight control system, making it the world's first deployment of this variety of AI in a commercial aerospace system.
• Twitter rolls out support for two-factor authentication using hardware security keys; to turn off threaded replies after consensus that the change "made conversations hard to read and join", and shut down its prototype twttr app.
• Amazon says 2020's holiday shopping season has been its biggest ever, with independent sellers reaching over US$ 4.8 billion in worldwide sales over the weekend, up 60% YoY; introduces new feature that lets users text Alexa on iOS to ask for things instead of only using their voice.
• Facebook acquires customer relationship management startup Kustomer in a deal worth over US$ 1 billion as the social media giant makes a big push into online shopping; adds custom chat wallpaper backgrounds and stick search features to WhatsApp.
• Fintech startup Stripe announces Stripe Treasury in partnership with banks to offer a banking-as-a-service API that allows its clients to provide bank accounts to their customers.