Tech Roundup: Facebook Collab, Google Outage & More

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

• Google suffers rare worldwide outage that knocks off popular services such as Gmail, YouTube, Calendar Chat/Meet, and Google Docs, for about 45 minutes due to an "internal storage quota issue"; officially discontinues Google Home Max smart speaker, as it slowly phases out its earlier smart home products in favour of Nest-branded alternatives.
• Uber and Lyft unveil new benefits for drivers in the U.S. state of California on their platforms, including guaranteed minimum earnings and stipends for health care following their victory on the Prop 22 ballot measure last month that exempts gig economy companies from requiring them to treat their contract workers as employees; Uber to apply a fee of up to US$ 1.50 to the cost of rides and up to US$ 2 on meal deliverie to cover the costs of the new benefits.
• The U.S. Federal Trade Commission unwraps new investigation into Amazon, TikTok owner ByteDance, Facebook, WhatsApp, Discord, Reddit, Snap, Twitter, and YouTube, with a focus on how these companies "collect, use, and present personal information, their advertising and user engagement practices, and how their practices affect children and teens."
• Pornhub purges all videoes from unverified accounts off its platform, as the number of hosted videos drops from 13.5 millionto 7.2 million, following revelations that the adult content site is rampant with videos of child sexual abuse; to only accept cryptocurrency for its premium service after Visa and Mastercard cut off payments to the website last week.
• Encrypted messaging app Signal updates its iOS and Android apps with support for encrypted group video calls with up to five participants.
• ByteDance-owned TikTok partners with Samsung to launch TikTok on smart TVs from models dating from 2018 or later in Europe, starting with the U.K.; to come pre-installed in all new Samsung TVs going forward.
• Apple officially releases iOS 14.3 and macOS Big Sur 11.1 with App Store privacy labels that aims to provide more transparency around third-party app data collection (as I mentioned here, monitoring the veracity of the information in the privacy labels will be key to the success of this initiative); updates Shazam with a new Apple Music-like design, and support for music identification via the web browser, one month after surpassing 200 million monthly active users.
• The labels are just one of Apple's new policies to give users more privacy at the possible expense of the app economy, which largely relies on collecting and selling furtively acquired user data. App Tracking Transparency is the other.
• Facebook's internal R&D group, NPE Team, formally launches Collab, a TikTok-inspired music making app for collaborating on music videos, on iOS in the U.S., after announcing a beta version in May; begins testing a revamped "lite" version of Instagram app in India, months after discontinuing the app worldwide.

• Electronic Arts to buy U.K. racing game developer Codemasters in a deal worth $1.2 billion; rival Ubisoft opens its subscription service Ubiosoft+ (formerly Uplay+) to add support for Google Stadia (with Amazon Luna support coming later), allowing subscribers to sign up for a free Stadia account and stream Ubisoft games from the cloud on supported devices.
• In a related development, Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo, who among them effectively control the entirety of the console gaming market, announce a shared set of safety guidelines for moderating their online platforms, including cooperation with other organizations and ratings agencies on safety initiatives and letting players customise their privacy controls)
• China's antitrust watchdog retroactively fines Alibaba and Tencent 500,000 yuan (US$ 76,000) each, Alibaba for increasing its stakein major Chinese mall operator Intown to 73.79% in 2017 and China Literature (Tencent's ebook arm) for its acquisition of film studio New Classics Media, for failing to seek regulatory clearance; says it's reviewing an impending Tencent-led merger between games streaming giants Huya and Douyu, as antitrust authorities in the country increase scrutiny of China's largest tech corporation ahead of new anti-monopoly rules.
• Finnish telecom giant Nokia launches PureBook X14 laptop (US$ 815) in collaboration with Walmart-owned Flipkart for the Indian market; packs a 14-inch full-HD display, Windows 10 Home, 512GB NVMe SSD and 8 GB DD4 RAM, and Intel's 10th generation quad-core i5 processor with up to 4.2GHz turbo speed.
• Twitter gets fined €450,000 by Ireland's Data Protection Commission (DPC) for failing to notify the breach on time to the authority and adequately document the breach, making it the first such cross-border GDPR decision by the Irish watchdog; to shut down Periscope livestreaming app in March 2021 which it acquired back in 2015, citing decline in usage and terming its current state as "unsustainable."
• Facebook to require U.K. users of the site, along with Instagram and WhatsApp, to sign an updated terms of service agreement in the coming months that shifts the jurisdiction from its European branch based in the Republic of Ireland to the U.S. following the country's vote to leave the European Union, thus stripping users of strict privacy protections guaranteed under GDPR. (In a similar Brexit related change, Google earlier this February announced a legal migration for U.K. users, moving them from its E.U. subsidiary to the U.S.)
• Microsoft updates its Authenticator two-factor authentication app with support for syncing autofill passwords for apps and websites across its Edge browser, Google Chrome, and mobile iOS or Android devices; reportedly working on in-house designs for chips to run its cloud servers and Surface brand of PCs.
• Bitcoin breaks above US$ 20,000 for the first time in history following increased demand from institutional investors for the world's most valuable digital currency.
• Amazon's Zoox unveils an autonomous electric "carriage-style" robotaxi that can hold four passengers, travel up to 75 miles per hour, and run for a supposed 16 hours on a single charge; retail giant rolls out new Alexa feature for Echo devices that live-translates conversations between English and Spanish, German, French, Hindi, Italian, and Brazilian Portuguese.
• Australia's Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) sues Facebook for allegedly using now-discontinued Onavo VPN app to spy on users for commercial purposes in 2016 and 2017, stating the practice of collecting detailed personal activity of the app's users is "completely contrary to the promise of protection, secrecy and privacy that was central to Facebook's promotion of this app."