Tech Roundup: Apple Anti-Tracking Policy, YouTube Clips & More

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

• Apple confirms its new anti-tracking policy for apps (both first- and third-party apps) will be enabled by default with the next iOS 14 beta release in early spring, with added option toggle to share advertising identifiers (called IDFA) on a by-app basis; releases a new "A Day in the Life of your Data" report taking a swipe at the ad industry, pointing out that apps, on average, have six trackers from other companies to "surveil and identify users across apps, watching and recording their behaviour" with "the sole purpose of collecting and tracking people and their personal information", and that the industry collects US$ 227 billion in revenue each year.
• "Privacy means peace of mind, it means security, and it means you are in the driver's seat when it comes to your own data," Apple senior vice president of software engineering Craig Federighi said in a statement, as CEO Tim Cook warns of algorithms pushing society towards social catastrophe, stating valuing engagement over privacy leads to polarisation and violence.
• "At a moment of rampant disinformation and conspiracy theories juiced by algorithms, we can no longer turn a blind eye to a theory of technology that says all engagement is good engagement," Cook said. "Users may not know whether the apps they use to pass the time, to check in with their friends, or to find a place to eat, may in fact be passing on information about the photos they’ve taken, the people in their contact list, or location data that reflects where they eat, sleep or pray," he added.
• New analysis finds more than a dozen third-party apps with misleading or inaccurate privacy labels, more than a month after Apple debuted the feature as a way for providing users with a broad overview of the data types an app may collect, and whether the information is used to track them or is linked to their identity or device.
• Mozilla's new Internet Health Report for 2020 finds that "58% of 14,000 young women and girls surveyed in 22 countries faced online abuse or harassment," adding a mere seven companies — Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google's parent company Alphabet, Facebook, and China's Tencent and Alibaba — control the vast majority of the internet's traffic and much of its infrastructure ("When you use Netflix or Zoom, for example, you're using Amazon Web Services," the report said).
• Popular messaging app Telegram launches a new tool to let users import chat history from WhatsApp, Line, or KakaoTalk on Android and iOS.
• Chinese tech giant Huawei begins investigations into claims that the company officials retweeted messages from 14 fake accounts on Twitter to spread a pro-5G influence campaign in Belgium, which has imposed new restrictions to ban Huawei from supplying 5G equipment to local telecom providers. (It's not immediately clear if any of the 14 accounts were controlled by Huawei or a related entity, although all the accounts in question have now been suspended.)
• India outlines plans to introduce a law to ban private cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin in the country and "create a facilitative framework for creation of the official digital currency" that will be issued by the nation's central bank, the Reserve Bank of India.

• Internal research at Facebook last August showed that ~70% of the platform's most active civic Groups were considered too toxic to recommend to users; warned of blatant misinformation and "graphic calls for violence" that were filling the majority of the Facebook civic groups, in addition to directing a million views daily to fake news stories and other provocative content, raising concerns that the company's integrity systems "aren't addressing these issues."
• Another problem that exarcerbates the problem is the fact that Groups can be private (or closed), so only members could access them, while some others can be "hidden," which lends the closed groups an extra cloak of invisibility.
• They can neither be searched nor do they show up in search results, making it difficult to know how many toxic groups exist, much less about the kind of content that's shared by the members of such groups, with the exception of Facebook's own detection systems.
• WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned popular messaging app with more than 2 billion users, rolls out a new feature that requires biometric authentication when connecting to its web and desktop versions from the mobile app as a second layer of protection alongside the existing QR code verification.
• Shared office services provider WeWork is said to be in talks to merge with a special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC) at a valuation of around US$10 billion, more than a year after its high-profile failure to go public.
• Facebook reportedly preparing an antitrust lawsuit against Apple for forcing developers to abide by App Store guidelines that Apple's own apps are exempted from, as the social media giant's long-simmering public dispute with Apple nears a boiling point; also to target Apple's refusal to allow third-party apps from becoming the default messaging service on its devices instead of iMessage.
• The U.K. Competition and Markets Authority said it plans to make a decision over whether or not Facebook's acquisition of Giphy has a "realistic prospect" of substantially lessening competition by March 25, as it continues to scrutinise the deal. (It's worth noting that Facebook has paused the integration of Giphy into Instagram in the wake of the probe.)
• Sony debuts Xperia Pro, the company's first smartphone with 5G in the U.S, for US$ 2,499.99; aims for pro-users who it hopes will use its HDMI input to turn the phone into an external camera monitor and its 5G connectivity to quickly upload or live-stream footage.

• Huawei's drops to sixth place for worldwide phone sales for the three month period October to December, as Samsung, Apple, Xiaomi, Oppo, and Vivo take up the top five slots.
• China's state-owned newspaper under Communist Party mouthpiece People's Daily, The Global Times, calls on tech firms in the country to sue for compensation from the Indian government after the latter permanently bans 57 Chinese apps over national security concerns.
• Facebook is supposedly developing newsletter tools for independent journalists and writers, including tools to help build followers, curate email lists, and offer paid subscriptions, in a bid to take on Twitter (which this week acquired Revue) and Substack.
• Researchers from MIT develop a new 'liquid' neural network that's capable of adapting its underlying behavior in response to new data inputs after the initial training phase; aims to help "decision making based on data streams that change over time, including those involved in medical diagnosis and autonomous driving."
• Facebook's Oversight Board begins to public comments till February 5 on the company's decision to permanently ban former U.S. president Donald Trump in the aftermath of the U.S. Capitol attack on January 6th to address concerns if the removal complied with the company’s responsibilities to respect freedom of expression and human rights, days after the board announced its rulings on its first set of cases earlier this week, upholding only one takedown and overturning four others involving hate speech, nudity, and misinformation.
• Google-owned YouTube begins testing a new "Clips" feature that allows viewers and creators to make and share clips of short, bit-sized clips of longer videos.