Tech Roundup: China Big Tech Crackdown, Microsoft Nuance Acquisition & More

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

• China's State Administration for Market Regulation continues its antitrust crackdown, as it orders 34 internet companies, inlcuding Tencent, Meituan, ByteDance, Baidu, and JD.com, to rectify their anti-competitive practices in the next month, days after issuing a record $2.8 billion fine to e-commerce giant Alibaba for its abuse of market dominance.
• German regulators seek to bar upcoming revision to WhatsApp's privacy policy over concerns that the changes could lead to the unlawful use of user data for marketing and advertising purposes. (WhatsApp's contentious new terms of service are slated to come into effect from May 2021. The updated privacy policy changes how Facebook can access users’ chats with business accounts.)
• Microsoft confirms its plans to acquire speech tech company Nuance for US$ 19.7 billion in cash, a 23% premium on its Friday closing price, as it boosts its healthcare offerings, giving the company a crucial foothold in the voice-based AI market and making it the firm's fourth biggest takeover after LinkedIn (US$ 26 billion), ZeniMax (US$ 7.6 billion), and GitHub (US$ 7.5 billion). (It also helps that Microsoft has largely avoided the same level of antitrust scruntiny its peers Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google have been subjected to in recent years.)
• Google expands Lens image recognition app beyond mobile by rolling it out inside Google Photos for the web, allowing desktop users to copy text from images using OCR.
• U.S. lawmakers table new proposal aimed at Big Tech that would cap corporate giants from acquiring companies with a market capitalization of over US$ 100 billion in a bid to bolster antitrust laws.
• Chromium-based browsers Brave and Vivaldi disable Google's FLoC tracking method from all of their respective releases, saying it materially harms user privacy under the guise of being privacy-friendly, calling it a "dangerous step that harms user privacy."
• Chipmaker Nvidia previews Morpheus, an AI-powered cloud-native app framework to help cybersecurity providers detect and prevent breaches in real-time.

• Music streaming service Spotify Spotify announces Car Thing, a Spotify-only, voice-controlled device for the car in the U.S.; debuts a new "Hey Spotify" voice assistant feature, allowing users to start, navigate, and search for their music and podcasts in a hands-free manner, as it insists the functionality is optional and that "the app listens for 'Hey Spotify' in short, few-second snippets that are deleted if you don't say it."
• Apple says letting third-party apps bundle their own payment systems "would make the App Store a flea market"; says "the volume of people going into such a market would be dramatically lower, which would be bad for the user," as the company's projection of the app store as a curation of secure, thoroughly vetted apps is dubbed a "security theater."
• Apple announces online event on April 20 at 10am PT, entitled "Spring Loaded", to unveil new iPad Pro devices, as Samsung sets its next Galaxy Unpacked on April 28, teasing "the most powerful Galaxy is coming," hinting at Galaxy Book laptops.
• Facebook tests a new video speed-dating app called Sparked as part of a "small, external beta test" designed to generate insights about how video dating could work; Facebook Oversight Board to begin letting users to appeal for posts to be taken down from Facebook and Instagram, in what's a significant expansion of the board's scope that previously only allowed appeals for restoring content that were taken down..
• Messaging platform Discord amps up its restrictions on adult content, with new age gates on NSFW servers and a ban on accessing these servers from iOS devices; lets users mark entire servers as NSFW if their community "is organised around NSFW themes or if the majority of the server’s content is 18+."
• Japanese electronics giant Sony invests another US$ 200 million in Epic Games as part of a $1 billion funding round, pushing the Fortnite developer's total valuation to US$ 28.7 billion; comes after the company purchased a US$ 250 million stake in July 2020.