Tech Roundup: Facebook Soundmojis, Paytm IPO & More

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

• Global smartphone shipments grows 12% YoY in Q2, 2021, with Xiaomi up 83% to take a 17% share and pushing past Apple (14%) to become the second largest smartphone vendor for the first time ever; Samsung leads with 19% share, while Oppo and Vivo round off the top five spots with 10% market share each.
• Facebook says it banned 2 million WhatsApp accounts in India between May 15 and June 15 to prevent harmful behaviour on the platform and thwart accounts from sending harmful or unwanted messages at scale.
• PayPal increases weekly cryptocurrency purchase limit fivefold to US$ 100,000, up from a previous limit of US$ 20,000; scraps its annual purchase limit of US$ 50,000, as part of its efforts to "enable our customers to have more choice and flexibility in purchasing cryptocurrency on our platform."
• Digital payments platform Square to create a new business line called TBD, which is "focused on building an open developer platform with the sole goal of making it easy to create non-custodial, permissionless, and decentralized financial services."
• Facebook ditches its plans to build a head-mounted brain-typing device that would enable people to send text messages and control computers by thinking to focus on a different neural interface approach with an experimental wrist controller for virtual reality that reads muscle signals in the arm using technology from CTRL-Labs, a company it acquired in 2019.
• Facebook to expand its Facebook Pay service beyond its own platforms, starting in August with Shopify vendors in the U.S.; adds Soundmojis, which add audible expressions to emojis, to Facebook Messenger, and tests new Instagram alert that nudges users to check out features that are "only available" on Facebook as part of a renewed attempt on part of the social media giant to drive users back to its flagship platform.

• Apple's new privacy setting that makes it mandatory for third-party apps to seek users' explicit consent to allow their internet activity to be tracked across apps for serving ads leads to panic among advertisers after experiencing a 15% to 20% revenue drop as a majority of iPhone users (83% worldwide) deny apps permission to track their behavior, severing a critical data pipeline that has powered the targeted advertising industry for years and costing Facebook (and other apps) the ability to track users and leading to a drop in effectiveness of its ads. (Apple has made privacy a foundation of the company's marketing effort around its ecosystem of products and services, pushing back against the digital advertising model that has vacuumed immense amounts of user data in return for providing free services.)
• Indian digital payments platform Paytm, which competes with Google Pay, Amazon Pay and Walmart-backed PhonePe, files to go public, with plans to raise up to US$ 2.2 billion in an initial public offering.
• The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission files a lawsuit against Amazon over the sale of hundreds of thousands of hazardous products, including carbon monoxide detectors that fail to detect carbon monoxide, hair dryers without required protection from shock and electrocution, and flammable sleepwear meant for children that are allegedly defective and "pose a risk of serious injury or death to consumers."
• China's share of global bitcoin mining plunges sharply from 75.5% in September 2019 to 46% in April 2021, as Kazakhstan emerges the world's third-largest player in the industry, with the U.S., Russia and Iran becoming the second-, fourth- and fifth-largest countries for bitcoin mining.
• Google rolls out a shortcut to delete last 15 minutes of Search history on its namesake iOS app, with a similar option for Android in the works.