Tech Roundup: Facebook Facial Recognition Shutdown, Microsoft Loop & More

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

• Meta-owned Facebook to delete a massive trove of facial recognition data on more than a billion users, which it introduced in 2010 as a means to automatically tag photos with names, over "growing concerns about the use of this technology as a whole."
• Popular note taking app Notability becomes the latest service to switch to a subscription model, with key features included in original app purchases to stop functioning after one year. (While there is no denying subscription fatigue and the fact that developers need to have a source of income to keep up development, the best way to about the transition would be to take the Grandfathering approach by launch a new version while keeping the existing version intact for current users.)
• Videoconferencing platform Zoom pilots showing ads to users on its free "Basic" tier; says "ads will be rolled out only on the browser page users see once they end their meeting," and that "only free Basic users in certain countries will see these ads if they join meetings that are hosted by other free Basic users."
• Match Group, which owns popular dating services like Tinder, Match.com, Meetic, OkCupid, Hinge, PlentyOfFish, Ship, and OurTime, reports Q3 revenue of US$ 802 million, up 25% YoY, with 16.3 million paying users, up 16% YoY.
• Video streaming platform Netflix takes on Apple Arcade by officially rolling out exclusive mobile games — "Stranger Things: 1984," "Stranger Things 3: The Game," "Shooting Hoops," "Card Blast" and "Teeter Up" — to Android users from within the app, with later plans for Apple's iOS.

• Zillow to shut down its home buying business, laying off about 2,000 employees and taking a write down of more than US$ 500 million; plans on focusing on its "core business" of providing a place to browse houses for sale and provide pricing estimates.
• Microsoft announces general availability of Chromium-based Edge web browser for Linuxwith support for a variety of distributions, including Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora and openSUSE; to integrate the recently acquired video editing web app Clipchamp into its Office apps; add an audio "recording studio" to PowerPoint, expands Excel's support for custom data types with images, matrices, arrays, and formatted number values; and launches Notion-clone Loop (formerly Fluid Work), an app that combines a "flexible canvas" with collaborative components that sync across Microsoft 365 services for project management and collaboration.
• Retail and entertainment giant Amazon brings auto-generated, synchronized transcripts on select podcasts for users of Amazon Music in the U.S.
• Yahoo! pulls its suite of services out of China, citing "increasingly challenging business and legal environment"; coincides with the enactment of the country's Personal Information Protection Law, a privacy law that went into effect November 1 that imposes new data-collection restrictions on tech companies.