Tech Roundup: Amazon's China Compromise, Meta VR Groping & More

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

• France's foremost privacy regulator, the CNIL, orders controversial facial recognition company Clearview AI to delete all its data relating to French citizens after being found in violation of GDPR data protection regulations; company reiterates it only "collect public data from the open internet and comply with all standards of privacy and law."
• The E.U. is set to approve Meta's acquisition of Kustomer following assurances that allows rival products to function with those of the U.S. customer service startup, weeks after the U.K. regulator recommended that the company unwind its purchase of GIPHY; comes amid ongoing scrutiny of "so-called killer acquisitions aimed at shutting down potential rivals before they are big enough to be a threat."
• Chinese government orders Microsoft's Bing search engine to pause its auto-suggest feature for 30 days, days after it replaced its LinkedIn platform in the country with a special app named InCareer that comes without a social feed.
• Meta discloses that a woman, a beta tester, was groped on its Horizon Worlds VR social platform on November 26, with an internal review noting that she should have used its "Safe Zone" tool; removes 1,500 fake accounts on Facebook and Instagram associated with seven private surveillance companies from Israel, India, China and North Macedonia, who used the fictitious profiles to target dissidents, journalists, and human rights activists with spyware.

• Retail giant Amazon allegedly bent over backwards to grow its kindle, cloud, and e-commerce businesses in China by "helping to further the ruling Communist Party's global economic and political agenda," including creating a selling portal on the company's U.S. site, Amazon.com — a project that came to be known as China Books.
• Encrypted messaging app Signal scales its group video call limit from 5 to 40 participants with a help of a new feature called Signal Calling Service.
• Spotify implements a five-star rating system, similar to Apple's, in an attempt to improve podcast discovery; acquires Whooshkaa, a nearly six-year-old Australian company focused on helping radio broadcasters monetise, edit, and distribute their shows as podcasts, as the company continues to beef up its audio product arsenal.
• ByteDance-owned TikTok rolls out GIPHY support and tweaks its recommendation algorithm for its "For You" feed to ensure that no one topic gets undue weightage — along with options to pick words and hashtags to remove videos from their feed to avoid negative reinforcement — in a bid to give users more autonomy over their feed and prioritise mental health; partners with Virtual Dining Concepts to launch TikTok Kitchen, a food delivery service based on viral trends, starting with 300 U.S. locations in March 2022, and launches a stand-alone shopping app called Douyin Box in China, similar to its Fanno platform in Europe, describing it "an e-commerce platform for trends and fashion."

• Google's plans to merge Duo and Meet into a single app hits fresh roadblock as the company focuses on improving the latter's enterprise utilities, leaving the consumer facing app without a clear future; subsidiary Sidewalk Labs announces plans to shut down and fold its products into Google.
• Tax preparation company H&R Block sues Block, formerly Square, for trademark infringement, claiming Block's name and logo are "nearly identical" to its own.
• Apple releases Swift Playgrounds 4, which lets users develop iPhone and iPad apps on their iPads, preview apps in real time, and upload them to the App Store.
• Cryptocurrency scams have cost victims US$ 7.7 billion in 2021, up 81% from 2020, a new report by Chainalysis reveals, in part driven by "the emergence of rug pulls, a relatively new scam type particularly common in the DeFi ecosystem, in which the developers of a cryptocurrency project — typically a new token — abandon it unexpectedly, taking users' funds with them."
• Adobe releases a new browser-based web tool called Project Shasta that allows users to create and edit audio recordings, alongside AI features that can improve the audio quality or automatically remove filler words.
• Indian antitrust watchdog, the Competition Commission of India (CCI), revokes prior approval it granted for Amazon's 2019 investment in retail and logistics company Future Group and imposes a fine of about US$ 26.3 million to the American e-commerce giant for concealing facts; comes after Reliance Retail, India's largest retail chain, reached an agreement with Future Group to acquire the latter's retail and wholesaler business, as well as its logistics and warehousing business, for US$ 3.4 billion.