Tech Roundup: Mozilla Firefox 95, WhatsApp Disappearing Messages & More

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

• Apple sues Russia's Federal Antimonopoly Service challenging an order that would allow developers to promote alternative payment methods to Apple's in-app purchases, following similar unsuccessful moves in the U.S., prompting the company to announce that it intends to collect a commission from these third-party payment methods.
• A draft E.U. proposal is expected to force food delivery and ride-hailing services to reclassify as many as 4.1 million workers as employees, costing the sector up to €4.5 billion per year.
• Meta-owned Messenger begins testing Split Payment in the U.S., a way for connections to either split a bill evenly or and share the cost of bills and expenses; Instagram is said to have quietly rolled out a pop-up over the past year encouraging users to "try a new account" so they can "keep up with a smaller group of friends."
• Google begins widely rolling out Google Photos Locked Folder feature, which enables users to hide sensitive photos and videos from the Photos grid and in a separate folder that's protected by the device screen lock, to non-Pixel phones.
• Japanese electronics giant Sony is reportedly planning to launch a subscription service, codenamed Spartacus, next spring that merges PlayStation Plus and PS Now, to compete with Xbox Game Pass.
• Life360, a family safety app with 33 million users and the new owner of Tile, has been found selling users' precise location since 2016, making it one of the location data broker industry's top sources, new investigation from The Markup reveals.

• Meta's WhatsApp now lets users set all one-to-one chats to disappear by default after 24 hours, seven days, or 90 days, following a similar move by Signal; Facebook Gaming announces a Play with Streamer feature that lets creators invite audience members to join a game, debuting alongside Pac-Man Community's launch.
• Google's YouTube publishes its first Copyright Transparency Report, with over 2.2 million videos hit with incorrect copyright claims (against a total of 729 million copyright claims) hit the first half of 2021.
• Mozilla releases Firefox 95 with with a new sandboxing technology called RLBox that prevents untrusted code and other security vulnerabilities from causing "accidental defects as well as supply-chain attacks."
• ByteDance-owned TikTok pilots new feature in Indonesia that enables sellers on the platform to manage their online stores right from within the app, including registering their campaigns and managing their promotions, engaging in customer service, as well as accessing seller education materials.
• Ride-hailing company Uber launches a new safety feature in its app in the U.S. that allows riders and drivers to turn on audio recording at the start of a trip, marking the first in-app feature that provides audio documentation of rides.
• Pinterest acquires video creation and editing app Vochi for an undisclosed sum as part of its efforts to expand its set of video creation tools and to help its creators make more dynamic videos.