Tech Roundup: Amazon E.U. Agreement, TikTok U.S. Scrutiny & More

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

• Apple gets accused of censorship on its App Store and compromising with "authoritarian regimes" in China and Russia; AppleCensorship highlights a pattern of app removals, including that of LGBTQ+, news, and VPN apps.
• Amazon avoids multibillion-dollar fine as it reaches agreement with the European Commission over its "use of non-public marketplace seller data and over a possible bias in granting to sellers access to its Buy Box and its Prime programme."
• The E.U. opens a probe into Broadcom's proposed US$ 61 billion VMware acquisition over concerns that "Broadcom could prevent its hardware rivals to interoperate with VMware's server virtualization software," leading to "higher prices, lower quality and less innovation for customers and consumers."
• Apple reportedly working on an Android app for Apple TV, letting users access its growing collection of original shows and movies.
• OnePlus, a subsidiary of Oppo, officially announce a deeper merger, making OnePlus a sub-brand of Oppo.
• ByteDance-owned TikTok faces new setback in the U.S. after lawmakers introduce a new bill designed to ban the social media app from government-owned devices owing to its connections to China; comes as 19 out of 50 states in the country have announced measures to block access to TikTok on government computers. (It's worth noting that TikTok access is already restricted by some federal agencies, including all U.S. military, the White House, the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, and the State Department.)

• TikTok rolls out new transparency measure that informs users "why a particular video has been recommended to them" in their For You feeds. (TikTok recommends content by ranking videos based on a combination of factors determined by user activity on its app. The announcement comes a little over a week after the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) found that TikTok pushes harmful content promoting eating disorders, self-harm and suicide to teens within minutes of signing up for the service.)
• Twitter updates search results for $Cashtags (i.e., $TWTR, $AAPL or $GOOG) with pricing graphs for major stock and cryptocurrency symbols using data sourced from TradingView; begins rolling out publicly visible tweet view counts, expanding on private analytics, stating it "shows how much more alive Twitter is than it may seem."
• Apple expands its Self Service Repair program to include Mac Studio, M1 Mac mini, M1 iMac, and Studio Display in the U.S.
• Google open sources privacy-enhancing tools called Magritte, which blurs objects in a video, and Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) Transpiler, a software that lets developers work on encrypted data without accessing personal information.
• TikTok confirms it fired four employees who accessed the TikTok data of multiple journalists, including their IP addresses, as part of a "covert surveillance campaign" to identify anonymous sources who were leaking information to the media on the company's ties to the Chinese government. (The news couldn't come at a more inopportune time for TikTok, which is already under a microscope when it comes to its handling of user data and privacy. The revelations follow an earlier October report from Forbes that disclosed the company's plans to use the platform to track the physical locations of specific U.S. citizens, an allegation TikTok had denied.)
• DuckDuckGo debuts new privacy feature that blocks Google sign-in pop-ups on websites across its apps and browser extensions.
• Google introduces a new feature that will allow young users to send a purchase request to the manager of the family account to approve when there is no present payment method.