Tech Roundup: AI Regulation, Meta Privacy Fines & More

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

• Meta gets fined a record US$ 1.3 billion in the E.U. for transferring Facebook users data from the bloc to the U.S. in violation of GDPR laws (which, coincidentally, went into effect exactly five years ago), exceeding the previous E.U. record of US$ 886.6 million levied against Amazon in July 2021; links back to a case brought by Austrian privacy campaigner Max Schrems in June 2013. (While previously these data transfers were protected by a transatlantic pact known as the Privacy Shield, it was nullified in 2020 after the European Court of Justice found that it did not protect the personal data of its citizens from being scraped by U.S. surveillance programs. That said, a new deal to transfer such data is expected to be operational later this year.)
• Meta's WhatsApp rolls out the ability to edit messages up to 15 minutes after they are sent; unveils open source AI models it says can identify more than 4,000 spoken languages and produce speech for over 1,000 languages.
• OpenAI calls for the establishment of an international authority to "inspect systems, require audits, test for compliance with safety standards, place restrictions on degrees of deployment and levels of security" and hold individual companies to an "extremely high standard of acting responsibly"; walks back on warning it may pull out of the E.U. if it cannot comply with AI regulations in the bloc that could force companies dabbling in the space to disclose details about their system's design and provide "summaries of copyrighted data used for training." (OpenAI is far from the first tech firm to threaten regulators with a product withdrawal. That said, overseeing AI requires answering tough questions surrounding training data and consent. Will OpenAI and other companies be ready to delete every model trained on data obtained withour prior consent?)
• U.S. intelligence agencies announces plans to develop a system called Hidden Activity Signal and Trajectory Anomaly Characterization (HAYSTAC) that's "capable of modeling population movement patterns around the globe and providing alerts when concerning anomalies emerge."
• China bans U.S. chip maker Micron from selling to Chinese companies working on key infrastructure projects citing serious cybersecurity risks, as the tech battle heats up.
• Twitter suffers from a bug that restores deleted tweets and retweets on users' profiles.
• PayPal-owned Venmo introduces teen accounts, allowing parents and legal guardians to open a Venmo account for "teenagers between the ages of 13 to 17-years-old so they can send and receive money."
• Microsoft integrates Copilot AI assistant to Windows 11 and adds native support for rar, 7-zip, tar, gz, and other archive formats to the operating system; agrees to sign all AI-generated art from Bing Image Creator and Microsoft Designer with a cryptographic watermark; debuts Azure AI Studio, which lets customers combine a model like GPT-4 with their private data to build their own "copilots"; adds AI-generated summaries of app reviews to the Microsoft Store; and brings a force quit option to close apps without the Task Manager on Windows.
• Netflix cracks down on password sharing in the U.S. with new paid sharing option, which lets some accounts add an extra member outside their household for US$ 7.99 per month; comes as Warner Bros. Discovery rebrands HBO Max as Max with a new Ultimate Ad-Free tier for US$19.99 per month
• Apple officially releases Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro for iPad;
• Flipboard rolls out support for integrating accounts from decentralised social networks Bluesky and Pixelfed, shortly after adding support for Mastodon in February 2023.
• Google launches Product Studio, a tool that lets merchants create and edit product imagery using generative AI for free; plans to use generative AI to boost Search ads relevance based on the context of a query and experiment with ads that appear in its AI chatbot in Search.
• OpenAI says it will start using Microsoft Bing as the default search experience for ChatGPT for ChatGPT Plus users and for free ChatGPT users via a plugin.
• Apple announces a "multiyear, multibillion-dollar" deal with Broadcom to develop and manufacture 5G and wireless components, including FBAR filters, in the U.S.
• Stock photos repository Shutterstock to acquire Giphy from Meta for US$ 53 million in cash (a significant loss for Meta, which acquired Giphy in 2020 for US$ 315 million) after the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority annulled the deal and ordered Meta to divest Giphy in 2022, citing potential anti-competitive effects.
• Adobe launches Generative Fill for Photoshop, which utilises cloud-based image synthesis and AI-generated content to fill selected areas of an image based on a text description.
• Samsung's display unit unveils a new generation of OLED panel that it says can recognise fingerprints anywhere on the screen and even check the user's heart rate, blood pressure and stress levels using multiple simultaneous finger readings.
• Google expands its flood forecasting capabilities to 80 countries, including 60 new countries across Africa, the Asia-Pacific region, Europe, and South and Central America.
• Amazon announces the 11-inch Fire Max 11 tablet with support for a new keyboard with trackpad and a stylus.
• Cloud software company officially announces plans to acquire search startup Neeva for an undisclosed amount, days after the latter said it's shutting down its search engine to focus on AI models for enterprises.
• The European Commission calls for an a voluntary agreement on universal rules for AI as the technology gets increasingly baked into widely used products and services, posing new security and privacy risks and proliferating mis/dis-information.
• Google's DeepMind unveils a new visual language model called Flamingo to help generate descriptions for YouTube Shorts; to exist as metadata to aid in better discoverability.
• ByteDance-owned TikTok says Oracle has begun a review of the video-sharing app's source code as part of its undertaking to have all U.S. user data hosted by the company; tests a chatbot called Tako that helps users discover new content and ask questions about a video.
• Emerging news aggregation platform Artifact introduces emoji reactions and options to flag articles as clickbait.
• Twitter introduces a new US$ 5,000-per-month API tier that gives developers the ability to fetch one million tweets per month and post 300,000 tweets per month; also grants access to the full archive search endpoint.
• Google starts rolling out its LLM-powered Search Generative Experience to Search Labs members; to shut down Stories in YouTube on June 26, 2023.
• Amazon to shutter its Appstore in China on July 17, 2023, following the company's announcement last year that it would shutter its Kindle e-bookstore in the country on June 30, 2023.
• Web browser Opera takes on Microsoft Edge with its own AI-powered side panel called Aria that comes with OpenAI ChatGPT integration, allowing users to ask questions, write code, and other tasks.
• Decentralised social network Bluesky allows users to choose between different custom feeds (similar to Twitter lists).
• Apple to shut down My Photo Stream service on July 26, 2023, as it recommends users to switch to iCloud Photos.
• Google gets hit with a US$ 32.5 million penalty for infringing on a patent held by Sonos relating to grouping speakers so they can play audio at the same time; Sonos calls Google a serial infringer of its patent portfolio.
• Meta offers commitments not to use competitors' advertising data for its Facebook Marketplace online classified ad service; to also restrict the use of ad data benefit its own products.
• Amazon's Twitch raises the monthly price of its ad-free tier Twitch Turbo effective August 31, 2023, in the U.S. and other markets.
• The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) used its Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Section 702 powers to conduct warrantless searches on US persons more than 280,000 times in 2020 and 2021, according to new disclosures.