Tech Roundup: Ad-free Facebook, Fairphone 5 & More

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

• The Sri Lankan government steps in to allay privacy concerns after an Indian company named Madras Security Printers is awarded a contract to build the country's national digital ID project.
• Meta's WhatsApp launches a native macOS app and tests transfers of larger files up to 2 GB in size and an option to share original quality photos and videos; also pilots a new "Protect IP address in calls" option that makes it harder to infer users' location by routing the calls through WhatsApp's servers.
• X rival Bluesky adds a new tab for viewing users' likes, following a similar change by Meta Threads.
• Meta, for its part, is also testing a search feature in Threads and a "For you on Threads" carousel in Instagram, with a button to open the Threads app, after adding a "Send to Instagram DM" button in Threads. The "retention-driving hooks" are seen as a way to battle falling numbers on Threads.
• That said, the release of the web version appears to have had little significant impact on the platform's usage, new data from Similarweb indicates. Whether will these alternatives gain traction in the long run is another matter, as users are increasingly migrating to direct messages, closed communities, and group chats.
• Microsoft brings its Bing AI chat to Google Chrome, with support for other browsers forthcoming; adds an autosave option to Notepad, integrates live traffic updates from Bing Maps to Microsoft Start, to discontinue WordPad after 28 years and deprecate Math Solver, Picture Dictionary, Citations, Grammar Tools and Kids Mode from its upcoming version of Edge browser.
• OpenAI launches ChatGPT Enterprise with improved privacy and performance; says it won't train its models on business data or conversations and that "all conversations are encrypted in transit and at rest." (The development comes amid reports that the company is burning cash at an alarming rate as it struggles to monetise its flagship chatbot and is facing a sustained decline in traffic for the second month in a row.)
• Hosting platform WordPress announces a new century-long domain registration plan that's designed to give users "the ultimate security and longevity for their digital presence" for US$ 38,000 (or US$ 380 per year).
• Yahoo debuts new AI tools in Mail, including message summaries, writing assistant and Shopping Saver, a tool to surface "long-forgotten gift cards, discount codes, and store credits in user inboxes, and drafts suggested messages to vendors to help apply those savings after a purchase has been made."
• Uber Eats is reportedly developing an AI-powered chatbot that will offer recommendations to users and provide a quicker way to place orders.
• Quora's AI chatbot Poe gains the ability to search for custom bots across mobile and web.
• Google adds Microsoft OneDrive integration in ChromeOS version 116; announces an enterprise tier for Colaboratory.
• Amazon acquires Fig, an IDE-style autocomplete tool, for an undisclosed sum; to be part of the company's Amazon Web Services (AWS) division.
• Google integrates Duet AI, the search giant's AI assistant for Workspace, across Gmail, Chat, Meet, and Docs to draft emails, take notes during video calls, send meeting summaries, get a summary of documents shared in a space, catch up on missed conversations, and even attend meetings on a person's behalf.
• Meta experiments with a new feature to let Instagram creators share notable fan comments to their Stories; internally tests letting users create Reels up to 10 minutes long, after TikTok increased its maximum video length to 10 minutes in February 2022.
• Snap begins rolling out Dreams, a take on the generative AI selfies popularised by apps like Lensa, enabling users to "try on new identities."
• Google unveils SynthID, which embeds an invisible digital "watermark" directly into AI-generated images; adds AI tools from other companies, like Meta's Llama 2, Anthropic's Claude 2 and Falcon LLM, to Cloud.
• X (née Twitter) to allow political ads on the platform and provide a global advertising transparency center, emphasising that it will deploy "robust screening processes to ensure only eligible groups and campaigns are able to advertise"; to allow users to make video and audio calls without a phone number, and updates its privacy policy to include carveouts for biometric data, which the company plans to collect for safety and security, along with employment history for its hiring features.
• Google updates its YouTube Community Guidelines to allow creators take an educational training course when they receive a warning, completing which will result in the warning being lifted "so long as they don't violate the same policy for 90 days"; discontinues its Pixel Pass subscription, an all-in-one subscription that bundled the Pixel phone with Preferred Care protection, Google One cloud storage, YouTube Premium, Google Play Pass, and (optionally) Fi Wireless service, after launching it in 2021.
• Apple announces a "Wonderlust" event for September 12 to unveil next-generation iPhones and Apple Watch; comes as Google sets a hardware event on October 4 to unveil the Pixel 8, Pixel 8 Pro and Pixel Watch 2.

• Google updates Photos app to backup and sync locked folders across mobile and the web; brings support for live lyrics and comments in YouTube Music and launches its Search Generative Experience in India and Japan via Search Labs opt-in, following the U.S. launch of the AI search feature in May 2023.
• Meta's decision to block links to news articles in Facebook within Canada in response to a new law that forces tech platforms to negotiate commercial deals with Canadian news publishers for use of their content had no impact on the usage in the country.
• Amazon announces the Buy with Prime app for Shopify, which will let U.S.-based Shopify merchants natively integrate Amazon's program into their exist checkout options.
• Robinhood adds support for bitcoin and dogecoin in Wallet six months after public launch.
• Microsoft plans to address a Windows 11 "unintended behaviour" that caused malware-like notification pop-ups promoting Bing search to Chrome users; to discontinue Visual Studio for Mac.
• Sony announces plans to raise the price of its annual PlayStation Plus subscription effective September 6 (Essential plan to go from US$ 60 to US$ 80, the Extra plan from US$ 100 to US$ 135, and the Premium plan from US$ 120 to US$ 160); unveils Xperia 5 V smartphone with a 120Hz, 6.1" display, a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, a 52MP sensor and a heat diffusion shield for €999.
• China's Cyberspace Administration starts approving the first batch of generative AI services for general rollout in the wake of new regulations that require companies to obtain relevant administrative licenses prior to rolling out AI chatbots; Baidu receives greenlight to launch its Ernie Bot to the public on August 31, alongside ByteDance's Doubao. (With recent regulations on generative AI models imposing strict requirements that they should "reflect core socialist values" and avoid disseminating information which undermines "state power" or "national unity," it remains to be seen if censorship will play a role in their adoption, or lack thereof.)
• Samsung debuts Food, an AI-powered food and recipe app in eight languages and 104 countries, featuring over 160,000 recipes.
• Fairphone announces the €699 Fairphone 5, with a 6.46" 90Hz OLED display, dual 50MP cameras, 30W charging, 5 years warranty and 8-10 years of OS support.
• Google partners with Mio to allow messaging interoperability between Google Chat, Slack, and Microsoft Teams, leading to a more unified communication experience across platforms; also adds support for voice messages.
• WhatsApp is reportedly working on a history sharing feature that will allow new members of a group chat to access older messages from the past 24 hours; adds the ability to edit sent messages in Communities.
• Google pilots a Face-to-Face mode in Translate that enables users to get around linguistic barriers by making it possible to read translated text as it's being spoken; adds a new option in Chrome that lets users copy an exact video frame.
• Walmart-backed Indian mobile payments solution PhonePe gets into stock and mutual fund investment with a new offering called Share.Market as it seeks to expand its gamut of financial services.
• Meta adds option for Facebook users to delete third-party personal information that can be used by the company in the training of generative artificial intelligence models. (The development comes as data privacy advocates have questioned the practice of aggregating vast quantities of publicly available information to train AI models, often relying on cheap labour in countries like the Philippines. OpenAI, for its part, has sought to push back against claims that AI outputs infringe on people's copyright, citing fair use exceptions.)
• Philips Hue launches Secure, a DIY security system with E2EE, starting at US$ 200 for a wired indoor/outdoor camera.
• Microsoft plans to unbundle Teams from Microsoft 365 and Office 365 across Europe from October 1, 2023, instead offering Teams to enterprise for €24 per year.
• Australia abandons its plans to mandate age verification tech for porn sites, citing privacy and security concerns.
• Substack introduces new AI-powered tools to generate transcripts and audiograms for podcasts on the platform.
• Meta releases FACET (short for FAirness in Computer Vision EvaluaTion), an AI benchmarking tool for evaluating the "fairness" of AI models that classify and detect things in photos and videos, including people.
• Magic Leap informs customers the Magic Leap 1 AR headset, which launched in August 2018, and its apps will "cease to function" from December 31, 2024.
• Dating app company Bumble releases updated community guidelines with an aim to crack down on bots, spam, ghosting and doxing.
• Google has processed more than seven billion copyright takedown requests for its search engine to date, with the URLs also removed from users' private saved collections, TorrentFreak reports.
• Chinese sextortion scammer accounts have flooded X since April 2023 after the platform changed its policy allowing users to buy verified badges, a new investigation reveals.
• Meta is considering paid, ad-free versions of Facebook and Instagram for users in the European Union, to fend off privacy concerns and scrutiny from EU regulators, The New York Times reports, citing sources familiar with the matter.
• Google tests a major redesign of the default map layer on Maps with a new color scheme; removes sketchy live streaming app Chamet, which lets users pay to video call hosts, from the Play Store for violating its user-generated content policy.
• PC maker Lenovo debuts Legion Go gaming handheld for US$ 699 to take on Nintendo Switch and Asus ROG Ally; shows off Legion Glasses, a pair of augmented reality glasses that works with Legion Go, the newly launched Legion 9i gaming-focussed laptop, as well as other platforms.
• Zoom adds a collaborative notes feature that allows participants to create and share content.