Tech Roundup: Apple Siri Settlement, India Data Protection Rules & More

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

• Greece announces plans for a government-operated app that aims to enhance parental oversight of mobile devices by verifying the age of users and limit excessive and inappropriate internet use by children under the age of 15.
• Telegram rolls out its first update of the year, adding a new account verification method powered by third-parties to cut down on scams and misinformation, new message search filters, and the ability to turn gifts into NFTs.
• Apple agrees to pay US$ 95 million to settle a lawsuit claiming it recorded private conversations after Siri was unintentionally activated and shared the data with others.
• Apple adds safety warning labels to AirTags and their boxes to comply with a U.S. law requiring consumer products with button cell or coin batteries to explicit warnings to protect children from life threatening ingestion.
• China's Microsoft Office rival, WPS Office, reaches 100 million daily users amid self-reliance drive.
• Google teams up with Samsung for a new open-source 3D audio standard called plan to bring Eclipsa Audio; to allow creators to upload videos with Eclipsa Audio tracks to YouTube later this year.
• Apple says its Apple Intelligence system, with features like Genmoji and Image Playground in iOS 18.2, requires 7GB of storage, compared to 4GB in iOS 18.1.
• Apple and Google pull more than six VPN apps, including Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1, Hide.me and PrivadoVPN, from their respective app stores in India citing a demand from the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre.
• Meta removes AI-generated social media profiles from Facebook and Instagram that have been around since 2023 following the discovery of a bug that prevented users from blocking them and criticisms that the accounts posted stereotypical content or even lied in chats with humans.
• Apple and Strava partner to feature Strava athletes in Apple Fitness+ programming and add more detailed Fitness+ workout summaries in the Strava app.
• China says shipments of foreign smartphones, including iPhones, fell 47.4% YoY in November 2024, after a 44.25% YoY drop in October, marking four months of decline; plans to expand its national consumer trade-in program to smartphone, tablet and smartwatch purchases to boost domestic spending as external headwinds pick up.
• A Russian court orders Yandex to hide access to maps and photos of a Russian oil refinery from search results due to repeated attacks by Ukrainian drones.
• Google's YouTube takes steps to limit teens' exposure to videos that promote and idealise a certain fitness level or physical appearance.
• India releases the draft Digital Personal Data Protection Rules, 2025, meant to enforce the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, for public comments; require platforms to verify the age and identity of a parent when obtaining consent to process data of users under 18.
• A lawsuit filed by the U.S. State of Utah accuses ByteDance-owned TikTok of not only being aware that TikTok Live was exposing minors to concerning messages from adults, but that the company also directly profited off of some of the exchanges through TikTok Live's virtual gifting system.
• Malaysia says X and Google haven't applied for a new social media licence under a new law that went to effect at the start of the year aiming to tackle online harm including scams, cyberbullying, pedophilia and child pornography; X notes that the number of its users in the country did not meet the eight million threshold required to obtain a licence, while Google disputes YouTube's classification.
• Microsoft's AI-powered Recall feature, which was delayed due to security and privacy concerns, continues to still capture sensitive data like credit card numbers, social security numbers and dates of birth, even with the default "sensitive information" filter enabled; comes as the company predicts conversational AI will become the primary way people interact with technology, replacing traditional web browsers and search engines within the next few years.
• OpenAI faces criticism for failing to deliver on a Media Manager tool to let creators specify how they want their works to be included in (or excluded from) its AI training data, as it appears that the program "was rarely viewed as an important launch internally."