Technology | The Guardian

Company workers reportedly obtained personal account information of critics of the government in Saudi ArabiaTwo former Twitter employees have been charged with spying after they reportedly obtained personal account information for critics of the government of Saudi Arabia.A complaint unsealed on Wednesday in US district court in San Francisco detailed a coordinated effort by Saudi officials to recruit employees at the social media giant to look up the private data of thousands of Twitter accounts. Continue reading...

Fitbit says data of its 28 million users will not be sold or used for Google adsGoogle’s recent acquisition of Fitbit for $2.1bn has left many users worried the tech giant may soon have access to their most intimate health information – from the number of steps they take each day to their breathing patterns, sleep quality or menstrual cycles.Fitbit, founded in San Francisco in 2007, tracks the health data of 28 million users. In a blogpost following the acquisition on Friday, Fitbit claimed user data would not be sold or used for Google advertising. “Consumer trust is paramount to Fitbit. Strong privacy and security guidelines have been part of Fitbit’s DNA since day one, and this will not change,” the company said in a statement. Continue reading...

Sarah Douglas recommends taking a break away from it all, and Chris Gibson suggests using non-smart mobilesI too am one of those incompetent and weak-willed parents alluded to in your report (The majority of 11-year-olds own smartphones. And experts are worried, 1 November), and appropriately slated in the comments. In my defence, I work in the NHS and thanks to many ill people I get home late, tired and basically incapable of parenting.The solution I have discovered is Pembrokeshire. One week here and my teenagers have walked along beaches, visited ruins, played board games and even eaten salad. A visit now and again will, hopefully, redeem them – and me – a little.

Camera with local AI for face recognition allows proactive display of personalised informationGoogle’s latest smart display is larger and can recognise your face for proactively showing you personalised information making it just that little bit smarter than competitors.The £219 Nest Hub Max is Google’s second own-brand smart display and is essentially a super-sized version of the excellent original Home Hub (now renamed Nest Hub). But where the Nest Hub is a veritable bargain at £119 or frequently much less, the Nest Hub Max is a different proposition at a little under twice the price. Continue reading...

Alex Crowley worked on ‘Mainstream Network’ campaign pushing for no-deal BrexitThe former Boris Johnson aide who was behind a Facebook ad that broke the social network’s funding disclosure rules previously worked on a fake grassroots campaign pushing for a no-deal Brexit, the Guardian can reveal.Alex Crowley, who left No 10 in September, oversaw the previous “Mainstream Network” Facebook campaign alongside employees of the lobbying firm run by Sir Lynton Crosby, the Australian political strategist who helped run three Conservative general election campaigns. Continue reading...

‘I’d use them in class,’ says Izzy Jones, a London-based vice-principal, while marveling at their range and ingenuityThere is a long-held stereotype that teenagers spend a lot of time online, uninterested in real life events.People who say that clearly haven’t seen them on TikTok, where they are engaging in the unexpected: teaching history lessons. Continue reading...

Seen at BlizzCon, the new game’s trailer offers intense, cinematic story missions where upgraded favourites work togetherTeam-based multiplayer shooter Overwatch is getting a sequel: and interestingly for fans, it’ll bring story missions into the game for the first time. According to Blizzard, it will also “redefine what a sequel means”. Which is quite a claim for an online shooter.Unveiled with a crowd-pleasing cinematic trailer at annual fan convention BlizzCon last week, Overwatch 2 will introduce PvE missions in an all-new story mode, as well as a new core competitive mode, Push, a six-versus-six PvP team battle, which sees teams compete to have a robot push the map’s objective to their opponent. Continue reading...

The company’s new logo is designed to bring a ‘sense of optimism’ to the brand that brought us the Cambridge Analytica scandalForget Facebook: meet FACEBOOK.Amid antitrust investigations, Capitol Hill hearings, and a generally poor reputation, the company announced on Monday it is rebranding itself. In the coming weeks, a new multicolored, all-caps logo will begin appearing across its services. Instagram and Whatsapp, owned by the company, will proudly tell users that they are services “from FACEBOOK”. Continue reading...

Users must sit online test and pay annual fee of £9 to join register or face £1,000 fineDrone users in the UK must now sit an online test and pay a £9 annual fee or face a £1,000 fine after the launch of a mandatory national registration scheme on Tuesday.Owners are obliged to identify and label all drones by 30 November, and operators must pass a test about legal and safe usage before they can fly them. Continue reading...

The experiment for the month of August led to more efficient meetings and happier workers who took less time offMicrosoft tested out a four-day work week in its Japan offices and found as a result employees were not only happier – but significantly more productive.For the month of August, Microsoft Japan experimented with a new project called Work-Life Choice Challenge Summer 2019, giving its entire 2,300-person workforce five Fridays off in a row without decreasing pay. Continue reading...

The corporation rents electric vehicles via Jump and has until Friday to appeal or their permit will be revokedLos Angeles has suspended Uber’s permit to rent electric scooters and bicycles because the corporation refused to follow the city’s rules on data sharing.The temporary suspension could result in the city confiscating scooters and bikes of Uber’s subsidiary Jump. It marks the latest conflict between local governments and the rideshare company, which has repeatedly flouted traditional transportation regulations. Continue reading...

Letter signed by more than 1,000 employees calls for zero emissions by 2030 in latest wave of industry climate activismMore than 1,000 Google workers have signed a public letter calling on their employer to commit to an aggressive “company-wide climate plan” that includes canceling contracts with the fossil fuel industry and halting its donations to climate change deniers.The letter, which is addressed to Google’s chief financial officer, Ruth Porat, also calls for zero emissions by 2030 and “zero collaboration with entities enabling the incarceration, surveillance, displacement or oppression of refugees or frontline communities”. Continue reading...

Letter calls for suspension until after vote due to lack of time to reform online advertising rules

Former presidential candidate criticises Facebook’s decision to let politicians lie in adverts

(ZA/UM; PC)

Kari Paul and Alex Hern join Jordan Erica Webber to discuss how the big social media platforms are tackling the sticky issue of political adverts. Dr Kate Dommett also talks about how UK political parties could use or misuse social media as they launch their general election campaigns. Continue reading...

Rana Foroohar’s masterly critique of the internet pioneers who now dominate our world“Don’t be evil” was the mantra of the co-founders of Google, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the graduate students who, in the late 1990s, had invented a groundbreaking way of searching the web. At the time, one of the things the duo believed to be evil was advertising. There’s no reason to doubt their initial sincerity on this matter, but when the slogan was included in the prospectus for their company’s flotation in 2004 one began to wonder what they were smoking. Were they really naive enough to believe that one could run a public company on a policy of ethical purity?The problem was that purity requires a business model to support it and in 2000 the venture capitalists who had invested in Google pointed out to the boys that they didn’t have one. So they invented a model that involved harvesting users’ data to enable targeted advertising. And in the four years between that capitulation to reality and the flotation, Google’s revenues increased by nearly 3,590%. That kind of money talks. Continue reading...

Company has been accused of pro-Republican bias, in both policy and personnel, amid fears it could be broken up if a Democrat wins in 2020Facebook has been accused of pro-Republican bias, in both policy and personnel, amid fears at the company that it could be broken up if a Democrat wins the White House next year.Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg faced fierce criticism this week, first for including Breitbart – once described by former chairman Steve Bannon as a “platform for the ‘alt-right’” – in its list of trusted sources for Facebook News, then for refusing to ban or factcheck political advertising. Continue reading...

Amateur boxers may dismiss the bout as ‘a joke’, but the web stars’ clash is big on marketable spectacleOn 9 November, two boxers will face each other in the ring in a highly anticipated bout, broadcast live on pay-per-view TV and expected to generate millions of pounds.Nothing unusual about that, except the pugilists are not Tyson Fury and Deontay Wilder, or any of the sport’s big names, but two YouTube stars without a professional bout between them, fighting to settle a beef. Continue reading...

Social media app is owned by Chinese firm ByteDance but says it does not operate in ChinaTikTok is reportedly being investigated as a potential national security risk by the US government, as the company’s 2018 acquisition of American social media app Musical.ly comes under retroactive scrutiny.The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which has the ability to scrutinise acquisitions and investments by foreign companies, never formally approved the buyout, since TikTok, which is owned by Chinese startup ByteDance, did not explicitly request clearance. Continue reading...

Takeover allows web giant to take on Apple in fast-growing smartwatch and wearables businessGoogle has snapped up the Fitbit activity tracker business in a $2.1bn (£1.6bn) deal that will enable the search giant to go toe-to-toe with Apple in the fast-growing smartwatch and wearables business.Google is paying cash for the San Francisco-based Fitbit, which was set up in 2007. Continue reading...

Activists speak out after being warned of alleged cyber-attack to infiltrate mobile phonesMore than a dozen pro-democracy activists, journalists and academics have spoken out after WhatsApp privately warned them they had allegedly been the victims of cyber-attacks designed to secretly infiltrate their mobile phones.The individuals received alerts saying they were among more than 100 human rights campaigners whose phones were believed to have been hacked using malware sold by NSO Group, an Israeli cyberweapons company. Continue reading...

What do Zuckerberg’s bromides about American values mean to Facebook users in Kashmir or the Philippines?When Facebook wrote to Joe Biden’s campaign to say it would not back down from its decision to exempt politicians from its ban on advertising false statements, it was not Mark Zuckerberg or Sheryl Sandberg who signed the letter, but a not particularly well-known staffer named Katie Harbath.As Facebook’s director of public policy for global elections, Harbath has been a prominent voice in defending the controversial policy. “If people have a problem with Facebook’s policy, they have a problem with the way political speech is protected in this country,” she wrote in an op-ed in USA Today this week. “Fundamentally we believe that, in a democracy, it’s better to let voters make their own decisions, not companies like Facebook.” Continue reading...

PS4, PC; Sony / Kojima Productions

Reese Witherspoon and Steve Carrell match the Friends star stride for stride in this funny, fearless drama from Apple TV+What a strange and rather lovely thing it is to watch an actor you have grown up with for two and a half decades finally come into her kingdom. So it is with Jennifer Aniston who, 25 years after she arrived on our screens in Friends, returns in a TV series for the first time since the hit show ended in 2004.The Morning Show is a slick, sophisticated venture stuffed with powerhouse performances – Aniston’s foremost among them. She plays Alex Levy, the co-anchor of a morning talk show whose life is thrown into disarray when her co-presenter Mitch (Steve Carrell, proving alongside Aniston that if you can do comedy you can do anything) is accused of sexual misconduct and fired. Their chemistry kept the waning show afloat – without it, she becomes even more vulnerable. Behind the scenes, network executives have already been looking to replace her ageing presence. This is their opportunity to do so, at least until Alex starts to fight furiously back while the lies, rumours, deals, double-crossings and backstabbings multiply. In a coup d’etat, she installs as her new partner a scrappy regional reporter, Bradley Jackson (Reese Witherspoon), who is experiencing 15 minutes of fame as a voice of the people after candid footage of her at a coal-mining protest went viral. Continue reading...

AppleTV+ starts with smaller budget than Netflix or Amazon but aims for prestige marketApple gatecrashes the fast-growing global streaming business on Friday with the launch of Apple TV+, offering a free service on all new Apple devices for the first year.The Silicon Valley giant has pulled out all the stops to promote the service, which launches in 100 countries on Friday, with the stars of its flagship new series The Morning Show, Jennifer Aniston and Reece Witherspoon, spearheading the publicity push on both sides of the Atlantic. Continue reading...

When you raise the question of not giving kids phones at all, parents balk. ‘How can we do that?’ they ask. But what alternative is there?A report released by Common Sense Media on Tuesday found that by age 11, 53% of kids in the US have their own smartphone. And 69% do by the time they’re 12. This surge in phone ownership and the increased screen time associated with it comes amid growing concerns from experts and people like me that phones are bad for kids.Related: In a world made small by smartphones, we crave escape into otherness | Brigid Delaney Continue reading...

Katarzyna Pruszkiewicz spent six months running fake social media accounts at self-described ‘ePR firm’ in WrocławIt is as common an occurrence on Polish Twitter as you are likely to get: a pair of conservative activists pouring scorn on the country’s divided liberal opposition.“I burst out laughing!” writes Girl from Żoliborz, a self-described “traditionalist” commenting on a newspaper story about a former campaign adviser to Barack Obama and Emmanuel Macron coming to Warsaw to address a group of liberal activists. Continue reading...

Instagram requires ads by LGBTQ-focused health center to go through verification processFacebook is facing backlash after it classified advertisements for an HIV prevention drug as political advertising.Apicha, a New York health center that caters to LGBTQ patients, said last week the tech giant initially blocked ads it tried to run on Instagram that aimed to raise awareness of PrEP, an FDA-approved anti-HIV medication sold under the brand name Truvada. Continue reading...

It’s easy to romanticise places where the thing that has you in its thrall hasn’t arrived yet – until you realise it may not have arrived for market-driven reasonsWhether the world feels small, close and manageable, or foreign, unknowable and chaotic, says something about where you live and what sort of device you carry in your hand.For the former, the world is made small by smartphones. Continue reading...

A splashy new series imagines what would have happened if Russia had won the space race with decent, if rarely compelling, resultsMonths of hype for Apple TV+ and the many A-list names attached has dramatically dissipated this week as reviews have revealed a ragtag bunch of half-formed shows that have replaced big ideas with big production values. It might therefore be faint praise to label glossy space race drama For All Mankind as the best of the bunch but it’s adequately entertaining and the first three episodes hint at the show it might become, something far better than it currently is.Related: Dickinson review – Emily Dickinson reborn as a Lizzo-loving feminist Continue reading...

Jack Dorsey has cut off a tiny revenue stream while focusing attention on rival’s inactionTwitter’s announcement that it will ban all political advertising has prompted a wave of calls for Facebook to do the same. But Twitter’s political advertising operation had just 21 advertisers across the entirety of the EU during the parliamentary elections this year, according to the site’s transparency report.The Twitter co-founder and chief executive, Jack Dorsey, has turned a weakness into a strength, cutting off a minuscule revenue stream in order to heap pressure on his main competitor. In the hours since Twitter’s announcement, support has come from voices as diverse as the US-based campaign group Muslim Advocates, the Open Knowledge Foundation thinktank and the screenwriter Aaron Sorkin. Continue reading...

PC, PS4 (version tested), Xbox One; Activision

Robert still listens to MP3s but wants wants to know which music service pays artists bestI’m a big music fan and enjoy listening to music through my PC and phone, but I feel stuck in the last century as I still listen to my MP3 collection. I refuse to get Spotify, as it’s such a bad deal for the artists. Are there any alternatives that treat the artist well? RobertYour problem is that you don’t really have a problem. I’m in almost exactly the same position, only slightly worse, because I still use an MP3 player to listen to albums in MP3 format. The main difference is that I’m almost completely happy about not using any music streaming services. They are not obligatory. If you don’t need them, don’t use them. Spend the money on downloads or CDs instead. Continue reading...

Brilliant camera, slick features and small size mean nothing when the phone won’t even last a dayGoogle is one of only a handful of smartphone manufacturers still making flagship phones that aren’t ginormous beasts, with the new Pixel 4 the cheapest in a while that significantly undercuts the competition.Priced at £669, the Pixel 4 is £70 cheaper than last year’s Pixel 3 and £60 cheaper than Apple’s iPhone 11. It’s also cheaper than its bigger sibling the £829 Pixel 4 XL. The concern is: which corners have been cut and do they matter? Continue reading...

The favorable report drove the tech giant’s stocks up 2.5% on Wednesday, as the company expands its focus beyond the iPhoneApple reported record-high quarter four earnings on Wednesday, citing strong performances in wearables and other services as the company continues to expand its focus beyond flagship products such as the iPhone.The company reported a revenue of $64bn, beating a $63bn estimate from analysts. Continue reading...

Social network’s move comes as Facebook faces controversy over ads that promote misinformationTwitter will ban all political advertising, the company’s CEO has announced, in a move that will increase pressure on Facebook over its controversial stance to allow politicians to advertise false statements.The new policy, announced via Jack Dorsey’s Twitter account on Wednesday, will come into effect on 22 November and will apply globally to all electioneering ads, as well as ads related to political issues. The timing means the ban will be in place in time for the UK snap election. Continue reading...

Fake networks in eight nations are connected to man allegedly behind disinformation empireFacebook has taken down accounts linked to Yevgeny Prigozhin – the businessman allegedly behind Russia’s notorious troll factory – which were actively seeking to influence the domestic politics of a range of African countries.The company said on Wednesday it had suspended three networks of “inauthentic” Russian accounts. The Facebook pages targeted eight countries across the continent: Madagascar, the Central African Republic (CAR), Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Sudan and Libya. Continue reading...

DeepMind’s AlphaStar masters game dubbed ‘next grand challenge for AI’ in just 44 days‘The challenge was to play like a human’: AI takes on the gamersAn artificial intelligence (AI) system has reached the highest rank of StarCraft II, the fiendishly complex and wildly popular computer game, in a landmark achievement for the field.Related: 'The challenge was to play like a human': AI takes on the gamers Continue reading...

Firm had to promise to verify drivers’ identities, in deal attacked by London cabbies

The maestros of film sound reveal the secrets of their challenging job with great frankness and amazing modestyHere is a valuable and deeply felt documentary, celebrating the work of the sound designers, sound editors and Foley wizards in the cinema, and if it feels like a feelgood in-house promotional video for Hollywood technicians … well, they’ve got an awful lot to feel good about.These are the people who create that world of sound, that palimpsest of exquisitely blended noise layers, which is perhaps the thing least consciously comprehended by the movie audience but which is indispensable for fabricating a total world in which a film can live and breathe. It requires an artistry and a delicacy, as well as resourcefulness and make-do-and-mend ingenuity that reaches back to the cinema’s beginnings. Continue reading...

Adriel Hampton registered as candidate for California governor in attempt to avoid checksFacebook will continue to fact-check adverts posted by a California gubernatorial candidate despite a policy exempting political candidates from its rules on misinformation in advertising.The company said that because Adriel Hampton, the head of the Really Online Lefty League political action committee (Pac), “has made clear he registered as a candidate to get around our policies … his content, including ads, will continue to be eligible for third-party fact-checking.” Continue reading...

Unlike most tech companies, Fairphone has a workforce with an almost equal gender split, and a majority of women in leadership. So is its ethical mission the secret to achieving parity?Eva Gouwens had heard that the tech industry was male-dominated, but it wasn’t until she attended the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona for the first time that the extent of the gender imbalance really hit her.

While celebrated, some in the LGBTQ community say it reinforces a fixed idea of what gender-neutral people should look likeApple has expanded its emoji offerings on Monday to include non-binary versions of nearly every human emoji, including non-binary couple pairings.The 328 new emoji designs came with the release of the company’s latest software update iOS 13.2. The non-binary emojis even extend to fantastical creatures such as merpeople, fae, and vampires. Continue reading...

Adriel Hampton plans to run false commercials in protest at policy of letting politicians lieA California man has registered as a candidate for state governor purely to run false commercials on Facebook, as a protest against the social network’s policy to allow political misinformation in paid advertising.Adriel Hampton, a San Francisco resident, has already hit the headlines for his protests against Facebook’s misinformation policy, after a political action committee (Pac) he set up ran an advert falsely claiming that the Republican senator Lindsey Graham supported the Green New Deal. Continue reading...

Tom Watson urges competition regulator to investigate ‘data grab’ by tech companyLabour has written to the competition regulator calling for Google’s reported acquisition of Fitbit to be halted, at least until a wider inquiry into anticompetitive practices in the technology sector is completed.Google made an offer to purchase the fitness tracking company on Monday for an undisclosed price, according to Reuters. Continue reading...

Los Angeles district judge ruled jury will decide whether Tesla chief’s statements about British diver amount to defamationElon Musk will go to trial in December, after a judge denied his request to throw out a defamation lawsuit by a British man Musk called a “pedo guy”.Los Angeles district judge Stephen Wilson said a jury would now decide whether Musk’s statements about Vernon Unsworth, a British diver who helped rescue a team of young football players from an underwater cave in Thailand in 2018, amount to defamation. Continue reading...

More than 600 creators and social media influencers join campaign to plant 20m treesA group of YouTube stars have raised more than $6m (£4.7m) to plant trees around the world by rallying their huge numbers of subscribers.The American YouTuber Jimmy Donaldson, known as MrBeast, was challenged on Reddit in May to plant 20m trees to celebrate reaching 20 million subscribers on his YouTube channel, where he posts videos of extravagant stunts. Continue reading...