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Activist groups including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have spoken out against Apple and Google, for hosting a Saudi Government app, called Absher, that permits the Saudi men to control and decide where the women can travel. As per the complaints of rights groups, Absher promotes discrimination against women and is enforcing ‘gender apartheid’ in Saudi Arabia. This is why they want Apple and Google to consider ‘rehosting’ the app, reports INSIDER. “We call on these companies to assess the risk of human rights abuses and mitigate the harm that these apps may have on women. This is another example of how the Saudi Arabian government has produced tools to limit women's freedoms”, said Dana Ahmed, Saudi Arabia researcher for Amnesty International. Absher app is based on Saudi “guardian” law, according to which, every woman has a legal "guardian" to whom she remains legally dependent for many aspects of life, irrespective of her age, education level or marital status. This male guardian could be her father, uncle, husband, brother, or son, who offers his consent to a variety of basic needs of a woman such as education, clothing, work, money, travel, marriage, etc.                                                                                                                  Absher app (Google Play store) Absher comes with a set of features aimed to restrict women’s travel to specific airports and routes, making sure that in case the woman decides to flee from the country without permission, she can get instantly caught. This is because it comes with an automatic SMS feature that is sent to a woman’s ‘guardian’ for times she crosses borders or makes airport check-ins without permission. 1,000 women try to flee away from Saudi Arabia each year, and text alerts make it very difficult for these women to flee with most of them getting caught by their family members.   The SMS alerts were made compulsory in 2012, however, it received a heavy backlash by the Saudis on social media. This later led to the Saudi Government suspending the SMS alerts in 2014, however, the rights groups believe that the system is still in function. According to Amnesty International, the automated SMS alerts are “another example of how the Saudi Arabian government has produced tools to limit women's freedoms”. Men can also specify the destinations that the women are allowed to travel along with time period for the travel on Absher. Although there are other basic and harmless features in Absher that allows you to pay parking fines, or renew a driver's license, it is mostly used to keep a tight leash on Saudi women.                                                    Absher features What’s even more distressing is the fact that Absher app has been downloaded more than 1 million times on Android devices. Rothna Begum, Middle East researcher for Human Rights Watch told INSIDER, that “Apple and Google have rules against apps that facilitate threats and harassment. Apps like this one can facilitate human rights abuses, including discrimination against women." Apple and Google haven’t responded to the news yet. Public reaction to this news is largely negative with the majority of the people condemning the app and its widespread use in Saudi Arabia: https://twitter.com/Shadow0pz/status/1095030573976961024 https://twitter.com/MustacheofDeath/status/1095186423471210496 https://twitter.com/JuliaFelly/status/1094928811509104642 https://twitter.com/SanctionSaudi/status/1095016257928265729 Read the full story on INSIDER. An AI startup now wants to monitor your kids’ activities to help them grow 'securly' Babysitters now must pass Perdictim’s AI assessment to be “perfect” to get the job Twitter blocks Predictim, an online babysitter-rating service, for violating its user privacy policies; Facebook may soon follow suit

Amazon has announced its plans of acquiring ‘Eero’, the startup that is focussed on mesh home routers.  Eero makes use of a mesh network to produce wireless routers and extenders that provide better coverage for home Wi-Fi networks and makes it easy to have fast and reliable Wi-Fi all over the house. Eero routers are designed to overcome coverage and dead zone issues encountered through traditional routers. Multiple access points are used to provide coverage to an entire home or apartment with a strong Wi-Fi signal. Amazon says that this deal will “help customers better connect smart home devices.” It will make it easier to set up Alexa-compatible gadgets if Amazon also controls the router technology. Amazon SVP Dave Limp said in a press release that “We are incredibly impressed with the Eero team and how quickly they invented a WiFi solution that makes connected devices just work. We have a shared vision that the smart home experience can get even easier, and we’re committed to continuing innovating on behalf of customers.” While the deal is good news for Amazon investors, many Eero users have expressed their disapproval of the deal. Amazon has faced criticism about how Alexa listens in people’s homes, and can be a threat to user privacy. Existing Eero users have voiced their concerns along the same lines: https://twitter.com/steveriggins/status/1095081742736605184 https://twitter.com/TimSchmitz/status/1095103321407397888 https://twitter.com/DerekWallace/status/1095088112554921984 Eero support has tried to put customers worry to rest with a tweet, saying, “Eero does not track customers’ internet activity and this policy will not change with the acquisition”. Eero is not the first router startup to be acquired by Amazon. Amazon has acquired startups like  Ring and Blink, in recent years, with a vision to launch its own in-house Alexa smart home ecosystem. Details of the deal have yet to be disclosed. Head over to Techcrunch for more insights on this news. “Amazon wants to make all the rules and weaken democracy in NYC”: Brad Lander on Amazon’s HQ2 deal Aurora, a self-driving startup, secures $530 million in funding from Amazon, Sequoia, and T. Rowe Price among others Amazon faces increasing public pressure as HQ2 plans go under the scanner in New York  

Talks of AI algorithms causing harms including addiction, radicalization. political abuse and conspiracies, disgusting kids videos and the danger of AI propaganda are all around. Last month, YouTube announced an update regarding YouTube recommendations aiming to reduce the recommendations of videos that promote misinformation ( eg: conspiracy videos, false claims about historical events, flat earth videos, etc). In a historical move, Youtube changed its Artificial Intelligence algorithm instead of favoring another solution, which may have cost them fewer resources, time, and money. Last Friday, an ex-googler who helped build the YouTube algorithm, Guillaume Chaslot, appreciated this change in AI, calling it “a great victory” which will help thousands of viewers from falling down the rabbit hole of misinformation and false conspiracy theories. In a twitter thread, he presented his views as someone who has had experience working on Youtube’s AI. Recently, there has been a trend in Youtube promoting conspiracy videos such as ‘Flat Earth theories’. In a blog post, Guillaume Chaslot explains, “Flat Earth is not a ’small bug’. It reveals that there is a structural problem in Google’s AIs and they exploit weaknesses of the most vulnerable people, to make them believe the darnedest things.” Youtube realized this problem and has made amends to its algorithm. “It’s just another step in an ongoing process, but it reflects our commitment and sense of responsibility to improve the recommendations experience on YouTube. To be clear, this will only affect recommendations of what videos to watch, not whether a video is available on YouTube. As always, people can still access all videos that comply with our Community Guidelines”, states the YouTube team in a blog post. Chaslot appreciated this fact in his twitter thread saying that although Youtube had the option to ‘make people spend more time on round earth videos’, they chose the hard way by tweaking their AI algorithm. AI algorithms also often get biased by tiny groups of hyperactive users. As Chaslot notes, people who spend their lives on YouTube affect recommendations more. The content they watch gets more views, which leads to Youtubers noticing and creating more of it, making people spend even more time on that content. This is because YouTube optimizes for things you might watch, not things you might like. As a hacker news user observed, “The problem was that pathological/excessive users were overly skewing the recommendations algorithms. These users tend to watch things that might be unhealthy in various ways, which then tend to get over-promoted and lead to the creation of more content in that vein. Not a good cycle to encourage.” The new change in Youtube’s AI makes use of machine learning along with human evaluators and experts from all over the United States to train these machine learning systems responsible for generating recommendations. Evaluators are trained using public guidelines and offer their input on the quality of a video. Currently, the change is applied only to a small set of videos in the US as the machine learning systems are not very accurate currently. The new update will roll out in different countries once the systems become more efficient. However, there is another problem lurking around which is probably even bigger than conspiracy videos. This is the addiction to spending more and more time online. AI engines used in major social platforms, including but not limited to YouTube, Netflix, Facebook all want people to spend as much time as possible. A hacker news user commented, “This is just addiction peddling. Nothing more. I think we have no idea how much damage this is doing to us. It’s as if someone invented cocaine for the first time and we have no social norms or legal framework to confront it.” Nevertheless, Youtube updating it’s AI engine was taken generally positively by Netizens. As Chaslot, concluded on his Twitter thread, “YouTube's announcement is a great victory which will save thousands. It's only the beginning of a more humane technology. Technology that empowers all of us, instead of deceiving the most vulnerable.” Now it is on Youtube’s part how they will strike a balance between maintaining a platform for free speech and living up to their responsibility to users. Is the YouTube algorithm’s promoting of #AlternativeFacts like Flat Earth having a real-world impact? YouTube to reduce recommendations of ‘conspiracy theory’ videos that misinform users in the US. YouTube bans dangerous pranks and challenges Is YouTube’s AI Algorithm evil?

Tensions over Amazon’s HQ2 deal have been on a rise in New York ever since Amazon decided to bring 25,000 jobs to a new campus in New York City. Why? Because according to The Guardian: “Amazon is bad. It is monopolistic. It works its blue-collar and white-collar employees to the bone, prompting frequent exposés of its awful working conditions. New York City is a union town; Amazon is an anti-union company. Its owner should have his immoral hoard of wealth forcibly expropriated by the state before his power grows so great that all of society is warped by it. Jeff Bezos’s money should immediately be put to use helping the public; instead, he cackles from inside his cartoonishly large mansion as cities and states desperately compete to shower his company with the maximum amount of public subsidies, in order to secure a glorified satellite office.” Last week, after the Washington Post’s article revealed that Amazon could possibly back out of this deal due to political factors, tensions have surfaced among the political masses in New York. However, two people with direct knowledge of the matter acknowledged that the post had “gone too far and Amazon had no plans to back out”. New York Times reports that  Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo says, that the project’s political opponents were being unreasonable by not supporting the deal and that the situation is “absurd”. Increasing the pressure on political opponents to accept the idea, the governor has warned that if Amazon did pull out of the deal, the political opponents will face the wrath of voters as tens of thousands of jobs would be at stake. Cuomo said at a news conference on Long Island, "For the state Senate to oppose Amazon was governmental malpractice, And if they stop Amazon from coming to New York, they're going to have the people of New York state to explain it to. It is irresponsible to allow political opposition to overcome sound government policy." New York Times reports that according to two people familiar with the deal, Amazon executives have grown increasingly frustrated that the company has not received a positive response in New York as it has received in Virginia and Nashville. Amazon is also riled up because of the selection of an Amazon opponent to a state board with the potential power to make or break the deal. Brad Lander, NYC council member posted his views about Amazon in a thread on Twitter. He called their alleged decision to back out as ‘threats’ and has stated in very plain words that Amazon doesn't play by NYC’s rules, pay their taxes in full, are not good neighbors, and do not play their part in our democracy. He calls out their business model as “evading taxes from the start”. He further says that “They want to hold all the cards & make all the rules… and destroy democracy”. His thread gives sufficient examples to support his claim against Amazon. Taking a stab at the Governor, he says that “It is not surprising Cuomo is happy to subordinate our democracy to their corporate power and would take part in Amazon’s efforts to bully opponents into silence.” Citizens have depicted contradictory views on these statements- some in support of Amazon’s deal and some against it. https://twitter.com/PhilipSundstro3/status/1094455450882445312 https://twitter.com/WillieMitts/status/1094457824292290560 It would be interesting to see the outcome of this public and political backlash on Amazon’s deal in NYC. You can head over to CNBC for more insights on this news. Amazon admits that facial recognition technology needs to be regulated As anti-trust for big tech gains tractions in EU and US, India tightens the noose on e-commerce rules: Amazon can either be a marketplace or a seller, not both Biometric Information Privacy Act: It is now illegal for Amazon, Facebook or Apple to collect your biometric data without consent in Illinois

AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint sold their customers’ real-time location data to a bounty hunter, as reported by Motherboard in January. As per the reports, Motherboard was even able to purchase the real-time location of a T-Mobile phone from a bounty hunter source on the black market for $300. Telecom companies responded that this abuse was a fringe case. However, in reality, around 250 bounty hunters and related businesses had access to AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint customer location data. As per the documents by CerCareOne, a location data seller that operated until 2017, one of the bail bond firms was using the phone location service more than 18,000 times, and others were using it thousands or tens of thousands of times. These documents include the list of companies that had access to the data and also the phone numbers that were pinged by those companies. According to the documents, the location requests stretch from 2012 up to 2017, with some of the phones being located multiple times over minutes, hours, and days. CerCareOne sold cell phone tower data and also highly sensitive and accurate GPS data to bounty hunters. This data was so precise that users could easily locate someone’s location inside a building. CerCareOne operated in secrecy for almost 5 years by making its customers agree to “keep the existence of CerCareOne.com confidential,” according to terms of use document obtained by Motherboard. The company allowed bounty hunters, bail bondsmen, and bail agents to find the real-time location of mobile phones and it would sometimes charge up to $1,100 per phone location. Oregon Senator Ron Wyden said in an emailed statement after presented with Motherboard’s findings, “This scandal keeps getting worse. Carriers assured customers location tracking abuses were isolated incidents. Now it appears that hundreds of people could track our phones, and they were doing it for years before anyone at the wireless companies took action. That’s more than an oversight hat’s flagrant, willful disregard for the safety and security of Americans.” In an email to Motherboard, Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at campaign group the Electronic Frontier Foundation said, “The scale of this abuse is outrageous.” The target phones received no text message warning that they were being tracked. Previously telecom companies and location aggregators have told Motherboard that they require clients to obtain consent from people they wish to track. A Sprint spokesperson wrote in an email, “We contractually require location aggregators to obtain prior written consent from Sprint 60 days before the use of any sub-aggregator, and we received no such request related to CerCareOne,” 15 senators called on the FCC and Federal Trade Commission for investigating as to how consumers location data ended up in the hands of bounty hunters. An FCC spokesperson told Motherboard in an email, “We are investigating carriers’ handling of location information, and we can’t comment on what facts we have uncovered in the middle of an active investigation.” Senator Mark Warner, presented with Motherboard’s new findings, said in a statement that “we have a systemic problem across the digital economy, where consumers remain totally in the dark about how their data is collected, sold or shared, and commercialized.” To know more, check out Motherboard’s post. Internal memo reveals NASA suffered a data breach compromising employees social security numbers U.S. Senator introduces a bill that levies jail time and hefty fines for companies violating data breaches Former Senior VP’s take on the Mariott data breach; NYT reports suspects Chinese hacking ties

Online privacy abuse, these days, is under a check with different legislation passed for user data safety. Last week, Democratic Senator, Ron Wyden introduced a new bill that would allow Federal Trade Commission the authority to establish privacy and cybersecurity standards. Additionally, the bill levies a jail time, and a billion dollar fine on the biggest tech companies if their companies steal and sell user data, or allow a massive data breach to occur at their company. Read Also: A brief list of drafts bills in US legislation for protecting consumer data privacy In an interview with The Oregonian/OregonLive, Wyden said, “The point is the Federal Trade Commission on privacy issues thus far has basically been toothless. I am trying to recreate this agency for the digital era.” Provisions provided by the bill A ‘Do Not Track’ option The bill would establish a ‘do not track’ option for people using online services. In lieu of allowing their search history, social media favorites and online activity to be sold to advertisers, people could opt to pay an unspecified fee to preserve their privacy. An annual report to be submitted by big companies The bill would allow the FTC to establish privacy and cybersecurity standards and require big companies to report annually on their privacy practices. Penalty if false information is submitted Penalize large companies that submit false information in their annual privacy report. Penalties could amount to 4 percent of annual revenue – a number that could run in the billions of dollars for the biggest social media companies. Executives could face jail time up to 20 years. Assessment of algorithms The bill stated that big companies would be required to provide assess their algorithms for accuracy, fairness, bias, and discrimination. According to The Oregonian/OregonLive, Wyden “introduced the bill last fall and it has made little headway in the intervening months. But he’s hoping persistent consumer outrage about privacy violations could give it additional traction, coupled with support from within the tech industry itself.” “What we are essentially advocating is what the big financial services firms have to do under Sarbanes-Oxley,” Wyden said. David Hoffman, Intel’s associate general counsel and global privacy officer, said, “The bill is a tremendous step towards effective comprehensive U.S. privacy legislation. Providing more authority and resources to the US Federal Trade Commission is a critical foundation for robust privacy protection.” Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins explains why this bill is necessary, in their YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhB7_4sxff8 Lawmakers introduce new Consumer privacy bill and Malicious Deep Fake Prohibition Act to support consumer privacy and battle deepfakes The Collections #2-5 leak of 2.2 billion email addresses might have your information, German news site, Heise reports Australia’s Assistance and Access (A&A) bill, popularly known as the anti-encryption law, opposed by many including the tech community

The Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment (Assistance and Access) Act 2018, passed on December 6, 2018, has been put into action recently by the Australian intelligence and law enforcement agencies. However, a few industry groups, academics and civil liberties campaigners opposed by saying that the AA legislation makes Australians less safe by stripping away foundational concepts of privacy and may have a significantly detrimental impact on Australian tech companies. In spite of this opposition, the legislation is not only active but the intelligence agencies actively using its provisions and several notices too have been issued under this new law. With the AA act, the legislation’s aim is to allow intelligence agencies and some law enforcement to pry open encrypted messages in particular cases, especially where it concerned national security. The government has consistently argued the legislation makes Australians safer. “The legislation is being actively used by law enforcement and security agencies in a number of investigations to keep Australia safe”, a government spokesperson reported. “The legislation in no way compromises the security of any Australians’ digital communications”, he added. The Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security (PJCIS) is currently reviewing the provisions of the legislation and the report for the same will be released in April. According to InnovationAus, “A collective of academics and industry groups, including the Communications Alliance, the Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA), and the Information Technology Professionals Association (ITPA), have recently made a joint submission to the PJCIS recommending a raft of changes.” This group has criticized how the powers under the Act are unnecessarily broad and vague and have called for the need to introduce greater judicial oversight, particularly around the issuing of notices by agencies. Vanessa Teague, an associate professor in cryptography at the University of Melbourne, said, “Without that specific [technical] proposal, we just can’t have a rational and grounded discussion about what those unintended consequences is going to be because they depend on what the proposal is.” During the same panel discussion, Suelette Dreyfus, executive director of Blueprint for Free Speech described the introduction of the Act as a “zero-sum game between the privacy of individuals and the powers of the state”. Dreyfus said, “This coalition has been built and is being fortified and strengthened. It’s not only civil society within Australia or technical experts in Australia, it’s internationally as well with international academic experts and leading NGOs in the technical and legal space in places like Washington and London.” “[These people are] are liaising with us and working with us because they are very concerned that what happens in Australia will spread like a bad case of the measles to the digital privacy rights overseas”, she added. To know more about the AA Act in detail, visit the Australian government’s official website. Australia’s Assistance and Access (A&A) bill, popularly known as the anti-encryption law, opposed by many including the tech community Australia passes a rushed anti-encryption bill “to make Australians safe”; experts find “dangerous loopholes” that compromise online privacy and safety Australia’s ACCC publishes a preliminary report recommending Google Facebook be regulated and monitored for discriminatory and anti-competitive behavior  

Yesterday, Wells Fargo, an American multinational financial services company, suffered a major outage of their online and mobile banking operations and the services went completely offline. Following this, the company posted a tweet at 9:28 a.m. ET, apologizing to its customers for this issue with their online banking and mobile app. https://twitter.com/Ask_WellsFargo/status/1093516743304069120 Jackie Knolhoff, a Wells Fargo spokeswoman, said that the system issues were "due to a power shutdown at one of our facilities, initiated after smoke was detected following routine maintenance." https://twitter.com/WellsFargo/status/1093566291112353793 This is the second time in a week the company experienced such a similar outage. A similar disruption occurred last Friday, which lasted for five-and-a-half hours. According to a user comment on HackerNews, “They had all their mission-critical infrastructure in a single data center. How many billions of dollars do they make per year? And they can't afford even a tiny bit of redundancy? If I were a customer, I'd use this as a sign that this company is not technically competent enough to manage my money”. It is yet unknown how many of the bank’s customers were affected but Twitter complaints have been registered across the U.S. The customers are frustrated and are demanding for an inconvenience fee from the company. One of the customers tweeted, “Wells Fargo is responsible for this and they should cover any late fees generated by their failure.” To know more on this, read Wells Fargo’s Twitter thread. Microsoft Cloud services’ DNS outage results in deleting several Microsoft Azure database records Outage in the Microsoft 365 and Gmail made users unable to log into their accounts How Dropbox uses automated data center operations to reduce server outage and downtime  

Aurora, a self-driving startup, announced yesterday that it has raised over $530 million in Series B financing round led by Sequoia, an American venture capital firm. Apart from securing funds from Sequoia, the firm has received huge investments from Amazon and T. Rowe Price Associates. Aurora’s valuation has been now pushed to more than $2.5 billion. “Amazon’s unique expertise, capabilities, and perspectives will be valuable for us as we drive towards our mission. We are also looking forward to having T. Rowe Price with us on this journey as a long-term capital partner”, states the Aurora team on a Medium blog post. Amazon signed on as a partner for Toyota's new mobility alliance called e-palette concept, last year, that aimed to develop fully autonomous electric vehicles. Aurora might be Amazon’s first official investment in self-driving tech, though it has not been confirmed by Amazon yet. “We are always looking to invest in innovative, customer-obsessed companies, and Aurora is just that. Autonomous technology has the potential to help make the jobs of our employees and partners safer and more productive … we’re excited about the possibilities,” Amazon told Forbes. Other partners to join the funding round includes Lightspeed Venture Partners, Geodesic, Shell Ventures, and Reinvent Capital along with previous investors Greylock and Index Ventures, who made investments worth $90 million last year in Aurora. In total, Aurora has now secured worth $620M in funding over two rounds. Additionally, Carl Eschenbach, a partner at Sequoia, will be now joining Aurora’s existing board of directors, namely, Mike Volpi, Reid Hoffman, and Ian Smith. Eschenbach has past experience in operations, partnerships, and scaling companies, which will add immense value to growing Aurora. https://twitter.com/aurora_inno/status/1093557587025391622 Aurora was found in 2017 by Chris Urmson, who previously led Google's pioneering self-driving car program, and was later joined in by two other leaders in the autonomous driving industry - Drew Bagnell, formerly of Uber, and Sterling Anderson of Tesla. The firm has made incredible achievements in a short period of 2 years that it has stayed in the market. The company now has new offices in Palo Alto, San Francisco, and Pittsburgh in the US. Also, two of the world's largest automakers, namely, Volkswagen and Hyundai have offered their self-driving car software to Aurora, in addition to Chinese electric vehicle startup Byton. According to Mike Volpi, Aurora partner and board member, the company is “poised to win the self-driving market”. In the blog published yesterday, Volpi mentions how Aurora has a competitive advantage in the market because of its position as an independent company and the fact that it’s a full-stack provider to the Autonomous vehicle market. https://twitter.com/mavolpi/status/1093583791447171072 “With this newest investment, we will accelerate the development of the Aurora Driver and strengthen our team and ecosystem. The investment and strategic partners we bring on board today will help us build an enduring company”, writes the Aurora team. Anthony Levandowski announces Pronto AI and makes a coast-to-coast self-driving trip This self-driving car can drive in its imagination using deep reinforcement learning Introducing AWS DeepRacer, a self-driving race car, and Amazon’s autonomous racing league to help developers learn reinforcement learning in a fun way

On Thursday, German regulators, after a ruling, have ordered Facebook to put a stop to its data collection practices in Germany after they found that Facebook was exploiting consumers by requiring them to agree to data collection. This law was released by the German competition authority, called the Bundeskartellamt. Andreas Mundt, president of the Bundeskartellamt, said in a press release Thursday, “Facebook will no longer be allowed to force its users to agree to the practically unrestricted collection and assigning of non-Facebook data to their Facebook user accounts.” Facebook’s advertising model tracks its users from the Facebook app, WhatsApp and Instagram, collecting data on the sites and apps visited, also keeping a note of what they like, and where they shop. This data allows the company to serve ads that are more relevant to users’ interests. However, privacy advocates have maintained that Facebook does this without the user’s consent and don’t offer complete transparency. According to a press release published Thursday, German authority’s decision covers different data sources: Facebook-owned services like WhatsApp and Instagram can continue to collect data. However, assigning the data to Facebook user accounts will only be possible subject to the users’ voluntary consent. Where consent is not given, the data must remain with the respective service and cannot be processed in combination with Facebook data. Collecting data from third-party websites and assigning them to a Facebook user account will also only be possible if users give their voluntary consent. Bundeskartellamt’s has given Facebook one month to appeal the decision to the Düsseldorf Higher Regional Court. In a blog post published on FB newsroom, Facebook confirmed that it would appeal the decision. “We disagree with their conclusions and intend to appeal so that people in Germany continue to benefit fully from all our services. The Bundeskartellamt underestimates the fierce competition we face in Germany, misinterprets our compliance with GDPR and undermines the mechanisms European law provides for ensuring consistent data protection standards across the EU.” The German ruling applies to all users of Facebook based in Germany. If the decision is confirmed, Facebook would have to come up with a solution within four months to meet Bundeskartellamt’s orders. “This is significant,” says Lina Khan, an antitrust expert affiliated with Columbia Law School. “The FCO’s theory is that Facebook’s dominance is what allows it to impose on users contractual terms that require them to allow Facebook to track them all over,” Khan says. “When there is a lack of competition, users accepting terms of service are often not truly consenting. The consent is a fiction.” Antitrust lawyer Thomas Vinje, a partner at Clifford Chance in Brussels, told Reuters that the Cartel Office ruling had potentially far-reaching implications. "This is a landmark decision, it’s limited to Germany but strikes me as exportable and might have a significant impact on Facebook's business model." Facebook faces multiple data-protection investigations in Ireland Snopes will no longer do fact-checking work for Facebook, ends its partnership with the firm. Stanford experiment results on how deactivating Facebook affects social welfare measures

InstaCart, a popular online grocery delivery service in the US, has been hit with a lawsuit, filed by Los Angeles-based worker Sarah Lozano and other Instacart shoppers (workers who handpick items for customers and deliver them), last week. The lawsuit has been filed over concerns related to Instacart’s mishandling of tips and treatment of its delivery drivers. Instacart also shifted to a new payment model last year in November, publicly announcing that the change is intended to “provide clearer and more consistent earnings, and enhance the shopper experience”. The change was not taken well by the workers’ who complained of pay cuts and “tips stealing” after the company adopted the new pay model. As per the new model, Instacart guarantees its workers a minimum per-job payment of $10, so during cases when the total pay of workers’ hit below $10, Instacart has to pay extra to make the overall pay reach $10 minimum, reports NBC News. However, as per the workers’ complaints, the tip paid by the customers’ is being used by Instacart to supplement the batch payments to reach the total $10 payment value for workers. After the $10 minimum payment is reached, the tip amount helps boost the worker’s take-home pay. The lawsuit filed in California’s Superior Court, states that Instacart “intentionally and maliciously misappropriated gratuities in order to pay plaintiff’s wages even though Instacart maintained that 100 percent of customer tips went directly to shoppers. Based on this representation, Instacart knew customers would believe their tips were being given to shoppers in addition to wages, not to supplement wages entirely”. This is not the first time when Instacart has come under the bus regarding payment related issues. In November 2017, Instacart paid $4.6 million to settle a class action lawsuit with its workers. The lawsuit was filed by independent contractors working for the firm who claimed 18 violations against it, including unfair tip pooling. A workers’ organization, called Washington Workers’, shared screenshots on its blog that it received by Instacart shoppers across the country, stating that the screenshots are proofs of how “messed up” the company’s pay model is.                                                                           Working Washington                                                        The first screenshot (left) above shows Instacart paying just $1.23 for a job that took 62 minutes, and using customer’s tip to hit the minimum $10. If the customer had tipped $0, Instacart would have had to pay more. This reduces the company’s cost without adding anything to the worker’s income.  Similarly, the second screenshot (right) shows a job that took 127 minutes to complete, where Instacart paid just $6.72 as customer tipped $25. Many workers also took to Reddit and other online forums to raise their voice against Instacart’s paying practices. Apoorva Mehta, Founder & CEO of Instacart, published a post on Medium, today, where she states that although the changed pay model was designed to improve transparency, the company fell short on delivering its promises to the workers. Instacart is now reversing its pay model and has launched new measures to “more fairly and competitively compensate” their shoppers. As per the new pay model, tips will always be separate from Instacart’s contribution to shopper compensation, and Instacart will “retroactively compensate” shoppers in case there are tips included in minimum, among other new changes.“While our intention was to increase the guaranteed payment for small orders, we understand that the inclusion of tips was misguided”, states Mehta. Other than Instacart, another popular online grocery delivery services in the US, called DoorDash has come under the fire for similar reasons as Instacart. Although, DoorDash FAQ page states, “Dashers always receive 100% of tips...In addition to 100% of the tip, Dashers will always receive at least $1 from DoorDash”, DoorDash hasn’t explicitly reacted yet to the recent uproar. Tech Workers Coalition (TWC), a non-profit coalition of tech-workers, also spoke out in support of the Instacart workers on Twitter, while bashing DoorDash for remaining silent: https://twitter.com/techworkersco/status/1093272671398244355 https://twitter.com/techworkersco/status/1093227213711798272 Public reaction to the news has been largely negative towards Instacart, with people supporting Instacart shoppers for raising their voice against the firm’s unfair pay model: https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1093244878627225602 https://twitter.com/NicoleGarton_/status/1093246126080151553 https://twitter.com/Ithen_thought/status/1092521656143265798 https://twitter.com/BabiesFree/status/1092526715539152897 Tech Workers Coalition volunteers talk unionization and solidarity in Silicon Valley Amazon faces increasing public pressure as HQ2 plans go under the scanner in New York

Google’s BigQuery Public Datasets program, has added six new cryptocurrencies to expand it’s blockchain search tools. Including Bitcoin and Ethereum which were added last year, the total count is now eight. The six new cryptocurrency blockchain datasets are Bitcoin Cash, Dash, Dogecoin, Ethereum Classic, Litecoin, and Zcash. BigQuery Public dataset is stored in BigQuery and made available to the general public through the Google Cloud Public Dataset Program. The blockchain related datasets consist of the blockchain’s transaction history to help developers better understand cryptocurrency. Apart from adding new datasets, Google has released a set of queries and views that map all blockchain datasets to a double-entry book data structure that enables multi-chain meta-analyses, as well as integration with conventional financial record processing systems. A Blockchain ETL ingestion framework helps to update all datasets every 24 hours via a common codebase. This results in a higher latency for loading Bitcoin blocks into BigQuery. It also leads to ingesting additional BigQuery datasets with less effort. It also means that a low-latency loading solution can be implemented once and can be used to enable real-time streaming transactions for all blockchains. With this release, the blockchain data sets have been standardized into a "unified schema," meaning the data is structured in a uniform, easy-to-access way. They’ve also included more data, such as script op-codes. Having these scripts available for Bitcoin-like datasets enables more advanced analyses. They have also created some views that abstract the blockchain ledger to be presented as a double-entry accounting ledger. This helps to further interoperate with Ethereum and ERC-20 token transactions. Allen Day, Cloud Developer Advocate, Google Cloud Health AI, writes in a blog post, “ We hope these new public datasets encourage you to try out BigQuery and BigQuery ML for yourself. Or, if you run your own enterprise-focused blockchain, these datasets and sample queries can guide you as you form your own blockchain analytics.” Blockchain governance and uses beyond finance – Carnegie Mellon university podcast Stable version of OpenZeppelin 2.0, a framework for smart blockchain contracts, released! Is Blockchain a failing trend or can it build a better world? Harish Garg provides his insight.

A paper with inputs from 15 researchers talks about artificial intelligence systems playing a game called Hanabi in a paper titled The Hanabi Challenge: A New Frontier for AI Research. The researchers propose an experimental framework called the Hanabi Learning Environment for the AI research community to test out and advance algorithms. This can help in assessing the performance of the current state-of-the-art algorithms and techniques. What’s special about Hanabi? Hanabi is a two to five player game involving cards with numbers on them. In Hanabi, you are playing against other participants but you also need to trust the imperfect information they provide and make deductions to advance your cards. Hanabi has an imperfect nature as players cannot see their own cards. This game is a test of collaboratively sharing information with discretion. The rules are specified in detail in the research paper. Games have always been used to showcase or test the ability of artificial intelligence and machine learning, be it Go, Chess, Dota 2, or other games. So why would Hanabi be ‘A New Frontier for AI Research’? The difference is that Hanabi needs a bit of human touch to play. Factors like trust, imperfect information, and co-operation come into the picture, with this game which is why it is a good testing ground for AI applications. What’s the paper about? The idea is to test the collaboration of AI agents where the information is limited and only implicit communication is allowed. The researchers say that Hanabi increases reasoning of beliefs and intentions of other AI agents and makes them prominent. They believe that, developing techniques that instill agents with such theory will, in addition to succeeding at Hanabi, unlock ways how agents can collaborate efforts with human partners. The researchers have even introduced an open-source ‘Hanabi Learning Environment’, which is an experimental framework for other researchers to assess their techniques in the environment. To play Hanabi, the theory of mind is necessary, which revolves around human-like traits such as beliefs, intents, desires, etc The human approach of the theory of mind reasoning is important not just in how humans approach this game. It is also about how humans handle communication and interactions when multiple parties are involved.. Results and further work State-of-the-art reinforcement learning algorithms using deep learning are evaluated in the paper. In self-play, they fall short of the hand-coded Hanabi playing bots. In case of collaborative play, they do not collaborate at all. This shows that there is a lot of room for advances in this area related to theory of mind. The code for the Hanabi Learning Environment is being written in Python and C++ and will be available on DeepMind’s GitHub. Its interface is similar to OpenAI Gym. For more details about the game and how the theory will help in testing AI agent interactions, check out the research paper. Curious Minded Machine: Honda teams up with MIT and other universities to create an AI that wants to learn Technical and hidden debts in machine learning – Google engineers’ give their perspective The US Air Force lays groundwork towards artificial general intelligence based on hierarchical model of intelligence

Google announced a new and free Android app, called, Live Transcribe, earlier this week. Live Transcribe is aimed at making real-world conversations more accessible globally for deaf and Hard of Hearing (HoH) people. Live Transcribe, powered by Google Cloud, automatically captions conversations in real-time. It supports more than 70 languages and more than 80% of the world’s population. How does Live Transcribe work? Live Transcribe combines the results of extensive user experience (UX) research with sustainable connectivity to speech processing servers. To ensure that connectivity to these servers doesn’t cause excessive data usage, the team used cloud ASR (Automated Speech Recognition) for greater accuracy. Similarly, to reduce the network data consumption required by Live Transcribe, an on-device neural network-based speech detector was implemented. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLCwjIaPXwA   The on-device neural network-based speech detector is built using Google’s dataset for audio event research, called AudioSet, announced last year. AudioSet is an image-like model that is capable of detecting speech, automatically managing network connections to the cloud ASR engine, and minimizing data usage over long periods of use. Additionally, the Google team partnered with Gallaudet University to make Live Transcribe intuitive, with the help of user experience research collaborations. This, in turn, would ensure that the core user needs are satisfied while maximizing the app’s potential. Google considered different devices ranging from computers, tablets, smartphones, and small projectors, etc., to effectively display auditory information and captions. After rigorous analysis, Google decided to choose smartphones because of its ” sheer ubiquity” and enhanced capabilities. Addressing transcription confidence level issue Google mentions that while building Live Transcribe, they faced a challenge regarding displaying transcription confidence. The researchers explored if they needed to show word-level or phrase-level confidence, as it was traditionally considered to be helpful. Using previous UX research, they found out that a transcript is easiest to read when it is not layered and focuses on the better presentation of the text, thus supplementing it with other auditory signals apart from speech signals. Another useful UX signal is the noise level of the current environment and to address this, researchers built an indicator that visualizes the volume of user speech relative to background noise. This helps provide users instant feedback on microphone performance, allowing them to adjust the placement of the phone. What next? To enhance the capabilities of this mobile-based automatic speech transcription service, researchers plan to include on-device recognition, speaker-separation, and speech enhancement. “Our research with Gallaudet University shows that combining it with other auditory signals like speech detection and a loudness indicator makes a tangibly meaningful change in communication options for our users”, state the researchers. Google has currently rolled out the test version of Live Transcribe on Play Store, and it has been pre-installed on all Pixel 3 devices with the latest update. Public reaction to the news has been largely positive, with people appreciating the newly released app: https://twitter.com/MattWilliams84/status/1092510959988629505 https://twitter.com/iamAbhisarW/status/1092642493504589826 https://twitter.com/seanmarnold/status/1092508455200587776 For more information, check out the official Live Transcribe blog. Transformer-XL: A Google architecture with 80% longer dependency than RNNs Google News Initiative partners with Google AI to help ‘deep fake’ audio detection research Google Cloud Firestore, the serverless, NoSQL document database, is now generally available

Last month, The EU Copyright directive had been put on hold since the European Council (with representatives from all the member states) couldn’t establish a level ground for Article 13. 11 member nations voted against the law causing the final “trilogue” meeting (at which the law was supposed to be finalized) to be called off. According to the member states, Article 13 is ‘insufficiently protective of users’ rights.’ While most of the state governments remained in favor of Article 13, there was a certain disagreement about the details of this law. France and Germany couldn’t agree on which internet platforms should install upload filters to censor their users’ posts. The disagreement has been resolved, and the process of enacting the law is back in motion. This time- making the law even worse, says the EEF. This is because, after a lot of back and forth, Germany and France have come to an agreement that will possibly affect tons of smaller sites as well as the larger ones, with hardly any protection to sites that host user-generated content. Julia Reeda, a German politician and Member of the European Parliament, uploaded the Franco-German deal [PDF], that was leaked today and which shows that Upload filters must be installed by everyone except those services which fit all three of the following “extremely narrow criteria”: Available to the public for less than 3 years Annual turnover below €10 million Fewer than 5 million unique monthly visitors BoingBoing.net summarises the above saying, every single online platform where the public can communicate and that has been in operation for three years or more must immediately buy filters. The size of the company does not matter. Once a platform makes €5,000,000 in a year, it will be obligated to implement "copyright filters as well. And finally, every site must demonstrate that it has taken 'best efforts' to license anything that their users might conceivably upload. This means that any time a rightsholder offers the site a license for content that their users might use, they are obliged to buy it from them, at whatever price they name. The next step for this draft is that the national negotiators for EU member states approve the deal, and then a final vote in the European Parliament. If the law is finalised, there would be an enormous investment of money needed. Copyright filters will cost hundreds of millions of euros to develop and maintain. Besides the monetary aspect, the law may also block legitimate speech that probably uses copyrighted works to get a point across and is incorrectly identified as containing copyrighted works. The petition opposing this law is now the largest petition in European history. You can head over to Techdirt for more insights on this news. Lawmakers introduce new Consumer privacy bill and Malicious Deep Fake Prohibition Act to support consumer privacy and battle deepfakes Facebook hires top EEF lawyer and Facebook critic as Whatsapp privacy policy manager Russia opens civil cases against Facebook and Twitter over local data laws