Government
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Senator Al Franken Asks Uber’s CEO Tough Questions On User Privacy
Senator Al Franken, Chairman of the Subcommittee On Privacy, Technology, and the Law, has posted a public letter to Uber CEO Travis Kalanick in which he addresses many of the claims made over the past few days that the company has consistently compromised user privacy as a matter of course. “I am especially troubled because there appears to be evidence of practices inconsistent with… Read More
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Former TechCrunch Co-Editor In Chief Eric Eldon Heads To Hyper-Local Journalism Site Hoodline
Eric Eldon, who stepped in a few years ago to lead and stabilize TechCrunch after the departure of its founder Michael Arrington and many key staffers, has quietly been been dipping his toes back into journalism. This time it’s not about tech startups. He’s going into local journalism with Hoodline, a startup that grew out of a hyper-local blog about the Haight-Ashbury… Read More
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Hundreds Protest At San Francisco City Hall After Soccer Conflict With Dropbox, Airbnb Employees
A week after a video of an argument between a handful of local teenagers and Dropbox and Airbnb employees went viral, hundreds of demonstrators protested at San Francisco City Hall, asking for the city’s parks to be freely open to the public. The city’s parks and recreation general manager acquiesced, dropping the reservation requirement at night for that specific park in the… Read More
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EU Hangs Up On Fixed-Line Call Regulation Amid Mobile And Broadband Shift
Here’s an interesting sign of the times and the huge rush of mobile and broadband usage. Neelie Kroes, the outgoing VP for the European Commission overseeing communications and technology, has just announced that the EC will no longer regulate fixed-line calls, effective immediately, so that it can focus more of its attention on mobile and broadband — services that are seeing… Read More
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Here’s The 3 Reasons Europe Green-Lighted Facebook’s $19B WhatsApp Deal
The EU has approved Facebook’s landmark $19 billion acquisition of messaging startup WhatsApp — determining that the two are “not close competitors”. In a statement confirming the clearance, it highlights three key areas where it believes the two do not create an anticompetitive environment for other players in this space: consumer communications services; social… Read More
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EU OKs Facebook’s $19B WhatsApp Acquisition, Clearing The Last Antitrust Hurdle
This just coming in: the EU has approved Facebook’s $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp — deciding that the two are “not close competitors”. WhatsApp today has 600 million users, while Facebook has 1.3 billion, with 300 million using its Facebook Messenger product. This marks closure for the last big regulatory hurdle that the social network needed to pass before… Read More
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Tim Cook Holds Firm On iMessage Security: It’s Encrypted, And We Don’t Have A Key
As Apple continues to come under some attack for how it handles iCloud security, the company’s CEO Tim Cook is holding firm on the company’s priorities when it comes to data protection. In part 2 of an interview with Charlie Rose, airing on PBS tonight, Cook is adamant that Apple is not in the business of collecting data, but rather selling hardware, and, as such, it puts data… Read More
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Google Doubles Down On Productivity With ‘Google For Work’ Rebrand
This morning at its San Francisco offices, Google announced a rebrand of its enterprise products, renaming the set of tools and productivity services ‘Google for Work.’ The new nomenclature will stretch across the company’s various business tools, with each service picking up a ‘for Work’ appendage — Google now vends Drive for Work, Search for Work, and… Read More
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Snapchat Could Be Stripped Of Valuable “Tap-And-Hold For Video” Patent
Snapchat has quietly been embroiled in an intellectual property interference proceeding that could revoke its lucrative patent for a design trick now widely copied by Facebook, Google and more.
Snapchat filed for a patent on the ability to tap and hold a smartphone camera’s shutter button to record a video on August 8th, 2012, while another company called Mojo Media filed for a nearly… Read More
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Apple Asserts Its Commitment To Privacy In Response To Report By China’s CCTV
Apple has published a statement via its Chinese website as a follow-up to a report on the state-run CCTV last week that claimed its devices could present a state security risk according to researchers. The statement, available in both Chinese and English, details Apple’s efforts to ensure customer privacy is protected, and reiterates that Apple does not store or track user locations… Read More
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