iOS 6: Apple drops Google Maps, debuts in-house ‘Maps’ with incredible 3D mode  —  Rough mockup showing the user-enabled 3D mode (on the right)  —  According to trusted sources, Apple has an incredible headline feature in development for iOS 6: a completely in-house maps application.

Facebook Fleshes Out Privacy Policy To Comply With Data Protection Audits, Will Hold Q&A On Monday  —  Today Facebook will start sending the first of three billion notices to users about proposed changes to its privacy policy, which were made to comply with a Spring deadline …

Facebook Co-Founder Saverin Gives Up U.S. Citizenship Before IPO  —  Eduardo Saverin, the billionaire co- founder of Facebook Inc. (FB), renounced his U.S. citizenship before an initial public offering that values the social network at as much as $96 billion, a move that may reduce his tax bill.

HP restarts tablet manufacturing  —  SHANGHAI : Hewlett-Packard (HP) has announced it will resume production of consumer tablets but says it will run them on Microsoft's new Windows 8 operating system.  —  The world's largest technology firm suspended its touchPad WebOS tablet production line last year on poor sales.

Apple accuses Samsung of purposefully destroying evidence  —  On May 1, Apple filed a motion in the Northern District of California alleging that Samsung intentionally destroyed documents it was obligated to hand over as part of the discovery process, an act referred to as “spoilation of evidence” in the legal parlance.

USPS To Stop Delivering iPads And Kindles To Troops And Overseas Consumers On May 16  —  The United States Postal Service has banned all international shipments of electronics with lithium batteries effective May 16.  The cost for families to send gadgets via private parcel service …

LinkedIn Is NOT Buying Monster: Here's The Real Story  —  Just got off the phone with a source close to LinkedIn.  —  LinkedIn is not going to buy Monster, and it was never particularly interested in doing so.  —  Basically, a little while back, Monster's Bank of America bankers called LinkedIn …

Apple's Siri: the ‘best smartphone ever’ is the Nokia Lumia 900.  Wait, what?  —  When you break out your iPhone 4S and ask Siri what the ‘best smartphone ever’ is, your humble virtual assistant will recommend you to buy Nokia's Lumia 900.  —  Which is, of course, a decent phone indeed.

On Diaspora's Social Network, You Own Your Data  —  Sitting along Yankee Stadium's third base line during New York University's rainy graduation two years ago, Max Salzberg couldn't focus.  The phone in his pocket wouldn't stop buzzing.  With each notification, the NYU senior wiped water off …

Three-quarters of smartphone owners use location-based services  —  A new report finds that 74% of smartphone owners use their phone to get real-time location-based information, and 18% use a geosocial service to “check in” to certain locations or share their location with friends.

Playlist-based radio, post to Tumblr and embeddable Play Buttons come to Spotify for Windows and Mac OS  —  We've added some new features to our Windows and Mac OS apps that we wanted to let everyone know about.  Spotify Version 0.8.3 which starts rolling out today includes the following updates:

Mobile devices account for nearly 10 percent of internet traffic, according to StatCounter  —  On April 7th, web analytics firm StatCounter recorded a milestone event: for the very first time, mobile devices reportedly accounted for over 10 percent of traffic on the global internet.

Verizon Refuses to Identify Alleged BitTorrent Pirates  —  Last fall, John Wiley and Sons became the first book publisher to go after BitTorrent users in the US.  —  By filing a mass-BitTorrent lawsuit the company became one of the many copyright holders who together have sued a quarter million people in the country since early 2010.

Dropbox fixes app rejection issue, complies with Apple's rules  —  Applications using the Dropbox development kit for iOS are no longer being rejected from the App Store by Apple after links to an external purchase option were removed.  —  Filip Radelic, developer of the Cambox application for iPhone …

Facebook Is Killing Text Messaging, Report Says  —  Apple's iMessage, the free, Internet-based text-messaging service, isn't the only thing AT&T's chief executive should lose sleep over.  Facebook is also eating into text-messaging revenues for carriers, according to a report.

Sony, Panasonic Fall to 30-Year Lows  —  Sony Corp. and Panasonic Corp. (6752), Japan's biggest consumer-electronics makers, fell to the lowest level in three decades after forecasting earnings that missed estimates because of a failure to end losses from TVs.