Techmeme
November 20, 2020, 10:55 AM

Top News

Bloomberg:
Facebook responds to Apple's defense of IDFA, saying Apple is using its “dominant market position to self-preference their own data collection”  —  Apple Inc. on Thursday slammed Facebook Inc. and other internet giants for their ad-targeting practices in response to a letter questioning …
Chance Miller / 9to5Mac:
Apple defends its delayed IDFA changes in iOS 14 and slams Facebook, saying “its intent is to collect as much data as possible” on its users  —  Last month, a coalition of eight civil and human rights organizations penned an open letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook regarding …
Dan Primack / Axios:
Roblox files S-1 for its IPO, reports losses of $206M on $589M in revenue, 31.1M DAU, and 22.2B engaged hours, up 122% YoY, for the first nine months of 2020  —  Roblox, a Silicon Valley-based based social gaming platform for tweens and teens, on Thursday filed for a $1 billion initial public offering.
Michal Lev-Ram / Fortune:
Apple announces Barbara Whye as its new head of inclusion and diversity starting in early 2021; Whye will arrive from a similar role at Intel  —  Apple has announced a new vice president of inclusion and diversity.  Barbara Whye, who has made a name for herself as Intel's head of D&I, will join the iPhone-maker in early 2021.
James Pearson / Reuters:
Source: Vietnam has threatened to shut down Facebook inside the country if it does not censor more “anti-state” posts on the platform  —  HANOI (Reuters) - Vietnam has threatened to shut down Facebook in the country if it does not bow to government pressure to censor …
Scott Stein / CNET:
Apple's AR execs on how iPhones and iPads are becoming world-mapping, object-scanning tools that are laying the groundwork for the arrival of AR headsets  —  Exclusive: Apple's AR executives talk about why iPhones and iPads are transforming into world-mapping, object-scanning tools — and why that matters more right now than glasses.
More: MacRumors and Medium
Heather Kelly / Washington Post:
A look at Facebook Groups, used by two thirds of Facebook's MAUs and a company focus since 2017, which make leaving the platform especially difficult  —  Facebook invested heavily in the one feature it knew people couldn't leave behind: Their groups  —  Before the pandemic, Andrea Norrington barely checked Facebook.
Adi Robertson / The Verge:
Facebook's Q3 transparency report: 0.1%-0.11% of what users see violates hate speech rules; 95% of hate speech takedowns are proactive, up from 24% in 2017  —  Lawmakers and moderators criticized its policies this week  —  Facebook says it is proactively detecting more hate speech using artificial intelligence.
Salvador Rodriguez / CNBC:
Damien Wilde / 9to5Google:
Google says Stadia is coming to iOS as a Safari PWA within “several weeks”  —  Apple's tough enforcement of its App Store policies has led to a sad lack of a playable version of Google Stadia on iOS.  That is set to change very soon as public testing of a dedicated progressive web app …
Zack Whittaker / TechCrunch:
Go SMS Pro, an Android messaging app with 100M+ installs, is exposing photos, videos, and other files sent privately by its users  —  Go SMS Pro, one of the most popular messaging apps for Android, is exposing photos, videos and other files sent privately by its users.  Worse, the app maker has done nothing to fix the bug.
Tom Simonite / Wired:
Research renews concerns about gender bias in image recognition services offered by Google, Microsoft, and Amazon  —  A new paper renews concerns about bias in image recognition services offered by Google, Microsoft, and Amazon.  —  MEN OFTEN JUDGE women by their appearance.  Turns out, computers do too.
Abner Li / 9to5Google:
Google says it has completed a global rollout of RCS and will start testing end-to-end encryption in Android Messages  —  In mid-2019, Google decided to take over and speed up the launch of RCS.  A little over 17 months later, Google announced today that it has completed a global rollout of RCS …

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Earlier Picks

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Annie Palmer / CNBC:
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