Google Inc. 167,90 -5,79 -3,33% has settled with 40 US State Attorney Generals for tracking Android users since 2014 without their knowledge or permission. All said and done Google will pay out $391 Million USD. Besides the monetary payout, Google has also agreed to make changes to Android privacy settings to make it easier for users to opt-out. While Android users were misled into thinking disabling the “Location History” in the device’s settings would disable location tracking, another account setting—turned on by default and named “Web & App Activity”—enabled the company to collect, store and use the customers’ personally identifiable location…
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Today is Sunday, November 13th: time for the weekly roundup of the good, the bad and the ugly tech news of the week! The Good In a rare instance Microsoft has made it into ‘The Good’ category this week. Microsoft’s newly released tablet computer, Surface 9 Pro has been found to be much easier to repair than previous models. Furthermore, Microsoft is providing repair manuals and expect to have a large availability of parts on the market in the first half of 2023. The Bad Most people are not aware Flash is dead (replaced by HTML 5) and Adobe Flash…
Elon Musk’s hope to getting Twitter back in the black (and potentially avoid bankruptcy) was to generate revenue with ‘new and improved’ Twitter Blue subscriptions (he admited ‘Twitter can not rely on advertisers’). The $7.99 USD a month service would offer the user a Blue Verified checkmark and a slew of other features (most of which are still ‘coming soon’). However, the new subscription option is only available to Twitter users who had created their Twitter account before November 9, 2022 AND sign- up within the Twitter App on iOS. This means Android and web users are unable to sign-up…
It has been two weeks since Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 Billion and took on $13 billion debt in the process. Since then, advertiser have fled, Twitter Blue was revamped with less features and higher price (which includes a very worthless verification badge which they attempted to resolve with yet another badge) several key executives keep leaving (which could put Twitter in danger of violating an FTC decree from 2011 resulting in massive fines) and he gutted half the workforce…plus the remaining half which survived the massive layoff last week are being told working remote is no longer an…
Yet another Twitter Executive has left. Chief Consumer Officers (business ad sales) and CMO Leslie Berland left shortly after Chief Twit took-over Twitter. Today comes news, Twitter chief information security officer Lea Kissner has also departed. I’ve made the hard decision to leave Twitter. I’ve had the opportunity to work with amazing people and I’m so proud of the privacy, security, and IT teams and the work we’ve done. I’m looking forward to figuring out what’s next, starting with my reviews for @USENIXSecurity 😁 — Lea Kissner (@LeaKissner) November 10, 2022 Also chief privacy officer Damien Kieran and chief compliance officer…
Chief Twit had this to say Wednesday morning… Please note that Twitter will do lots of dumb things in coming months. We will keep what works & change what doesn’t. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 9, 2022 Well, at least he is being honest. However, why do we get the feeling it is going to me more like ‘We will keep what doesn’t work & change what does. To his credit though he did change Twitter Blue due to the verification not working as planned….by suspending new subscriptions.
Just days after the re-launched of Twitter Blue (and all the new ‘fake’ accounts that followed), Twitter has temporally blocked new users from being able to subscribe to Twitter Blue. Twitter has altered the rules for its $8 Blue subscription service to prevent new accounts from getting a blue checkmark. Yesterday evening, the company edited the service’s help page to add that accounts created on or after November 9th, 2022 “will be unable to subscribe to Twitter Blue at this time.” The website also added that Twitter Blue is only available on iOS for users in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the…
We shall call this step #4 in Chief Twit’s ultimate plan to kill Twitter. To recap the plan so far: Step #1: Twitter Blue price and feature changes Step #2: The ‘Verified’ Blue Checkmark fiasco Step #3: Scaring off your advertisers Step #4: Banning Remote Work This tactic might work with Tesla and SpaceX which both have more employees than Twitter (Tesla 99K, SpaceX 9.5K, Twitter 7.5K pre-layoff). However, Twitter employees are a different breed and much like employees of other tech companies have come expect to be able to work remotely. We will see how long before Twitter Employees…
Several news sites have reported getting their ‘Official’ Grey checkmark on Twitter earlier this morning, but now those checkmarks have gone away. It seems Chief Twit want to prioritize who gets those Grey Checkmarks first (and it is not individuals). Elon Musk claims he “just killed” the deployment hours after it began. The gray checkmarks have vanished from those accounts that only just got them, including Engadget’s and The New York Times. With that said, this isn’t necessarily a complete about-face. Twitter VP Esther Crawford clarified that you’ll still see the marks, but that the social media giant is handing them out to “government and…
As reported yesterday, Twitter was going to introduce a new ‘official’ badge for high profile accounts. This is because the old ‘verified’ blue checkmark now represents a user who is paying $8 a month for Twitter Blue. This means the old blue ‘verified’ checkmark is nothing more then a status symbol and nothing to do with being a verified account. As of today, Twitter has introduced a grey checkmark below the blue checkmark for the high profile accounts. However, not all high profile accounts currently have these, so this change may still be in the process of being fully deployed….