Isro wants ‘made-in-India GPS’ tech in smartphones: What you must know

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Google has banned Chinese app developer CooTek from its ad platforms and Play Store, removing 60+ CooTek Android apps for bombarding users with disruptive ads (Craig Silverman/BuzzFeed News)

Craig Silverman / BuzzFeed News:
Google has banned Chinese app developer CooTek from its ad platforms and Play Store, removing 60+ CooTek Android apps for bombarding users with disruptive ads  —  Google is banning CooTek, a publicly traded Chinese app developer, from its Play store and ad platforms after BuzzFeed News …

Justice John Paul Stevens, dead at 99, promoted the Internet revolution

US lawmakers take jabs at Amazon & other Big Tech companies in antitrust hearing

Legislators demanded explanations from Apple about charges for apps and in-app purchases, Facebook for its rapidly changing privacy policy and Alphabet's Google over whether its rivals are demoted in search results. https://ift.tt/2NY6rWN https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

ETtech Top 5: Payment firms seek reimbursement for MDR loss, Rivigo layoffs & more

A closer look at today's biggest tech and startup news and why they matter. https://ift.tt/32wdTeD https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

AI photo editor FaceApp goes viral again on iOS, raises questions about photo library access

FaceApp. So. The app has gone viral again after first doing so two years ago or so. The effect has gotten better but these apps, like many other one off viral apps, tend to come and go in waves driven by influencer networks or paid promotion. We first covered this particular AI photo editor  from a team of Russian developers about two years ago.

It has gone viral again now due to some features that allow you to edit a person’s face to make it appear older or younger. You may remember at one point it had an issue because it enabled what amounted to digital blackface by changing a person from one ethnicity to another.

In this current wave of virality, some new rumors are floating about FaceApp. The first is that it uploads your camera roll in the background. We found no evidence of this and neither did security researcher and Guardian App CEO Will Strafach or researcher Baptiste Robert.

The second is that it somehow allows you to pick photos without giving photo access to the app. You can see a video of this behavior here:

Shouldn’t photo access need to be enabled for this to be possible ? pic.twitter.com/wy45zKn63E

— Karissa Bell (@karissabe) July 16, 2019

While the app does indeed let you pick a single photo without giving it access to your photo library, this is actually 100% allowed by an Apple API introduced in iOS 11. It allows a developer to let a user pick one single photo from a system dialog to let the app work on. You can view documentation here and here.

Because the user has to tap on one photo, this provides something Apple holds dear: user intent. You have explicitly tapped it, so it’s ok to send that one photo. This behavior is actually a net good in my opinion. It allows you to give an app one photo instead of your entire library. It can’t see any of your photos until you tap one. This is far better than committing your entire library to a jokey meme app.

Unfortunately, there is still some cognitive dissonance here, because Apple allows an app to call this API even if a user has set the Photo Access setting to Never in settings. In my opinion, if you have it set to Never, you should have to change that before any photo can enter the app from your library, no matter what inconvenience that causes. Never is not a default, it is an explicit choice and that permanent user intent overrules the one-off user intent of the new photo picker.

I believe that Apple should find a way to rectify this in the future by making it more clear or disallowing if people have explicitly opted out of sharing photos in an app.

One good idea might be the equivalent of the ‘only once’ location option added to the upcoming iOS 13 might be appropriate.

One thing that FaceApp does do, however, is it uploads your photo to the cloud for processing. It does not do on-device processing like Apple’s first party app does and like it enables for third parties through its ML libraries and routines. This is not made clear to the user.

I have asked FaceApp why they don’t alert the user that the photo is processed in the cloud. I’ve also asked them whether they retain the photos.

Given how many screenshots people take of sensitive information like banking and whatnot, photo access is a bigger security risk than ever these days. With a scraper and optical character recognition tech you could automatically turn up a huge amount of info way beyond ‘photos of people’.

So, overall, I think it is important that we think carefully about the safeguards put in place to protect photo archives and the motives and methods of the apps we give access to.

Xiaomi to Launch Mi A3 Today: Everything You Need to Know

Mi A3 is all set to be launched today. Xiaomi will be unveiling the smartphone in Spain at 3pm CEST. In addition to the Mi A3, the Chinese smartphone maker is also expected to announce the new Mi A3... https://ift.tt/30zI0jz

PCI seeks compensation for losses that may incur due to govt's zero MDR proposal

In the Union Budget for 2019-20, the government announced that there would be no charges levied on merchants processing digital payments as well as on consumers opting to pay digitally. https://ift.tt/32teNZx https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

Redmi K20 Series Set to Launch in India Today: How to Watch Live Stream

Redmi K20 Pro price in China starts at CNY 2,499 (roughly Rs. 24,900) for the base 6GB RAM + 64GB storage variant, while Redmi K20 price in China starts at CNY 1,999 (roughly Rs. 19,900). https://ift.tt/2xNxyJ0

Highlights from the House's antitrust hearing, where Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook executives fought criticism that their companies dominate their markets (Bloomberg)

Bloomberg:
Highlights from the House's antitrust hearing, where Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook executives fought criticism that their companies dominate their markets  —  U.S. technology giants are headed for their biggest antitrust showdown with Congress in 20 years as lawmakers and regulators demand …

Chinese electric scooter maker Niu, a supplier to US ride-sharing service Revel, says it will transfer tariff costs to US clients as trade war continues (Iris Deng/South China Morning Post)

Iris Deng / South China Morning Post:
Chinese electric scooter maker Niu, a supplier to US ride-sharing service Revel, says it will transfer tariff costs to US clients as trade war continues  —  Niu is transferring increased tariff costs to consumers as trade war drags on The scooter company has plans to go into retail …

Rivigo lays off 70-100 employees, rolls back on-campus offers

Rivigo has been under pressure from investors to cut costs, move away from an asset-heavy business, and improve its unit economics across all business verticals. https://ift.tt/2SjpFUY https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

New Cayman base to bring funds to Oyo

Oyo founder Ritesh Agarwal has set up a Cayman Islands-registered entity, RA Hospitality, which will look to make fresh investments in the SoftBank-backed hospitality chain https://ift.tt/2LnpZlb https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

Realme X vs Redmi K20

Realme X price in India starts at Rs. 16,999, while the Redmi K20 price in the country is yet to be announced. We compare the Realme X with Redmi K20 to help you choose the best-suited phone for you. https://ift.tt/2lrcNzQ

Google Accused of Ripping Off Digital Ad Technology in US Lawsuit

Alphabet's Google was hit on Monday with a US lawsuit alleging it copied a smaller firm's patented digital advertising technology. https://ift.tt/2YQmfvw