Google News

Congress grilled the CEOs of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google. Here are the big takeaways

Of the tech titans, which included the CEOs of Amazon (AMZN), Apple (AAPL), Facebook (FB) and Google (GOOGL), some fared better than others in the first hours of the hearing. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, acknowledged, albeit earnestly and transparently, that Amazon may have improperly used third-party seller data to inform its own product decisions — a key concern over the company’s approach to competition. Apple CEO Tim Cook, on the other hand, got off pretty lightly. Despite some early… Source link

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Google’s Sundar Pichai grilled over ‘destroying anonymity on the internet’ – TechCrunch

Google’s Sundar Pichai faced an awkward line of enquiry during today’s House Antitrust Subcommittee hearing related to its 2007 acquisition of adtech platform DoubleClick, and how it went on to renege on an original promise to lawmakers and regulators that it would not (nor could not) merge DoubleClick data with Google account data — automagically doing just that almost a decade later. By linking internet users’ browsing data, as harvested via the DoubleClick cookie, to… Source link

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How CommonLook’s Expertise Helps Google With PDF Accessibility | State

ARLINGTON, Va., July 29, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — Two years ago, Google reached out to CommonLook because of our expertise in PDF accessibility. “At the time, we recognized the potential impact on PDF accessibility due to the massive number of Chrome users around the world.” – Monir ElRayes, President and CEO, CommonLook, Inc. Google knows that online content publishers are required to have their PDFs accessible and compliant to standards. Unfortunately, most organizations do not support directly… Source link

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Google Stadia’s cellular support might draw in some new blood

Google this week revealed it was unbinding Stadia from WiFi, meaning you can finally play your games on mobile devices via 4G or 5G cellular networks. It’s an upgrade Stadia’s been missing for a while, and could make the service more palatable to potential users — which Stadia could certainly use help recruiting. The option is currently available to users, though you have to opt into an “experiment,” meaning essentially a beta test. Once you do, you can… Source link

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Google’s business model ‘is the problem,’ David Cicilline says

During Wednesday’s tech antitrust hearing, Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI) tore into Google CEO Sundar Pichai over the company’s dominance in search and its use of data to monitor would-be competitors. “It is Google’s business model that is the problem,” Cicilline said, alleging a pattern of anti-competitive behavior that allowed Google to grow while smaller businesses were crushed. “Our documents show that Google evolved from a turnstile to the rest of the web to a walled garden… Source link

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Google CEO defends US military support, downplays work in China

Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., questions Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai over Google’s artificial intelligence work in China. Google CEO Sundar Pichai came under fire from lawmakers on Capitol Hill during a highly-publicized hearing on Wednesday for the company’s decision to pull out of bids for lucrative government contracts following employee backlash – while still carrying on some operations in China. When questioned about decisions to end a bid for the lucrative $10 billion Pentagon JEDI cloud… Source link

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Google One now offers free phone backups up to 15GB on Android and iOS – TechCrunch

Google One, Google’s subscription program for buying additional storage and live support, is getting an update today that will bring free phone backups for Android and iOS devices to anybody who installs the app — even if they don’t have a paid membership. The catch: While the feature is free, the backups count against your free Google storage allowance of 15GB. If you need more you need — you guessed it — a Google One membership to buy more storage or delete data you no… Source link

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