Major corporations, including Facebook and Airbnb, are increasingly turning to racial equity audits, which empower an outside expert steeped in debates around technology and racial inequalities to investigate thorny issues including hate speech online, personnel hiring, and processes used to vet products for bias. Critics say these audits can spot and solve problems companies aren’t remedying themselves. Source link
Read More »Google One VPN expands internationally to Canada, Mexico, UK, and more
Google is expanding the VPN service that it provides as part of its Google One subscription to seven new countries: Mexico, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy, as spotted by 9to5Google. The company started offering VPN access to 2TB Google One cloud storage subscribers in the US late last year, as a free addition to the existing $9.99 / month plan. But today’s announcement sees a marked expansion of the service. There are a few limitations that separate… Source link
Read More »TCL announces new 6-series and 5-series TVs with Google TV instead of Roku
TCL has long been the flag bearer of Roku TVs. The company’s 6-series is one of the best-performing sets you can buy for under $1,000. It features a fantastic picture with the help of Mini LED backlighting — TCL beat Samsung and LG to implementing that technology — and quantum dot HDR color. The 5-series and 4-series Roku TVs are no slouches either in their respective pricing tiers. But now TCL is taking a step that could dramatically shake up the US TV market: it’s expanding… Source link
Read More »Google to introduce increased protections for minors on its platform, including Search, YouTube and more – TechCrunch
Weeks after Instagram rolled out increased protections for minors using its app, Google is now doing the same for its suite of services, including Google search, YouTube, YouTube Kids, Google Assistant, and others. The company this morning announced a series of product and policy changes that will allow younger people to stay more private and protected online and others that will limit ad targeting. The changes in Google’s case are even more expansive than those Instagram announced,… Source link
Read More »Google will add privacy steps for teenagers on its search engine and YouTube.
Google says it plans additional privacy measures to protect teenage users on YouTube and its search engine, becoming the latest technology giant to adopt tougher standards in the face of criticism that companies are not doing enough to protect children. In a blog post on Tuesday, Google announced that videos uploaded to YouTube by users 13 to 17 years old would be private by default, allowing the content to be seen only by the users and people they designates. Google also will start to allow… Source link
Read More »Pay cut: Google employees who work from home could lose money
NEW YORK, Aug 10 (Reuters) – Google employees based in the same office before the pandemic could see different changes in pay if they switch to working from home permanently, with long commuters hit harder, according to a company pay calculator seen by Reuters. It is an experiment taking place across Silicon Valley, which often sets trends for other large employers. Facebook (FB.O) and Twitter (TWTR.N) also cut pay for remote employees who move to less expensive areas, while smaller companies… Source link
Read More »Facebook’s updated data transfer tool can port events to Google Calendar
Facebook has updated its data transfer tool, Transfer Your Information, with two new destinations for information associated with your Facebook account: Photobucket and Google Calendar (via Engadget). Facebook allowed photo transfers to services like Google Photos in the past, but the company says Facebook Events are a new data type for the tool it created as part of the Data Transfer Project. Support for Photobucket and Google Calendar comes alongside a larger redesign of Transfer Your… Source link
Read More »Google allegedly considered buying Epic Games to silence antitrust complaints
Enlarge / Let’s see, you landed on my “Google Ads” space, and with three houses, that’ll be $1,400. Ron Amadeo / Hasbro Back in 2018, Google and Epic Games kicked off a years-old spat over Fortnite on the Play Store. Instead of distributing the game through Google Play, Epic decided that sideloading would be the way to get Fortnite on Android, thereby sidestepping Google’s 30 percent cut of sales. Epic would go on to file an antitrust… Source link
Read More »Google Chips Away at Problems at “Mega-Batch” Scale
As Google’s batch sizes for AI training continue to skyrocket, with some batch sizes ranging from over 100k to one million, the company’s research arm is looking at ways to improve everything from efficiency, scalability, and even privacy for those whose data is used in large-scale training runs. This week Google Research published a number of pieces around new problems emerging at “mega-batch” training scale for some of its most-used models. One of the most noteworthy new items… Source link
Read More »Facebook adds Photobucket and Google Calendar to its data portability options – TechCrunch
Daniel Cooper Contributor Daniel Cooper is a senior editor at Engadget. Facebook has today announced that it has added two new destinations for when you want to move your data from the social network. In a blog post, the company said that users will be able to move their images to Photobucket and event listings to Google Calendar. Product Manager Hadi Michel said that the tool has been “completely rebuilt” to be “simpler and… Source link
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