Tag Archives: TechCrunch

Another strike against use of Google Analytics in Europe: The Italian data protection authority has found a local web publisher’s use of the popular analytics tool to be non-compliant with EU data protection rules owing to user data being transferred to the U.S. — a country that lacks an equivalent legal framework to protect the info from being accessed by US spooks. The Garante found the web publisher’s use of Google Analytics resulted in the collection of many types of user… Source link

Google announced today that it’s adding a new label on Maps and Search that will allow people to identify their business as being LGBTQ+ owned. The new label is now available to merchants in the United States with a verified business profile on Google. The new label joins the current options available to merchants, which include Black-owned, Latino-owned, veteran-owned and women-owned. The label also expands on the “LGBTQ+ friendly” and “transgender… Source link

Google News is refreshing its desktop site with a new design that allows you to track global and local news on one screen. The redesign puts Your Briefing, Local news, and Top Picks section on a single page in different columns so it’s easier to catch up with news on topics and regions you care about. Until now, if you logged on to Google News, you’d see the headlines section first, along with the weather widget on the side. Other sections like World, For You,… Source link

Germany’s competition regulator is looking into possible abuses related to how Google operates its Maps product. It’s the latest proceeding the Federal Cartel Office (FCO) has opened against Google — with earlier (ongoing) investigations into the tech giant’s News Showcase licensing practices and its data terms. However the Maps proceeding is the first initiated under tougher abuse controls which have applied to Google’s business in Germany since January — when the… Source link

Data centers, which drive the apps, websites, and services that billions of people use every day, can be hazardous places for the workers that build and maintain them. Workers sometimes have to service a data center’s electrical equipment while it’s being energized. And they can become exposed to chemicals like chlorine, which is used as a sterilizing agent for the water circulated through liquid cooling systems for computers and servers. In June 2015, five people had to be taken to… Source link

TechCrunch has learned that Russia search giant Yandex is to switch from using yandex.ru as its main front page for Russian-speaking users to ya.ru — a less trafficked domain it’s owned since 2000 that, historically, has only hosted a basic search engine page. Imagine if Google decided to de-emphasize google.com in favor of a less popular domain it also owns and you’ll get an inkling of how big a shift this looks to be for the Russian Internet landscape. (Albeit, a fuller… Source link

Google Maps is introducing a new widget for Android that will be another use for the functionality that helped make a name for Waze, the other driving and mapping app that Google acquired nearly a decade ago: It will now show live traffic around you not just in the app but in a widget you can access on your lock screen. Google Maps already provides estimated arrival and travel times, and indicates when there is less or more congestion on your route with… Source link

Yahoo announced six new members of its board of directors today, about a year after the internet brand was acquired by private equity firm Apollo for $5 billion [Disclosure: TechCrunch is part of Yahoo]. The new appointees include Jessica Alba, actress and founder of The Honest Company; Aryeh Bourkoff, founder and CEO of the independent global investment firm LionTree, an investor in Yahoo; Fouad ElNaggar, co-founder and CEO of Array and Sapho (acquired by Citrix); Michael Kives,… Source link

The reconfiguring of Russia’s digital landscape in the wake of Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine continues to play out at a macro and micro level. Here’s a development on the latter front: Local tech giant Yandex has quietly removed national borders from its maps product. Users of Yandex’s maps app, which is popular in countries in the CIS region, can still see country names displayed — but lines depicting exact borders between nations are no longer visible. We understand the… Source link

Roughly a year ago, Google announced the launch of Vertex AI, a managed AI platform designed to help companies to accelerate the deployment of AI models. To mark the service’s anniversary and the kickoff of Google’s Applied ML Summit, Google this morning announced new features heading to Vertex, including a dedicated server for AI system training and “example-based” explanations. “We launched Vertex AI a year ago with a goal to enable a new generation of AI that empowers data… Source link