Tag Archives: TechCrunch

Update: It looks like various services are starting to come back again, but with some glitches (such as the address bar in Gmail not working correctly). We’ve contacted Google for a statement about what happened. In all, it looks like a huge range of Google services were down for about an hour today. That hour that crossed into business operation times in multiple markets, leading to a slight drop in pre-market trading for parent company Alphabet. It’s also an alarming reminder of… Source link

Welcome back to Human Capital, where I break down the latest in diversity, equity and inclusion, and labor in tech. This week, Twitter dropped its latest diversity report and Tesla released its first one ever. Meanwhile, Google CEO Sundar Pichai apologized for the way things went down with Dr. Timnit Gebru, a prominent researcher in artificial intelligence ethics. Sign up here to get this as a weekly newsletter in your inbox every Friday at 1 p.m. Google’s Sundar Pichai will… Source link

The European Commission must block the Google -Fitbit merger as a matter of democratic imperative, prominent academic and author Shoshana Zuboff has warned. The Harvard professor who wrote the defining book on surveillance capitalism has become the latest voice raised against the $2.1 billion data+devices deal — that’s now been delayed at the regulatory clearance stage for more than a year. Others calling for the Google-Fitbit acquisition to be blocked — unless or until robust… Source link

If you’ve ever had a Father’s Day ad offering great deals for your dead dad sail into your inbox, you know that online advertising can be disturbing sometimes. Children’s gifts for people struggling to get pregnant, pet toys for your deceased doggo, the list goes on. Google is taking a small but helpful step to help people control which ads they run into. Starting with YouTube in the U.S., users will be able to toggle off ads for alcohol and gambling — two subjects that are… Source link

A group of industry heavyweights, including Google, Box, Citrix, Dell, Imprivata, Intel, Okta, RingCentral, Slack, VMware and Zoom, today announced the launch of the Modern Computing Alliance. The mission for this new alliance is to “drive ‘silicon-to-cloud’ innovation for the benefit of enterprise customers — fueling a differentiated modern computing platform and providing additional choice for integrated business solutions.” Whoever wrote this mission statement was clearly… Source link

Google announced today it’s introducing a new search feature that will surface a list of authorized vaccines in users’ location, as well as informational panels about each individual vaccine. The feature is first being launched in the U.K., which earlier this month gave emergency authorization to the BioNTech/Pfizer coronavirus vaccine.  The company says the feature will roll out to other countries as their local health authorities authorize vaccines. The feature itself will appear… Source link

France’s data protection agency, the CNIL, has slapped Google and Amazon with fines for dropping tracking cookies without consent. Google has been hit with a total of €100 million ($120M) for dropping cookies on Google.fr and Amazon €35M (~42M) for doing so on the Amazon .fr domain under the penalty notices issued today. The regulator carried out investigations of the websites over the past year and found tracking cookies were automatically dropped when a user visited the… Source link

Another batch of complaints has been filed with European Union data protection agencies urging enforcement action against the adtech industry’s abuse of Internet users’ information to target ads. The complaints argue that behavioural ads are both harmful and unlawful. Earlier complaints over the same Real-Time Bidding (RTB) programmatic advertising issue were filed across the EU in 2018 and 2019 but have yet to result in any substantive regulatory action. Ireland did open a probe… Source link

In light of artificial intelligence researcher Dr. Timnit Gebru’s exit from Google last week, Google CEO Sundar Pichai sent a memo to staffers, obtained by Axios, saying the company would investigate “the circumstances that led up to Dr. Gebru’s departure, examining where we could have improved and led a more respectful process.” Last week, Gebru said she was fired from the company after sending an email to her direct reports discussing how she was disappointed in her… Source link

The coronavirus outbreak, elections and Zoom meetings were on the minds of U.S. consumers this year, according to Google’s list of the U.S. top trending searches in 2020, released this morning. These search trends don’t reflect the most-searched for words and phrases across Google, but rather those that saw high spikes in traffic over a sustained period of time during the year, as compared with 2019. This paints a more accurate picture of consumers’ changing interests during the… Source link