Find out the week’s top mobile stories from around the world.
This week.. Facial recognition privacy Act suggested in US, Facebook loses chief product officer and Whatsapp head, Apple responds to Spotify’s claims, but not its demands and much more.
Face Recognition Privacy Act aims to protect your identifying info
Engadget
US Senators Roy Blunt and Brian Schatz want to protect people’s facial recognition data and make it much harder to sell now that information is treated as currency. The lawmakers have introduced the bipartisan Commercial Facial Recognition Privacy Act of 2019, which prohibits companies from collecting and resharing face data for identifying or tracking purposes without people’s consent.
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Facebook loses chief product officer and Whatsapp head
BBC
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has announced the departure of the firm’s chief product officer Chris Cox and head of WhatsApp Chris Daniels. Mr Cox joined in 2005, a year after Facebook was founded, while Mr Daniels took up his role only a year ago. No reason has explicitly been given for their departure.
The changes come shortly after Mr Zuckerberg outlined his plan to transform Facebook into a “privacy-focused platform.”
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Apple addresses Spotify’s claims, but not its demands
Tech Crunch
Two days after Spotify announced that it had filed a suit against Apple with the European Commission over anticompetitive practices, Apple today issued its own response of sorts.
In a lengthy statement on its site called “Addressing Spotify’s Claims”, Apple walks through and dismantles some of the key parts of Spotify’s accusations about how the App Store works, covering app store approval times, Spotify’s actual cut on subscription revenues, and Spotify’s rise as a result of its presence on iOS.
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Ajit Pai’s plan for phone location data never mentions the word “privacy”
Ars Technica
Smartphone 911 location data is getting more precise, but the Federal Communications Commission isn’t updating its privacy rules despite carriers’ history of selling their customers’ location data.
AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint were recently found to be selling detailed location data to third parties, despite rules banning such sales, and requiring that data to be used only for 911 purposes. The data ended up in the hands of bounty hunters, bail bondsmen, bail agents, and others, Motherboard reported in one of a series of articles detailing such privacy violations.
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Marketers need a ‘one-second mobile strategy’ says MMA study
The Drum
The human brain needs less than half a second to engage with a mobile ad to create its own positive or negative impression, according to research from the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA). This means marketers need to think fast and create mobile ads made for maximum instant impact.
MMA’s Cognition Neuroscience Research project was conducted in collaboration with The Advertising Research Foundation and Neurons Inc.
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Securing the mobile enterprise means thinking outside the VPN box
Tech Republic
By 2020 mobile workers will account for nearly three-quarters (72.3%) of the US workforce, according to technology research and consulting firm, IDC.
This trend is good for business. It enables employees in sales and service to position themselves closer to their customer bases. It enables software developers to work from home. And it enables companies to deploy IoT at remote plants and in the field in order to monitor operations.
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Ericsson CTO calls for rational 5G regulation
Mobile World Live
Ericsson joined calls for a rational approach to spectrum licence fees for the 5G era, urging regulators not to sacrifice the long-term potential of the technology for short-term gain.
Erik Ekudden, the vendor’s CTO (pictured), told Mobile World Livegovernments must prepare an investment climate that enables all parties to profit from the next-generation technology. Key to this are light touch regulations which deliver the necessary spectrum, and give companies the confidence to invest in and deploy 5G kit.
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Machine learning on mobile, IoT devices? Google pushes TensorFlow Lite 1.0
Future IoT
Google has unveiled a lightweight cross-platform solution for developers deploying machine learning models on mobile and Internet of Things (IoT) devices.
TensorFlow is an open-source programming platform developed by the Google Brain team released in 2015. The specialized version for mobile devices, TensorFlow Lite 1.0, was first seen as a developer preview in November 2017.
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How data collected from mobile phones can help electricity planning
The South African
Access to reliable and affordable electricity brings many benefits. It supports the growth of small businesses, allows students to study at night and protects health by offering an alternative cooking fuel to coal or wood.
Great efforts have been made to increase electrification in Africa, but rates remain low. In sub-Saharan Africa only42% of urban areas have access to electricity, just 22% in rural areas.
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16 arrested in India for playing PUBG Mobile (Fortnite is still okay, apparently)
Android Authority
Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG) might not dominate gaming headlines anymore, owing to the likes of Apex Legends and Fortnite, but it’s still a mega-popular video game. In fact, 16 students have reportedly been arrested in India for playing the game.
According to the Indian Express, 10 university students were arrested for playing PUBG Mobile a week after a ban was instituted in the state of Gujarat. The students were released on bail.