James Farrell
Latest from James Farrell
Senate antitrust hearing questions Google and Apple app store dominance
Apple Inc. and Google LLC today were grilled in front of a Senate judiciary antitrust subcommittee regarding anticompetitive behavior. The hearing, titled “Antitrust Applied: Examining Competition in App Stores,” included testimony from lawyers from Spotify Technology SA and Match Group, the parent company of the Tinder dating app. The two companies have for a long ...
Amazon experiments with its own futuristic … hair salon?
Amazon.com Inc. is boldly going where no one expected the company to go, opening its first-ever hair salon today. The home of the salon reportedly will be London, England, in the neighborhood of Spitalfields, an area renowned for fashionable restaurants, clothes stores and crafts. It won’t be an ordinary salon, of course: Amazon says artificial ...
Hello, Clubhouse: Facebook to release new audio products this summer
Facebook Inc. announced today a slew of audio-only products that it says will be rolled out in the coming months. First the company will release an audio app very similar to Clubhouse, joining a host of tech companies doing the same. Called “Live Audio Rooms,” it will first be available to Groups and later to ...
Advocacy groups tell Mark Zuckerberg Instagram for children is a very bad idea
Advocacy groups today signed off on a letter telling Facebook Inc. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg that he should not go ahead with plans to develop an Instagram app for children under the age of 13. Thirty-five consumer advocacy groups, as well as 64 experts in the field of child development, said technology such as Instagram ...
Twitter to study its algorithms for unintentional harms
Twitter Inc. announced today that it will study its machine learning algorithms in an effort to ascertain whether they cause unintentional harm. The company said that over the next few months as part of its “Responsible Machine Learning Initiative,” it will try to understand if there is racial or gender bias. Last year the company ...
Whistleblower says Facebook allows global politicians to manipulate the platform
A new investigation accuses Facebook Inc. of allowing world leaders and politicians to use the platform to manipulate the public, despite being told about it by staff. In a report by The Guardian today, the newspaper said it had seen internal documents that revealed how Facebook treated 30 cases across 25 countries in which politicians ...
Intel’s new hate speech-purging AI Bleep comes under criticism
Last month Intel Corp. announced that it was working on a solution to cut down on toxic speech that gamers hear when playing multiplayer games online, but already that solution is being called “absurd.” The technology, named “Bleep,” uses artificial intelligence to “detect and redact” audio based on what users have chosen as the content ...
Twitch will now start banning users for what they do offline
In an industry first announced today, Amazon.com Inc.-owned Twitch says it will now ban users for it calls “severe off-service misconduct.” The updated policy will mean that those using the livestreaming platform could find themselves in trouble for harassing people face-to-face or on a social media platform such as Twitter or Facebook. The misconduct policies ...
UK introduces new watchdog to ensure big tech doesn’t exploits its dominance
The U.K. will launch a regulator Wednesday to ensure that companies such as Google LLC and Facebook Inc. don’t take advantage of their dominant positions in their respective markets. The regulator, called the Digital Markets Unit, was announced last year but today it will go into action, with limitations on what it can do. Until ...
Facebook gives people more control of their News Feed
Facebook Inc. today announced a slew of changes that the company says will give users more control over what they see on the platform. First and foremost, the changes will mean that people have more power to control what appears in their News Feed, rather than Facebook’s algorithm making the choice for them. The company ...