Update: Electronic Frontier Foundation Senior Policy Analyst Matthew Guariglia offered TechCrunch the following statement,Today, Amazon Ring has announced that it will no longer facilitate police’s warrantless requests for footage from Ring users.
Now, Ring hopefully will altogether be out of the business of platforming casual and warrantless police requests for footage to its users.
Amazon today announced that it is end-of-lifing Request for Assistance (RFA), a controversial tool that allowed police and fire departments to request doorbell video through Ring’s Neighbors app.
“Public safety agencies like fire and police departments can still use the Neighbors app to share helpful safety tips, updates, and community events,” Neighbors app head, Eric Kuhn, noted in a blog post.
In 2021, Amazon made police requests public as part of its biannual transparency report.
Alinea Invest, a fintech app offering AI-powered wealth management aimed at Gen Z women, has $3.4 million in seed funding ahead of the launch of a virtual AI assistant that will help users with their investing needs.
“The pain point we saw is that people like us who are young women, Gen Zs, children of immigrants, they have no idea where to start.
With the seed round of $3.4 million, Alinea wants to move further into the AI market with the launch of an AI financial advisor.
Though competition is rife in the fintech space, Alinea believes they can capture a particular demographic — the younger, Gen Z investor, and largely women.
“Financial literacy and investing is a crucial path to wealth and financial stability for women and Gen Z,” said Kelly Graziadei, F7 General Partner.
The new rules prevent “anti-steering” practices, whereby the platform owner — in this case Apple — prevents app developers from informing their users about alternative payment or subscription options.
And the DMA also has provisions for preventing gatekeepers from requiring developers to use their own payment services.
“For years, even in our own app, Apple had these rules where we couldn’t tell you about offers, how much something costs, or even where or how to buy it.
The DMA means that we’ll finally be able to share details about deals, promotions, and better-value payment options in the EU,” Spotify said in a blog post.
One where you can see all subscription pricing, promotions or deals, and even make purchases, all seamlessly within the app.
Krafton has more in store for its battle royale shooting game PUBG, its biggest mobile title, according to Goldman Sachs.
The South Korean firm is plotting “incremental updates” to its strategy to sustain and expand PUBG, Goldman Sachs said in a note Wednesday seen by TechCrunch.
Major graphics upgrade is also in the works, Goldman Sachs said, adding that Krafton plans to use Unreal Engine 5 for a PUBG 2.0 revamp.
The current version of PUBG uses a customized version of Unreal Engine 4.
Epic Game’s latest iteration of the ubiquitous Unreal Engine offers developers significant advancements in achieving heightened realism and immersion at reduced performance costs.
BeReal, a rising social media app that emphasizes authenticity, is making its first outreach to brands and celebrities.
Over the last year, BeReal has rolled out a number of new features like groups, mentions, multiple posts per day, pinned posts and a “friends of friends” feed.
But the problem with BeReal, and its commitment to fostering existing friendships, is that it can’t make money.
Like any other user on BeReal, they will have to post on time at the spur of the moment.
Well, if we’re about to start seeing BeReal posts from brands, may we humbly nominate the Duolingo Owl for early access?
Models and influencers are among Artisse’s early adopters along with some businesses using AI photography for their ads.
“I see AI photography as a new category that should be probably of a similar size, if not bigger than, photo editing apps,” he says.
The investment, which was inbound, made sense because the fund has an influencer marketing arm and could help with marketing the app, Wu explains.
Shopping from AI photos and turning them into physical prints are other ideas being explored.
Artisse’s AI app is available on both iOS and Android.
TikTok is the latest tech company to mount another round of layoffs in an increasingly bleak January.
According to NPR, which broke the news, TikTok cut about 60 jobs, mostly in sales and advertising.
Since then, TikTok users have complained that their For You Page is overrun with videos from creators seeking to make affiliate commissions by promoting products from TikTok Shop.
Across social platforms and other consumer tech products, layoffs have been rampant so far this year.
Google has laid off hundreds of employees in hardware and advertising sales, plus another hundred employees at YouTube.
Google’s Chrome web browser is getting an infusion of AI technology in the latest release.
In addition to the writing assistant, AI can also be used to help organize tab groups and personalize your browser.
Chrome’s Tab Groups feature allows users who keep many tabs open to manage them by organizing them into groups.
With the new Tab Organizer, Chrome will automatically suggest and create groups based on the tabs you already have open.
To access these features, you’ll sign into Chrome, select “Settings” from the three-dot menu, and then navigate to the “Experimental AI” page.
The proceeds bring Clerk’s total raised to $55.5 million, and co-founder and CEO Colin Sidoti says that they’ll be put toward expanding Clerk’s service beyond authentication and into authorization — i.e.
Clerk builds developer tools for authentication, offering drop-in components coded in React, the open source frontend JavaScript library.
“Despite authentication and authorization being ubiquitous challenges across every software company, they have been exceptionally slow to become outsourced,” Colin said.
“When you ask developers why, they often highlight that authentication and authorization are too tightly-coupled to the rest of their application to outsource.
The integration is motivated in part by the investment from Stripe, which Colin says marks the beginning of a “strategic partnership” between the two firms.
Another interesting new feature in iOS 17.3 is something called stolen device protection.
Once again, the passcode can be used if Face ID fails — thieves can also register their own face in Face ID if they have the device passcode.
Apple gives you an hour to remotely wipe your deviceAs a protection mechanism, Apple has introduced stolen device protection in iOS 17.3.
When it’s turned on, some actions will require Face ID or Touch ID biometric authentication, such as accessing stored passwords and credit cards.
In addition to requiring Face ID or Touch ID authentication, changing your Apple ID password, changing your passcode and turning off stolen device protection also require a security delay.
