Charlotte Henry

Amazon announced a host of new hardware products at the end of last month. One of those was the Ring Always Home Cam surveillance drone. Wired highlighted how that product, and others, are prompting major privacy concerns about the company.

Meanwhile, the biometric data that Amazon Go will collect is particularly sensitive, because unlike a password you can’t simply change it if a hacker steals it or it gets unintentionally exposed. Amazon has a strong record for maintaining the security of its massive cloud infrastructure, but there have been lapses across the sprawling business. The stakes are already phenomenally high; the more data the company holds the more risk it takes on. “Amazon has a major genomics cloud platform, so maybe they hold your DNA and now they’re going to have your palm as well? Plus all of these devices inside your house. And your purchase history on Prime. That’s a lot of information. That’s a lot of personal information,” says Nina Alli, executive director of Defcon’s Biohacking Village and a health care security researcher.

The EU has put significant resources into taking on ‘big tech,’ including Apple, in recent years. According to Politico, that is only set to increase.

Under Commission Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestager, the bloc’s executive arm is planning to merge two major legislative initiatives on competition into a single text, EU officials told POLITICO. One is the so-called New Competition Tool, a market investigation tool that would allow competition enforcers to act more swiftly and forcefully. The other is a part of the Digital Services Act, a new set of rules due to be unveiled in December for companies like Google, Apple and Amazon. Combined, the new powers would be known as the Digital Markets Act and would carry a hefty wallop for tech giants in its crosshairs. “We’re working on a new legislative proposal focused on digital markets, which would feature two complementary pillars, a combination of ex ante regulation and case-by-case enforcement,” Vestager said in a speech Thursday.

Nearly half of iPhone users believe that their device is 5G enable, despite the fact no 5G iPhone exists… yet. AppleInsider reported on the finding of a survey by Global Wireless Solutions.

Protonmail CEO Andy Yen is not happy with Apple. At all. In an interview with The Verge, he described growing tensions between the two firms over the implementation of In-App Purchase rules.

For the first two years we were in the App Store, that was fine, no issues there,” he says. (They’d launched on iOS in 2016.) “But a common practice we see … as you start getting significant uptake in uploads and downloads, they start looking at your situation more carefully, and then as any good Mafia extortion goes, they come to shake you down for some money.” “We didn’t offer a paid version in the App Store, it was free to download … it wasn’t like Epic where you had an alternative payment option, you couldn’t pay at all,” he relates. Yen says Apple’s demand came suddenly in 2018. “Out of the blue, one day they said you have to add in-app purchase to stay in the App Store,” he says. “They stumbled upon something in the app that mentioned there were paid plans, they went to the website and saw there was a subscription you could purchase, and then turned around and demanded we add IAP.”

This week, Spotify finally unveiled a lyrics search feature. It allows users to look for a song using the words in it, instead of by artist or title. As Engadget noted, Apple Music launched a similar tool nearly two years ago.

The two leading music services often add features seemingly inspired by their competition; the latest is lyric search. A Spotify engineer tweeted earlier today that users can now input lyrics into the app’s search field to get song results, something that Apple Music has offered since late 2018. As you can see from the screenshot above, songs that include the lyrics you input will have a “lyrics match” label; they show up along side other potential results, so keep an eye out for that label if you’re specifically searching with lyrics.

Apple Maps feature ‘Look Around’  is now available in Phoenix, Arizona. Macrumors spotted the update, which recently arrived in cities in the UK and Ireland.

Apple recently expanded its “Look Around” feature in Apple Maps to Phoenix, Arizona, providing 3D street-level imagery that’s similar to Google’s Street View. Apple has been slowly adding the Look Around feature to new cities. It expanded to Chicago in April and several cities in Japan in August. Though not yet mentioned on Apple’s website, Look Around last week expanded to London, Dublin, and Edinburgh.

Apple Podcasts is now available on Amazon Echo and Fire TV devices in Germany like they are in the U.S, AppleInsider reported. The service can be set as the default via a skill. I very much hope this comes to other European countries, including the UK! At the moment, in these other countries, you can access podcasts on an Alexa device via TuneIn.