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"Privacy, transparency, and consent are of utmost importance in this effort, and we look forward to building this functionality in consultation with interested stakeholders. We will openly publish information about our work for others to analyze. All of us at Apple and Google believe there has never been a more important moment to work together to solve one of the world's most pressing problems. Through close cooperation and collaboration with developers, governments and public health providers, we hope to harness the power of technology to help countries around the world slow the spread of COVID-19 and accelerate the return of everyday life."

A new Vonage app for the iPhone will be released late because of technical issues.

"Ministers have paused a planned update to the NHS Covid-19 app after Apple and Google blocked it from their stores over privacy violations. The app, which aids contact tracing in England and Wales, uses technology built by the Silicon Valley companies to track interactions between users with their bluetooth signals and venue "check-ins"."

"Apple and Google's tougher enforcement could preclude such apps from becoming realistic alternatives to the mainstream social networks. They now face the choice of either stepping up their policing of posts - undercutting their main feature in the process - or losing their ability to reach a wide audience."

"The glasses pick up audio and visual cues, translating them into text that gets displayed on your lens, right in your line of vision. These virtual subtitles overlay on your vision of the world, providing a contextual, USEFUL augmented reality experience that's leaps and bounds ahead of what the Google Glass was designed to do in 2013."

"People have made the anecdotal observation that their Apple products become much slower right before the release of a new model. Now, a Harvard University study has done what any person with Google Trends could do, and pointed out that Google searches for "iPhone slow" spiked multiple times, just before the release of a new iPhone each time."

"The tech giant is partnering with OpenAI to integrate its chatbot, ChatGPT, into the iPhone's operating system, Bloomberg reported. Apple is expected to announce the deal at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference which starts on June 10."

"It is time now for two things: for people to wake up and realise how much our lives are dominated by such a small number of Silicon Valley bros, one hand in their jean pocket announcing their next move, and for tech companies to acknowledge their power and influence and become truly accountable."

"Users post violent and hateful content to Facebook and Twitter all the time, they argued - and no one was demanding those platforms get the boot from the app stores."

"Google and Mozilla are making changes to their respective web browsers to try and thwart the notoriously corrupt government of Kazakhstan's efforts to launch a surveillance operation against its own citizens."

"Given the government's obsession with passing cybersecurity legislation, you would think they'd be happy that Apple and Google are making it harder for foreign governments and criminals to break into people's phones or company servers to steal your data. But you'd be forgetting that the head of the FBI and his fellow fear-mongerers are still much more concerned with making sure they retain control over your privacy, rather than protecting everyone's cybersecurity."

"Mobile advertising was the great hope for newspapers and magazines, replacing revenues lost in the switch to digital from print. Earlier this year the influential analyst Mary Meeker, of the venture capitalists Kleiner Perkins, had pegged it as a $25bn opportunity in the US alone. Now the hoped-for revenues are in peril, and publishers - and people who care about free, independent news - are rightly worried."

"These exploits are based on chip engineering flaws, not on software flaws. Apple, Google, Abode, Microsoft, and other software companies didn't write poor software or bad Operating Systems to cause these problems to occur. Rather, the chip manufacturers - Intel, AMD and ARM - designed and then engineered computer chips with flaws built into them. Once discovered, those flaws allow the Meltdown and Spectre exploits to be run. Worse, these chips have been sold with consumer computers, servers and mobile devices since 1995. so the impact is, potentially, both personal and global in scope."

"Most people are aware of the cookies that track them across the web, and the privacy-invading practices of Google search, but did you know Google's email service, Gmail, collects large amounts of data too? This was recently put into stark focus for iPhone users when Gmail published its app "privacy label" - a self-declared breakdown of the data it collects and shares with advertisers as part of a new stipulation on the Apple App Store."

"Data center emissions probably 662% higher than big tech claims. Can it keep up the ruse? Emissions from in-house data centers of Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple may be 7.62 times higher than official tally"

"Yet so-called smart devices inarguably depend on thousands of low-paid humans who annotate sound snippets so tech companies can upgrade their electronic ears; our faintest whispers have become one of their most valuable datasets."

"The president of Baidu, Ya-Qin Zhang, said in a statement: "As AI technology keeps advancing and the application of AI expands, we recognise the importance of joining the global discussion around the future of AI. Ensuring AI's safety, fairness and transparency should not be an afterthought but rather highly considered at the onset of every project or system we build.""