Digital Information World

TikTok announced on Monday that the company is transferring the responsibility for safeguarding the privacy of European users from its United States entity to its UK and Irish entities. Now, the service provider for EEA-Swiss users will be transformed to TikTok Ireland, and the United Kingdom office will take charge of service provision for users in the UK.

TikTok UK will control the data for users in the UK, Switzerland, and EEA. According to the company, the changes will take effect from July 29 of this year. Since the app was launched in Europe, the company has invested in local talent and created a regional senior leadership team. The company has also set up necessary business functions in Europe.

According to TikTok, this is the best way to support its continuously growing community, and from July 29 of this year, TikTok UK and TikTok Ireland will take over from TikTok Inc, their United States entity. TikTok’s UK and Irish entities will provide TikTok app to users in Europe, and manage as well as safeguard the personal data of users in Europe. Over 1,000 people work for TikTok in Europe, with 800 individuals based in Ireland and the United Kingdom. London is the second biggest office for TikTok Inc, with a trust & safety hub in Dublin.

The company announced back in January of this year that TikTok will establish a European base in Dublin with 100 employers. Discussing the regions, TikTok Ireland will be responsible for maintaining the privacy and safety of users in Europe. The trust & safety hub in Dublin enables the company to focus on improving its policies, moderation strategies, and technologies to the TikTok community safe.

Meanwhile, the new data privacy team will work to uphold the highest data protection standards. According to the company, the Office of the Data Protection Officer will oversee this work to drive accountability as well as encourage a culture of privacy and security awareness.

It was also reported that the company will also modify its terms of service and privacy policy. The company wants to make it more transparent by modifying the policy. TikTok will provide details of the type of data it collects from its users, how the company uses this data, and with whom the data is shared. Approximately 1 billion people use TikTok worldwide, and the app is particularly popular among younger people.

Photo: Andrew Kelly / Reuters

Read next: Study - 50 percent of social media users keep their accounts in private mode, while the remaining half chose to be public

Facebook is a platform having 2.6 billion monthly active users. It is a social network connecting millions of people throughout the world. Celebrities and political figures have been using it to share their opinions publicly. Facebook keeps a check on its user’s activity, although it provides freedom of speech but keeps a strict eye on the communication that is made. If there is something against the policies, Facebook tends to take it down immediately. However, sometimes the case if different.

Donald Trump has been on target by the critics for a long time. His posts and tweets are sometimes falling under the eligibility criteria for violating policies. He occasionally promotes hate speech in his statements. For this purpose, his posts are always a hot topic. Back in 2015, Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg was willing to take down some of President’s post. But instead of deleting the post, he changed the policies of the platform, i.e. according to a report by WP.

According to new policies, such posts were allowed and identified as “Political Discourse”. This was done for of-course reasons; Zuckerberg didn’t want the posts to be deleted. Although Mark Zuckerberg’s decision received a huge criticism he still stood unaffected with the situation.

According to Washington’s Sunday post, in 2015 President Donald Trump posted a video regarding Muslim immigrants. The video promoted hatred and hostility against Muslims. Public all around went crazy over the video. According to the policies, the video should have been removed. However, the chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, Senior Executive Joel Kalpan, and other prominent members of the team allowed the video under-recognition of Political Discourse.

While whole this chaos, another issue aroused was PR Risks.

Mark Zuckerberg was advised by his advisors to condemn Trump’s decision about building a border with Mexico; otherwise, it would look like Zukerberg was involved in favoritism.

Mark’s such decisions have provided a uniform platform to other headmen of the countries. For example, Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s President to promotes provoking content on the platform.

Every social media platform tries its best to provide a hatred free platform, along with freedom of speech. But they keep a strict check on users who are tended to violate the policies. They either send a warning or take the post down. Facebook has been playing an important role in keeping a check on its users. But sometimes the negligence by the platform becomes questionable.

Photo: Getty

Read next: Facebook warns its users about hateful comments that are not in line with its policies

Apple is expanding the Find My tracking service to devices other than iOS-based devices. It is launching a new accessory program with the release of iOS 14 that will let users locate non iOS devices, similar to those of Tile. Many third-party trackers will become much more useful because they will be integrated into the network of millions of iOS devices that help people find their lost gadgets.

Tile’s tracking devices ensure that that the items, they are attached to, do not get left behind by alerting the users if the device is about to leave the close range, making it easier to keep track of items. The users of Tile’s tracking network also get alerted when they are in the range of tracker marked as missing by its user. This can be greatly upgraded by integration in Apple’s already huge network of users.

The new program requires hardware manufacturers to follow specifications for Apple’s devices so that they are qualified to join the Find My network. However, these specifications are not yet complete just like iOS 14. Third-party trackers will be certified through Apple’s Made for iPhone program.

The Find My network relies on the millions of Apple devices already existing. This will help to locate missing items a lot. It is very similar to crowdsourced location tracking where a person’s iPhone comes in the range of an iPad that has been marked as missing, triggering a Bluetooth signal that updates the said iPad’s location in Find My network. This updated location is sent to the original owner who can then approximately estimate where the missing device is.

Apple makes it very difficult for companies like Tile to have the same tracking abilities as Find My by default so third-party trackers have not been able to take advantage of this network. This is because these third-party apps have to request permission from iOS users to monitor their GPS locations. Tile has complained to lawmakers in Congress about Apple, whose behavior is pretty much anti-competitive as Find My has these permissions by default and it is also expected that Apple will soon release its tracking tiles. The accidental leaks of “AirTag” tracking devices by the company on YouTube caused this speculation.

Also read: Apple Will Not Support These 16 Web APIs That Allow Developers To Create Powerful Web Applications

It is still not clear if Tile wants to participate in the Find My program as it is still following Apple’s rules and working within its bounds. However, Tile trackers will become more useful for the users if they can take advantage of the vast Find My network and its permissive location tracking.

However, Apple still faces the anti-trust investigation under the European Union, where regulators are inspecting if the company holds too much power and control over the developers in its App Store.

Read next: Besides TikTok, 53 Other Major iOS Apps Are Also Spying On Clipboard Data

Do you remember the old days when if anything was to be censored for privacy reasons, editors used to put up a colored box over it? To date, people also find it as a good practice to hide details in screenshots e.g blacking out the name, picture or personal information of anyone to protect them from being targeted by fanatics.

However, over the years another effect called pixelation has also emerged to achieve the same privacy goal. The good thing about pixelation or blurred effect is that it reveals a major side of what’s going on while also taking care of protecting the person’s identity. This technique has been more popular to hide body parts for reasons.

There are also high chances that you may have seen a practical implication of pixelation during the massive protests that have been going around the world lately. Law enforcement agencies use the footage to identify participants so that they could either take legal action against them or put them in the record for participating in a violent protest.

Looking at its usage and benefits, researchers are now working on developing the sort of AI technology that can actually reverse the pixelation effect to make users easily identify the faces hidden behind those blurry image.

A glimpse on such a technology has been given by a group of scientists from Duke University as they published a paper based on Photo Upsampling via Latent Space Exploration (PULSE) system.

According to the researchers, the main aim of a single-image super-resolution is to build a high-resolution image from the corresponding low-resolution (LR) input.

The end result is pretty much similar to how you see in movies and TV shows when a person from investigation authorities orders to “enhance” the image quality and you get a clear footage of the person hidden behind the pixels. Well, yes what you used to see in science fiction, PULSE can pretty much turn it into reality.

The team of researchers also did demo tests in which they downscaled the images of selected people and passed them through PULSE. The final look of the image coming from PULSE was not exactly like the original image of the person but still, the results were very close.

The only problem with facial recognition AI however still remains and that is how false positives are more likely to appear than accurate results and that is something PULSE will have to continue working on.

Read next: Facebook reveals the results of the Deepfake Detection Challenge and shows some promising prospects

The social media giant, Facebook, is rolling out the fan subscription tool to more regions. The tool is designed to help game streamers and other creators to generate extra revenue streams. Facebook first launched this program in early 2018, and only a small group of content creators in the US and the UK were able to charge their fans a monthly subscription fee of $4.99. In return, viewers get exclusive content and fan badge for their profiles.

However, the company announced today in a blog post that Facebook is expanding the availability of this program in Mexico, Canada, the US, the UK, Brazil, Thailand, and Australia. To sign up to participate in this program, a creator should have 10,000 followers or over 250 return viewers, and 180,000 watch minutes or 50,000 post engagement in the past 2 months. Creators must also abide by the company’s general monetization policies.

Facebook monetizes these fans subscriptions by taking up to 30% of the revenue generated by subscriptions. Additionally, the company also announced that the Stars will now be available to creators in the US, the UK, Spain, Italy, Indonesia, Canada, Germany, Columbia, Australia, Malaysia, France, New Zealand, Taiwan, Philippines, India, and Peru. Stars is a virtual currency that fans use to tip their favorite content creators.

Content creators use video and online events to connect to their fans, and Facebook is improving tools to better support their partners. These tools help content creators to earn more money as well as manage their presence on the social media platform.

Lastly, the company announced that Facebook is introducing new ways for content creators to generate money via advertising, including photo and post-roll ads in the form of short videos that can be between 60 and 180 seconds. Creators can also post ads in live videos.

The company is also working to improve the experience of content creators in the Creator Studio tool. Now, the company is enhancing the Creator Studio tool with features such as Comment Insights. The Comment Insights feature displays how particular comments can impact engagement and audience size. The company is also adding the ability for creators to sign in by using the Instagram login credentials.

The new features will allow content creators to generate extra money as well as manage their presence on Facebook’s platform. It is expected that the company will expand the availability of Stars and fans subscriptions to more countries as well.

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The social media giant, Facebook, has been facing a major ad boycott for the first time in its history. A lot of advertisers have signed on the #StopHateForProfit campaign. The advertisers are protesting against the company’s failure to stop the spread of hate speech across the platform.

Facebook’s largest advertising companies including Starbucks, Microsoft, Verizon, and Unilever have pulled their ads from the site. This Sunday Nick Clegg, the company’s VP for Public Affairs, stated that the company has no incentive to promote hate speech. He said that the protest has been damaging for the platform, and Facebook does not benefit from the proliferation of hate speech across its platform.

He also stressed the efforts Facebook make to tackle hate speech across its platform. He said that Facebook removes approximately 3 million posts containing hate speech across the globe every month. He also revealed that 90% of these items are removed before they are even reported.

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO Facebook, announced on Friday an expanded policy on hate speech. According to this policy, ads that scapegoat asylum seekers, minorities, immigrants, and racial groups, will be banned. The company also announced to include labels to posts that newsworthy but violates Facebook’s policies.

Facebook has been facing criticism when the company did not remove controversial posts from US President, Donald Trump. However, it seems that advertisers are not satisfied with the new move. After Facebook announced the expanded policy, Hershey’s also announced to join the boycott stating that Facebook is not efficiently managing violent and divisive content across its platform.

Also read: Facebook started warning its users about hateful comments that are not in line with its policies

Starbucks, Facebook’s 6th largest advertiser, announced on Sunday to pause all its social media advertising, however, it did not cite the #StopHateForProfit boycott. Clegg stated that Facebook has made ‘meaningful changes,’ and plans to redouble its efforts to tackle hate speech. He said that they constantly need to improve implementing their policies. Other than instances of hate speech, the company has also been criticized for the frequent presence of divisive content on the platform. Clegg explained that Facebook cannot get rid of everything that users react negatively to.

Facebook will continue to tackle hate speech in particular, he added. The company understands that this is a fraught intense time in the country, and Facebook will continue to demonstrate its sincerity in dealing with this issue.

Photo: Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Read next: Instead Of Taking Down The Problematic Content in 2015 Made By Trump, Zuckerberg Changes The Facebook Policy So He Doesn’t Have To Delete The Post

You may have noticed on internet some odd characters which appear vertically overlay other text on a webpage. It may also sometimes break out the boundaries of a user interface. Actaully, this is Unicode that is causing this behavior. For example, the Twitter profile page of Bleeping Computer has started to appear glitch for some days.

In Bleeping Computer’s case, a certain Unicode character was causing this behavior. The Unicode is present in the display name of Hylejam, a security researcher. Several ‘magic’ Unicode characters cause this behavior when they are placed in a particular UI. They are impacting multiple areas of Twitter as well as Gmail website.

When Bleeping Computer asked Hylejam why he used these characters, he said that it all started after he came to know that a Telugu character broke Apple devices. He examined the behavior of the ‘జ్ఞ‌ా’ character with letters and numbers. He tried to understand the bug that caused the WhatsApp app to crash.

Previously, a text-rendering bug caused WhatsApp to crash. The ‘ە’ character caused several glitches which is an Arabic character identified by U+06D5. The Arabic language is written right-to-left, so cursor needs to be aligned while typing.

He also reported the bug to Twitter via HackerOne, but the platform dismissed the report as Hylejam could not provide a proof of concept. Hylejam was not able to entirely understand what exactly was causing the glitch. A Reddit user Loseshape posted how they could ‘reverse’ the characters of a conversation by putting a right-to-left override Unicode in their username on Google’s YouTube.

AntisocialWeeb, a Reddit user also shared a list of mysterious Unicode characters in the same thread. Mozilla also fixed a UI rendering bug back in the year 2015. The bug broke the color of emoji because of a Unicode character. It is challenging to keep track of what exactly causes a glitch as the set of Unicode is cast and continually expanding.

Various users on StackOverflow states that Unicode character space can accommodate more than 1.1 million characters and only 10% of this space has been used till now.

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Did you like using Facebook in dark mode on your device? If the answer is yes, then there is more good news for you as the company is currently testing to bring the dark interface to the mobile app as well.

First spotted by a Twitter user, Facebook has already made the dark mode on iOS devices available to a small number of users globally and if the feature is received well, chances are that you will be able to adjust the Facebook view on your mobile too in low light environments very soon.

Users who are fortunate enough to test the dark mode have shared the screenshots of how the Facebook Mobile App looks like on social media.

It’s indeed surprising to see that Facebook took so long to introduce mobile dark mode - especially after considering how Instagram, Whatsapp, and Messenger already have the dark mode for quite a long while now. The company’s direct competitor, Twitter too brought the night mode for Android and iOS months ago and even Google also offers the dark mode to its mobile app users for quite some time now.

Shifting to dark mode is always a step in the right direction because it not only offers the opportunity to the user to make the background of their app window dark but the mode also allows them to see the content of the app under low-light with more ease. Moreover, we can also not ignore that dark mode versions also help a lot to save battery life.

Should you expect the dark mode to release on Facebook Mobile in the upcoming days? Well, yes but no official confirmation has been given by any of the company’s spokespersons.

The American based social network, Facebook has decided to join hands with UK based website Full Fact in order to spot false news being circulated. This is for Europe, Africa and the Middle East users.

Right now it is an alarming situation for Facebook due to the circulation of fake information. Users have been publishing untrue information which is causing harm to the people worldwide. Since this lethal disease coronavirus has out broken down, the circulation of harmful information has become even more common. Some fake information has also resulted in the deaths of people. Although Facebook is a platform where people are supposed to share information and socialize. But passing on false information is now being health hazardous.

For this purpose, Facebook has collaborated with Full Fact - an organization run by a team who stand against fake information. There has been much tittle-tattle between the users. However, WhatsApp is an end-to-end encrypted and it is difficult to keep a track of what’s been discussed on chats. However, Facebook is a public site. Things posted on Facebook are usually public. Hence the Full Fact researchers can keep an eagle eye on rumors and false information.

Not only Facebook but other social media platforms also have their policies to defend fake information. Like YouTube and Twitter pull down the posts that are humiliating or spreading fake information. Twitter adds a flag to such information. This demotivates other people not to get involved in this activity. Facebook also has its policy to highlight posts that are violating their rules and policies.

For this reason, a new website and campaign has been introduced as a part of Facebook's mission against fake news. This campaign will guide users on how to spot misinformation, by asking 3 important questions "what, where and how" before sharing anything on social media.

Facebook stated that it is working to remove posts that are delivering false news regarding any issue. It has removed an indefinite number of posts which promotes any fake information. In line with this, Facebook also introduced a feature that will notify users if they share an old article. This will prevent the user from sharing any outdated posts causing harm.

Read next: Facebook warns its users about hateful comments that are not in line with its policies

LinkedIn, the professional's network, shared a report in which they stated that since this pandemic, people have been active on its platform more than ever. This is for of course reasons. The entire businesses are being operated remotely. Everything is now being handled digitally. People are now migrating towards a new framework and new tools.

In their report, LinkedIn discuss tips for businesses regarding how they should communicate with their consumers during this pandemic.

LinkedIn says that this new business approach has made its network an even more active platform. There are a large number of people looking for jobs and a large number of employers searching for talented candidates among the crowd.

The platform further reported that they have noticed a 52% growth in engagement on articles that mention remote working and work from home. Since majority of companies are operating remotely or semi remotely, this topic is expected to remain escalating till the pandemic ends.

Business continuity is even bigger and hot topic as according to LinkedIn this category saw a 144% jump in engagement.

The LinkedIn report clarifies that key technology audience has also been super active.

LinkedIn further divulged that things and situation cannot be predicted at the moment, but the company which manages to survive in customer’s mind will take the huge chunk of the market.

LinkedIn has been the traditional platform for job hunters. Let’s see how it helps during this pandemic.

Take a look at this infographic for more insights on trends that are shaping the future of workplace.

What’s Next for Tech? Key Trends Shaping the Future of our Modern Workplace - infographic

Read next: LinkedIn Launched A New Tool To Measure Various Impacts Of The Coronavirus Pandemic

Facebook along with its Oculus team, has been working to produce a streamlined VR technology. Now, the company claims that they have demonstrated the thinnest VR headset to date. This headset is a pair of VR sunglasses that are easy to wear. However, they are only a proof-of-concept device.

It uses flat holographic films for the optics and the display is less than 0.35 inches thick. The company has combined two techniques to decrease the overall size as well as the weight of the VR display. The holographic optics and optical folding based on polarization are the two techniques that can be used. A simple refractive lens is used in most VR displays, which is composed of a curved and thick piece of plastic or glass.

You may have seen holographic images that seem like 3D with realistic depth. The holographic optics in this VR display are a recording of the interaction of laser light with various objects. However, in this case, the object is a lens instead of a 3D scene. The holographic optic bends light in this VR display like a lens, however, it looks thin, and transparent sticker.

According to Facebook Reality Labs, the company’s current prototype outputs in monochrome. However, the company’s Reality Labs hope to deliver a wider color range with enhanced imagery. The company is working to add a wide color range and Facebook’s Reality Labs hopes to deliver this one day.

The company’s Reality Labs also explained that they identify the current limitations of their proposed VR display prototype in their technical paper. They also discussed the future areas of research that will help them to make the approach more practical. This new prototype is a significant achievement for the company is this space.

Facebook’s Reality Labs hopes to enhance the resolution to the ‘limit of vision of a human.’ This may ultimately lead to Virtual Reality glasses people will be able to wear for longer periods. Currently, their work is pure research, but they expect that they will be able to develop a light-weight, comfortable, and easy-to-use VR technology that also offers high performance. The company’s Reality Labs also said that they are excited to see what the future holds for them in this area.

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The researchers from Microsoft AI team has now created a new algorithm based on artificial intelligence that can restore old images that have suffered from severe degradation. The algorithm uses a deep learning approach to restore old photos.

Conventional restorations can be solved via supervised learning, however, the degradation in real pictures is complex. Moreover, the domain gap among synthetic photos and real old images makes the network fail to generalize. We cannot effectively restore old photos through supervised learning, and the new technique developed by the Microsoft Research team can restore old photos efficiently.

The new AI-based algorithm proposes a novel triplet domain translation network. The new technique leverages real images with massive synthetic photo pairs. Particularly, the Microsoft Research team trains two VAEs (variational autoencoders) that help them to respectively transform old images as well as clean pictures into two latent spaces.

Then, the translation among these latent spaces is learned with synthetic paired information. This translation then generalizes well to real images as the domain gap is now closed in this compact latent space. If there are multiple degradations mixed in one old picture, the research team created a global branch with a partial nonlocal block to address this issue. The partial nonlocal block target the structured defects like dust spots on a photo or scratches.

While the local branch targets the unstructured defects in a photo like blurriness and noises. Then, both of these branches are fused in the latent space. This ultimately leads to enhanced capability of restoring old images from various defects. The new technique outperforms state-of-the-art techniques for restoring old photos.

With the new technique, the image quality is enhanced and it works better than the already existing techniques for restoring old images. In terms of visual quality, this method can prove to be very useful. However, Microsoft has not yet made a demo website available to the public for trying the new technology. We expect that the company will soon make it available publicly to try out the new method for restoring old photos.

Read next: Artificial Intelligence Can Soon Make Pixelated Image Reversal Possible

Part of the job of a marketing agency is to make it so that brands are able to find an enormous amount of success. When it comes to apps, marketers tend to focus a lot on driving downloads and a big part of the reason why that is the case has to do with the fact that pretty much the only way that an app or its developer would be able to find any reasonable amount of success would be if the app in question ended up getting downloaded since this is the only way that the company that created the app would end up getting any reasonable amount of revenue in any way, shape or form.

Marketing agencies are well aware of this fact, and a recent study has indicated that they tend to rely heavily on video ads in order to drive downloads. Around 42% of the average app install budget for marketers goes towards video, making this take up the lion’s share of the budget since it is receiving the highest percentage. Display ads end up using the second highest percentage of the budget, getting about 23% of the overall app install budget that marketers have.

Another interesting thing that this study has revealed is that Android is becoming a more popular platform for people to end up investing in because of the fact that 23% of marketers have said that they plan to focus more on Android in the near future. While iPhones have traditionally superseded Android phones in their influence, this is the sort of thing that might be changing in the near future as the number of products people are able to use end up being diversified and as a result of the fact that this is the case marketing agencies are starting to change the way that they do things as well to a large extent.

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TikTok, a China based short video app has gained huge popularity in a limited period. According to sensor tower, the app has 2 billion downloads since 2018. It has attracted many users. In this app, you’ll see people doing their favorite dance steps on their favorite song, or remaking a movie scene through lip-syncing. The app has received much appreciation. However, it is reported that the app is not fully safe.

The app is at risk because it has been reported that many fake accounts are circulating throughout the platform. A large number of accounts have been circulating fake information and prompting political topics like “Black Live Matters’’. Social media forums like Instagram have eliminated and deleted many fake accounts that were using ghost information.

Ghost Data recently conducted a study to see if TikTok’s efficiency to control the ghost or fake account. According to the results, the TikTok account was easily accessible to bots that will for sure spread false information. TikTok has been suspected of a higher risk of bots. Bots can be regretful for political information.

The core function of TikTok has attracted many users. The feature of adding music with transition, effects, and text convinced many users to download the app and become a frequent user. TikTok users have been actively sharing videos on public topics “Black Live Matters”

Chinese Tech Company ByteDance that is the owner of TikTok, is one of the worthiest companies in the world. Its worth is around $75 billion. However, the company had to face a recession when India announced to ban TikTok for security purposes. India believed that the app has been negatively influencing Indians.

Bot accounts is something that can influence views on the video uploaded. One ghost account can bring 10 million fake views for a sole TikTok video. Not only TikTok but on Instagram, it can get up to 55 million fake views on a single video.

Head of vulnerability research for Check Point, Oded Vanunu said that bots can be very dangerous for social media algorithms. It can manipulate the system and consequences can be worst.

Although modernized technology has made it easy to keep a strict eye on folks, ghost accounts, or bots. But sadly, such accounts are still operating and attempts made until now have not been enough to eliminate the account.

Android has managed to become a real contender in the world of smartphone operating systems over the years, but in some ways people consider it to still be more or less inferior to iOS and a big part of the reason why that is the case has to do with the fact that it doesn’t have some of the unique features that iOS has, features that are often quite useful. One of these features is AirDrop, a feature that Apple users end up utilizing quite often for obvious reasons.

Google was well aware of the lack of this feature in Android and it had started working on a similar feature of their own dubbed Nearby Sharing a few years ago. However, it is important to note that this feature has not yet been widely released because of the fact that this is the sort of thing that could potentially end up causing a lot of security issues which it definitely did resulting in potential lost data and the like along with hacks among other security issues all of which would have been a real disaster for Google if users had had to go through any of it.

With all of that having been said and out of the way, Google informed AP, that Nearby Sharing is finally ready for beta testing. While the testing field is currently quite small, the fact that a select group of users might now be able to figure out a way to send items and data to each other using an Airdrop like feature will help the wider Android using community figure out a way in which they can better understand the feature as well. Only time will tell whether or not this test run would end up working in Google’s favor, but seeing as how conscious the tech giant has been so far it’s fair to say that the likelihood of a wider rollout is greater than ever now.

Read next: Google Chrome will now give definition to Android users with a single tap

The Administrative Council for Economic Defense (CADE) declared it would be reverting the ban on the partnership between Facebook's WhatsApp and Brazilian card operator Cielo.

According to Reuters, the ban was placed due to early information from Facebook and Cielo stated that they would not compromise users' choices nor would they limit other deals with rival companies. Cielo is the largest card operator in Brazil, flaunting a 41 percent market share.

CADE had previously been perturbed about favoritism as the partnership with WhatsApp could increase Cielo's card transaction profits by 10 percent.

Although CADE has allowed the partnership between WhatsApp and Cielo they said that they would continue to investigate the deal and that restriction on WhatsApp's deals with other partnership giants like Visa and MasterCard would not be lifted.

A spokesperson for WhatsApp expressed gratitude for relaxation of the ban and said that it would greatly ease the people of Brazil so that they could send and receive money to and from family and friends and could conduct purchases right on WhatsApp.

Last week CADE imposed a suspension on the payment service partnerships between WhatsApp and Visa, MasterCard, and Cielo. CADE feared that as Brazil is the second-biggest market worldwide for WhatsApp, they would infringe on competition and as well as on data privacy and efficiency.

CADE has stated that they want to protect a banking system that is competitive and payments infrastructure already exists that allows for quick, easy, and safe payments.

CADE says that the suspension imposed as a precautionary measure and that they wanted to bar the partnership before any incidents officially occurred. The relaxation of the ban is a big win for Facebook as Brazil was the first country where this new payment system was launched and now the company has the potential to gain feedback and improve its system before making it available worldwide as they no doubt intend to.

Brazil has one hundred and twenty million WhatsApp users which makes it second only to India in terms of total popularity.

The launch of these partnerships is just another step in Facebook's gameplan of entering the payments market in a major manner. The recent unveiling of Facebook Pay and its various other ploys to make it easier for users to conduct transactions and make payments from their platforms is an example of their tenacity to enter the payments business in an impactful manner. This would mean that Facebook is looking to move into other eCommerce related businesses and this seems to be the first step in their seemingly long term plan.

For all the Amazon Prime Members in the U.S, the good news has finally arrived as you can now watch TV shows and movies with your friends by hosting a Watch Party on Prime Video.

Although the feature is slowly rolling out, with currently being available only for the users in the US, users can still add up to 100 viewers in one Watch Party group. The only restriction, for now, is that every person in the group should be a US-based Prime member. Once the Watch Party begins, people can choose any original/licensed show or movie from a wide range of options available (as Amazon Prime is now already known for having the largest collection among all the streaming platforms)

There is also one more catch that movies or TV shows that are currently available for rent or purchase, however, won’t be available for a watch party. So, you can choose any title from US streaming video on demand catalog including the platform’s originals Fleabag, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Jack Ryan, The Big Sick, The Boys, Homecoming, and My Spy or licensed titles that are made available after you have subscribed to Amazon Prime Video.

Watch Party hosts will have full playback control and there will be a chat box for friends in the group to talk in between intervals or boring scenes.

Furthermore, as Twitch and Amazon’s other streaming services offer streams that are open for anyone to join, as long as they have a Prime account, Prime Video’s new Watch Party feature will remain private. The hosts will share the link of the Watch Party to the guests they want to invite and then people will click to join - pretty much similar to how Zoom works or Netflix’s popular Watch Party feature.

Despite being late in the race of virtual viewing parties, Prime Video Watch Party is still only available for desktop. Amazon has not also confirmed whether they would be working on a mobile version or not.

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Google News is an app that is essentially Google’s attempts to diversify the range of services it offers. We pretty much Google a lot of our news these days anyway, so it is understandable that the tech giant would be branching out into a news app of its very own, a separate app that can be used to help people better understand the world around them. With all of that having been said and out of the way, it is important to note that a lot of the time when you go to the Google News app you are probably going to see news that is of a global nature.

This can be a problem particularly in this current day and age during which the coronavirus pandemic is wreaking havoc with people’s lives and making it more or less impossible to truly understand what is going on. Hence, the Google News app is now getting a section that is dedicated not just to covid-19 news, but covid-19 news that has been provided by local sources so that people can get a better understanding of what the disease might be doing in their own backyard.

This local news would involve timelines that would help you better understand when the schools and businesses in your area might be open again for you and your children to go to, as well as a number of other resources like the number of cases in your area along with donations that you can make in order to make it so that you can help those that are in need during these trying times.

Google is an important source of information for people so it is a good sign to see that the tech company is trying to make it so that the news and information that people get will be pertinent to their current situations.

Source: Google.

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One of the most popular features on WhatsApp, as well as most other platforms that deal with communication, is stickers. Using stickers can help make the conversations that you are having a lot more lively, and they can enable you to add a bit of your own personality into the mix as well instead of just relying on dry text which usually doesn’t do a lot to carry tone across and can therefore make everything that you are saying seem a bit emotionless to the person that you are saying it to.

According to WABI the beta versions of new WhatsApp updates incorporate something new into the mix, namely animated stickers. These stickers will be somewhat like GIFs, and there will be a number of different types of them that would be available for people to use if they were to buy them from the WhatsApp store. WhatsApp would also allow you to buy stickers that have been made by third parties, although it’s fair to say that this feature would be somewhat restricted if you were to use the app on iOS devices since Apple doesn’t really let its users download apps from third party platforms and the like.

Since this feature is now available on WhatsApp’s beta versions, this means that it is going through a final round of testing and chances are that it might just be coming to the stable version of WhatsApp quite soon once a few tweaks have been made. The texts don’t move automatically for example, and this is a problem that makes these animated stickers somewhat less effective than what we have seen on other Facebook owned platforms although this is most likely something that would be handled quite soon. WhatsApp is basically testing the new features to see what potential problems would arise, and once these problems have been fixed regular users who use a stable version of WhatsApp would be able to use this feature too.

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Were you able to spot a bottom navigation bar in Chrome for Android when Google first introduced it as an experiment back in 2018? While the company kept on going for more fixtures in the feature - considering how its name was also changed from “Duplex” to “Duet” in order to make sure that it is not counted as a part of Google’s AI project or it was removed and reintroduced earlier this year with massive changes, the company is now again set to introduce a different and much-improved bottom bar on the mobile version of the browser.

The new Chrome flag will now let users add a bottom tab bar in Chrome for Android all by going to the following address chrome://flags/#enable-conditional-strip. The bottom tabs, for now, are only available in the beta channel of Chrome 84 and unfortunately, it is not working for everyone ( it worked for us only be close forcing/ clearing cache).

Going into the depth of what Google has done with the new bottom navigation is that it shows the tabs that you have opened in the form of circles which are filled with a site’s favicon. Users can tap on any of the icons if they want to switch from one tab to the other.

These tabs also look pretty much similar to how Chrome For Android has tab groups programmed. Once the tab bar is enabled, you also see a tab button along with the number of tabs that are opened being shown in the top bar. Nevertheless, the bottom bar still provides more ease to the users to switch between tabs. The whole experience feels pretty much like the desktop one.

Some users have reported seeing this feature enabled on their Chrome Canary 85.0.4174.0 without the flag. Chances are that Google may be testing out this new interface change for a wide stable release. But that doesn’t mean that you expect the change to arrive soon for every user as Google is known for playing with Chrome features and taking down a lot of good stuff already.

Hat Tip: Androidpolice.

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