The walkout organizer at Google has quit the company citing retaliation against her, Microsoft deleted the database it was using to train facial recognition, and ASUS releases updates for a phone it is not even selling yet.
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It’s all the tech news that’s popular right now. Welcome to Hashtag Trending. It’s Monday June 10, and I’m your host, Buckley Smith.
Claire Stapleton, an employee of Google who was key in organizing the 20,000 person walkout over protests of the companies handling of sexual harassment allegations, has quit the company. And this has many people on Reddit buzzing about the news. In April, she, along with another of the walkout organizers said they had faced retaliation from management and claimed the company had tried to force them into new roles. But on Friday, Stapleton announced that she had left the company. In her statement, she said that despite how much she cared for the company in her career, the culture changed in 2017 and bigger scale issues like sexual harassment were not being addressed properly.
Sticking with Reddit, news has broken that Microsoft has deleted the database of images it was used to train facial recognition technology. The database, known as MS-Celeb-1M, began as a database of celebrity images, but over time it began to be filled with other like images of writers and journalists; totaling about 100,000 different individuals by the end. When asked for its reasoning for deleting the database, Microsoft simply said that the employee who was running the database is no longer with the company and therefore they removed the data.
Last up on the docket we have a story trending on Google about the not yet released ASUS phone, the ZenFone6. Despite it not yet being released, ASUS has already created four updates for the phone aimed at fixing such issues like the unusual camera solution, system stability, and auto brightness setting. Many in the industry are calling for other smartphone manufacturers to follow a similar proactive path instead of allowing bugs to be discovered by users after the release.
That’s all the tech news that’s trending right now. Hashtag Trending is a part of the ITWC Podcast network. Add us to your Alexa Flash Briefing or your Google Home daily briefing. I’m Buckley Smith. Thanks for listening.
