Google wins a big European privacy case, Amazon introduces a celebrity guest voice, and a controversial phone call between President Donald Trump and the president of Ukraine raises eyebrows.
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It’s all smiles at Google. The verdict in a major privacy case is in, and the EU’s top court has ruled that Google does not have to apply the right to be forgotten globally. This stems from a 2015 order from CNIL – an independent French administrative regulatory body whose mission is to ensure that data privacy law is applied to the collection, storage and use of personal data – demanding Google to globally remove search result listings to pages containing damaging or false info about a person. A year later, Google launched a geo blocking feature that prevented European users from being able to see delisted links. However, it also prevented censoring search results for people in other parts of the world. Europe didn’t like that, but Google had argued that applying Europe’s GDPR rules globally could be abused by authoritarian governments trying to cover up, say human rights abuses. It looks like the EU’s top court, alongside other tech companies such as Microsoft, agree.
Amazon announced a number of big changes to Alexa, but the one that’s trending on Twitter is the introduction of celebrity guest voices, beginning with the one and only Samual L. Jackson. With the help of neural text-to-speech software that relies on deep learning, Amazon says Alexa will be able to mimic real human voices, and what better voice to mimic than the eye-patched wonder/jedi master.
And lastly, a bizarre story about President Trump’s phone conversation with the Ukranian President is turning heads in the tech space due to the mention of the security firm CrowdStrike. Reddit is buzzing about a July phone call between the two presidents, which led Trump asking for a “favor” to help locate a “server” linked with CrowdStrike. The news comes after an unclassified transcript of the call released Wednesday revealed Trump’s push to search for a server linked with the 2016 breach of the Democratic National Committee, an incident that the California-based company helped investigate. CrowdStrike has maintained that the breach can be blamed on two Russian advanced persistent threat groups known as Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear. Trump and other Republicans have partially blamed CrowdStrike for covering up the DNC breach.
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.