Apple removes app that tracks Hong Kong police movement, global PC shipment hits a seven-year high, Apple reinstates voice data collection.
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That’s all the tech news that’s trending today. It’s Friday, Oct. 11th, and I’m your host, Tom Li.
Trending everywhere, Apple has approved, then immediately removed, an app that tracks Hong Kong Police. The app HKmap.live allowed its users to track police movement in Hong Kong via crowdsourced data. The intent of the app was to improve public safety, but Apple said that protestors were using it to attack police. Conversely, the app is still up in Google’s Play Store with over 50,000 downloads.
Trending on Google, global PC shipment has reached its highest point in seven years. According to a Canalys report, PC shipment grew 4.7 per cent in Q3 2019, totalling to 70.9 million units shipped. Amongst the companies, HP saw the strongest growth with 8.5 per cent year over year, followed by Lenovo at 7.2 per cent, and Dell at 5.2 per cent. Although not as dramatic as the others, Apple shipment also grew by 1.5 per cent. Canalys attributes the trend to Windows 10 upgrades and resellers filling inventory to prepare for holiday sale events.
Lastly, from my Feedly feed, Apple has brought back audio review in the iOS beta. This time around, it more clearly asks the users to opt-in before any data collection begins. Under the user’s permission, the audio clips will be ushered off to Apple and help it improve Siri. The feature was previously disabled by Apple after it was discovered that clips containing personal detail were being reviewed by third-parties. In addition to asking nicely, Apple has added a delete dictation data feature, which purges all data Apple has collected for that user.
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 Tom Li, thanks for listening.