According to co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Threads has gained 10 million users in seven hours. The highly anticipated new service requires an Instagram account for onboarding, but deleting a Threads account requires deleting the linked Instagram account. Meta states in its “Supplemental Privacy Policy”: “You may deactivate your Threads …

Nearly 70 IT security and privacy academics have voiced concern that the UK’s Online Safety Bill could undermine strong encryption if it isn’t amended. In an open letter, 68 UK-affiliated security and privacy researchers warned the draft legislation threatens critical security technologies used to secure digital communications. We develop online …

Calendarize it. European pals: July 4th could become independence-from-Meta-surveillance-capitalism day. Today’s long-awaited Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) ruling appears to have destroyed the social media giant’s ability to violate EU privacy law by denying users a choice over its tracking and profiling. The ruling stems from a …

Tech companies continue to pursue M&A and consolidation in a tight market. Startups, larger tech companies, and their partners are affected by this trend. HappyFunCorp, a product engineering firm that builds apps for Apple, Disney, Amazon, and Twitter, is being acquired by Canadian firm Tiny for $30 million. Tiny is …

Wade Norris wanted to create a life-changing project at Google. He co-founded Google Lens, a computer vision app that displays object information. It didn’t satisfy. Norris and aerospace systems engineer Scott Baron founded SnapCalorie, a health-focused startup, several years ago. AI-powered SnapCalorie estimates a meal’s calories and macronutrients from a …

Inflection, a well-funded AI startup aiming to create “personal AI for everyone,” revealed the large language model powering its Pi conversational agent. Competition is good, but it’s hard to objectively and systematically assess these things’ quality. As measured by computing power used to train them, Inflection-1 is roughly GPT-3.5 (AKA …

After two years, Spotify will launch its HiFi tier with lossless music streaming through a “Supremium” plan later this year, which may cost more than $9.99 per month. Bloomberg reported that the company is launching this new plan to boost revenue and appease investors seeking a price increase. The non-U.S. …

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman is unfazed by platform API protests. Huffman told The Verge, NBCNews, and NPR that the API was not designed to support third-party apps. In these interviews, the Reddit co-founder discussed protesting moderators, site rules, and profitability. The platform’s CEO seems unmoved by the community’s strongest backlash. …

A four-week-old startup has raised $113 million to compete with OpenAI in building, training, and applying large language models and generative AI. Paris-based Mistral AI, co-founded by Google DeepMind and Meta alumni, will focus on open source solutions and enterprises to solve what CEO Arthur Mensch calls the biggest challenge …

The most popular VTubers, online personalities who use motion-capture-powered manga- and anime-inspired avatars to interact with the world alongside games, over YouTube, and elsewhere, have hundreds of millions of hours of viewership per month, loyal fan bases, lucrative sponsorships, and demand for more. Big tech appears to be taking notice. …