A new report reveals that a Google product manager is suing the Mountain View company due to the alleged illegal confidentiality policies and practices in has in place in order to prevent various leaks. However, the policies prohibit Google employees from discussing even internally matters regarding illegal conduct or dangerous products.

The news broke after the Google employee filed a complaint on Tuesday in the Superior Court of California. The document reveals that Google’s alleged confidentiality policies and practices violate the laws in California. More specifically, the company restricts the right of employees to speak or whistle-blow regarding a potentially illegal action. Furthermore, the policies prohibit workers from speaking to the government, the press or even their attorneys about a possible wrongdoing. Google allegedly goes as far as to restrict employees from speaking to their spouses or friends about their work.

The complaint also revealed that Google’s own Investigation Team uses volunteers to report on other employees and if they have disclosed any information about the company. The complaint creates a strong contrast with the image and culture that Google has strived to create and promote.

Furthermore, Google has even started a program called Stopleaks which requires employees to report the strange actions of personnel, like anyone asking specific questions about a specific project or job. The complaint also reveals that Google’s attempt to prevent leaks goes as far as to require employees to have the company’s permission to write fiction about a person working at a tech company in Silicon Valley. The author would be required to obtain Google’s approval on the idea of the book as well as the final draft.

These confidentiality policies revealed in the complaint are intended to allow Google a higher degree of control over both former and current employees, limit competition, restrict the reporting of wrongdoing or misconduct. However, it seems that Google’s attempt may very well violate several constitutional rights of their employees.

The complaint mentions that the case does not take issue with any of Google’s trade secrets, any undisclosed information or consumer privacy. Instead, it focuses on how Google’s confidentiality policies affect the civil liberties of their employees through illegal means.

What do you think about this whole situation?

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Although Facebook believes that the future communication will be centered around video mediums, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the service is ready to completely abandon traditional text as a way to lets user express themselves. Quite the contrary, Facebook keeps adding various features for text messages in hopes of getting people to be more active on the platform.

For this purpose, Facebook latest feature is a new customization option which enables users to change the color of the background for status updates. This colored backgrounds feature was first spotted by TechCrunch and it was later confirmed by Facebook.

The colored backgrounds customization options will allow users to choose from several different colors so that their status update can be complemented by the feeling of the color they have chosen. Users can choose between yellow, red, purple, orange, a number of blue variations and more. Facebook also implemented some more advanced customization options for the feature such as a color gradient, which might seem more appealing than just the flat options.

Unfortunately, the new colored backgrounds feature won’t be available to everyone at the start. Facebook will gradually release them for Android users at first. However, the status updates with color backgrounds posted by Android users can be seen on both the desktop platform as well as on iOS.

The new feature seems to be a way for Facebook to incentivize sharing user-generated content with other users.  Earlier this year, an internal report revealed that the sharing of personal Facebook posts and content has gradually declined by 21 percent each year since mid-2015. Instead of personal posts, Facebook users have increasingly shared and posted links to a wide range of external content.

It is surprising to see a new feature for status updates, especially since Facebook has been mainly focused on promoting their Live video feature as well as prioritizing the new format of its News Feed. This lines up with Facebook’s estimates that by 2021, video content will generate around 70 percent of traffic on the platform across all devices.

Depending on how the new colored backgrounds feature is, Facebook may very well start implementing a new feature for text-based communication, instead of focusing all their efforts on video.

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Twitter is among the largest social media networks in the world, with a very large number of users in the US. However, like most similar companies, Twitter collects a lot of user data consisting in your tweeting habits, the location and device you tweeted from and more. The company’s policy is to not use the data for surveillance but one subsidiary firm did exactly that.

The official policy of Twitter was to prohibit the use of data meant for surveillance. However, the American Civil Liberties Union discovered a social media monitoring firm called Dataminr, which the social media company owns. Dataminr has repeatedly taken various government contracts which give local and federal law enforcement agencies access to news alerts based on user data collected by Twitter.

ACLU discovered that Dataminr managed to act contrary to Twitter’s official policy due to the fact that it worked with fusion centers and through public records requests.  The firm collaborated with 77 fusion centers around the United Stated, which enabled Dataminr to search billions of both real-time and historical public tweets, which then could be shared with government agencies.

Facing mounting pressure from ACLU and its supporters as well as informed Twitter users, the company has decided to cut Dataminr’s access to those fusion centers. However, the social media monitoring firm has disputed the claim of Nicole Ozer, the technology, and civil liberties policy director at ACLU California. Dataminr stated that it never gave clients direct access to either historical tweets or bulk Twitter data, as it only uses data to issue breaking news alerts, without sharing the data with any customers.

Twitter backed Dataminr claim, maintaining that the first was gradually assigned to focus more on creating news alerts, and the remnants of a geospatial analysis program that the ACLU discovered was just an abandoned experiment.

Dataminr has further stated that it will continue to offer a limited version of their news alerts to government agencies to help them in their response to a situation. They continue to emphasize that direct firehose access to user data has never been the case in the first place.

Are you a Twitter user? If so, what do you think about this situation?

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The competition between Amazon’s and Google’s personal home assistant mainly consists in the number of actions and skills each device supports. Besides their design, the number of actions and services each device supports are the main difference between them. As such, both companies are gradually adding more actions to appeal to more customers.

Amazon’s Alexa assistant found in Echo or Dot devices recently received an update with a large number of skills. However, Google Home is not going to be left behind as the company just announced that they have added over 30 news actions for different services and companies.  Google Home actions are similar in function to Alexa’s skills, it gives a user control and ways to interact with the assistant.

The newest update for Google Home is the largest release of actions yet, since its release in October. The Google Assistant platform used to command the device only launched last week and it initially had only three third-party conversation action. However, thanks to a new update that number has jumped to 35.

Jason Douglas, the Google Assistant product lead stated that the conversation actions from Google Home early access partners will gradually be released in the coming weeks for all users starting today. The update consists in a variety of actions, from Domino’s Pizza to WebMD, and many more in hopes to have something for every Google Home users.

There are even actions which will allow the Google assistant to recommend cocktails, movies, and tv shows as well as books. Regarding games, you can play trivia with SongPop, 20 questions with Akinator, and other various games like Genie and Sub War. Finally, Google Home supports a number of news related actions from companies like NPR, NBC, HuffPost, CNBC, and Wall Street Journal.

If you enjoy the Google Assistant, then you should know that it can also be found in Google’s messaging app Allo. The company has also announced a new partnership with Mercedes-Benz which will result in the automaker installing the Google Assistant in their cars. The first official preview of a car with this feature will take place at the Consumers Electronic Show in 2017.

Image source: Google

Since the social the network made its debut, Facebook only served as a location where people and companies can showcase their various original content. Now, although the company insisted that it’s not a media company, it is looking to add a variety of original video content on its platform.

Recode reports that Ricky Van Veen, which was the co-founder of College Humor and who joined the company earlier this year, is the man leading Facebook’s efforts of gathering an array of original video content. The company is in talks with various TV studios as well as other video producers regarding the licensing of shows.

Facebook is interested in acquiring or developing a wide variety of scripted or unscripted shows, as well as sports. This recent effort builds on the company’s previous media deals with companies like Vox Media, which will produce live content exclusively for the social network. According to Van Veen, Facebook is interested in creating an ecosystem of third-party content.

Although most of the current deals involve purchasing its own content via licensing and from the outset, Facebook is also considering to develop original video content in the manner of companies like Netflix or Amazon Prime Video. Unfortunately, nothing specific has been revealed in this regard.

Facebook currently benefits from the large number of videos its users create and watch for and on the platform. As such, it is unclear why they want to adopt a riskier practice of acquiring or developing original video content. Most think it has to do with Facebook imagining the future for its platform, and media in general. It previously emphasized that video will be the main form of communications and content delivery.

As such, the company recently added a video tab to the platform earlier this year. However, it is still far from sites like YouTube. By creating and acquiring their own library of original video content, Facebook could gradually become a destination for watching a wide variety of videos. This could help the company create a clear path to monetization for its users and partners. This feature, in turn, will lead to more content and increasingly bigger audiences.

These are ambitious plans for Facebook which keeps maintaining that it is a tech and not a media company.

Image source: Pixabay

Technology has evolved a lot in the last few years. There are a lot of social media sites and chat rooms on the internet and people are communicating faster than they ever used to. This has caused some problems because people sometimes tend to make comments which are considered sexist or racist.

Manual moderation can’t keep track with these comments and messages and some of them remain on the sites. This is why Twitch has created an automated tool which is going to moderate these comments and posts. The name of the automated tool is AutoMod.

This tool is going to take care of those inappropriate messages. This means that Twitch is not going to rely on users to flag messages; it is going to use this tool to take down the messages much faster. All inapropriate content will be detected by AutoMod and sent to a moderation queue for dismissal or approval.

There are four levels of aggression from which users can choose. These levels are sexual language, identity, profanity, and aggressive speech. The developers of AutoMod mentioned that the automated tool is not as easy to trick as users believe. They also said that this automated tool goes beyond banned word lists and can find the smallest inappropriate content.

“Beyond identifying inappropriate words and phrases, AutoMod can detect potentially inappropriate strings of emotes and other characters or symbols that others could use to evade filtering,” mentioned the developers in a press release.

Other sites have tried to develop automated tools that can detect inappropriate messages or comments but many of those were tricked by users and their comments are still there. This automated tool, developed by Twitch needs to be better and to really detect sexual or aggressive language. Many users will try to trick the automated tool but developers still believe that their tool can’t be fooled by trolls.

The automated tool is now available in English and it can also work in beta form in Czech, Italian, Arabic, Polish, Spanish, Turkish, Portuguese, Korean, and French. Users can turn on this automated tool from their setting page on Twitch.

What is your opinion about AutoMod? Do you think that this tool is going to work?

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Google has announced it has signed a new deal on Monday with Cuba’s state-run telecommunications firm in order to move a few of its server on the island nation. This will speed up the internet access to Cubans who will access YouTube and various other Google sites and products.

Google has made some strides in Cuba as the Obama administration worked to re-open diplomatic relations with the country, after their Cold-War dispute. Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO was present in Havana this Monday in order to sign the Cuba deal with Mayra Arevich Marin, which is the president of the country’s State Enterprise Telecommunications. The company, also known as ETECSA, handles all the phone and internet services in Cuba.

The Cuba deal will lead to Google’s deployment of its Global Cache service to the island nation. This will reduce the time it takes content which requires high-bandwidth content to load. It’s able to speed up internet access by storing data on servers placed in secure centers on the island. Google has previously made available to Cubans their Chrome browser as well as the Google Play music service.

Despite improving the internet speed of Cuban internet users for Google services, this deal won’t actually expand the number of internet users in the country. Freedom House estimates that between 5 to 30 percent of Cuba’s population have access to the internet. The country is among the most restrictive when it comes to providing the service to its population.

ETECSA has launched several wi-fi hotspots around Cuba’s largest cities. The state-run telecom company is also experimenting with providing internet access directly into the homes of Cubans. The service has only started this year and there have been reports that it costs a few hundreds of dollars a month.

Nonetheless, Google’s Cuba deal lays the foundation for an expansion of the country’s internet infrastructure, which will eventually lead to a drop in price as well. This, in turn, will allow for a greater percent of the population to benefit from having internet service. However, Cuba has been somewhat reticent about the intentions of US companies, fearing that they will threaten the country national security.

What do you think about Google’s Cuba deal?

Image source: Wikimedia

Nintendo and Mario’s first experience on the mobile platform, which has grown drastically in the few years, isn’t as well received as anyone expected. The game will require a constant internet connection to be played. This has upset a high number of people, from hardcore Mario fans to even more casual gamers.

The new Super Mario Run game for mobile platforms isn’t even out yet and still managed to upset gamers. The fact that the game will require an always-on internet connection was first announced by Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of Super Mario, during a recent interview.

He explained that the constant connection is required because developers had a hard time offering the game’s World Tour single-player mode as offline. This is due to the fact that the mode is linked with the other two modes, Mushroom Kingdom and Toad Rally.

Basically, the Toad Rally mode needs to access the scores and various other play data of players. This information can only be downloaded from a server. Additionally, the Mushroom Kingdom mode includes a purchase verification as the players will buy in-game items with their coins. This verification cannot be possible without a constant internet connection.

Miyamoto has stated that Nintendo will continue to work on the game and hopes to develop a way to make the World Tour single-player mode available even during offline play. However, the relation between the different game modes is not the only reason for implementing the always-on internet connection measure.

Nintendo considers that through their constant internet connection, they will be able to monitor the game’s version. Doing this, they hope to prevent the piracy of the game as well as maintain the security of players’ data.

As expected the news of an internet connection being required to play the game has upset many players. Additionally, Nintendo seems to be missing the point of a mobile game which many phone users play mostly when they don’t have an internet connection. A huge demographic of the game consists of young children playing the game on offline devices. The success of the game will also depend on its quality though Nintendo should be familiar with touch controls for their games.

What do you think about the always-on internet connection for Super Mario Run?

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It seems that the already crowded market of music streaming apps continues to grow. One year after Pandora bought what was left of Rdio, the company has recently unveiled their newest app, Pandora Premium. The company’s vision on what an on-demand music streaming service should be will be competing with apps like Spotify, Apple Music, which offer a similar service at the same price, but with more features.

Although the basic features of Pandora Premium such as ad-free streaming for an extensive library of music available anytime, and the option to save your music offline, can be found in all similar apps, Pandora Premium sets itself apart from competitors through personalization.

For example, one of the best features of Pandora’s app is the ability to automatically add similar songs to your playlist, just by tapping a button. Another great feature is the personalized search, which will provide results based on your listening history. It will take your preferences and music tastes more seriously than any other service. In the browse section as well as in the new release section, you will only find music tailored to your tastes.

A cool personalized feature of the intuitive, sleek and clean design of Pandora Premium is the ability to change the artwork based on what music you are playing. Additionally, the app will include all your prefer preferred music and radio stations familiar to the current Pandora users.

Pandora Premium will be available for both Android and iOS users during the early stages of 2017 and will feature a $10 per month subscription service. This is very similar to its competitors such as Apple Music, and Spotify. Despite the market being quite crowded, the company hopes to achieve a number of 11 million subscribers by 2020.

Pandora already has almost 80 million users on its ad-supported version and it hopes to convert at least 20 percent of those users to paying subscribers. Their estimates are cautious since Spotify manages to convert around 25 percent of its users. However, there have been companies who were not able to make a successful transition to a paid service, such as Soundcloud who had 125 million free users before.

Are you currently using Pandora? If so, are you planning on getting a subscription?

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Dropbox is one of the most popular cloud storage services around and it is going to get even better. The company recently announced that users will be able to access their Dropbox files on their phones even without internet thanks to the upcoming offline folders support.

Dropbox made the announcement on Tuesday in hopes to better compete with other services that already had this feature. Although nowadays we can easily keep being connected to the internet non-stop, there are cases where users might find themselves without a connection but requiring immediate access to their Dropbox files such as on a plane.

The new mobile offline folders support will also be easy enough to access so users can benefit from it as soon as its available. You just have to select a folder or even just a specific file in your Dropbox app and tap the option “Make Available Offline.” The app will then begin to download the files on your device, be it a smartphone or a tablet.

Unfortunately, as is the case with all offline viewing features it’s only useful if you know you’re going to have an offline period so that you can download the files you need beforehand, straight from the app. In a blog post, Dropbox emphasizes the fact that the new feature will help reduce downtime during the commute of users or when they are traveling. It will allow anyone both in the office as well as in the field to use the latest documents available.

The feature will become available in the next few days to Dropbox Pro as well as Business and Enterprise users with the latest version of the app on Android. The offline folders support will only become available for iOS early next year. If you’re excited about the new feature remember to check your Dropbox updates.

The mobile offline folders support is a welcome addition to Dropbox’s range of functions, despite being somewhat late to the party. Some of its competitors like Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive already supported offline file viewing for a while now. However, Dropbox’s new feature comes with the added functionality of viewing entire folders offline not just files.

Do you use Dropbox? If so, are you going to use the new feature?

Image source: Flickr