Facebook and Instagram are blocking posts about mailing abortion pills

If you post about being able to mail abortion pills to those who need it on Facebook or Instagram, don’t be surprised if you get a warning — or even get your account restricted. A tipster told Motherboard that they were notified a minute after posting …

House Democrats are working on legislation to protect people’s period tracker data

In a letter posted on her official website, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has revealed that House Democrats have been working on legislation to protect personal data collected by reproductive health trackers. It’s one of the three avenues the lawmakers are exploring following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. “Many fear that this information could be used against women by a sinister prosecutor in a state that criminalizes abortion,” she explained, though she didn’t expound on how the lawmakers plan to protect people’s personal data. 

Users have been swapping their period trackers for others they believe can offer them more privacy ever since the Supreme Court decision dropped. It’s not unusual for companies to sell user information or to cooperate with law enforcement, and people are concerned about the possibility of investigators using that data to identify them if they ever seek an abortion. As TechCrunch reported, a number of reproductive health apps enjoyed a surge of new signups over the weekend. 

One of those apps is Flo, which announced that it plans to launch an anonymous mode shortly after the Supreme Court decision came out. The mode is supposed to remove one’s personal information from their account so that they can’t be identified, but Flo has yet to reveal when it will become available. It’s worth noting that Flo’s average daily installs has been on the decline, based on Apptopia numbers cited by TechCrunch, likely because it has a history of sharing private data with third parties.

Back in 2019, The Wall Street Journal listed Flo as one of the apps that had been giving Facebook access to people’s sensitive data. Two years later, Flo settled with the FTC over allegations that it was sharing information with the social network, Google and other third-party companies. As part of that settlement, Flo now has to explicitly ask for user consent before it can give external services access to their personal health information.

Despite the House Speaker’s announcement that House Democrats are working “to protect the health and freedom of American women,” there’s no guarantee that the legislation they’re cooking up would be signed into law. It’s always smart to take a closer look at how apps are protecting user data by reading their “nutritional label” on iOS or their “safety section” in the Play Store on Android. But for those who want to be truly safe, perhaps the best solution is to not use a period tracking app at all.

US senators ask FTC to investigate Apple and Google over mobile tracking

A group of Democratic senators is urging the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Apple and Google over their collection of mobile users’ information. In a letter addressed to FTC Chair Lina Khan, the lawmakers — Senators Ron Wyden, Elizabeth Warren, Cory A. Booker and Sara Jacobs — accuse the tech giants of “engaging in unfair and deceptive practices by enabling the collection and sale of hundreds of millions of mobile phone users’ personal data.” They added that the companies “facilitated these harmful practices by building advertising-specific tracking IDs into their mobile operating systems.”

The senators specifically mentioned in their letter how individuals seeking abortions will become particularly vulnerable if their data, especially their location information, is collected and shared. They wrote the letter shortly before the Supreme Court officially overturned Roe v. Wade, making abortion immediately illegal in states with trigger laws. They explained that data brokers are already selling location information of people visiting abortion providers. The senators also stressed how that information can now be used by private citizens incentivized by “bounty hunter” laws targeting individuals seeking an abortion. 

Android and Google were built with tracking identifiers that are used for advertising purposes. While the identifiers are supposed to be anonymous, the senators said data brokers are selling databases linking them to consumer names, email addresses and telephone numbers. Apple rolled out an update for iOS last year to implement stricter app tracking privacy measures, requiring apps to ask for permission before collecting users’ unique Identification for Advertisers device code. 

Google, they said, still enables that tracking identifier by default. The company previously introduced features to make it harder to track users across apps, though, and it recently vowed to refine Privacy Sandbox on Android, “with the goal of introducing new, more private advertising solutions.” The tech giant told Ars Technica: “Google never sells user data, and Google Play strictly prohibits the sale of user data by developers… Any claims that advertising ID was created to facilitate data sale are simply false.”

Despite the solutions the companies had introduced, the lawmakers said they’d already caused harm. They’re now asking the FTC to look into the role Apple and Google played in “transforming online advertising into an intense system of surveillance that incentivizes and facilitates the unrestrained collection and constant sale of Americans’ personal data.”

Wyden and 41 other Democratic lawmakers also urged Google last month to stop collecting and keeping location data that could be used against people who’ve had or are seeking abortions. More recently, another group of lawmakers led by Sen. Mark Warner and Rep. Elissa Slotkin asked the company to “crack down on manipulative search results” that lead people seeking abortions to anti-abortion clinics” instead.

Juul can temporarily keep selling its vaping products in the US

Juul has successfully convinced the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to delay the Food and Drug Administration’s ban on its products. The agency recently banned Juul from selling and distributing its e-cigarette pens and pods in the US after a comprehensive two-year review. It ordered the company to remove its products from the market and has even started telling retailers from pull them from shelves. This temporary reprieve will allow Juul to keep selling its vape pens and pods — and will allow retailers to keep carrying them without the fear of facing penalties — while the court reviews its appeal on the FDA’s decision. 

In its request for an emergency stay, Juul called the FDA ban “arbitrary and capricious.” It also said that the agency issued the ruling after “immense political pressure from Congress,” because it became politically convenient for them to blame Juul for the popularity of vaping among young people, “even though several of its competitors now have a larger market share and much higher underage-use rates.” 

Despite Juul’s accusation, the FDA didn’t mention youth vaping in its decision. Instead, the agency said it was banning the company’s products, because it didn’t submit sufficient evidence proving that potentially harmful chemicals don’t leach from its proprietary pods into the vapor that users inhale. The agency explained: “…some of the company’s study findings raised concerns due to insufficient and conflicting data – including regarding genotoxicity and potentially harmful chemicals leaching from the company’s proprietary e-liquid pods – that have not been adequately addressed and precluded the FDA from completing a full toxicological risk assessment of the products named in the company’s applications.”

Juul, of course, disagreed that it hasn’t provided sufficient information and data to the agency. In a statement it sent to Engadget, the company said: “In our applications, which we submitted over two years ago, we believe that we appropriately characterized the toxicological profile of Juul products, including comparisons to combustible cigarettes and other vapor products, and believe this data, along with the totality of the evidence, meets the statutory standard of being appropriate for the protection of the public health.”

Juul has a long history of butting heads with the FDA, particularly over underage vaping. Its fruit-flavored vape products were once pretty popular among young people until it suspended their sales and stuck to selling menthol and tobacco-flavored pods. Juul also faced a Federal Trade Commission and a House investigation into whether its marketing efforts targeted teens. Things have changed over the past few years: According to a recent study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, most high school students that use e-cigarettes now favor Puff Bar over any other brand. 

According to The New York Times, the court gave Juul until Monday to file an additional motion. The FDA will then have until July 7th to respond to that. It still remains to be seen whether Juul will be able to continue selling its vaping pens and pods in the US throughout the course of its appeal. Sources told The Wall Street Journal that Juul has started exploring its options if it fails to reverse the ban completely, including filing for bankruptcy.

The largest bacterium discovered is visible to the naked eye

When you hear the word “bacteria,” you probably picture organisms that couldn’t be seen unless they’re placed under a microscope. A bacterium that has now been classified as the largest in the world ever discovered, however, needs no special tools to be visible to the naked eye. Thiomargarita magnifica, as it’s called, takes on a filament-like appearance and can be as long as a human eyelash. As the BBC notes, that makes it bigger than some more complex organisms, such as tiny flies, mites and worms. It was first discovered by marine biologist Olivier Gros living on sunken mangrove tree leaves in the French Caribbean back in 2009. 

Due to the organism’s size, Gros first thought he was looking at a eukaryote rather than simpler prokaryotic organisms like bacteria. It wasn’t until he got back to his laboratory that he found out that it wasn’t the case at all. Years later, Jean-Marie Volland and his team at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California took a closer look at the bacterium using various techniques, such as transmission electron microscopy, to confirm that it is indeed a single-cell organism. They’ve recently published a paper describing the centimeter-long bacterium in Science.

Volland said T. magnifica is “5,000 times bigger than most bacteria” and is comparable to an average person “encountering another human as tall as Mount Everest.” One other information Volland’s team has discovered is that the bacterium keeps its DNA organized within a structure that has a membrane. In most bacteria, DNA materials just float freely in their cytoplasm. Further, it has around 6,000 billion bases of DNA. “For comparison, a diploid human genome is approximately six giga (billion) bases in size. So this means that our Thiomargarita stores several orders of magnitude more DNA in itself as compared to a human cell,” said team member Tanja Woyke. 

While the scientists know that T. magnifica grows on top of mangrove sediments in the Caribbean and that it creates energy to live using chemosynthesis, which is similar to photosynthesis in plants, there’s still a lot about it that remains a mystery. And it’ll likely take some time before the scientists can discover its secrets: They have yet to figure out how to grow the organism in the lab, so Gros has to gather samples every time they want to run an experiment. It doesn’t help that the organism has an unpredictable life cycle. Gros told The New York Times that he couldn’t even find any over the past two months. 

Volland and his team now aim to find a way to grow T. magnifica in the lab. As for Gros, he now expects other teams to go off in search of even bigger bacteria, which like T. magnifica, may also be hiding in plain sight.

Cruise begins charging fares for its driverless taxi service in San Francisco

GM’s Cruise has started charging passengers for fully driverless rides in San Francisco. The company secured a driverless deployment permit from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) earlier this month, making it the first in the industry to do so. That allows Cruise to charge for rides with no safety driver behind the wheel, though its vehicles are limited to select streets in the city. In addition, the company’s paid passenger service can only operate from 10PM to 6AM, and its cars can only drive at a max speed of 30 mph.

Another limitation is that its driverless vehicles aren’t allowed on highways and can’t operate during times of heavy fog and rain. Still, it’s a major milestone, not just for Cruise, but for the nascent robotaxi industry as a whole. Cruise’s permit allows it to operate a commercial driverless ride—hailing service with a fleet of up to 30 vehicles. It previously said that it will roll out fared rides gradually, and it reiterated that plan in its latest announcement, where it noted that it’s “inviting more people” into its driverless vehicles every week. The goal is to eventually be able to offer fared rides all day across the entire city.

Cruise received permission to offer the public robotaxi rides last year, but it could only do so for free. The company, along with Waymo, was finally allowed to charge passengers this March, as long as they were rides with safety drivers behind the wheel. While Waymo can’t charge for fully autonomous rides yet, it’s still the only other company that’s been granted a drivered deployment permit, based on CPUC’s list.

Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick gets to keep his board seat

Bobby Kotick will get to keep his seat on Activision Blizzard’s board of directors despite catching flak over the alleged role he played in creating the company’s toxic workplace culture. At the video game developers’ annual meeting of stockholders, investors voted on several proposals, as well as who gets to be on the company’s board of directors over the next year. A total of 533,703,580 shareholders have voted to keep Kotick on the board, while on 62,597,199 have voted against it. As GameInformer notes, that means he gets to keep his seat until the next meeting in 2023. 

Activision Blizzard employees walked out of their jobs last year and called for Kotick’s resignation after The Wall Street Journal reported that the CEO knew about the worst instances of abuse in the company and even protected the employees accused of harassment. If you’ll recall, California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing sued the publisher in July 2021 for allegedly fostering a “frat boy” culture. The California agency investigated the company over the course of two years and found that women working for Activision Blizzard were paid less than their male counterparts and were subjected to constant sexual harassment. 

More recently, the New York City Employees’ Retirement System sued Kotick, calling him unfit to negotiate the company’s pending sale to Microsoft due to his “personal responsibility and liability for Activision’s broken workplace.” NYC’s retirement system represents the city’s police, teachers and firefighters and owns Activision Blizzard stock. The company named a new chief diversity, equity and inclusion officer in April to help the company have a more inclusive workplace. In response, a group of employees aiming to protect workers from discrimination formed a committee to outline a list of demands for Kotick and the new chief diversity officer. 

While majority of the shareholders have chosen to keep Kotick on the board, they also approved a plan to release an annual public report detailing how Activision handles any sexual harassment and gender discrimination dispute. The report must also detail how the company is preventing these incidents from happening and what it’s doing to reduce the length of time it takes to resolve them. 

Twitter brings its closed caption toggle to Android and iOS

Twitter is giving you the power to switch closed captions on or off on your mobile device. The social network has started rolling out a closed caption toggle to everyone on Android and iOS, a couple of months after it started testing the feature. So long as a video posted on the platform has available subtitles, you’ll see a CC button at its top right portion — simply tap it to turn subtitles off or on. 

It’s a great addition for accessibility purposes, seeing as it allows you to show captions whenever you want. In the past, you’ll only see the CC button on the web and for subtitles on mobile if your sound is turned off. Further, captions automatically disappear when you expand a video, since doing so enables sound playback. A few years ago, you even had to go to accessibility settings to switch on closed captioning if you want to see subtitles for your videos at all. That said, the feature does have a limitation: The button will only show up for a video if a caption has been provided for it. 

Twitter introduced automatically generated captions for videos back in December, which is unrelated to this particular feature, according to a spokesperson who talked to The Verge. They will, however, only show up on muted videos unless you choose the option to see them at all times through the website’s accessibility settings page. There’s also no way to report inaccurate automated captions at the moment.

Spotify’s Live Event Feed makes it easier to find out when your favorite artist is touring

Spotify has expanded its old Concert Hub and added more features to make it easier to find information and tickets for live events in your location. The streaming service sources listings for the hub, now called Live Events Feed, from its ticketing partners that include Ticketmaster, AXS, DICE, Eventbrite and See Tickets, among other companies. During the height of COVID-19 lockdowns, the Concert Hub helped users find at-home or studio performances, podcast recordings and other online performances. Turns out Spotify was studying user behavior at the same time. 

Sam Sheridan, Product Manager for Live Events Discovery, said Spotify spent the past two years studying the music industry and its users. One of the most important behaviors the company noticed was that fans would engage with artists on the platform and then leave to search for concert listings or to follow them on social media to be able to stay on top of any upcoming tour dates. “We think the Live Events Feed is an opportunity to help close this loop,” Sheridan said. 

If you don’t see the Live Events Feed in your app, simply search for “live events.” You’ll see a listing of all the performances in your area, and clicking on any of them would lead you to an interface that includes a link where you can find and buy tickets. If the artist you’re listening to has an upcoming tour date, Spotify will show you that event in-app while you’re listening. Spotify has also built a new messaging tool that can notify you about upcoming concerts based on your listening habits. Don’t worry — you can tweak your notification preferences so you don’t have to get messages if you don’t want to. 

Sheridan says Spotify will work “to even further integrate event discovery directly into the app” to make it more intertwined with the listening experience, so we’ll likely see more updates to Live Events in the future. 

The Polestar 5 will offer an 884 hp electric powertrain when it launches in 2024

The Polestar 5 is making its first public appearance at the 2022 Goodwood Festival of Speed in West Sussex, England. A prototype of the upcoming four-door electric GT sports car will drive up the Goodwood hill twice daily during the event that takes place starting today, June 23rd, until June 26th as part of the “First Glance” group of vehicles. Polestar’s UK team developed a “unique bonded aluminum chassis” for the EV, which the company says is key to achieving “a driving experience that is as desirable as the design.”

The sports car’s new electric powertrain is still under development in Sweden, though, where Polestar’s sibling company Volvo is also based. Polestar 5 will have a dual electric motor setup, with a rear electric motor that uses an 800-Volt architecture. In all, the complete dual motor powertrain is expected to deliver up to 884 horsepower (650 kW) and 663 lb-ft (900 Nm) of torque.

Jörg Brandscheid, Polestar’s CTO and Head of R&D, says: 

“The new powertrain we are working on will set a new brand benchmark in our high-performing cars. Combining strong electric motor engineering ability with advances in light-weight platform technology is leading to truly stunning driver’s cars.”

Polestar 5 is the production version of a concept EV called Precept, which was introduced back in 2020. When the company announced that it was going to turn the concept into a real vehicle, it said it was going to manufacture the EV at a new carbon neutral facility in China. The new images of the Polestar 5 show that it still resembles the original concept, with its “shark-like” nose and geometric creasing, though the automaker could still make changes to its final version. If you want to see how Polestar created a real vehicle out of a concept, you can watch a short series about the process on YouTube. 

The company plans to launch Polestar 5 in 2024 after launching the Polestar 3 and Polestar 4 electric SUVs. With all these vehicles in its lineup, including the Polestar 2, the brand is bound to become a veritable Tesla rival. Speaking of Polestar 2, the automaker is also debuting a high-performance limited edition version of the EV at Goodwood Festival, where attendees will have the opportunity to book it for a test drive.