Business

Apple is expanding its website on privacy with more explanations about its commitments, though its policies and practices aren’t changing.The new site Wednesday is part of Apple’s ongoing push to distinguish itself from data-hungry, advertising-fueled rivals such as Google and Facebook.Apple’s privacy website is mostly a users’ guide with papers on how to prevent apps and other third-party services from unnecessarily tracking users’ location and behaviors.  
 
The company’s actual privacy policy hasn’t changed.
 
Many of the new privacy enhancements were announced earlier as part of Apple’s iOS 13 software update for iPhones. Changes include the ability to sign in to third-party services with an Apple ID account rather than Facebook’s or Google’s, plus more notices and warnings about apps tapping location data. 
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An advocacy group tracking misinformation says it has found an increase in fake political news shared on Facebook ahead of the 2020 presidential elections.The group, Avaaz, said Wednesday that it found that viral misinformation is still being spread on the social network despite measures Facebook has put in place since the 2016 elections. The researchers tracked the 100 most widely shared false news stories between Jan. 1 and Oct. 1 this year. The stories they tracked had all been fact-checked and debunked by Facebook’s third-party fact-checking partners, which include The Associated Press.The group found that, collectively, the fake stories were posted more than 2.3 million times and had an estimated 158.9 million views, along with 8.9 million likes, comments and shares. The false stories targeted both political parties, though Avaaz says the majority were against Democrats and liberals.Most of the false news sources were individual users or non-official political pages. Avaaz, a left-leaning online advocacy group, said stories it found spreading even after they were debunked included one falsely claiming that President Donald Trump’s grandfather was a pimp and a tax evader and that his father was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. That story had an estimated 29 million views. Another story falsely claiming that Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar attended an al-Qaeda training camp had an estimated 770,000 views.Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the report late Tuesday.Avaaz said in the report that the findings are the “tip of the iceberg of disinformation” ahead of the 2020 elections.
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Dubai-based Mara Group launched in October what it calls Africa’s first smartphone manufacturer in the Rwandan capital, Kigali.  Mara Phone says its device is the first high specification, affordable smartphone made in Africa to compete in a market dominated by South Korean and Chinese brands.  As Ruud Elmendorp reports from Kigali, customers are starting to notice the African phone brand. 
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TikTok, a video app popular with teens, stressed its independence from China in a letter to U.S. lawmakers but failed to convince Senator Josh Hawley, who chaired a hearing on Tuesday on the security of U.S. citizens’ personal data.TikTok, a unit of Chinese-based ByteDance Ltd., said in a letter to lawmakers, a copy of which was seen by Reuters, that it had hired a U.S.-based auditing firm to analyze TikTok data security practices.”TikTok claims they don’t store American user data in China. That’s nice. But all it takes is one knock on the door of their parent company based in China from a Communist Party official for that data to be transferred to the Chinese government’s hands,” Hawley, a Republican, said at a hearing of a subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee.Last week, Reuters reported that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, had launched a national security review of TikTok.In the letter, dated Monday and signed by TikTok U.S.General Manager Vanessa Pappas, the company said it stores all U.S. user data in the United States, with backup redundancy in Singapore. It also said it plans to form a committee of outside experts to advise on content moderation and transparency. It added that it will not accept political advertisements.Hawley has demanded that executives from TikTok, which is just a few years old, testify before the committee under oath, and called the company a threat to national security. Executives from TikTok were not present at Tuesday’s hearing.TikTok has been growing more popular among U.S. teenagers at a time of rising tensions between Washington and Beijing over trade and technology transfers. About 60% of TikTok’s 26.5 million monthly active users in the United States are between the ages of 16 and 24, the company said this year.
Fueled by Teenagers, TikTok, the Short Video App, Takes Over the World video player.
Embed” />Copy LinkIn its letter, TikTok said its investors were mainly big institutional investors and that the app was not available in China.The national security review is focused on TikTok owner Beijing ByteDance Technology Co’s $1 billion acquisition of U.S. social media app Musical.ly.While the $1 billion acquisition was completed two years ago, U.S. lawmakers have been calling in recent weeks for a national security probe into TikTok, concerned the Chinese company may be censoring politically sensitive content, and raising questions about how it stores personal data. 
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United Parcel Service Flight Forward drones have flown prescription medications to the front lawn of a private home and to a retirement center, the UPS unit’s first revenue-generating deliveries for drugstore chain CVS Health.Flight Forward’s maiden delivery flight on Friday in Cary, North Carolina, beat rivals in one phase of the race for the nascent market. The second drone flight delivered medications to a public space at a retirement community.The packages, roughly the size of small shoeboxes, were lowered from drones hovering at an altitude of about 20 feet.UPS and CVS said on Tuesday the deliveries were the first of their kind under an program approved by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Regulators are still hammering out rules for how the unmanned winged vehicles will operate in U.S. airspace and guidelines are expected in 2021.”We see big potential in drone delivery in rural communities where life-saving medications are needed and consumers at times cannot conveniently access one of our stores,” said Kevin Hourican, president of CVS Pharmacy.”CVS is exploring many types of delivery options for urban, suburban and rural markets,” Hourican added.In September, UPS became the first company to win the broadest FAA certification to operate a drone airline. That permits Flight Forward to collect payment for drone deliveries and to fly as many drones supported by as many operators as necessary to meet customer demand.Flight Forward and drone startup Matternet have inked a variety of deals to deliver biological samples on a handful of medical campuses.Wing, a drone operator owned by Google parent Alphabet, is partnering with Walgreens and FedEx for a home delivery pilot in Christiansburg, Virginia. 
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It has captured the attention of teenagers, celebrities and global brands.And now U.S. lawmakers and regulators are interested in TikTok, the video app downloaded by 1 billion people.According to Reuters, the U.S. government is launching a national security review into the Chinese company ByteDance’s 2017 acquisition of U.S. app Musical.ly. ByteDance is the parent of TikTok, which makes it easy for users to make videos 15 to 60 seconds long.  National security concernsThe move comes at a time when lawmakers have called for increasing scrutiny of Chinese companies and their investments in the United States. Some lawmakers question whether TikTok censors users and how safe U.S. user data is if it is held in the hands of a Chinese company.ByteDance has repeatedly defended itself. In a recent blog post, it said that U.S. user data is stored in the United States. As for content moderation, the company said its “U.S. moderation team, which is led out of California, reviews content for adherence to our U.S. policies—just like other U.S. companies in our space.”In China, ByteDance owns Douyin, a Chinese version of TikTok.Making a viral videoFor users of TikTok, the app is a way to make a short vertical video, similar to Vine, which Twitter shut down in 2017. Video editing tools are built into the TikTok app, with a music library to choose from, so that a video can be made and posted in a school hallway between classes.Scrolling through TikTok videos is a window into pranks played on parents and friends, dance routines in school bathrooms or in backyards. Users say that watching the videos are addictive and a quick check of TikTok can lead to hours spent watching video after video.Silicon Valley takes noteCompetitors such as Facebook and Snap, the parent of Snapchat, have not missed TikTok’s rise. They are either imitating the company or looking to acquire a similar one. Facebook has its own service called Lasso. Google, which owns YouTube, has had talks about buying a TikTok competitor, The New York Times reported.Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, recently said that “China is building its own internet focused on very different values, and is now exporting their vision of the internet to other countries.”This isn’t TikTok’s first run in with U.S. regulators. Earlier this year, it paid a $5.7 million fine to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission over how it had illegally collected information about children under 13.
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This generation of children are called digital natives because they have grown up in a digital world. But there are two generations of older people and many disadvantaged people for whom the digital world is a mystery. A computer science teacher in Washington DC is working to change that. VOA’s Mykhailo Komadovsky reports.
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A supply ship rocketed toward the International Space Station on Saturday with sports car parts, an oven for baking cookies and a vest to protect against radiation.
 
Northrop Grumman launched its Cygnus capsule for NASA from Wallops Island, Virginia. The 8,200-pound shipment (3,700 kilograms) should reach the orbiting lab Monday.
 
“Good launch all the way around,” a ground controller observed.
 
The space station’s astronauts will test the oven by baking chocolate chip cookies and try out the new safety vest to gauge its comfort. Both experiments are seen as precursors to moon and Mars journeys.
 
Other newly arriving equipment will be used in a series of NASA spacewalks later this month to fix a key particle physics detector. Parked outside the space station since 2011, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer needs new cooling pumps to continue its search for elusive dark matter and antimatter.
 
Italy’s Lamborghini is also along for the ride. It’s sending up samples of carbon fiber used in its sports cars for six months of direct space exposure. Researchers are considering the materials for medical implants.
 
Like space, the insides of a person’s body are an extreme environment, explained Houston Methodist’s Alessandro Grattoni, who is collaborating with Lamborghini on the experiment. As a nanomedicine specialist, he said Friday he’s continuously on the lookout for new materials for devices that are inserted beneath the skin. These minuscule implants release therapeutic drugs to treat cancer, hormone deficiencies and other illnesses.
 
Northrop Grumman is now controlling two Cygnus capsules in orbit, a first for the Virginia-based company. Named for the swan constellation, the Cygnus launched last spring is flying free of the 250-mile-high (400-kilometer-high) space station, after completing its grocery run. It will be directed to a fiery re-entry sometime in the near future, taking station trash down with it, according to company officials.
 
The newest Cygnus is officially called the S.S. Alan Bean after the Apollo 12 astronaut who became the fourth man to walk on the moon 50 years ago this month. He later commanded NASA’s first space station, Skylab, and became known for his cosmic-themed paintings. He died last year.
 
NASA has contracted with Northrop Grumman and SpaceX to keep the space station stocked. This is Northrop Grumman’s 12th successful Cygnus flight since 2013. The company has upgraded both its Cygnus and Antares rocket to haul more cargo from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility on the eastern Virginia shore.
 
The space station is currently home to three Americans, two Russians and one Italian.  
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Fitbit is being acquired by Google’s parent company for about $2.1 billion, a deal that enables the internet company to step back into the hotly contested market for smartwatches and health and fitness trackers. 
 
Fitbit is a pioneer in wearable technology, but it’s been shredded by the competition. The company’s market capitalization soared to just under $10 billion after becoming a public company in 2015. Its value this week is well below $2 billion. 
 
Google has struggled to stake out a presence in the wearables market. Its years-earlier foray into smartwatches that used its Android Wear software has largely faded. This deal could give it more of an opportunity to compete with the Apple Watch.”Google doesn’t want to be left out of the party,” said analyst Daniel Ives of Wedbush Securities. “If you look at what Apple has done with wearables, it a missing piece of the puzzle for Google.”FILE – Fitbit devices and software include Fitbit Premium, various sleep tools, Fitbit Versa 2 smartwatch with Amazon Alexa Built-in, and its Aria Air smart scale, Aug. 27, 2019.When rumors of a potential buyout by Google surfaced earlier this week, Fitbit shares soared almost 30%. The stock jumped another 17% at the opening bell Friday. 
 
Alphabet said it will pay $7.35 per share for the company, which were trading at $7.20 each after the deal was announced. 
 
“With Google’s resources and global platform, Fitbit will be able to accelerate innovation in the wearables category, scale faster, and make health even more accessible to everyone,” Fitbit co-founder and CEO James Park said in a statement.Data trackingFitbit has 28 million active users worldwide and has sold more than 100 million devices. The company said that its privacy and security guidelines won’t change and that it will continue to be transparent about the data it collects and why. Fitbit said that it never sells personal information and that its health and wellness data will not be used for the advertisements that drive Google’s main business.Fitbit’s privacy policy says data it collects include a user’s date of birth, gender, height, weight, and for some users it also stores logs that track their food and water intake, as well as sleep and female health patterns.The deal is expected to close next year if approved by regulators and Fitbit shareholders.Ives said it will likely face additional scrutiny at a time when federal antitrust enforcers and Congress have launched broad investigations into the market dominance of Google and other major tech companies.”This is definitely going to get a very close look from regulators,” he said.
 
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The U.S. government has launched a national security review of TikTok owner Beijing ByteDance Technology Co.’s $1 billion acquisition of U.S. social media app Musical.ly, according to two people familiar with the matter. 
 
While the $1 billion acquisition was completed two years ago, U.S. lawmakers have been calling in recent weeks for a national security probe into TikTok, concerned the Chinese company may be censoring politically sensitive content, and raising questions about how it stores personal data. 
 
TikTok has been growing more popular among U.S. teenagers at a time of growing tensions between the United States and China over trade and technology transfers. About 60% of TikTok’s 26.5 million monthly active users in the United States are between the ages of 16 and 24, the company said earlier this year. 
 
The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which reviews deals by foreign acquirers for potential national security risks, has started to review the Musical.ly deal, the sources said. TikTok did not seek clearance from CFIUS when it acquired Musical.ly, they added, which gives the U.S. security panel scope to investigate it now. CFIUS, TikTok conferCFIUS is in talks with TikTok about measures it could take to avoid divesting the Musical.ly assets it acquired, the sources said. Details of those talks, referred to by CFIUS as mitigation, could not be learned. The specific concerns that CFIUS has could also not be learned. 
 
The sources requested anonymity because CFIUS reviews are confidential. 
 
“While we cannot comment on ongoing regulatory processes, TikTok has made clear that we have no higher priority than earning the trust of users and regulators in the U.S. Part of that effort includes working with Congress and we are committed to doing so,” a TikTok spokesperson said.  ByteDance did not immediately reply to a request for comment. 
 
The U.S. Treasury Department, which chairs CFIUS, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.   FILE – Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., speaks to reporters on Capitol Hill in Washington,Oct. 22, 2019.Last week, U.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York and Senator Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, asked for a national security probe. They said they were concerned about the video-sharing platform’s collection of user data, and whether China censors content seen by U.S. users. They also suggested TikTok could be targeted by foreign influence campaigns. 
 
“With over 110 million downloads in the U.S. alone, TikTok is a potential counterintelligence threat we cannot ignore,” Schumer and Cotton wrote to Joseph Macguire, acting director of national intelligence. 
 
TikTok allows users to create and share short videos with special effects. The company has said U.S. user data is stored in the United States, but the senators noted that ByteDance is governed by Chinese laws. 
 
TikTok also says China does not have jurisdiction over content of the app, which does not operate in China and is not influenced by any foreign government. 
 
Last month, Musical.ly founder Alex Zhu, who heads the TikTok team, started to report directly to ByteDance CEO Zhang Yiming, one of the sources said. He previously reported to Zhang Nan, the head of ByteDance’s Douyin, a Chinese short video app. 
 
It was not clear whether this move, which separates TikTok organizationally from ByteDance’s other holdings, was related to the company’s discussions with CFIUS over mitigation.  FILE – Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., speaks to journalists May 3, 2019, in Doral, Fla.In October, U.S. Senator Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, asked CFIUS to review ByteDance’s acquisition of Musical.ly. He cited questions about why TikTok had “only had a few videos of the Hong Kong protests that have been dominating international headlines for months.” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, whose product competes with TikTok, particularly for younger users, has also criticized the app over censorship concerns. 
 
The United States has been increasingly scrutinizing app developers over the safety of personal data they handle, especially if some of it involves U.S. military or intelligence personnel. 
 
Chinese gaming company Beijing Kunlun Tech Co. Ltd. said in May that it would seek to sell its popular gay dating app Grindr after it was approached by CFIUS with national security concerns. 
 
Last year, CFIUS forced China’s Ant Financial to scrap plans to buy MoneyGram International Inc. over concerns about the safety of data that could be used to identify U.S. citizens. The panel also compelled Oceanwide Holdings and Genworth Financial Inc. to work through a U.S. third party data administrator to ensure the Chinese company could not access the insurer’s  U.S. customers’ personal private data. 
 ByteDance’s rise 
 
ByteDance is one of China’s fastest-growing startups. It owns the country’s leading news aggregator, Jinri Toutiao, as well as TikTok, which has attracted celebrities like Ariana Grande and Katy Perry. FILE – A Bytedance sign is seen on the facade of its headquarters in Beijing, Aug. 8, 2018.ByteDance counts Japanese technology giant SoftBank, venture firm Sequoia Capital and big private-equity firms such as KKR, General Atlantic and Hillhouse Capital Group as backers. Analysts have called ByteDance a strong threat to other Chinese tech industry firms, including social media and gaming giant Tencent Holdings Ltd. and search engine leader Baidu Inc. Globally, ByteDance’s apps have 1.5 billion monthly active users and 700 million daily active users, the company said in July. 
 
The seven-year-old Chinese startup posted better-than-expected revenue for the first half of 2019 at over $7 billion, and was valued at $78 billion late last year, sources have told Reuters. 
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Seeking to bolster its image as a forward-looking metropolis, Dubai hosted the largest-ever international robotics contest this week, challenging young people from 190 countries to find solutions to global ocean pollution.
 
Event organizers say their selection of Dubai as host reflects a vote of confidence that this oil-rich Emirati sheikhdom can be a global hub for innovation. They also expressed hope that bringing together tomorrow’s scientists and engineers will help develop technologies to solve the world’s most pressing issues, particularly those related to the environment.Dean Kamen, founder of FIRST Global Challenge, said the Middle East represents a part of the world where the adults have not learned how to play nice with each other'' and it was up to young people to fix humanity's self-inflicted wounds.“We are in an accelerating race toward catastrophe, whether it's global warning, melting of the (polar ice) caps, bird flu, terrorism - you name it, we're worried about it. The solution to most of the world's grand challenges depends on better technologies than we have today,” he said.
 
“This globe of ours is on life support, so the thought is we get every kid in every country to focus on learning how to use technology, but focus on using it as a tool and not a weapon,” he explained.The unofficial “Robotics Olympics” seeks to encourage young people to pursue subjects known as STEM _ science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Teams of four to five students, aged 14-18, each received a kit of rods, wheels, wires and other raw materials with which to assemble their roving robots. Their task: Collect orange balls of various sizes from a playing field, which represented human-created pollutants in the ocean. Some devised robots for scooping, while others snatched up and fired the balls through the air into the receptacles.
 
The teams then formed “alliances,” each with up of four nations, to battle their way to the final round. Overall, 1,500 students took part.A team captained by Belarus, and including Syrian refugees, eventually won the gold medal, edging out a team captained by Israel in a dramatic final match. But organizers stressed a message of unity, not conflict.“The kids get it. To them this isn't a competition; this is a `coop-etition.' This is a celebration of technology,” said Kamen.Previous events tackled challenges related to clean water access and sustainable energy.Robotics is a natural fit for Dubai, a city that's already testing driverless cars and taxis. It's become a magnet for international entrepreneurs, with an entire zone called “Internet City” that's packed with high-tech startups. Next October, Dubai will host the Expo 2020, welcoming technological breakthroughs from around the world.
 
“If we are to become the city of the future, we need to have the right talent from around the world,” said Omar Al-Olama, the 29-year-old Emirati Minister of Artificial Intelligence, the world's first such minister.Artificial intelligence is based on data. Data is what drives all these new technologies. We have the holy grail of data. We have 200 nationalities represented in this country.”FedEx recently announced Dubai would become the first city outside the U.S. to test Roxo, an autonomous delivery device that can travel on sidewalks and even unpaved surfaces.
 
Roxo made its debut international appearance at this week’s robotics contest, drawing the interest of the tech-savvy teens hailing from places as diverse as Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. They mingled in Dubai’s Festival City, exchanging experiences and forming friendships while talking shop about their gadgets.
 
“We didn’t do so well in the matches because we had a lot of trouble with the control hub, but it doesn’t matter, we had a lot of fun,” said Stefan Sijbesma, 17, from the Netherlands. “For me, robotics is really important because it really helped me choose what I want to study and what I want to do with my life”The three-day tournament had a festival-like atmosphere to it, with announcers and commentators analyzing the action in sports-broadcast style and fans waving flags and banners supporting their teams. The pavilion floor was filled with facts about the millions of tons of pollutants threatening the world’s oceans, and featured slogans such as “united by land, connected by oceans” and “together we turn the tide on pollution.”As the nail-biting results were being announced, the Israelis huddled with their Ugandan teammates before embracing the winning team in a feel-good ending.
 
“I can’t believe it, it’s a miracle,” said Yamen Najjar, manager of Team Hope, which represents the Syrian refugees and was part of the winning alliance. “It was a very difficult competition for us, we faced a lot of problems, but we didn’t lose hope.”Outgoing U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry, who’d made the original announcement that Dubai would host the event earlier this year in a surprise visit to the World Government Summit, was on hand. Perry said he’s followed the robotics tournaments since 2002 when, as governor of Texas, he attended one of the regional competitions in Houston and was “blown away” by the passions and abilities of the young contestants.But he said he found their camaraderie even more impressive.“It is stunning what these young people are doing,” Perry said. “Where the adults may have failed in the standpoint of international diplomacy, these young people may accomplish, and if that’s the case maybe that is the most important thing that comes out of this.” 
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