Tech Digest daily roundup: WhatsApp launches privacy ad campaign

Chris Price News
Share


WhatsApp has launched its first major privacy-focused advertising campaign in the UK. It follows a customer backlash against changes to its terms and conditions, announced earlier this year. The platform also said it is standing firm against pressure from governments, including the UK, to compromise on the way it encrypts messages. Authorities should “demand more security” rather than less, WhatsApp boss Will Cathcart told the BBC. “The first step of keeping people safe is, you have to have strong security, and we think governments shouldn’t be out there trying to encourage tech companies to offer weak security,” he said. BBC 

In the early days of lockdown, amid the uncertainty and fear that gripped the nation, one man helped distract from the pandemic with his ludicrous antics. Joe Exotic, the gun-toting operator of a big cat park in Oklahoma, left millions of viewers gripped by his stranger-than-fiction tale in Tiger King when it came out in March last year. The show helped Netflix reach a record 182.9m monthly subscribers for the first three months of 2020, more than twice the number it had expected to gain. That trend continued throughout the year, with 1.3m people signing up to streaming services at the end of 2020 despite Covid restrictions forcing the amount of new shows and movies to slow to a trickle. In that period, Amazon gained 635,000 customers for its Prime Video service, 49pc of all new subscriptions to similar services. Now, however, the pandemic’s biggest winners are facing the prospect of rapidly shrinking user growth as lockdowns ease, with some warning the boom time may be over. Telegraph 

If yesterday’s big Xbox and Bethesda Games Showcase wasn’t enough for you, Microsoft has a little more to come. Xbox Games Showcase: Extended will be broadcast at 6pm UK time this Thursday, 17th June and feature conversations with some of Microsoft’s internal studios. Psychonauts 2 team Double Fine, The Outer Worlds 2 studio Obsidian, Hellblade 2 maker Ninja Theory and Sea of Thieves outfit Rare will all be included, alongside others. Kinda Funny Xcast’s Parris Lilly revealed the showcase via Twitter last night, and announced he would be hosting. Eurogamer

A trip into space with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has sold for $28m (£19.8m) at auction. The anonymous bidder will get to fly with Mr Bezos and his younger brother Mark on his rocket company Blue Origin’s maiden voyage next month. Their identity will be revealed in the coming weeks ahead of lift-off in West Texas on 20 July – the 52nd anniversary of the moon landings. It will be the first time Mr Bezos’s New Shepard capsule will have people onboard and will mark the launch of his space tourism business. Sky News

Elon Musk has said that Tesla will resume allowing bitcoin transactions when miners use more renewable energy. “When there’s confirmation of reasonable (~50%) clean energy usage by miners with positive future trend, Tesla will resume allowing bitcoin transactions,” Musk, the company’s CEO, said in a tweet on Sunday. The price of one bitcoin rose above $39,500 (£33,950) on Monday morning in the UK, an increase of by 10% since midday BST on Sunday. Musk also said that Tesla sold about 10% of its holdings to confirm bitcoin could be liquidated easily without moving the market. Guardian

The OnePlus Nord CE doesn’t quite hit the mark of distilling the “core” OnePlus experience. The hardware is underbaked, the design is forgettable, and the software experience — while good — can’t justify the phone’s existence when the older OnePlus Nord offers all of this and more. It might be an okay phone in a silo, but the ample competition makes the OnePlus Nord CE hard to recommend. Android Authority 

 

Chris Price
For latest tech stories go to TechDigest.tv