Tech Digest daily roundup: New homes required to have EV charging
New homes and buildings in England will be required by law to install electric vehicle charging points from next year, the prime minister is set to announce. The government said the move will see up to 145,000 charging points installed across the country each year. New-build supermarkets, workplaces and buildings undergoing major renovations will also come under the new law. The move comes as the UK aims to switch to electric cars, with new petrol and diesel cars sales banned from 2030. Announcing the new laws at the Confederation of British Industry’s conference on Monday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson will say: “This is a pivotal moment – we cannot go on as we are. We have to adapt our economy to the green industrial revolution.” BBC
Spotify has stopped shuffling albums by default following a request from Adele, according to a report by BBC. Previously, when viewing an album on Spotify, you’d see a small shuffle icon within the larger “Play” button. This indicated that Spotify would begin playing the album’s songs in a random order, which isn’t always what users would expect (or want) it to do. Now, when you hit “Play” in Album View, songs will play in order — that is, as long as you have a Premium subscription. You can still enable shuffle mode by toggling on the “Shuffle” icon when viewing an individual track. The Verge
This was the only request I had in our ever changing industry! We don’t create albums with so much care and thought into our track listing for no reason. Our art tells a story and our stories should be listened to as we intended. Thank you Spotify for listening 🍷♥️ https://t.co/XWlykhqxAy
— Adele (@Adele) November 21, 2021
The owner of Facebook and Instagram is delaying plans to encrypt users’ messages until 2023 amid warnings from child safety campaigners that its proposals would shield abusers from detection. Mark Zuckerberg’s social media empire has been under pressure to abandon its encryption plans, which the UK home secretary, Priti Patel, has described as “simply not acceptable”. The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) has said private messaging is the “frontline of child sexual abuse online” because it prevents law enforcement, and tech platforms, from seeing messages by ensuring that only the sender and recipient can view their content – a process known as end-to-end encryption. The Guardian
As it turns out, the November 22 teasers were about when the reveal date for the upcoming Honor 60 series will be announced – and that is December 1, Wednesday next week. This teaser continues the cosmic theme of the earlier ones, which will tie into an astrophotography mode for the phone’s camera. We expect that there will be three models – vanilla, Honor 60 Pro and an SE model. The Pro model will be powered by the Snapdragon 870 according to some rumors and its 4,500 mAh battery will charge at 100W (or perhaps even higher). That’s speculation, but we know from the 3C that the vanilla model will charge at 66W. The Honor 60 phones will maintain the “two circles” camera bump design of the 50-series. GSM Arena
WhatsApp has updated its privacy policy to be more transparent to users following a record €225m (£188m) fine and reprimand from regulators earlier this year. The company says that the update doesn’t change how it handles user data, but meets the demands of European Union privacy regulators about how transparent it is about this handling. At its core, the ruling in September said that Meta (then Facebook) failed to adequately inform individuals of which jurisdictions WhatsApp processes users’ data in and how it identifies people in their contacts books. The new policy takes effect in the UK as well as other European jurisdictions that have adopted the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR). Sky News
