Piloted in May, ditched in June: the failure of England’s Covid-19 app

How the government came to scrap its contact-tracing app in favour of Apple and Google’s

Designed to be a key component of the test, track and trace programme to forge a way out of lockdown, the NHS Covid-19 app has been beset by problems from day one – despite repeated claims to the contrary.

After a trial on the Isle of Wight at the start of May, the contact-tracing app was meant to be rolled out to the rest of England by the middle of the month. That soon slipped to some time in June. Then on Wednesday it emerged that we would have to wait until the winter. Now – after much behind-the-scenes scrambling, and head-scratching in Westminster – officials have decided to ditch the app entirely in its current form.

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Why are Google and Apple dictating how European democracies fight coronavirus? | Ieva Ilves

In Latvia we wanted to harness smartphone technology for contact tracing. We ran into a Silicon Valley-built brick wall

The Covid-19 pandemic has led to a rush by governments, private companies and digital startups to harness and develop the latest technologies in the fight against the spread of the virus.

To best meet public health needs, digital technology should be able to trace the spread of the virus, identify dangerous Covid-19 clusters and limit further transmission. The essential goal is to register contacts between potential carriers and those who might be infected. This has led to tech solutions using smartphones to perform the otherwise arduous and labour-intensive task of “contact tracing” – determining who has come into contact with a disease carrier and what should be done when a person has had that contact.

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Trump expected to sign executive order in bid to target Twitter and Facebook

  • Move could erode legal protections for social media platforms
  • Twitter placed warning on Trump tweets that spread falsehoods

Donald Trump is preparing to sign an executive order that could erode legal protections for social media companies for content posted on their platforms, potentially opening them to liability claims over controversial content.

Related: Trump focuses on possible social media regulation as US coronavirus death toll passes milestone – live

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Google executive took part in Sage meeting, tech firm confirms

Attendance of Demis Hassabis raises further questions about secretive group advising UK government on Covid-19

Google has confirmed that one of its senior executives participated in the UK government’s scientific advisory group on Covid-19, raising further questions about the composition of the secretive committee.

Demis Hassabis, a co–founder of Google’s artificial intelligence division, DeepMind, attended a meeting of the scientific advisory group for emergencies (Sage) on 18 March, when the group was considering whether the UK should go into lockdown.

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Google reports weak revenue growth in first pandemic-affected quarter

Alphabet first-quarter earnings offer a glimpse of how the digital ad market has fared amid stay-at-home orders

Google reported its weakest revenue growth in nearly five years in the first quarter as the pandemic-driven recession began to shrivel its advertising sales.

“It was the tale of two quarters,” Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, told investors on a conference call on Tuesday. Typically – strong revenue growth in January and February was undercut by a “significant and sudden slowdown in advertising” in March, he said. “When I last spoke with you, no one could have imagined how much the world would change – and how quickly.”

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Fortnite owner gives up battle against Google Play store

Epic makes its blockbuster game available in store, an embarrassing climbdown

Fortnite for Android is available through the Google Play store for the first time, almost 18 months after owners Epic Games tried to use the game’s popularity to break the app store duopoly.

The release is an embarrassing climbdown for Epic, which has sunk significant resources into building its own independent games service, and is sure to reignite accusations of anti-competitive behaviour on the parts of both Apple and Google.

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Facebook and Google to be forced to share advertising revenue with Australian media companies

Mandatory code being developed by ACCC will create ‘level playing field’ in media landscape, Josh Frydenberg says

Facebook and Google will be forced to share advertising revenue with Australian media companies after the treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, instructed the competition watchdog to develop a mandatory code of conduct for the digital giants amid a steep decline in advertising brought on by the coronavirus pandemic.

In its response to the landmark digital platforms inquiry in December, the federal government asked the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to develop a code between media companies and digital platforms including Google and Facebook.

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Don’t click on the traffic lights: upstart competitor challenges Google’s anti-bot tool

New charges for reCaptcha spur web security firm Cloudflare to develop its own identity-checking software

The days of clicking on traffic lights to prove you are not a robot could be ending after Google’s decision to charge for the tool prompted one of the web’s biggest infrastructure firms to ditch it for a competitor.

“Captcha” – an awkward acronym for “completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart” – is used by sites to fight automated abuses of their services. For years, Google’s version of the test, branded reCaptcha, has dominated, after it acquired the company that developed it in 2009 and offered the technology for free worldwide.

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Apple and Google team up in bid to use smartphones to track coronavirus spread

The app will use a Bluetooth technology to trace every phone a person comes in contact with, raising concerns over privacy

Apple and Google announced Friday an unprecedented collaboration to leverage smartphone technology to help trace and contain the spread of coronavirus.

The collaboration will open up their mobile operating systems to allow for the creation of advanced “contact-tracing” apps, which will run on iPhones and Android phones alike.

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Human rights activist ‘forced to flee DRC’ over child cobalt mining lawsuit

Landmark legal action against world’s biggest tech companies lead to death threats, says activist Auguste Mutombo

A Congolese human rights activist has said he was forced to flee the country with his family after being linked to a lawsuit accusing the world’s largest tech companies of being complicit in the deaths of children in cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

In December, the Guardian revealed that a group of families from DRC were launching landmark legal action against Apple, Google, Tesla, Microsoft and Dell. They claim they aided and abetted the deaths and injuries of their children, who were working in mines that they say were linked to the tech companies.

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AI system outperforms experts in spotting breast cancer

Program developed by Google Health tested on mammograms of UK and US women

An artificial intelligence program has been developed that is better at spotting breast cancer in mammograms than expert radiologists.

The AI outperformed the specialists by detecting cancers that the radiologists missed in the images, while ignoring features they falsely flagged as possible tumours.

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Apple and Google named in US lawsuit over Congolese child cobalt mining deaths

Dell, Microsoft and Tesla also among tech firms named in case brought by families of children killed or injured while mining in DRC

A landmark legal case has been launched against the world’s largest tech companies by Congolese families who say their children were killed or maimed while mining for cobalt used to power smartphones, laptops and electric cars, the Guardian can reveal.

Apple, Google, Dell, Microsoft and Tesla have been named as defendants in a lawsuit filed in Washington DC by human rights firm International Rights Advocates on behalf of 14 parents and children from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The lawsuit accuses the companies of aiding and abetting in the death and serious injury of children who they claim were working in cobalt mines in their supply chain.

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‘Google is no longer listening’: four fired workers file charges against tech giant

The employee-activists accuse the company of attempting to quash employee organizing, in violation of federal labor laws

The four worker-activists who were fired by Google during Thanksgiving week plan to file federal charges alleging that their former employer fired them to quash worker organizing, in violation of federal labor laws.

Google told its staff of approximately 100,000 last week that the employees were fired for “clear and repeated violations of our data security policies”, according to a memo obtained by Bloomberg. But in defiant interviews with the Guardian on Monday, the workers rejected that justification as a pretext.

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12 EU states reject move to expose companies’ tax avoidance

Proposal would have forced firms to reveal profits made and taxes paid in each EU country

Twelve EU countries, including Ireland, have blocked a proposed new rule that would have forced multinational companies to reveal how much profit they make and how little tax they pay in each of the 28 member states.

The proposed directive was designed to shine a light on how some of the world’s biggest companies – such as Apple, Facebook and Google – avoid paying an estimated $500bn a year in taxes by shifting their profits from higher-tax countries such as the UK, France and Germany to zero-tax or low-tax jurisdictions including Ireland, Luxembourg and Malta.

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Go game master quits saying machines ‘cannot be defeated’

Lee Se-dol retires from Chinese strategy game after playing against Google algorithm

The only human ever to beat Google’s algorithm at the ancient Chinese strategy game Go has said he decided to retire because machines cannot be defeated.

Lee Se-dol’s five-match showdown with Google’s artificial intelligence program AlphaGo in 2016 raised both the game’s profile and fears of computer intelligence’s seemingly limitless learning capability.

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Sacha Baron Cohen: Facebook would have let Hitler buy ads for ‘final solution’

In wide-ranging speech, actor accuses tech giants of running the ‘greatest propaganda machine in history’

Read Sacha Baron Cohen’s scathing attack on Facebook in full

Sacha Baron Cohen has denounced tech giants Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google as “the greatest propaganda machine in history” and culpable for a surge in “murderous attacks on religious and ethnic minorities”.

Baron Cohen was speaking on Thursday at Never Is Now, the Anti-Defamation League’s summit on antisemitism and hate in New York, where he was presented with the organisation’s international leadership award. He said that “hate crimes are surging, as are murderous attacks on religious and ethnic minorities” and that “all this hate and violence is being facilitated by a handful of internet companies that amount to the greatest propaganda machine in history”.

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Google’s secret cache of medical data includes names and full details of millions – whistleblower

Whistleblower tells Guardian of growing alarm over secret transfer of medical history data, which can be accessed by Google staff

A whistleblower who works in Project Nightingale, the secret transfer of the personal medical data of up to 50 million Americans from one of the largest healthcare providers in the US to Google, has expressed anger to the Guardian that patients are being kept in the dark about the massive deal.

Related: Mick Mulvaney drops impeachment lawsuit but will not comply with House subpoena – live

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How big tech is dragging us towards the next financial crash

Like the big banks, big tech uses its lobbying muscle to avoid regulation, and thinks it should play by different rules. And like the banks, it could be about to wreak financial havoc on us all. By Rana Foroohar

‘In every major economic downturn in US history, the ‘villains’ have been the ‘heroes’ during the preceding boom,” said the late, great management guru Peter Drucker. I cannot help but wonder if that might be the case over the next few years, as the United States (and possibly the world) heads toward its next big slowdown. Downturns historically come about once every decade, and it has been more than that since the 2008 financial crisis. Back then, banks were the “too-big-to-fail” institutions responsible for our falling stock portfolios, home prices and salaries. Technology companies, by contrast, have led the market upswing over the past decade. But this time around, it is the big tech firms that could play the spoiler role.

You wouldn’t think it could be so when you look at the biggest and richest tech firms today. Take Apple. Warren Buffett says he wished he owned even more Apple stock. (His Berkshire Hathaway has a 5% stake in the company.) Goldman Sachs is launching a new credit card with the tech titan, which became the world’s first $1tn market-cap company in 2018. But hidden within these bullish headlines are a number of disturbing economic trends, of which Apple is already an exemplar. Study this one company and you begin to understand how big tech companies – the new too-big-to-fail institutions – could indeed sow the seeds of the next crisis.

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Google sister company agrees to scale back controversial Toronto project

Sidewalk Labs agreed to 12 acres for a hi-tech waterfront neighbourhood rather than the 190 announced in June

The Google sister company Sidewalk Labs has agreed to scale back and refine its approach to a controversial hi-tech neighbourhood it has proposed for a swath of Toronto’s prime waterfront land.

Instead of developing 190 acres of property, as it pitched in June, Sidewalk agreed on Thursday to scale back its plan to the 12 acres it first envisioned in its response to a request for proposals two years ago.

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‘Alexa, are you invading my privacy?’ – the dark side of our voice assistants

There are more than 100m Alexa-enabled devices in our homes. But are they fun time-savers or the beginning of an Orwellian nightmare

One day in 2017, Alexa went rogue. When Martin Josephson, who lives in London, came home from work, he heard his Amazon Echo Dot voice assistant spitting out fragmentary commands, seemingly based on his previous interactions with the device. It appeared to be regurgitating requests to book train tickets for journeys he had already taken and to record TV shows that he had already watched. Josephson had not said the wake word – “Alexa” – to activate it and nothing he said would stop it. It was, he says, “Kafkaesque”.

This was especially interesting because Josephson (not his real name) was a former Amazon employee. Three years earlier, he had volunteered to sit in a room reciting a string of apparently meaningless phrases into a microphone for an undisclosed purpose. Only when Amazon released the Echo in the US in 2014 did he realise what he had been working on. He bought a Dot, the Echo’s cheaper, smaller model, after it launched in 2016, and found it useful enough until the day it went haywire. When the Dot’s outburst subsided, he unplugged it and deposited it in the bin. “I felt a bit foolish,” he says. “Having worked at Amazon, and having seen how they used people’s data, I knew I couldn’t trust them.”

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