A Google employee who became a high-profile opponent of the tech giant’s $1bn artificial intelligence and surveillance contract with the Israeli military has announced her resignation. Ariel Koren, a marketing manager, will be leaving the company this week, citing what she said was its creation of a hostile work environment due to her social activism. READ ALSO: DID YOU KNOW?
Google has launched its first Gaming Growth Lab in Pakistan. The Lab, a five-week virtual programme is designed to help emerging mobile-gaming enterprises expand their offerings and grow their businesses. The launch marks Google’s commitment to helping accelerate the digital gaming industry in Pakistan. The programme will be delivered in both English and Urdu. It will commence on March 1.
The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) has issued notices to Google Inc. and Wikipedia for spreading blasphemous content through their platforms. The PTA after receiving several complaints regarding “misleading search results associated with Present Khalifa of Islam and unauthentic version of Holy Quran on the Google Play Store”, has approached the authorities “to immediately remove the unlawful content.”
The US state of Arizona filed a lawsuit Wednesday accusing Google of committing fraud by being deceptive about gathering location data. Arizona attorney general Mark Brnovich said the suit resulted from an investigation launched two years ago. As a media report said that Google had ways of knowing where users were even if they opted not to share location information with the internet firm.
Tech giants Apple and Google released an initial version of their software tool that will make it possible for 23 nations to release coronavirus contact-tracing apps. It will alert users when they came into contact with people who were COVID-19 positive. But authorities would have to stop requiring phone numbers from users under the companies’ rules.
Google honoured late Pakistani journalist and screenwriter Saadat Hasan Manto on the occasion of his 108th birthday with a doodle on Monday. The illustration, made by Lahore-based guest artist Shehzil Malik, features Manto scribbling something on a page with a pen in his hand. One of the finest fiction writers of Soth Asia, Manto was born on May 11, 1912, in Samrala in the British Indian state of Punjab.
Google and Netflix have helped Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) to lower burden on its telecom network by sharing some steps they have taken. Google has introduced new features and resources which links to the National Institute of Health (NIH) to provide locally relevant information to Pakistani users such as expansion of COVID-19 SOS Alerts and Knowledge Panels on Google Search, as well as YouTube Information Panels.
Google, the search engine giant has asked people with Down syndrome (DS) to submit voice recordings in its latest attempt to increase accessibility. This is in order to train its voice-recognition AI to understand unique speech patterns of the DS patients as it can be slightly inconvenient for them to use. In order to remedy that, Google has partnered with the Canadian Down Syndrome Society so that it can acquire voice recordings from hundreds of people.
As the year comes to an end, Google has released their top 10s for every field, revealing Naimal Khawar as the most Googled person of 2019. While cricket still remained the most searched topic in Pakistan, Hamza Ali Abbasi’s wife became the talk of the town after their nikkah. Naimal’s dress and overall look for the events made rounds on social media for weeks.
A security researcher has recently discovered an unsecured Google cloud server with personal information of over 1.5 billion people. This massive 4 terabyte data cache contains people’s social media accounts, phone numbers, email addresses, and more. Most of the data was reportedly collected by a company named People Data Labs. However, the unprotected server didn’t belong to People Data Labs but was one of Google’s cloud servers about which Google refused to comment.