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Tech News Today for March 13, 2017

Tech News for Monday March 13, 2017

Last October, the ACLU went public with information showing how Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram were providing user data to a social media monitoring company called Geofeedia that was ultimately used to track protestors and political activists by law enforcement. Facebook says it has now updated its developer rules for both Facebook and Instagram to prohibit that data from being used as ammo for surveillance tools. Facebook says its policies already prohibited this, but it wants to make the policy even more explicit to ensure broader understanding of those limitations by developers. Read more at pcmag.com.

More singles in the driverless dating game are pairing up. Intel just bought Israeli computer vision tech company MobileEye for $15.3 billion dollars. This will make Intel a real player in the race to get autonomous cars on the road and cement its place in an industry that Intel's CEO says will be worth about $70 billion by 2030. TechCrunch says Mobileeye is a leader in sensor fusion, mapping, front- and rear-facing camera tech, and they'll begin crowdsourcing data for high definition maps in 2018. Read more at forbes.com.

Now is Pandora’s time to shine in the big leagues. Of course, Pandora has been around longer than almost everyone in the music streaming big leagues, but it's one of the last music services to launch its on-demand streaming service to users. Pandora Premium takes all of the familiar aspects of Pandora’s traditional service, and adds in the ability to pick and choose albums and songs at will from their library. Premium emphasizes recommendations based on listening and thumbs up history to free users from creating playlists. Pandora Premium cost $10 per month and will begin to roll out starting Wednesday on an invitation only basis at first. Read more at wired.com.

A study from Indiana University and University of Southern California found that there are 48 million social bots, meaning accounts controlled by software that generates content and establishes interactions algorithmically. Though most of these bots are designed to harrass, spam, or artificially influence certain groups by automatically retweeting and liking, some bots are also beneficial, like those used for customer service or designed to alert people of natural disasters. Read more at axios.com.

Google’s twenty percent project strikes again. This time, the company’s Area 120 incubator is launching a new iOS app called Uptime that allows users to watch YouTube videos together while reacting and commenting in real time. Certain interactions like comments and sparkles will be seen by other live viewers, while reactions like emojis and hearts will be included with the linked video and attributed to the user after viewing is complete. Read more at arstechnica.com.

Megan Morrone and Jason Howell are joined today by Gabriel Weinberg of DuckDuckGo. Tech News Today streams live weekdays at 4PM Pacific, 7PM Eastern at twit.tv/live. You can subscribe to the show and watch it on-demand at twit.tv/tnt.

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