Category Archives: Google

While its against the law in the US to install stalkerware on an adults phone without consent, marketing such apps is legal. Although many companies display disclaimers on their websites stating that their software is intended for legal purposes only, there have been a handful of convictions for installing spyware on unknowing adults devices.

Last September, in the first order of its kind, the Federal Trade Commission banned a company called Support King, which operated under the name SpyFone, from the surveillance business for illegally harvesting and sharing peoples private information and failing to implement basic security measures. The FTC said it will be aggressive about seeking surveillance bans when companies and their executives egregiously invade our privacy.

While many stalkerware apps are sold as parental monitoring tools for keeping an eye on children, they provide the same capabilities as services that are more blatant about being designed to spy on spouses, says David Ruiz, senior privacy advocate at the security group Malwarebytes. Theres a whole family of applications out there that straight up says they will, quote unquote, solve your problem of a cheating spouse. Which is not just ludicrousits dangerous.

Technology-facilitated abuse is a rapidly growing problem. Around 1.5 million Americans are stalked through some form of technology every year, according to the Stalking Prevention Awareness and Resource Center, while the UK domestic violence charity Refuge reported a 97% increase in the number of abuse cases requiring specialist tech support between April 2020 and May 2021.

The charitys tech abuse team said it works with countless survivors whose abusers installed stalkerware on their phones in a bid to intimidate, harass, and manipulate them.

To hear that these apps are being marketed directly to perpetrators is extremely concerning, says Emma Pickering, tech abuse lead at Refuge. Tech companies must act swiftly to remove ads which enable perpetrators to access tools to read their partners messages or track locations without their knowledge or consent.

We must recognize that cyberstalking is dangerous and threatening behavior in the same way stalking on the street is.

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Google is failing to enforce its own ban on ads for stalkerware - MIT Technology Review

Tech giant Google is preparing to purge nearly 900,000 apps, which have been abandoned or not been updated, from the Play Store.

According to Android Authority, the Google Play Store could see the number of available apps drop by nearly a third.

Google and Apple have both unveiled measures to deal with abandoned apps or apps that have not been updated in two years. In Google's case, that amounts to 869,000 apps, while Apple has some 650,000.

According to CNET, Google is preparing to hide those apps, making it impossible for users to download them until the developers update them.

The main reason both companies are taking these measures is to protect their users' security.

Older apps do not take advantage of changes in Android and iOS, new APIs, or new development methods that bring enhanced protection. As a result, older apps can have security flaws that newer apps don't have, the report said.

--IANS

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(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

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Google to remove nearly 900,000 abandoned apps from Play Store - Business Standard

Google has outlined its vision for this years major Android update, which looks set to continue many of the customization and privacy initiatives that the search giant introduced with last years Android 12. Its customizable Material You color schemes will now be available as preset themes and are also expanding to cover third-party apps icons and the media player. There are also new security features, including a dedicated Privacy and Security menu.

The direction isnt likely to come as much of a surprise to anyone whos kept up with Android 13s early betas. But todays announcements, made to coincide with the search giants annual Google I/O developer conference, see the company lay out its overarching vision for this years major Android update. The search giant is releasing Android 13s second public beta today to coincide with the announcements.

After last years Material You customizable themes feature, Android can already match its color scheme to that of your phones wallpaper. This year, media controls are also receiving a similar Material You-style overhaul and will be able to extract colors from the album art of the music being played. Another new feature for those that dont want or need their phones theme to exactly match their wallpaper is a series of optional preset color schemes to choose from.

Material You theming options are also coming to third-party app icons, which appeared in Android 13s first developer preview in February. This was a bit of a missing part for us in the last release, explains Googles vice president of product management, Sameer Samat. It felt like everything in the system UI got that nice Material You treatment except the icons. For us, it always felt like unfinished business. The new app icon-theming options will come to Pixel devices first and only work with supported apps.

Google Messages RCS support is also set to get a big improvement later this year with the beta launch of end-to-end encryption for group chats, a feature that is currently only available in one-to-one RCS chats in Google Messages. The search giant says the standard, which aims to be a successor to the now-ancient SMS and MMS protocols, is now available to over 500 million Google Messages users worldwide.

As weve seen from its betas, Android 13 is also placing more restrictions on the personal data and phone features apps can use by default. Soon, apps will have to ask for permission to even send notifications in the first place, and theres also a new photo picker that lets you restrict the photos and videos an app can access, rather than granting permission to see your whole library. New permissions will also limit apps to accessing either Photos & videos or Music & audio files, rather than all filetypes.

A new Security and Privacy settings page is being added later this year to collect all of your critical data privacy information in one place. Its designed to encourage Android users to address any security issues that might crop up.

Away from Android phones themselves, Google is also emphasizing the work its doing on interconnectivity with other devices. It plans to add fast-pairing support for the incoming Matter smart home standard this fall to make it quick and easy to use an Android phone to add supported smart home devices to your network. Support for the new power-efficient Bluetooth LE Audio standard is also on the way in Android 13.

A final feature worth mentioning: Android 13 will let users set system languages on a per-app basis, a feature that Samat says is helpful for multilingual users who rely on different languages in different situations. If youre using a social media app, you might use one language. But if youre banking, you might use another language, he explains.

After the chaotic rollout of Android 12, its perhaps reassuring to see that Googles focus this year is on refining rather than revolutionizing Android. Theres no massive change of direction here, just a steady series of tweaks and improvements to Androids existing initiatives.

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Google's vision for Android 13 is to offer a little more of everything - The Verge

For Google, a company that built its reputation on organizing the worlds information, the latest sales pitch to users is that it will try to do more with less of it.

At its I/O 2022 developer conference on May 11th, the tech giant announced a range of privacy measures that it says will help users retain more control over how their data is used by Google applications and displayed to the world through search.

One new change introduced at the conference is the My Ad Center interface: a hub that will let users customize the types of ads they see by selecting from a range of topics they are interested in or opt to see fewer ads on a given topic.

Google says that My Ad Center will help to give users control not just over how their data is used but also over how this affects their experience of the web.

In another announcement unveiled at the conference, Google said that users would be able to request that personal information such as email or address details be removed from search results through a new tool that will be accessible from a users Google profile page.

Perhaps expectedly for a conference geared toward developers, some of Googles most significant privacy announcements involved changing approaches to software engineering. The safety and security segment of the event, led by Jen Fitzpatrick, Googles SVP for core systems and experiences, emphasized the concept of protected computing: a set of technologies that Google says represent a transformed approach to where and how data is processed.

In summary, protected computing means that more data will be processed on devices (e.g., Android phones) without being sent to Googles cloud servers. And when user information is sent to Googles servers, more of it will be anonymized through techniques like the use of differential privacy and edge computing.

Fitzpatrick said that the changes were about justifying the trust that users put in Google to keep them secure.

Protecting your privacy requires us to be rigorous in building products that are private by design, she said.

The safety and security presentation included an acknowledgment that users expectations of privacy are changing and that the company has a need to recognize and adapt to them. Its notable that Google is increasingly trying to prove to users that it can keep at least some of their data out of the hands of the advertisers that bring in the vast majority of the companys revenue.

And under the guiding statement, secure by default, private by design, Google is also pushing to boost user safety across its products by implementing additional security measures out of the box.

Security announcements made at the I/O event included a number of measures meant to increase user protections across a range of Google products. For one, a new account safety status icon will show a warning on a users profile across all Google apps when any security issues are identified and direct the user toward recommended actions to correct the issue.

And the company will expand two-step verification for accounts by sending an Is this you? notification to phones when a user tries to sign in to a Google account elsewhere on the web.

Phishing protection will also be coming to the Google Workspace suite, with the Docs, Sheets, and Slides applications soon to display warning notifications about malicious links in documents.

Overall, Googles safety announcements suggest a company that wants to be seen as centering users security concerns. At an I/O event full of new and creative uses of user data, its heartening to see that, on the face of things, privacy was by no means forgotten.

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Google pitches for user trust with expanded privacy controls - The Verge

It is Google I/O 2022 this week, among many other things, and we were hoping for an architectural deep dive on the TPUv4 matrix math engines that Google hinted about at last years I/O event. But, alas, no such luck. But the search engine and advertising giant, which also happens to be one of the biggest AI innovators on the planet because of the ginormous amount of data it needs to make use of, did give out some more information about the TPUv4 processors and systems that use them.

Google also said that it was installing eight pods of the TPUv4 systems in its Mayes County, Oklahoma datacenter, which is kissing 9 exaflops of aggregate compute capacity, for use by its Google Cloud arm so researchers and enterprises would have access to the same kind and capacity of compute that Google has to do its own internal AI development and production.

Google has operated datacenters in Mayes County, which is northeast of Tulsa, since 2007 and has invested $4.4 billion in facilities there since that time. It is located in the geographic center of the United States well a little south and west of it and that makes it useful because of the relatively short latencies to a lot of the country. And now, by definition, Mayes County has one of the largest assemblages of iron to drive AI workloads on the planet. (If the eight TPUv4 pods were networked together and work could span all at simultaneously, we could possibly say the largest unequivocally. . . . Google surely did, as you will see in the quote below.)

During his keynote address, Sundar Pichai, who is chief executive officer of the Google and also of its parent company, Alphabet, mentioned in passing that the TPUv4 pods were in preview on its cloud.

All of the advances that we have shared today are possible only because of continued innovation in our infrastructure, Pichai said talking about some pretty interesting natural language and immersive data search engine enhancements it has made that feed into all kinds of applications. Recently, we announced plans to invest $9.5 billion in datacenters and offices across the US. One of our state of the art datacenters is in Mayes County, Oklahoma and I am excited to announce that there, we are launching the worlds largest publicly available machine learning hub for all of our Google Cloud customers. This machine leaning hub has eight Cloud TPU v4 pods, custom built on the same networking infrastructure that powers Googles largest neural models. The provide nearly 9 exaflops computing power in aggregate, bringing our customers unprecedented ability to run complex models and workloads. We hope this will fuel innovation in across fields, from medicine to logistics to sustainability and more.

Pichai added that this AI hub based on the TPUv4 pods already has 90 percent of its power coming from sustainable, carbon free sources. (He did not say how much was wind, solar, or hydro.)

Before we get into the speeds and feeds of the TPUv4 chips and pods, it is probably worth it to point out that, for all we know, Google already has TPUv5 pods in its internal-facing datacenters, and it might have a considerably larger collection of TPUs to drive its own models and augment its own applications with AI algorithms and routines. That would be the old way that Google did things: Talk about generation N of something while it was selling generation N-1 and had already moved on to generation N+1 for its internal workloads.

This doesnt seem to be the case. In a blog post written by Sachin Gupta, vice president and general manager of infrastructure at Google Cloud, and Max Sapozhnikov, product manager for the Cloud TPUs, when the TPUv4 systems were built last year, Google gave early access to them to researchers at Cohere, LG AI Research, Meta AI, and Salesforce Research, and moreover, they added that the TPUv4 systems were used to create the Pathways Language Model (PaLM) that underpins the natural language processing and speech recognition innovations that were the core of todays keynote. Specifically, PaLM was developed and tested across two TPUv4 pods, which each have 4,096 of the TPUv4 matrix math engines.

If the shiniest new models Google has are being developed on TPUv4s, then it probably does not have a fleet of TPUv5s hidden in a datacenter somewhere. Although we will add, it would be neat if TPUv5 machinery was hidden, 26.7 miles southwest from our office, in the Lenoir datacenter, shown here from our window:

The stripe of gray way down mountain, below the birch leaves, is the Google datacenter. If you squint and look off in the distance real hard, the Apple datacenter in Maiden is off to the left and considerably further down the line.

Enough of that. Lets talk some feeds and speeds. Here, finally, are some capacities that compare the TPUv4 to the TPUv3:

Last year, when Pichai was hinting about the TPUv4, we guessed that Google was moving to 7 nanometer processes for this generation of TPU, but given that very low power consumption, it is looking like it is probably etched using 5 nanometer processes. (We assumed Google was trying to keep the power envelope constant, and it clearly wanted to reduce it.) We also guessed that it was doubling up the core count, moving from two cores on the TPUv3 to four cores on the TPUv4, something that Google has not confirmed or denied.

Doubling the performance while doubling the cores would get the TPUv4 to 246 teraflops per chip, and moving from 16 nanometers to 7 nanometers would allow that doubling within roughly the same power envelope with about the same clock speed. Moving to 5 nanometers allows the chip to be smaller and run a little bit faster while at the same time dropping the power consumed and having a smaller chip with potentially a higher yield as 5 nanometer processes mature. That the average power consumed went down by 22.7 percent, and that jibes with an 11.8 percent increase in clock speed considering the two-and-change process node jumps from TPUv3 to TPUv4.

There are some very interesting things in that table and in the statements that Google is making in this blog.

Aside from the 2X cores and slight clock speed increase engendered by the chip making process for the TPUv4, it is interesting that Google kept the memory capacity at 32 GB and didnt move to the HBM3 memory that Nvidia is using with the Hopper GH100 GPU accelerators. Nvidia is obsessed about memory bandwidth on the devices and, by extension with its NVLink and NVSwitch, memory bandwidth within nodes and now across nodes with a maximum of 256 devices in a single image.

Google is not as worried about memory atomics (as far as we know) on the proprietary TPU interconnect, device memory bandwidth or device memory capacity. The TPUv4 has the same 32 GB of capacity as the TPUv3, it uses the same HBM2 memory, and it has only a 33 percent increase in speed to just under 1.2 TB/sec. What Google is interested in is bandwidth on the TPU pod interconnect, which is shifting to a 3D torus design that tightly couples 64 TPUv4 chips with wraparound connections something that was not possible with the 2D torus interconnect used with the TPUv3 pods. The increasing dimension of the torus interconnect allows for more TPUs to be pulled into a tighter subnet for collective operations. (Which begs the question, why not a 4D, or 5D, or 6D torus then?)

The TPUv4 pod has 4X the number of TPU chips, at 4,096, and has twice as many TPU cores, which we estimate to be 16,384; we believe that Google has kept the number of MXU matrix math units at two per core, but that is just a hunch. Google could keep the TPU core counts the same and double up the MXU units and get to the same raw performance; the difference would be how much front end scalar/vector processing needs to be done across those MXUs. In any event, at the 16-bit BrainFloat (BF16) floating point format that the Google Brain unit created, the TPUv4 pod delivers 1.1 exaflops, compared to a mere 126 petaflops at BF16. That is a factor of 8.7X more raw compute, balanced against a factor of 3.3X increase in all-to-all reduction bandwidth across the pod and a 3.75X increase in bi-section bandwidth across the TPUv4 interconnect across the pod.

This sentence in the blog intrigued us: Each Cloud TPU v4 chip has ~2.2x more peak FLOPs than Cloud TPU v3, for ~1.4x more peak FLOPs per dollar. If you do the math on that statement, that means the price of the TPU rental on Google Cloud has gone up by 60 percent with the TPUv4, but it does 2.2X the work. This pricing and performance leaps are absolutely consistent with the kind of price/performance improvement that Google expects from the switch ASICs it buys for its datacenters, which generally offer 2X the bandwidth for 1.3X to 1.5X the cost. The TPUv4 is a bit pricier, but it has better networking to run larger models, and that has a cost, too.

The TPUv4 pods can run in VMs on the Google Cloud that range in size from as low as four chips to thousands of chips, and we presume that means across an entire pod.

Go here to read the rest:

Google Stands Up Exascale TPUv4 Pods On The Cloud - The Next Platform

Following last years makeover of the Google TV app, which added features like movie and TV recommendations, critics scores and more, the company today announced at its Google I/O developer conference that, later this year, users will be able to cast TV shows and movies directly from their Android phone or tablet to their TV. The company additionally offered updated metrics related to its Android OS growing footprint and introduced new Android OS developer tools.

Google has been working to overhaul its connected TV experience and the companion app since 2020, when it first introduced the new Google TV interface for its Chromecast streaming devices. It also applied the Google TV name to the app that was previously known as the Google Play Movies & TV app. Earlier this year, Google also removed the Movies & TV section from the Play Store, noting the Google TV app would be the centralized place to buy, rent and watch movies and TV shows on mobile devices.

The company didnt provide additional details about its plans to add support for casting to the app, saying those would come closer to launch. But in a photo Google provided, it showed at least one of the supported apps is NBCUs Peacock.

Image Credits: Google

As part of its announcements, the company also offered a few updates on the Android TV ecosystem, noting there are now 110 million monthly active devices on Android TV OS, including Google TV. Thats up from the 80 million monthly active devices figure Google announced at last years Google I/O event.

It also said the Android TV OS now offers over 10,000 apps.

Of course, the Android TV OS is not a direct equivalent to something like Roku or Amazon Fire TV, as its not only used on the companys first-party devices, like Chromecast. Instead, Googles strategy is to license its platform to partners, including TV OEMs and pay-TV operators worldwide. Currently, there are over 300 partners using the platform, including seven out of the 10 largest TV OEMs, Google said.

But Googles 110 million active devices figure cant be directly compared with the metrics shared by rivals Roku and Amazon.

Android TV OS figures are actually calculated by counting the number of devices that were actively used in a month which means a user with multiple devices could have those devices counted separately, but a family with multiple people watching on one device would be counted once.

Roku and Amazon define monthly active users as accounts that have been active during the month. That means, even if that account streams on several different devices during the time period, it would only be counted once. If Roku or Amazon were to calculate active devices as Google is doing, their numbers would be higher.

In December 2020, Amazon said Fire TV had topped 50 million monthly active users a number still referenced today on its Amazon Ads website.This January, Amazon also noted it had sold more than 150 million Fire TV devices to bring its metrics more in line with Googles device claims. Roku, meanwhile, said during it had ended 2021 with 60.1 million active accounts. It updated that figure to 61.3 million accounts in Q1 2022. It doesnt count active devices.

Image Credits: Google

Google also highlighted several developer features and tools on Android 13 related to its Android TV efforts. The tools are focused on performance and quality, accessibilty and multitasking, Google said, and include:

The picture-in-picture API is particularly interesting as it could introduce more co-watching functionality across the Android TV ecosystem, following Apples introduction of SharePlay, which allows co-watching over FaceTime across platforms, including Apple TV.

More here:

Google TV app to add casting as Android TV ecosystem grows to 110M monthly active devices - TechCrunch

At Googles I/O developer conference, the company rolled out a series of updates for Android app developers who publish to Google Play. Among these were two high-profile changes to its Google Play app marketplace, custom store listings and in-app events, which follow updates Apple made to its own App Store just last year.

Google had been offering A/B testing for product page enhancements since 2015 a feature that allows developers to see which text and graphics would best convert users.

Apple later adopted a similar feature when, at last years Worldwide Developer Conference, it introduced Product Page Optimization designed to help developers to try out different app screenshots, videos and even app icons to try to appeal to different types of users. Developers could segment a certain percentage of App Store traffic to these cohorts to see which product pages performed better before deciding which page should be their default.

Apple last year also announced a related feature called Custom Product Pages that lets developers create different product pages to highlight different app features, each with its own unique URL to be used in external marketing channels.

Today, Google is following suit and essentially launching the same thing with Custom Store Listings.

Instead of simply testing different product pages, Android app developers will be able to make up to 50 custom store listings for their apps. Each page will have its own analytics and deep links available. Notably, this is more listings than Apples solution offers, which is currently set at 35 per app. Google explains developers can use this feature to display different listings to users based on where theyre coming from. For example, a developer with a recipe-finding app could target ad campaigns to U.S. users based on U.S. holidays, by showcasing recipes for Thanksgiving or Fourth of July. But it could target users from other markets at different times with recipes related to their own cultural traditions.

Apple last year also introduced an App Store feature, in-app events, to allow developers to promote real-time happenings going on inside their apps like special events or even just seasonal deals.

Google Play is now rolling out its own take on this feature, as well.

With the launch of what its calling LiveOps, developers will be able to submit content for featuring on the Play Store, including major updates for their app or game, in-app events and limited-time offers.

Google says LiveOps can drive 5% more 28-day active users to apps and deliver 4% higher revenue for those using the feature compared with those who dont. The feature is in an invite-only beta testing phase for the time being.

While these changes were the highlights among those designed to help developers target, acquire and reengage their users, Google also announced a few other notable Google Play updates.

The company said the Play Store would be updated to help people find the best tablet-optimized apps with new large-screen focused editorial content and a separate review and rating system for large-screen applications. Google Play will also later this year be updated to look better on tablets and foldable devices.

Image Credits: Google

For developers, Google also launched the Google Play SDK Index, which lists over 100 popular SDKs and which app permissions they use, so developers can determine if they adhere to Google Play policies and help fill out their apps privacy labels.

The company said it will soon launch a new Play Console page dedicated to deep links to put all the information and tools for deep links in one place. It also improved its Store Listing Experiments feature (aka A/B testing) to allow developers to see their results more quickly, with more transparency and control so they can better understand how long each experiment may need to run.

And beyond this, it rolled out features focus on improving app quality, including a new Developer Reporting API for accessing Android vitals metrics and issues data outside the Play Console; support for viewing vitals data at the country level; and Google said its making it possible to view vitals alongside Firebase Crashlytics. Itupdated the Play Console by adding revenue and revenue growth metrics to Reach and devices and overhauling its device catalog to include install data and filters by new device attributes like shared libraries. It said its now easier to test apps on different form factors including Android Auto and soon, Wear OS.

Play App Signing was updated to use Google Cloud Key Management and the ability for any app to perform an app signing key rotation in the event of an incident or as a security best practice from the Play Console.

And finally, Googles In-app Updates API will now let users know if theres an update available within 15 minutes instead of up to 24 hours.

See the article here:

Google Play adopts App Store-like features including in-app events and custom product pages - TechCrunch

Android Auto is getting another refresh, this time with a focus on the evolving nature of vehicle touchscreens.

Google says the new split-screen display will be standard for all Android Auto users, allowing them to access key features like navigation, media player, and messages all from one screen. Previously, the split-screen display was only available to owners of certain vehicles. Now, it will be the default user experience for all Android Auto customers.

We used to have a different screen mode that was available in a very limited amount of cars, said Rod Lopez, lead product manager at Android Auto. Now this is available no matter what type of display you have, what size, what form factor, and its a really, really exciting update.

Android Auto will also adapt to any type of touchscreen, no matter what size. Automakers are starting to get creative with the size of their infotainment display, installing everything from large portrait-style screens to long vertical ones shaped like surfboards. Google says that Android Auto will now conform seamlessly to all of those varieties.

Weve seen some really interesting innovation from the industry, going to these very large portrait displays going into these extremely wide landscape displays, Lopez said. And you know, the coolness is Android Auto will now support all of them, and will be able to adapt, giving you all of these features at your fingertips as a user.

Lopez acknowledged that screens in cars are getting bigger, especially in luxury vehicles like the Mercedes-Benz EQS, with its 56-inch wide Hyperscreen (which is actually three separate screens embedded in one pane of glass), or the Cadillac Lyriqs 33-inch LED infotainment display. He said that Google has been partnering with automakers to better adapt Android Auto to this trend.

That was part of the new motivation behind this redesign, was being able to adapt our product better to these vehicles that are coming out with these massive portrait displays and massive widescreen displays, Lopez said. And so our approach has been working really closely with these OEMs [original equipment manufacturers] to make sure that things make sense and they work.

As the screens get bigger, the likelihood that drivers will get more distracted by their displays also grows. A recent study found that drivers selecting music with Apple CarPlay or Android Auto had slower reaction times than those who were high from smoking pot. Google has been trying to work its way through this problem for several years now, but they have yet to arrive at a definitive solution.

Lopez said that safety is top of mind for the Android Auto product team, which motivates them to work closely with OEMs to ensure that the experience is fully integrated into the cars design to minimize distraction.

In addition to adapting to different sized screens, Google is also rolling out several other updates. Users will soon be able to respond to text messages with standardized replies that they can send with just one tap.

There are also more entertainment options. Android Automotive, which is Googles embedded Android Auto system, will now support Tubi TV and Epix Now streaming services. And Android phone owners can cast their own content directly onto their cars screen.

See original here:

Google updates Android Auto to better fit all the different sized touchscreens in cars today - The Verge

During yesterday's Google I/O keynote, there was a moment that stood out to me that may have been lost on a lot of folks. While giving examples of new apps featured on Wear OS 3, Google took the time to call out KakaoTalk. I wont lie. I stood up, pointed my finger at my computer monitor, and screeched some version of AHA! I was right!

If you already know what KakaoTalk is, you likely are Korean, Korean-American, have a ton of Korean friends, love K-pop and K-dramas, or have lived / are living in Korea. You can see where Im going here. KakaoTalk is the number one messaging app in Korea. The easiest way I can describe it is that KakaoTalk is Koreas version of WeChat or WhatsApp. According to Statista, more than 47 million South Koreans were active monthly users on the app in Q4 2021. The current population of South Korea is roughly 51 million.

In my family, only the iPhone users actually text each other. The rest of the time, its KakaoTalk. Thats where the family group chat is. Its how I call and text my aunt. If I call my aunt the normal way, she is much less likely to pick up than if I call her over KakaoTalk. When my parents were alive, it was the main app we used to communicate, send pictures, and share videos. I sometimes hear the KakaoTalk ringtone in my dreams.

While Tizen, Samsungs proprietary wearable OS, had its strengths, it didnt have a good selection of third-party apps. What third-party apps it did have were infrequently updated. Meanwhile, Apple and less technologically impressive Wear OS watches had a much more robust app ecosystem. Fixing this weakness was the main reason Samsung made the switch to Wear OS.

I doubt Samsung would ever admit it, but my theory is that Kakaos refusal to make a Tizen app drove home the point that Samsung would have to abandon the platform if it wanted to grow its smartwatch business. Samsung is the most powerful company in the country. It accounts for roughly 20 percent of South Koreas GDP and it could not get KakaoTalk, the countrys most popular messaging and social media app, to develop a dedicated Tizen app. Reportedly, the reason KakaoTalk gave boiled down to Tizens market reach not being worth the effort. To rub salt in the wound, KakaoTalk had already created Android, iOS, and watchOS versions of its app. Samsung was, in essence, getting dissed on its home turf.

KakaoTalk actually developed its Wear OS app back in October, but its another thing for it to be singled out at I/O. This actually isnt the first time KakaoTalk has been featured in Wear OS promotional materials. The app was also thrown up on the screen at Google I/O last year when Google announced it was collaborating with Samsung on Wear OS 3. I have to imagine this was Google helping Samsung out in appealing to the Korean market, where 72 percent of the population uses Android and 67 percent uses Samsung phones. (Google did also use japchae during the keynote to demo multisearch near me, and you cannot underestimate Korean national pride at stuff like that.)

This is Samsung signaling to the Asian market that its got the apps they want now. Apps that have been on the Apple Watch for a long, long time. For instance, LINE, another Korean-made chat app that is hugely popular in Japan, was also included as one of the featured Wear OS 3 apps. And while Google may not decide to bring the Pixel Watch to the Asian market, these additions do help Samsung smartwatches appear more appealing in arguably its most important market Asia.

So this feels like one of those times where Google trotting out KakaoTalk as a selling point wasnt meant for American or European markets at all. And judging by how I reacted, Id say it was pretty effective.

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Here's why Google highlighting KakaoTalk on Wear OS 3 matters - The Verge

Among the multiple artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) initiatives announced by Google last week at its annual I/O developer conference, there were a number of projects to train the internet companys AI platforms. One such development was the introduction of a 10-shade Monk Skin Tone (MST) Scale something that could have a broader sociological significance as technology platforms witness deeper intersections with society at large. In Googles words, the MST Scale will support inclusive product and research across the industry.

What is the Monk Skin Tone Scale?

Developed in partnership with Dr Ellis Monk, associate professor of sociology at Harvard University, the Monk Skin Tone (MST) Scale is a tool that will be primarily incorporated by Google into computer vision, which is a type of AI that allows computers to see and understand images. It has been found that computer vision systems often do not function as efficiently for people of darker skin as they do for those with fairer complexion. Using the MST Scale, Google and the tech industry are aiming to build more representative datasets so that such AI models can be trained to identify a wider range of skin tones in images.

How will it work?

According to Google, the scale will make it easier for people of all backgrounds to find more relevant and helpful search results. For instance, users who search for makeup or beauty tutorials in Google Images will see an option to refine search results further by skin tone. Going ahead, Google will utilise the MST Scale to better detect and categorise images to give a larger range of results.

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The tech giant plans to further expand the use of this schema the structure of the database created based on different skin tones so that creators and online businesses may label their content or products based on other attributes, such as hair colour and hair texture. Google has openly released the scale so that anyone can use it for research and product development.

Why the MST Scale?

According to Dr Courtney Heldreth, a social psychologist and user experience (UX) researcher at Googles Responsible AI Human-Centered Technology UX department, persistent inequities exist globally due to prejudice or discrimination against individuals with darker skin tones, also known as colourism. And AI not accurately seeing skin tone, which could further lead to existing inequities, is a type of colourism.

To bridge this gap, a Google research team including Heldreth and Xango Eye, a product manager working on Responsible AI, focused on bringing more skin tone equity to AI development. The team last year partnered with Monk, whose research has centred on how factors like skin tone, race and ethnicity affect inequality.

The foundation for the MST scale was laid upon the existing Fitzpatrick scale, developed by American dermatologist Thomas B Fitzpatrick in 1975, which classified human skin type into seven broad colours. The Google team and Monk arrived at a scale composed of 10 shades a range pegged to be not too limiting but also not too complex and surveyed thousands of adults in the US who felt more represented with the new methodology.

Are there similar developments elsewhere?

Several large corporations stepped up their efforts towards colour-based inclusiveness in light of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, which had happened in aftermath of police brutality and the killing of 46-year old African American George Floyd. In 2020, Johnson & Johnson-owned Band-Aid launched a new range of adhesive bandages in different shades of black and brown to make its products more inclusive for people of colour. In India, after backlash and strong public feedback over discrimination against people with darker skin tones, the Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI) in 2014 released guidelines for the advertising of skin lightening and fairness products. More recently, in 2020, Hindustan Unilever-owned cosmetic brand Fair & Lovely was renamed Glow & Lovely, after criticism for promoting colourism in its advertisements and marketing campaigns.

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Explained: Googles new skin tone scale for refined search results and more - The Indian Express