Meta: Bits and Bytes: Meta unveils glasses pitched as smartphone rival and more

Meta unveils glasses pitched as smartphone rival

Meta has given a peek at augmented reality eyewear touted as the most advanced glasses in the world.

According to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the bulky, black-framed prototype called ‘Orion’ is able to overlay holographic images on a wearer’s field of vision and is ultimately intended to rival the smartphone. “The right way to look at Orion is as a time machine,” Zuckerberg said.
People have been slow to embrace wearables in the form of headgear, but Meta is confident it can win them over by packing technology beefed up with AI into stylish Ray-Ban glasses that can do things like answer questions about what you are looking at or act as a translator for conversations.

Study finds ‘vast surveillance’ of social media users

The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said that it found several social media and streaming services engaging in a “vast surveillance” of consumers, including minors.The findings come from a study of how nine companies — including Meta, YouTube and TikTok — collected and used consumer data. The sites, which mostly offer free services, profited by feeding the data into advertising that targets specific users by demographics.

The agency said the report showed the need for federal privacy legislation and restrictions on how companies collect and use data. Efforts by the companies to police themselves also haven’t worked, the FTC concluded in its report. “Self-regulation has been a failure,” it added.

Google files EU complaint over Microsoft cloud services

Google said that it has filed a complaint against Microsoft at the European Commission, accusing the latter of “anti-competitive” licencing practices to force customers to use its cloud service.
Google said Microsoft had exploited customers’ reliance on “must have” products such as Windows Server to compel them to use its Azure cloud platform.

Microsoft has made it cost-prohibitive for clients to use Windows Server or other products on rival services, such as Google Cloud or Amazon’s AWS, by marking up the price by 400%, Google charged. “Microsoft’s licencing terms restrict European customers from moving their current Microsoft workloads to competitors’ clouds — despite there being no technical barriers to doing so,” Google Cloud vice-president Amit Zavery said.

X releases first transparency report since Musk’s takeover

Social media platform X published its first transparency report since the company was purchased by Elon Musk. The report, which details content moderation practices, shows that X suspended nearly 5.3 million accounts in the first half of the year, compared with the 1.6 million accounts it suspended in the first half of 2022. The company also “removed or labelled” more than 10.6 million posts for violating platform rules — about five million of which it categorised as violating its “hateful conduct” policy.

Posts containing “violent content” — 2.2 million — or “abuse and harassment” — 2.6 million — also accounted for a large portion of flagged content.

To enforce rules, X said, it uses a combination of machine learning and human review.