We chat about Google I/O & our reactions to the Duplex call. Plus a follow up to the #askt3chtree question on smartphone batteries.

Full show notes & links to subscribe are here.

Steve Straza:

The pricing for Twitter’s new account activity API is ridiculous and doesn’t address how Twitter clients have used the streaming APIs until now. Streaming is effectively dead as of August.

Predictable, but still sad.

I attempted a storytelling format on my latest episode on the Wildpeeta brothers & their journey from startup to shut down, and how the lessons they learnt have led to them coming back in partnership with Freedom Pizza.

As always, full show notes & links are here.

Taking monitoring to a whole new level.

Micro Monday shoutout to @hartlco, not just a community member but also actively growing the ecosystem with Icro. Excited that the app is now approved!

Natasha Turak, reporting for CNBC

UAE Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) Director General Hamad Obaid Al Mansouri confirmed the talks this week, according to local news reports, citing Microsoft and Apple’s growing investment plans in the UAE and the desire to forge closer relationships with tech companies as primary reasons.

Let’s hope.

We chat about ride-sharing platform Careem’s security breach notification & some password management tips. Plus, my first @microdotblog outro :)

Detailed show notes are available here.

Was told today I look like I’m 28. Either I’m doing something right or this person is doing something wrong, but regardless, a happy Saturday :)

Picked up my @instagram archive, will look into importing it to the current blog hopefully. Not planning to quit the platform just yet but glad I have a copy. If you didn’t know, you can pick it up here.

It’s been ages since anyone tried to redesign or uplift the usual Twitter experience (little surprise there). Flitter reminds me of @Twittelator Neue in a way, something very clean about it. vimeo.com/266730374

Utpal Bhaskar, reporting for LiveMint:

All Indian villages now have access to electricity. The last village to be brought on the national power grid was Leisang village in the Senapati district of Manipur at 5.30pm on Saturday.

Finally.

“Maybe together we can get somewhere”

When life forces you to replace your car tyres, and you’re just sitting there waiting, courtesy @gayamusic. #music #cover

The start of a new season of the ‘Coffee & Iced Tea’ podcast, where I speak to the sisters behind Frying Pan Adventures, Dubai’s first tour company & how they got started.

Detailed show notes are available here.

Links to subscribe and other fun stuff are here.

Excited to see our podcast @t3chtree as a friend of @TieDubai & media partner for #TiEConDubai 2018. #entrepreneurship #dubai #podcast

We’re talking grassroots innovation in our region, mentorship & the TiECon 2018. We also have some invite codes to give away if you’re looking to attend the conference.

Detailed show notes are available here.

What is this life if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

Someday, maybe. Not today. #2018

#always #weekend #birthday #whiskey

We’re talking #privacy & @facebook on the latest episode of @t3chtree, do check it out! #podcast 🎧

David Ingram, writing for Reuters:

Facebook Inc said on Wednesday the personal information of up to 87 million users, mostly in the United States, may have been improperly shared with political consultancy Cambridge Analytica, up from a previous news media estimate of more than 50 million.

Yay.

#Privacy iOS users, Settings → Privacy is your friend. Review & turn things off for apps that don’t need content they have access to. Turn on Advertising → Limit Ad Tracking, which stops providers from targeting ads to you (you can reset this ad ID if the setting was off).

Micro Monday shoutout to @Macgenie, who’s also a great resource to get started on micro.blog. Plus really enjoying the @monday microcast, do check it out with you haven’t.

Ep # 4: On the latest episode of @t3chtree talking Blackberry suing Facebook & smartphones: OS', batteries & cameras, with my recommendation for @halidecamera on iOS.

Foxconn buys Belkin for $866m

Sean Gallagher, writing for Ars Technica:

In response to an email inquiry by Ars about this data gathering, a Facebook spokesperson replied, “The most important part of apps and services that help you make connections is to make it easy to find the people you want to connect with. So, the first time you sign in on your phone to a messaging or social app, it’s a widely used practice to begin by uploading your phone contacts.”

A widely used practice is something Facebook could have taken a stand on, eons ago, and led the industry, rather hiding under its cover.

As much as the headlines about Facebook having a bad week will continue, it’s amazing how unchecked the whole system was:

If you granted permission to read contacts during Facebook’s installation on Android a few versions ago—specifically before Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean)—that permission also granted Facebook access to call and message logs by default. The permission structure was changed in the Android API in version 16. But Android applications could bypass this change if they were written to earlier versions of the API, so Facebook API could continue to gain access to call and SMS data by specifying an earlier Android SDK version. Google deprecated version 4.0 of the Android API in October 2017—the point at which the latest call metadata in Facebook users' data was found.

The issue with such far reaching applications and OS' is that there aren’t—and are unlikely to be anytime soon—overarching regulations that can manage these issues. Even if the US or the EU has stringent privacy regulations that will allow them to penalize Facebook’s entities within their jurisdiction, that’s as far as they’d be able to go.

Six months down the road, where will this situation be? Will Facebook brazen it out through via heres-another-setting-under-privacy-settings? That can be the only real indicator.