Geopolitics has a massive role to play. Both India and the U.S. have incentives to stick it to China any way they can right now–including Chinese owned businesses. It hasn’t been a good few weeks for TikTok, the Chinese-owned app that has been the world’s hottest social media platform for the past few years. It currently has over 2 billion users. Despite its mass appeal, the app is coming under increasing scrutiny from powerful governments–which could spell disaster for TikTok’s future. Read Full Story

But Portland residents can still use facial recognition tech, like the kind found in iPhones and Nest cameras. Over the past year, several U.S. cities have taken steps to ban or limit the use of facial recognition technology to surveil people. Yet these bans were only applied to government departments and police. As of today, Portland, Oregon, has surpassed those bans in an effort to protect its citizens from surveillance. Read Full Story

Facebook’s general counsel blasted the lawsuit as “revisionist history.” In the what may be the most consequential U.S. antitrust action in years, the U.S. government and 48 state attorneys general have filed suit against Facebook, asking that the social media giant sell off its WhatsApp messaging app and the social photo platform Instagram. Read Full Story

Slack Technologies is accusing Microsoft of illegally tying its Teams product to its market-dominant Office Suite. Slack Technologies is shining an antitrust spotlight on Microsoft, putting the tech giant in familiar territory. Read Full Story

The U.S.’s rural areas still suffer from limited broadband availability. Addressing that may take both government investment and new technologies. Providing reliable, high-speed internet to remote parts of the U.S. has been a challenge for years. And the COVID-19 pandemic has created a renewed sense of urgency to solve it. Read Full Story

It’s successfully helping the medical system in Ghana and Rwanda. Now the drone company thinks it can help streamline U.S. medical deliveries while maintaining social distancing. Zipline, a medical drone delivery company that launched in Rwanda , planned to come to the U.S. later this year. But as the coronavirus crisis grows, the company is now working with government regulators to try to launch as soon as possible. Read Full Story

The consumer-electronics research arm has been quiet for years—but it’s also been busy. Its new mission: Make Google hardware as smart as Google software. In 2015, Dan Kaufman, the director of the information innovation office at the U.S. Department’s fabled DARPA lab, began talking to Google about joining the company in some capacity. Maybe he could work on Android. Or take a job at X, the Alphabet moonshot factory formerly known as Google X. And then another possibility came up: ATAP (Advanced Technology and Projects), a Google research skunkworks that was “just like DARPA, but in Silicon Valley,” as he describes it. His reaction: “That sounds awesome!” Read Full Story

The symbiotic relationship between people and technology will power future business success.

The blue chip nonprofit released a report the week of the company’s expected IPO saying there’s a risk that Palantir’s software was used to enable human rights abuses against immigrants and their children. Two days before Palantir’s expected initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange, Amnesty International released a report saying the secretive data analytics company presents a risk to human rights. The charge stems from Palantir’s relationship with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and its role as an enabler of the U.S. government’s ill treatment of immigrants and asylum seekers. Read Full Story

The bill comes as TikTok looks to reassure U.S. officials.