10 things in tech you need to know today

sghosh@businessinsider.com (Shona Ghosh)
·2 min read
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YouTube is considering giving creators control of their own ad inventories.

PewDiePie/YouTube

Good morning! This is the tech news you need to know this Friday.

  1. Controversial facial recognition firm Clearview AI sold its technology to thousands of clients including ICE, the Justice Department, numerous law enforcement agencies, and many others, according to BuzzFeed. Clearview AI earlier this week admitted that its entire client list had been stolen.

  2. Facebook cancelled its annual F8 conference because of coronavirus concerns. Facebook said it planned to replace the in-person conference with "locally hosted events, videos and live-streamed content."

  3. TikTok videos mocking poor British people as 'chavs' have racked up millions of views and hundreds of thousands of followers, Business Insider has found. The term 'chav' – a slur used to describe poor people – features in thousands of clips posted to the app, which have been watched more than 150 million times in total.

  4. YouTube isn't bound by the First Amendment and is free to censor PragerU videos, a court ruled. In 2017, the right-wing organization Prager University sued YouTube, claiming the platform had violated its First Amendment rights by flagging some of its videos as "inappropriate", but this week lost its case.

  5. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said she worries about TikTok because it got huge faster than Facebook did. Sandberg also said people have reason to worry about their privacy on the app because TikTok is a Chinese company.

  6. Apple reportedly plans to release an iPad keyboard this year with a built-in trackpad, moving it one step closer to a true laptop alternative, according to The Information. The built-in track pad would bring the iPad one step closer to becoming a true alternative to traditional laptops.

  7. Reddit CEO Steve Huffman explosively described TikTok as "parasitic."Huffman, speaking at an event on Wednesday, claimed the Chinese app was always listening and described it as spyware.

  8. The company behind 'Fortnite' is skipping the biggest video game industry conference of the year because of the coronavirus outbreak. Epic Games, the company behind "Fortnite" and one of the world's most popular game development engines, will no longer attend the 2020 Game Developers Conference.

  9. YouTube is considering giving its influencers control of their own ad inventory. The site is testing out ways to allow creators to sell ads to brands they already have relationships with.

  10. The wildly popular simulation game 'Plague Inc' was pulled from the iPhone's Chinese app store amid the ongoing coronavirus crisis in China. The game's maker says it doesn't know why the game was pulled, and whether it was linked to the coronavirus outbreak.

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