Techmeme
May 3, 2022, 2:15 PM

Top News

Joseph Cox / VICE:
Investigation: for ~$160, data broker SafeGraph will sell a week's worth of data on visitors of 600+ Planned Parenthood locations and where they went afterwards  —  It costs just over $160 to get a week's worth of data on where people who visited Planned Parenthood came from, and where they went afterwards.
Joseph Cox / VICE:
Internal documents: the CDC bought the location data of millions of phones in the US to analyze compliance with COVID-19 rules, especially in the Navajo Nation  —  Newly released documents showed the CDC planned to use phone location data to monitor schools and churches, and wanted to use the data for many non-COVID-19 purposes too.
New York Times:
Interviews with 30+ people detail Elon Musk's impulse to acquire Twitter, relying on around 10 confidants who mostly agree with him and carry out his bidding  —  To a degree unseen in any other mogul, the world's richest man acts on impulse and the belief that he is absolutely right.
Matt Levine / Bloomberg:
By accepting Elon Musk's bid, Twitter's management and board of directors showed they care more about shareholders than Twitter as a company or as a product  —  I'm sorry but more Twitter  —  You can tell a simple story about Elon Musk's pending acquisition of Twitter Inc. that goes like this.
Sarah Frier / Bloomberg:
In a filing, Twitter says Elon Musk's bid could make it difficult to attract and retain key talent, keep employees focused, and make changes to its business  —  Twitter Inc.'s $44 billion deal to be acquired by Elon Musk means it risks losing advertisers and employees, who may be concerned about the company's uncertain future.
Reuters:
Wall Street Journal:
The SEC plans to add 20 investigators and litigators to its Crypto Assets and Cyber Unit, created in September 2017 to investigate fraud, taking it to 50 staff  —  Agency to add 20 staffers to help tighten scrutiny of unregulated $1.7 trillion cryptocurrency market
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Spotify debuts Spotify Island on Roblox, the first music streaming brand on the service; artists and fans can go on quests, unlock content, and buy merchandise  —  Spotify announced today it will become the first music streaming brand to have an official presence within Roblox, with the launch of …
Will Douglas Heaven / MIT Technology Review:
Meta's AI lab has created a language model called Open Pretrained Transformer, trained with 175B parameters, and is making it available for free for researchers  —  Meta's AI lab has created a massive new language model that shares both the remarkable abilities and the harmful flaws of OpenAI's pioneering neural network GPT-3.
Shuli Ren / Bloomberg:
After cracking down on its technology giants, China is leaning on Alibaba, JD.com, and Meituan's distribution networks during ongoing lockdowns in Shanghai  —  The regulatory crackdown on Big Tech that started in China in late 2020 sent stocks reeling.  Over the past year …
Ron Miller / TechCrunch:
Graphite, an open-source command line interface and code review dashboard, raises $20M Series A led by a16z and hopes to grow its team of 6 to 15+ by year's end  —  Graphite's founders came from Facebook, Airbnb and Square, three companies where they had access to sophisticated code review tools.
Financial Times:
Sources: the UK has shelved plans to empower the CMA's digital markets unit, announced in 2020, hampering its ability to set rules and impose fines  —  Government not expected to include legislation to beef up CMA's digital markets unit in Queen's Speech  —  The UK is poised to shelve plans …

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More News

Jeffrey Dastin / Reuters:
Shaurya Malwa / CoinDesk:

Earlier Picks

Bloomberg:
Paresh Dave / Reuters:
Jules Wang / Android Police:
Ashley Carman / Bloomberg:
Andrew Liszewski / Gizmodo: