We all knew it would happen eventually and now it has – Google has been fined for violating Europe’s new privacy legislation. Was the 10-year challenge meme actually some sort of secret plot by Facebook? And the question that we really want answered – do dead batteries bounce?
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Trending on Google, the search giant itself has been slapped with a $57 million penalty for violating Europe’s new privacy laws that went into effect last May. The General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, requires that tech firms fully disclose to individuals how their personal data is used. France’s privacy watchdog agency says that Google isn’t doing a good enough job of that. It also accuses Google of showing its users’ personalized ads without first getting consent. Google says it hasn’t decided if it will appeal or not. This is the first GDPR fine for a big U.S. tech company. And I am guessing it won’t be the last.
Trending on Reddit, was the 10-year challenge meme actually a plot by Facebook to harvest data to instruct its facial recognition algorithm? That’s the theory put forward by author Kate O’Neill in a guest column on Wired. She suggests that by asking people to create a big data set of then-and-now photos, you could better teach a machine learning algorithm how aging can change a face. Since then, Facebook has denied that it started the meme. It says it was just one of those user-generated memes. So it seems there was nothing more sinister to this than, you know, wasting all of our collective time.
Trending on Youtube, do dead batteries really bounce? Yes, it’s often said you can bounce a battery to see how much charge is left in it. The idea being that a charged battery will bounce higher than a dead battery. But is that just an urban legend? ‘The King of Random” Youtube channel puts it to the test. They even built a battery rail box that I can best describe as “battery Plinko” to compare them.