Bytes: What’s new in tech

Accused by a machine

A man in Michigan may have been the first person in the U.S. wrongfully arrested because of facial recognition software, said Kashmir Hill in The New York Times. In January, police in Detroit took Robert Williams into custody after surveillance video captured “a heavyset man, dressed in black and wearing a red St. Louis Cardinals cap,” shoplifting watches. The image had been uploaded to a facial recognition database, which “mapped the man’s face and searched for similar ones in a collection of 49 million photos.” Williams’ driver’s license photo was among the matches. He was arrested and brought to the station, where a police officer held the surveillance image by his face. “The photo was blurry, but it was clearly not Mr. Williams.” Yet he was still held for 30 hours and released only after posting $1,000 bond. The state offered to expunge the record of his arrest only after it was publicized in the press.

Trump’s social media ‘code red’

The Trump campaign is “devising workaround plans if social media companies continue to remove or block content,” said Emily Glazer and Michael Bender in The Wall Street Journal. Restrictions from Facebook,

Twitter, and Snapchat have created “digital roadblocks” that one campaign person called “code red.” Last week, Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale tweeted, “Hey @twitter, your days are numbered,” and linked to a post from him on Parler, an alternative site that describes itself as an “unbiased social media platform.” But Parler has roughly 1 million users; by comparison, Twitter has 53.5 million U.S. users. Officials have been trying to build an audience for the campaign’s own smartphone app, which “gamifies” its interface by allowing users to “earn points for actions like donations.”

A new look for the next iOS

The iPhone home screen is getting easier to navigate with the iOS 14, said Allison DeNisco Rayome in CNET.com. The uninterrupted grid familiar since the first days of the iPhone is gone. Taking a cue from Android, Apple is also bringing widgets that can be resized and added to the home screen, letting you see “information like the weather on your home screen at a glance.” The new operating system boasts an “App Library” at the end of your home screen that provides a much tidier way to quickly find apps “without swiping through page after page.”