When the Facebook app can’t be deleted
approaching people so they can interact, moving around a space to create a digital map, responding to being embraced.
Lovot’s horn-shaped antenna – featuring a 360-degree camera – recognises its surroundings and detects the direction of sound and voices.
Lovot is the brainchild of Groove X chief executive Kaname Hayashi, who previously worked on SoftBank’s Pepper, a humanoid robot that briefly appeared in a few United States shopping malls two years ago.
Hayashi wanted to create a real connection between people and robots.
‘‘This is just supporting your heart, our motivation,’’ he says.
-AP Facebook will always be around, at least for some people who own Samsung smartphones.
Some Samsung devices come preloaded with a Facebook app that owners can’t remove – the app can only be disabled.
Facebook told The Washington Post this week that the disabled version of the app acts as though it has been deleted and does not collect data about a user’s activity or send information to the social network.
But that may sound like cold comfort to users who don’t want Facebook on their phones, or to other app developers whose software doesn’t come automatically installed on popular smartphones.
Facebook said it has partnerships with other phone manufacturers, mobile operators and operating systems to preinstall its app. But the company would not disclose the names of the other companies it has such agreements with and declined to share the financial details of the partnerships.
Facebook said the pre-installed app allows users to hop on the social network right out of the box.
Bloomberg first reported on the pre-installed app.
Samsung told The Post: ‘‘We’re providing a preloaded Facebook app on select smartphone models with the option to disable it. The app is no longer running when it is disabled.’’
That the Facebook app can’t be removed from certain phones is especially significant.
The company has faced a public backlash over its data privacy controversies and the perceived negativity on the platform. According to a recent survey by the Pew Research Centre, one in four Americans have deleted the Facebook app from their phones.
Preloading software that users didn’t explicitly ask for isn’t unique to Samsung, and app developers besides Facebook have similar partnerships with hardware manufacturers.
Apple’s iPhone comes with many built-in Apple apps.
While they can be deleted using the latest version of the operating system, an earlier iteration doesn’t allow users to delete built-in apps; they can only be removed from the home screen. – The Washington Post