Bytes: What’s new in tech
Parler, still offline, fires its CEO
The co-founder and CEO of Parler said he was fired by its board, said Jeff Horwitz and Keach Hagey in The Wall Street Journal. John Matze, who helped launch the alternative social messaging platform in 2018, was “within days of restoring service to its roughly 15 million users” after Apple and Google barred it from their app stores and Amazon kicked Parler off its web-hosting service over the service’s role in the U.S. Capitol attack. Matze said he was “seeking to adjust the platform’s moderation rules” and add a ban on “designated domestic terrorist organizations.” Dan Bongino, a prominent conservative talk show host and Parler investor, said the site “could have been up in a week if we just would have bent the knee,” suggesting Parler “intended to fight back against the tech platforms.”
Apple auto partnership hits snags
Apple has been talking with Hyundai and Kia about building an electric vehicle, said Mark Gurman in Bloomberg.com, but the project has already hit a roadblock. The tech giant “keeps development projects secret for years and controls relationships with suppliers with ruthless efficiency,” and it became upset when Hyundai, which owns Kia, issued a premature statement revealing its relationship with Apple. Though the “secret project has ramped up in recent months” it’s unclear when talks will resume. Apple has teased its vision of an “Apple car” for nearly a decade with little to show for it. The company has a “small team of engineers” working on the project, but development is still at an early stage.
Tracking the Capitol rioters
Data collected from smartphone apps allowed us to track the movements of dozens of Capitol insurgents, said Charlie Warzel and Stuart Thompson in The New York Times. Phones are routinely surveilled in a complex advertising ecosystem that “turns every location ping into currency.” While the data made available to advertisers is supposed to be anonymized, we were able to “connect dozens of devices to their owners, tying anonymous locations back to names, home addresses, social networks, and phone numbers.” We tracked 100,000 location pings for thousands of smartphones, “revealing 130 devices inside the Capitol” on Jan. 6. One device led us back to the home of a Kentucky pest-control business owner. “When we reached him by phone, he insisted he never entered the Capitol.” But his phone data shows he did.