Brian McCullough (0:04)

Welcome to the tech meme right home for Tuesday, April 22, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, as the US v. Google remedy trial begins, the FTC also sues Uber and makes Airbnb disclose all fees. Looks like tech regulation is still very much a thing. Blue sky begins rolling out verification, Meta is using AI to find if kids are lying about their age on Instagram, and Microsoft is forging ahead with that recall feature. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. The Remedy phase of the US V. Google trial has opened with the DOJ arguing that Google should be forced to divest Chrome and Google calling the proposed remedies extreme, quoting the Washington Post. We're here to restore competition to these markets, said David Dahlquist, a Justice Department lawyer who laid out in court measures that he said were necessary to address a feedback loop of anti competitive practices that has allowed Google to freeze out Internet search rivals. The remedies will allow all rivals to take the field and allow that block of ICE to thaw, dahlquist said in his opening arguments. In a three week trial over how to address Google's search monopoly. In August, Judge Emmett P. Mehta of the US District Court for the District of Columbia found that Google illegally abused its market power to crush competition in Internet search, calling the company a monopolist that has acted as one to maintain its monopoly. Mehta is also presiding over the current trial and has said he expects to issue a ruling on remedies in August or September. The government late last year asked Meta to force Google to divest Chrome and prohibit the company from paying smartphone companies such as Apple and Samsung to make Google search a default on devices, positions the Trump administration's Justice Department reaffirmed last month. It has also asked for provisions forcing Google to share some technical data with competitors if the Internet search market does not change within five years. With those remedies, the government says Google should be forced to divest Android, its mobile operating system, standing before Meta. On Monday, Google lawyer John Schritlane called the government's proposed remedies it extreme and fundamentally flawed. Google won its place in the market fair and square, schmidtlein said, adding that the government's proposals will reward competitors with advantages they never would have earned in a market where Google competed. Another little interesting nugget shook loose because of this case. Apparently in this AI era, it's not just search deals, a Google vice president has said the company pays Samsung an enormous sum of money every month to pre install Gemini on its devices as part of a two year deal, quoting Bloomberg. The company began paying Samsung for Gemini in January, according to Peter Fitzgerald, Google's vice president of platforms and device partnerships, who testified Monday in Washington federal court as part of the Justice Department's antitrust case. The contract, set to run at least two years, provides fixed monthly payments for each device that preinstalls Gemini and pays Samsung a percentage of the revenue Google earns from advertisements within the app, Fitzgerald told Judge Amit Mehta, who is overseeing the case. The amount of money that Google pays to Samsung wasn't revealed in court. During opening statements, DOJ lawyer David Dahlquist said the search giant pays Samsung enormous sums of money in a fixed monthly payment. Between 2020 and 2023, Google paid $8 billion to make Google Search, the Play Store and Google Assistant the default on Samsung's mobile devices, according to testimony in a separate case over the company's monopolization of the Android ecosystem. Well, three months in and so far at least, there's little sign that the Trump administration will be less aggressive about regulating big tech. The US FTC has sued Uber, claiming the company charged for Uber one without consent, made it difficult to cancel and failed to deliver promised savings. Quoting cnbc, the agency claims Uber violated the FTC act and the Restore Online Shoppers Confidence act, providing misleading information about its Uber 1 subscription service, failing to provide a simple way for users to cancel their membership and charging them without their consent. Americans are tired of getting signed up for unwanted subscriptions that seem impossible to cancel, ftc chair Andrew Ferguson said in a statement. The Trump Vance FTC is fighting back on behalf of the American people. The complaint marks the first FTC action against a major tech company since President Donald Trump began his second term in January. The FTC has several ongoing lawsuits against tech's mega cap companies, including Meta, Google, Amazon. Some cases were brought during President Joe Biden's presidency, but Trump's FTC was aggressive during its first term, most notably going after Meta. Uber and CEO Dara Khosrowshahi each reportedly donated $1 million to President Trump's inaugural fund, joining a lengthy roster of tech companies and executives attempting to cozy up to the incoming administration. Noah Edwardson, an Uber spokesperson, said in an email that the company is disappointed by the FTC's complaint, but that it's confident the courts will rule in its favor. Uber one signup and cancellation processes are clear, simple and follow the letter and spirit of the law, edwardson said. Uber does not sign up or charge consumers without their consent, and cancellations can now be done anytime in app and take most people 20 seconds or less. End Quote Uber One, introduced in 2021, charges 999 monthly or $96 annually, and provides benefits like free delivery fees and discounts on certain ride delivery and pickup services. As of December, the program had around 30 million members, according to Uber's most recent annual report. The FTC's complaint claims Uber promotes Uber One as $25 in monthly savings without factoring in the membership fee. It also accuses Uber of billing users before their scheduled payment date. According to the ftc, canceling an Uber One membership is intentionally made extremely difficult. Some users are told to reach out to customer support to cancel, but no contact method is provided. Others report being charged for another billing cycle even after canceling their subscription. Airbnb now shows the full cost of a stay, excluding taxes in search results by default A Biden era FTC rule on junk fees is set to go into effect on May 12. The FTC is all over the show today, suddenly quoting Bloomberg. Customers in the US and 200 plus other markets that didn't previously have price display regulations will now see the total cost of their reservation, including all fees before taxes automatically when they browse listings in search results of the short term rental said Monday in a statement. Airbnb is making the change as an FTC rule meant to crack down on so called junk fees will become effective in the US on May 12. The rule, passed near the end of the Biden administration last December, requires businesses that sell live event tickets or short term lodging to clearly and conspicuously show the total price with mandatory fees in any display and advertisements associated with their goods and services. Airbnb customers in parts of Europe, Australia, Canada and Korea, but have had total pricing displaced since as early as 2019 following local regulations imposing such requirements. In 2023, Airbnb introduced a toggle feature that let users in the US and other markets without pricing transparency laws view the total cost of a booking upfront, excluding taxes. The change was part of a broader effort by CEO Brian Chesky to improve the overall Airbnb experience after growing backlash from both guests and hosts who were frustrated by hidden fees and misleading prices. The toggle was also intended to push hosts towards lowering or eliminating high cleaning fees, which had become a common complaint and a factor driving some travelers to choose hotels instead. In the months after the feature went live, Hosts on nearly 300,000 listings responded by cutting back or dropping their cleaning fees entirely, according to Airbnb's February 2024 update. BlueSky has begun rolling out Blue Check verification, initially limiting verification to select organizations and its moderation team, quoting Wired. The social platform, which has experienced rapid growth since it opened to the public in early 2024, formerly relied on an unconventional self verification system where users could authenticate themselves by including custom domains in their web handles. Now it's adopting a more proactive and traditional verification strategy with the Blue sky team identifying notable accounts and bestow blue check marks. It'll be a rolling process as the feature stabilizes, and then we'll launch a public forum that people can use to request verification, says CEO Jay Graber. The highest priority accounts right now are government officials, news organizations and journalists and celebrities. As Blue sky has grown, it has seen an uptick in impersonators posing as public figures, as MIT Technology Review documented last year. To meet growing demand for ways to confirm that accounts are legit, some Blue sky power users have taken it upon themselves to create their own verification systems. As the app continues to attract celebrity users former President Barack Obama joined earlier this spring, a more formal verification process will help reassure public figures that Blue sky is a safe digital hangout space. We want to reduce fraud and impersonation and drive a more trustworthy environment on Blue sky, graeber says. Rolling out what is pretty close to a dupe of Twitter's original verification system is not groundbreaking stuff. It's savvy nonetheless. The reason social networks like Instagram and TikTok aped the blue check approach wasn't because they necessari wanted to copy a rival's features. It was because these symbols had been successfully established as a visual cue that an account had been vetted. In addition to this traditional top down verification approach, BlueSky is also offering trusted verifier status to a select group of vetted organizations. These organizations will be given a scalloped blue check mark on their bluesky accounts. The initial batch of publications selected as trusted verifiers includes the New York Times and Wired, with more in the works. Whether an account is verified by bluesky itself or by these third party trusted verifiers, the blue check mark it receives will look identical. When users click or tap on the checkmark, they will see a list of which organizations verified the account. For example, clicking on a blue check next to a Wired reporter's name would show that Wired verified their identity and may show that BlueSky and other organizations also verified it. Multiple organizations can verify one account, Graeber says. The introduction of the trusted verifier system on top of the conventional centralized verification offering is a nod to bluesky's general philosophy of decentralization. It's also, one suspects, a deeply practical move as the company's headcount remains under 25 people. BlueSky users should begin to see the first official blue check marks today. End quote. 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This feature can't be turned off, but parents can control it through the Family Link app. For unsupervised teens 13 to 17 years of age, this feature can be turned off in the Google Account settings. There are two aspects to it, with the first blurring images that may contain nudity, with the ability to delete before viewing. Your options are Learn why nude images can be harmful, Block this number, no, don't view or yes view. You can blur the image back by tapping Remove Preview in the bottom right corner. The second reminds users of the risks of sending nude imagery and preventing accidental shares. Before they send or forward something that may contain nudity, they must confirm to continue. To send the image, tap next to continue, swipe right yes send to cancel, select no don't send. This image classification, which does not currently apply to videos, works on dev and is powered by Android System Safety Core, which doesn't send identifiable data or any of the classified content or results to Google servers. Google announced it in October and said it was beginning to roll out in February. We're now seeing it in Google Messages Settings Protection and Safety, then manage Sensitive content warnings. This takes you to a new settings page with a Warnings in Google Messages Toggle. Meta is testing using AI tools in the US to detect teen Instagram users even if they've lied about their birthday, and then place them under Teen Account Settings. Quoting the Verge, Instagram announced it was using AI for age detection in 2024. The system looks for signals that users were under 18 years old, like if messages from friends say happy 16th birthday, for example. Meta also says it uses engagement data. People in the same age group often interact with content they see in similar ways. Teen accounts Instagram are subject to more restrictive settings. By default, teen accounts are private, strangers aren't able to send them messages, and Instagram limits what kind of content teens see. Last year, Instagram changed the settings for all teens on the platform so that safety features were automatically enabled. The company now says it will use AI to proactively look for teen accounts that have an adult birthday and change settings for users it suspects are kids. In a blog post, Instagram says it will begin testing the feature today in the U.S. if it detects that a user is actually a child, but the account says otherwise, Instagram will automatically place it under the more restrictive teen settings. Instagram acknowledges the possibility that the system will make errors. The company says users will have the ability to change their settings back End quote Finally today, this sounds both icky and probably inevitable. Quoting techdirt Last year, Microsoft announced that it was bringing a new feature to its underperforming Windows 11 OS, dubbed recall. According to Microsoft's explanation of recall, the AI powered technology was supposed to take screenshots of your activity activity every five seconds, giving you an explorable timeline of your PC's past that Microsoft's AI powered Assistant Copilot can then help you peruse. The idea is that you can use AI to help you dig through your computer, use to remember past events, helping you remember that restaurant your friend texted you about, or remember that story about cybernetic hamsters that so captivated you two weeks ago. But it didn't take long before privacy advocates understandably began expressing concerns that this not only provides Microsoft with an even more detailed way to monetize consumer privacy, it creates significant new privacy risks should that data be exposed. Early criticism revealed that consumer privacy genuinely was nowhere near the forefront of their thinking during Recall development, and after some criticism, Microsoft said it would take additional steps to try and address concerns, including making the new service opt in only and tethering access to encrypted recall information to the pin or biometric login restrictions of Windows hello Enhanced Sign in security. But that, quite understandably, didn't console critics, and Microsoft eventually backed off the launch entirely. Until now. Last week, Microsoft, clearly hungry to further monetize absolutely everything you do, announced that they were bringing Recall back. Microsoft's hoping that making the service opt in for now with greater security will help quiet criticism. To use Recall, you will need to opt in to saving snapshots, which are images of your activity, and enroll in Windows hello to confirm your presence so only you can access your snapshots, they wrote. But as Ars Technica's Dan Gooden notes, even if User A opts out of Recall, all the users he's interacting with may not, opening the door to a long chain of potential privacy violations. That means anything User A sends them will be screenshotted, processed with optical character recognition and copilot AI, and then stored in an indexed database on the other user's devices that would indiscriminately hoover up all kinds of User A's sensitive material, including photos, passwords, medical conditions, and encrypted videos and messages. End quote. The simple act of creating this additional massive new archive of detailed user interactions may thrill Microsoft in the era of unregulated data brokers and rampant data monetization, but it creates an entirely new target for bad actors spyware subpoena wielding governments, and foreign and domestic intelligence in a country that's literally too corrupt to pass a modern privacy law. It's all very Microsoft. It's another example of enshitification pretending to be progress, and Microsoft isn't responding to press inquiries about it because it knows that barreling forth without heeding privacy concerns is a bad idea. It just doesn't care. Nothing more for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.