Facebook and Google have become the targets of the first official complaints of GDPR noncompliance, filed on the day the privacy law takes effect across the EU.

Across four complaints, related to Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Google’s Android operating system, European consumer rights organisation Noyb argues that the companies have forced users into agreeing to new terms of service, in breach of the requirement in the law that such consent should be freely given. Max Schrems, the chair of Noyb, said: “Facebook has even blocked accounts of users who have not given consent.”

Google is under investigation in Australia following claims that it collects data from millions of Android smartphone users, who unwittingly pay their telecom service providers for gigabytes consumed by the activity, regulators said on Tuesday.

Responding to the latest privacy concerns surrounding Google, a spokesman for the U.S. based search engine operator said the company has users’ permission to collect data. “Any charges for transmission of data over a cellular connection, including any location-related data, would be governed by a user’s mobile carrier plan,” Google said in a statement. 

Google is working on a brand new design for the web version of Gmail. Yesterday, I published screenshots of the new design. TechCrunch’s tipster Chaim also discovered an interesting new feature in the new Gmail. You’ll soon be able to send expiring emails.

Working on an email service is hard as you have to be compatible with all sorts of email providers and email clients. But it doesn’t seem to be stopping Google as the company is now evolving beyond the simple POP3/IMAP/SMTP protocols. Based on those screenshots, expiring emails work pretty much like expiring emails in ProtonMail. After some time, the email becomes unreadable.

Google's Project Zero initiative tasks its security researchers with finding flaws in various software products developed by the company itself as well as other firms. Back in 2016, it revealed a serious vulnerability present in Windows 10, and reported a "crazy bad vulnerability" in Windows in 2017.

Now, the firm has disclosed another security flaw in Microsoft Edge, after the Redmond giant failed to fix it in the allotted time. Back in February 2017, Microsoft stated that it would be using Arbitrary Code Guard (ACG) in Microsoft Edge with the Windows 10 Creators Update to mitigate arbitrary native code execution. 

A group of Silicon Valley technologists who were early employees at Facebook and Google, alarmed over the ill effects of social networks and smartphones, are banding together to challenge the companies they helped build.

The cohort is creating a union of concerned experts called the Center for Humane Technology. Along with the nonprofit media watchdog group Common Sense Media, it also plans an anti-tech addiction lobbying effort and an ad campaign at 55,000 public schools in the United States. The campaign, titled The Truth About Tech, will be funded with $7 million from Common Sense and capital raised by the Center for Humane Technology. 

When you think you've seen it all, malware authors always find a way to impress you. Today's "that's clever!" moment comes courtesy of a criminal group that's been spreading a new version of the Zeus Panda banking trojan since June, this year.

Instead of relying on old techniques of malvertising and spam campaigns, this group has taken a novel approach, never before seen in the distribution of banking trojans. Black-hat SEO, for the win! This Zeus Panda group decided to rely on a network of hacked websites, on which they inserted carefully chosen keywords in new pages or hid the keywords inside existing pages.

California — California's Central Valley is known for its miles and miles of farm orchards, fights over water rights, and, these days, high unemployment. High-tech? Not so much.

But I was here on Monday to see in action a cutting-edge technology that has the potential to greatly reshape our economy and society — the self-driving car. Waymo, Google's autonomous vehicle spinoff, has its testing facility at a decommissioned Air Force base. The company invited several dozen reporters to see its cars in action, get a ride in one, and hear its case that its technology is all-but ready for the real world. 

Google is offering security experts a bounty to identify Android app flaws as the Alphabet Inc unit seeks to wipe out bugs from its Google Play store.

Each flaw will score at least $1,000 under the program announced on Thursday to back up automated checks that have failed to block malware and other problems that security experts say infect the 8-year-old app store far more than Apple Inc’s rival App Store. Google will partner with HackerOne, a bug bounty program management website, to target a list of apps and flaws such as those that allow a hacker to redirect a user to a phishing website or infect a gadget with a virus. 

Google’s artificial intelligence group, DeepMind, has unveiled the latest incarnation of its Go-playing program, AlphaGo – an AI so powerful that it derived thousands of years of human knowledge of the game before inventing better moves of its own, all in the space of three days.

Named AlphaGo Zero, the AI program has been hailed as a major advance because it mastered the ancient Chinese board game from scratch, and with no human help beyond being told the rules. In games against the 2015 version, which famously beat Lee Sedol, the South Korean grandmaster, in the following year, AlphaGo Zero won 100 to 0. The feat marks a milestone on the road to general-purpose AIs. 

The Google Home Mini fits most of the features of the tech giant’s popular Home smart speakers into a $50, four-inch-wide package, except for the larger, $130 version’s better acoustics. But it is still very, very good at listening.

As many as 4,000 Google Home Minis handed out at Made By Google press and pop-up events could have a flaw making them capture virtually all audio around them before uploading the recordings to Google servers, Android Police reported on Tuesday. According to Android Police’s Artem Russakovskii, he received a demo unit at an October 4th tech press event and installed the device in his bathroom.