After a 3 year investigation, the Irish Data Protection Commission has fined WhatsApp a 225 million euro for infringing the EU's GDPR laws. According to the regulator, Facebook and WhatsApp were not transparent enough about the information it gave users about how their data is processed by and between the two companies following Facebook's acquisition of WhatsApp. Of course, WhatsApp has said it's more transparent now and isn't happy about the fine, saying the it's "entirely disproportionate"" and will appeal it. Interestingly, the other EU members were not happy with the size of the fine, saying it should be higher and that Ireland went soft because their worried about upsetting their tax haven cash cows.
Citizens of Arizona, Connecticut, Georgia, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Oklahoma, and Utah can add their drivers licence into their Apple Wallet and use NFC at TSA checkpoints in select US airports. Some things to note - "users do not need to unlock, show, or hand over their device to present their ID" and "Apple's mobile ID implementation supports the ISO 18013-5 mDL". It's pretty similar to Service NSW's digital drivers license, which uses a QR code instead of NFC to do the "is this a legit ID?" check. Gonna be interesting to see how wide spread the devices to read these IDs become. If I just want to show my age at the bottle shop but I don't want to carry my physical drivers licence, are they gonna have to install new hardware to scan my phone?
Twitter has been busy testing new features. Super Follows are now a thing for some US-based iOS Twitter users. You can pay "creators" a monthly fee to receive special tweets from them. Ticketed Spaces are Spaces (the group audio chat thing) but with money involved. You can pay up to $999 to join in the audio chat. The Tip Jar feature is getting Bitcoin support via the Lightning Network, which considering Jack Dorsey's cryptocurrency fetish, I'm surprised it's taken this long. More excitingly, Twitter is testing auto-archiving of old tweets and letting you remove yourself from a thread! I'd pay for that Twitter Blue bullshit if it had those features in it. Finally, there's a new Safety Mode option that'll let you "temporarily autoblock accounts sending harmful or abusive tweets".
Earlier this week I launched a forum for paid Sizzle subscribers and in just a short few days over 270 people signed up and have hundreds of posts already. Here's some of the more popular ones:
📻 Bogie - Caleb Landry Jones
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The Sizzle is created on Wathaurong land and acknowledges the traditional owners of country throughout Australia, recognising their continuing connection to land, water and community. I pay my respect to them and their cultures and to elders both past and present.