Google’s Chromecast is a fantastic way to fling streaming video from phone to TV — but these days, you can often get a Roku Streaming Stick or Amazon Fire Stick with dedicated remote control for the same money. But what if Google launched an Android TV dongle with its own remote control for the same $50 you’d pay for a high-end Roku or Firestick?

That’s exactly what 9to5Google seems to have discovered, thanks to a new Home Depot leak. The home improvement story briefly listed a Google “Sabrina” for $49.99, and 9to5Google’s sources were able to provide pictures of that price tag in the Home Depot’s internal systems as well.

Sabrina, of course, would be that Android TV dongle that leaked in June, only to seemingly appear again at the FCC just last week, ahead of a rumored “summer” launch alongside the Pixel 5 and Pixel 4a 5G. Mind you, summer is now “fall” since Google already said that’s when the phones will actually come out. We can’t be 100 percent sure that Sabrina will ever truly arrive, of course, and this price could be a placeholder, but personally I’d be surprised if we go another month without the formal announcement.

source:theverge

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Google has started selling a long-delayed budget smartphone boasting the same high-quality camera and several other features available in fancier Pixel models that cost hundreds of dollars more.

The Pixel 4a unveiled Monday will be available Aug. 20 after months of delay caused by supply problems triggered by the pandemic.

It will cost $349, a $50 discount from a cheap Pixel released last year. It’s also a major markdown from other higher-end models in the existing product line-up that start at $799. The next versions of Google’s top-of-the-line Pixel phones will be released sometime this fall, Google said, without revealing their price.

The budget-minded Pixel 4a is coming out four months after Apple released a discount iPhone, the SE, priced at $399. The low price helped spur iPhone sales at a time of soaring unemployment, as the economy plunged into a deep recession that is causing millions of households to curb their spending so they can pay rent and buy food.

It’s doubtful the Pixel 4a will reel in as many consumers as the iPhone SE, based on Google’s inability to make significant inroads as a device maker so far, despite generally positive reviews for the devices, especially their cameras.

Google so far has been selling fewer than 10 million Pixel phones a year since rolling out the product line in 2016, barely making a dent a market where more than 1 billion phones are shipped annually, according to IDC.

source: AP

 

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Google’s own engineers were troubled by the way the company secretly tracked the movements of people who didn’t want to be followed until a 2018 Associated Press investigation uncovered the shadowy surveillance, according to unsealed documents in a consumer fraud case.

The behind-the-scenes peek stems from a three-month-old lawsuit against Google filed by Arizona’s attorney general. The files, unsealed late last week, reveal that Google knew it had a massive problem on its hands after an AP article published in August 2018 explained how the company continued to track users’ whereabouts even after they had disabled the feature Google called “location history.”

The released documents include internal Google emails and a fresh version of the state’s civil complaint with fewer redactions than the original.

The same day the AP story was published, the company held what one unidentified email correspondent called an “Oh S—-” meeting to discuss its location tracking tools, according to the unsealed records in Arizona’s Maricopa County Superior Court. Google also began monitoring public reaction to the AP story, including how it was trending across Facebook, Twitter and other influential online services, the documents show.

The release of the emails is embarrassing for a company that tries to build trust with billions of users of free services such as maps and online search, which in turn provide the personal information Google can use to target ads. Those ads generated more than $130 billion in revenue last year alone.

Google is still fighting to keep many of the exhibits and key passages in the lawsuit redacted on the grounds that the contents contain confidential information.

Google is seeking to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing that the Arizona law only applies to goods and services that charge consumers. That would exclude free services that draw upon the tracking tools that are at the heart of the lawsuit.

The company also contends that Brnovich, a Republican, may have been prodded to pursue the investigation by Oracle, which has been involved in a long-running legal battle over the rights to some of the software code used in Google’s Android software for smartphones and other mobile devices.

“Privacy controls have long been built into our services and our teams work continuously to discuss and improve them,” Google spokesperson Jose Castaneda said Wednesday. “In the case of location information, we’ve heard feedback, and have worked hard to improve our privacy controls.”

Source:AP

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Alphabet Inc’s Google and Apple Inc on Tuesday announced a new system that will enable public health authorities to use smartphones to assist in contact tracing without having to build an app.

The new system - called Exposure Notifications Express - will allow public health officials to submit a small configuration file to Apple and Google. The two tech companies will then use the file to set up systems that phone owners can opt in to in order to determine whether they have been near someone who has tested positive for the novel coronavirus.

In the case of iPhones, a new version of the iOS operating system being released on Tuesday will alert users whether an exposure notification system is available from local health authorities and allow users to set it up without downloading any new apps. On Android devices, users will also get a prompt from the phone’s operating system, but will still have to download an automatically generated app.

The two companies said Maryland, Nevada, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., will be the first U.S. places to use the new system. The new system also works alongside tools that the two companies released in May that enable public health officials to build apps that allow iPhones and Android devices to use Bluetooth signals to detect proximity to a person who has tested positive.

Six U.S. states and about two dozen countries have launched exposure notification apps based on the Apple-Google technology in recent weeks without major hitches.

The apps are increasingly compatible with each other, allowing for cross-border tracking. A few jurisdictions, such as Hawaii, are moving forward with separate tracking technology.

However, the effectiveness of exposure notification apps in helping slow coronavirus spread remains a major question. Most governments are not tracking detailed data on app usage in the interest of user privacy.

In Alabama, for example, more than 1,000 students caught the virus in an outbreak in August. But a university representative said it was too early to tell whether a two-week-old state app had made any difference.

source:reuters

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