TikTok says it’s planning to sue the Trump administration, Apple and WordPress lock horns after Apple gets a little greedy, and a story about PIPEDA and Tim Hortons catches fire on Reddit.
It’s all the tech news that’s popular right now. Welcome to Hashtag Trending! It’s Monday, August 24, and I’m your host Alex Coop.
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The Verge is reporting that TikTok will file a lawsuit against the Trump administration over an executive order demanding parent company ByteDance to divest its TikTok operations in the US. “Even though we strongly disagree with the administration’s concerns, for nearly a year we have sought to engage in good faith to provide a constructive solution,” TikTok spokesman Josh Gartner told the Verge. “What we encountered instead was a lack of due process as the administration paid no attention to facts and tried to insert itself into negotiations between private businesses.”
A battle between Apple and WordPress heated up on Friday after WordPress founding developer Matt Mullenweg claimed that Apple had locked developers out from making updates to the platform until it added in-app purchases to the free iOS app. What does that ultimately mean though? Well, to no one’s surprise, Apple is kinda pressuring a free app into monetizing itself, allowing Apple to take a 30 per cent commission on future purchases, cause you gotta squeezing every penny.
And lastly, a follow-up editorial about Tim Horton’s data tracking scandal is catching the attention of the Reddit community. Back in June, the National Post ran a story about how the coffee chain tracks customers through its mobile ordering app. Months later, the conversation orbits Canada’s Personal Information and Protection of Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA). The much more important conclusion about all this is that PIPEDA is fundamentally flawed. As law professor Michael Geist says in the story: “Reputational harm is currently the bigger risk, as opposed to pure legal risk.”
That’s all the tech news that’s trending right now. Hashtag Trending is a part of the ITWC Podcast network. Add us to your Alexa Flash Briefing or your Google Home daily briefing. I’m Alex Coop, thanks for listening.