Serious Tech News #5: F*ck The Policy

Serious Tech News now has it’s own website! Follow us on Twitter too.

Happy Monday! Here’s the thing about tech: you can always find that one tweet that encapsulates what’s currently being discussed in the tech world.

Oftentimes it’s this guy’s tweet:

Big things happened last week, so let’s get to it, shall we?

F*ck The Policy

Your mom’s favorite messaging app is pushing a new privacy policy, making it obligatory for users to share their data with its’ parent company Facebook if you want to continue using the app.

Knowing Facebook’s track record on data privacy, it’s basically the equivalent of your sketchy roommate agreeing for your girlfriend to move in under the condition that the door needs to always be open whenever you have sex.

Serious Tech News also received reports of group chat lurkers leaving WhatsApp groups they felt too awkward to leave before using “I respect data privacy” as an excuse. These chat groups are usually, but not exclusive to extended family group chat, political conspiracy theory group chat (these two are usually the same), or the “High School Reunion” group chat.

Congratulations, You Plaid Yourself

Visa’s $5.3 billion acquisition of the fintech startup Plaid was put to halt by the U.S. Department of Justice. This news comes as a surprise to exactly no one, as the U.S. government are not unfamiliar with “rejecting visas”. If you’re Asian like me, you know what I’m talking about.

The credit card payment company is not new to antitrust litigations. If you’re a company too big of asize that countries has been suing you every three years or so, maybeee think twice when buying something as big as the GDP of Fiji.

Public Display of Affection

In the news of using human emotions to make money for stakeholders: the dating app Bumble is filing for IPO.

Our sources said in order to make sure the IPO day stock trading to be fair, attractive, and authentic to Bumble, female buyers will be prioritized to buy first.

The Conspirator Next Door

“Community” was the tech buzzword of 2020 right there after “Creator economy” and “F*ck San Francisco” - The real challenge is always in making sure that it’s not infiltrated by crazy people. Yes, I’m looking at you, local second-hand clothes sale Facebook group and Hacker News

Moderators of local-focused social network app Nextdoor, has been raising concerns to the company about the rise of QAnon related discussion on their community forum. This scrutiny might force the conspiracy group to other niche communities such as Strava groups or JIRA forum.

Snapchat Finally Snapped

After having their features copied constantly by other social media platforms year after year after year, they had enough and finally moved to copy their competitors latest product: banning Donald Trump.

That’s it for this week’s serious Tech News!

See you next Monday, and hopefully today’s issue freshen up your inbox a little bit!

Can I ask you a favor? If you like this issue, it’ll be awesome if you can share it!