If a new European law restricting what companies can do with people’s online data went into effect tomorrow, almost 1.9 billion Facebook Inc users around the world would be protected by it. The online social network is making changes that ensure the number will be much smaller.

Facebook members outside the United States and Canada, whether they know it or not, are currently governed by terms of service agreed with the company’s international headquarters in Ireland.

Next month, Facebook is planning to make that the case for only European users, meaning 1.5 billion members in Africa, Asia, Australia and Latin America will not fall under the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which takes effect on May 25.

It’s all a game.

Om Malik:

Douglas Weber is an American industrial designer based in Fukuoka, Japan. He formerly worked for Apple in Cupertino and is a fellow coffee nerd. He is currently working on what he deems the perfect coffee grinder at his new company Lyn Weber, which he founded with VFX designer Craig Lyn. We recently talked about the new wave of coffee and cafes and how and why design is becoming such an integral part of coffee culture.

Wow!

Facebook Inc said on Tuesday it would continue requiring people to accept targeted ads as a condition of using its service, a stance that may help keep its business model largely intact despite a new European Union privacy law.

And

Facebook Deputy Chief Privacy Officer Rob Sherman said the social network would begin seeking Europeans’ permission this week for a variety of ways Facebook uses their data, but he said that opting out of targeted marketing altogether would not be possible.

Whether you like targeted ads or not, it makes sense that Facebook is still going to require users to accept them—it’s their entire business model. The choice is simple—accept the ads or delete the app.

Apple Inc. plans to integrate recently acquired magazine app Texture into Apple News and debut its own premium subscription offering, according to people familiar with the matter. The move is part of a broader push by the iPhone maker to generate more revenue from online content and services.

Texture was all about magazines, but I wonder if Apple will include other forms of media, like paid newspaper subscriptions, as part of this new service.

Winners of the 2018 Pulitzer Prizes were announced at Columbia University in New York City on Monday. The Pulitzers are highly revered and mark the best in journalism in 14 categories.

Congrats to the winners.

Netflix Inc’s blitz of new programming attracted a surprisingly high 7.4 million new customers from January to March, reassuring investors who are betting the video streaming pioneer’s massive spending will fuel growth around the world.

Netflix’s shows are great, as are many of the others put out by similar services. These numbers show how much consumers want these types of shows. This is exactly what Apple is looking to happen when it releases its video content—we’ll see how that works out.

From Apple’s internal memo:

Leakers do not simply lose their jobs at Apple. In some cases, they face jail time and massive fines for network intrusion and theft of trade secrets both classified as federal crimes. In 2017, Apple caught 29 leakers. 12 of those were arrested. Among those were Apple employees, contractors and some partners in Apple’s supply chain. These people not only lose their jobs, they can face extreme difficulty finding employment elsewhere. “The potential criminal consequences of leaking are real,” says Tom Moyer of Global Security, “and that can become part of your personal and professional identity forever.”

I have a hard time understanding the motivation for employees to leak information about upcoming products. I think this is a smart move by Apple, telling its employees that there are consequences for their actions. The fact that 12 people were arrested should scare the hell out of anyone considering leaking information.

Apple is not fucking around anymore. You’ve been warned.

Uber Technologies Inc said on Wednesday it is planning to offer more modes of transportation for riders through its app, giving people more ways to get around in cities.

In cities like San Francisco, having a variety of transportation options is especially important.

Apple’s ad for the newly announced iPhone 8.

Israel’s consumer protection bureau said on Tuesday it was investigating Apple over a failure to disclose to consumers that its software could slow performance in some iPhones.

I think what these investigations will come down to is Apple’s intent. I don’t believe for a second they did this to trick people into buying a new iPhone.

Tom Boger, Senior Director of Mac Hardware Product Marketing:

“We want to be transparent and communicate openly with our pro community so we want them to know that the Mac Pro is a 2019 product. It’s not something for this year.”

Matthew Panzarino provides some really interesting information in this piece after speaking to Apple. I especially like the new Pro Workflow Team.

The group is under John Ternus and works closely with the engineering organization. The bays that I’m taken to later to chat about Final Cut Pro, for instance, are a few doors away from the engineers tasked with making it run great on Apple hardware.

“We said in the meeting last year that the pro community isn’t one thing,” says Ternus. “It’s very diverse. There’s many different types of pros and obviously they go really deep into the hardware and software and are pushing everything to its limit. So one thing you have to do is we need to be engaging with the customers to really understand their needs. Because we want to provide complete pro solutions not just deliver big hardware which we’re doing and we did it with iMac Pro. But look at everything holistically.”

Apple is hiring some of the industry’s top professionals to find out where the pain points are in the workflow and fix them. This is an incredibly detailed approach to getting the next Mac Pro out the door.

“We’ve been focusing on visual effects and video editing and 3D animation and music production as well,” says Ternus. “And we’ve brought in some pretty incredible talent, really masters of their craft. And so they’re now sitting and building out workflows internally with real content and really looking for what are the bottlenecks. What are the pain points. How can we improve things. And then we take this information where we find it and we go into our architecture team and our performance architects and really drill down and figure out where is the bottleneck. Is it the OS is it in the drivers is it in the application is it in the silicon and then run it to ground to get it fixed.”

I can’t wait to see this new machine.

Facebook Inc said on Wednesday that the personal information of up to 87 million users may have been improperly shared with political consultancy Cambridge Analytica, up from a previous news media estimate of more than 50 million.

Surely nobody is surprised.

Facebook Inc said on Wednesday it planned to revise the written policies that people agree to when they use the social network, adding language about the protection of personal data as it prepares to comply with a strict new European law.

I wonder how much of this will show up in the U.S. considering Facebook already said it wouldn’t extend the new European law globally.

Apple has hired Google’s chief of search and artificial intelligence, John Giannandrea, a major coup in its bid to catch up to the artificial intelligence technology of its rivals.

Apple said on Tuesday that Mr. Giannandrea will run Apple’s “machine learning and A.I. strategy,” and become one of 16 executives who report directly to Apple’s chief executive, Timothy D. Cook.

Okay, that is a big hire. It’s especially interesting that Giannandrea agrees with Apple’s privacy stance.

Zuckerberg told Reuters in a phone interview that Facebook already complies with many parts of the law ahead of its implementation in May. He said the company wanted to extend privacy guarantees worldwide in spirit, but would make exceptions, which he declined to describe.

His comments signals that U.S. Facebook users, many of them still angry over the company’s handling of personal information, may soon find themselves in a worse position than Europeans.

Extending the privacy law globally may be a great thing for the user, but it certainly won’t be for Facebook.

Police have responded to multiple 911 calls at YouTube headquarters in San Bruno, California. Multiple victims have been taken to the hospital following the shooting, CBS San Francisco reported. About 1,700 people work in the building, according to ABC News.

Mike Thornton takes you from 1983 to present day. It’s fascinating to see when some of the features I remember using were actually released.

Apple Inc. is planning to use its own chips in Mac computers beginning as early as 2020, replacing processors from Intel Corp., according to people familiar with the plans.

The initiative, code named Kalamata, is still in the early developmental stages, but comes as part of a larger strategy to make all of Apple’s devices — including Macs, iPhones, and iPads — work more similarly and seamlessly together, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private information. The project, which executives have approved, will likely result in a multi-step transition.

There is no doubt that Apple knows how to build fantastic chips for its mobile devices, and if this plan received the go-ahead from executives, they must have fast Mac chips on the horizon. When Apple switched to Intel years ago, the transition was pretty smooth—If this is going to happen, the transition will need to be just as smooth.

What an incredible song.

Facebook is going to limit how much data it makes available to advertisers buying hyper-targeted ads on the social network.

More specifically, Facebook says it will stop using data from third-party data aggregators — companies like Experian and Acxiom — to help supplement its own data set for ad targeting.

I thought this part was particularly interesting:

Apparently it’s not important enough to Facebook’s revenue stream to deal with a potential headache if something goes wrong.

So even though Facebook is cutting out the use of third-party aggregators, they are still going to make enough money that making this move won’t really affect the bottom line.

Facebook announced a series of changes on Wednesday to give users more control over their data, after a huge data scandal which has wiped more than $100 billion from its stock market value.

Facebook said the changes were in the works for some time, but I have a hard time believing that.

You’ve probably heard the news from today’s event, but if you want to see it, you can. The video is available on Apple’s Web site.

For the first time, users will be able to draw, sketch or write with Apple Pencil directly in the Pages, Numbers and Keynote apps. With Apple Pencil, advanced yet easy-to-use tools allow all users, from students to professionals, to bring their documents to life with drawings, illustrations, diagrams and more. Apple Pencil can also be used to easily and precisely add color, texture and more to any drawing.

And my favorite feature:

Smart Annotation, launched today in beta, is an innovative new tool in Pages that allows users to easily give, receive and incorporate feedback in a document using Apple Pencil. With Smart Annotation, comments and proof marks will dynamically anchor to text. And as a user integrates feedback and the document changes, remaining annotations will stay with the text they were attached to.

I really do love that feature.

Apple today updated its most popular iPad with support for Apple Pencil plus even greater performance, starting at $329. The new 9.7-inch iPad and Apple Pencil give users the ability to be even more creative and productive, from sketching ideas and jotting down handwritten notes to marking up screenshots. The new iPad is more versatile and capable than ever, features a large Retina display, the A10 Fusion chip and advanced sensors that help deliver immersive augmented reality, and provides unmatched portability, ease of use and all-day battery life.

Apple is selling the new iPad to its education customers for $299, plus $99 for the Apple Pencil. For the regular consumer, the new iPad will cost $329, plus $99 for the pencil. This seems like a really nice offering for education customers.

Apple pencil is playing a big part in today’s education event.

“One person can change the world.”