The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.
1. Apple is turning Siri audio clip review off by default and bringing it in house
Following reports that contractors were reviewing customers’ Siri audio samples for quality control, Apple says it has revamped the process. Moving forward, users have to opt-in to participate, and the audio samples will only be reviewed by Apple employees.
“As a result of our review, we realize we haven’t been fully living up to our high ideals, and for that we apologize,” the company said.
2. Mozilla CEO Chris Beard will step down at the end of the year
Mozilla is currently seeking a replacement for Beard, though he’s agreed to stay on through year’s end. Executive chairwoman Mitchell Baker announced in her own post that she’s agreed to step into an interim role if needed.
3. Federal grand jury indicts Paige Thompson on two counts related to the Capital One data breach
Thompson allegedly created software that allowed her to see which customers of a cloud computing company (although the indictment does not name the company, it has been identified as Amazon Web Services) had misconfigured their firewalls, and as a result accessed data from Capital One and more than 30 others.
4. Juul introduces new POS standards to restrict sales to minors
The Retail Access Control Standards program, or RACS for short, automatically locks the point-of-sale system each time a Juul product is scanned until a valid, adult ID is scanned as well.
5. Apple expands access to official repair parts for third-party shops
Until today, if you were a non-authorized repair shop, you couldn’t get official parts. This could result in mixed experiences for customers.
6. Spotify aims to turn podcast fans into podcast creators with ‘Create podcast’ test
The streaming music service is testing a new ‘Create podcast’ feature that shows up above a user’s list of subscribed podcasts. It directs them to download Anchor, the podcast creation app that Spotify acquired in February.
7. How UK VCs are managing the risk of a ‘no deal’ Brexit
The prevailing view among investors about founders is that Brexit means uncertain business as usual. One response: “Resilience is the mother of entrepreneurship!” (Extra Crunch membership required.)
Comment