In Brief

Perplexity has reportedly closed a $500M funding round

AI-powered search engine Perplexity has reportedly closed a $500 million funding round, valuing the startup at $9 billion. Bloomberg, citing sources familiar, reports that the round was led by Institutional Venture Partners, and that it closed earlier in December. In an email to TechCrunch, a Perplexity spokesperson declined to comment. The mammoth tranche comes as […]

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Apple and Meta go to war over interoperability vs. privacy

Apple and Meta are warring in Europe over the balance between interoperability and privacy, Reuters reports. The fight focuses on the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), a competition regulation that requires designated gatekeepers (including Apple and Meta) not to restrict rivals’ access to so-called core platform services. In Apple’s case, this means: iOS, iPadOS,

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With 25M users, Bluesky gets a $1M fund to take on social media and AI

Successful tech companies follow a typical pattern: from product to platform where other startups build businesses on top of theirs. To spur that, they often launch a fund. In this case, someone else is launching a fund to help fast-growing social media site Bluesky, which now claims 25 million users. On Wednesday open source and

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OpenAI may pay its nonprofit arm ‘billions of dollars’ in conversion to for-profit

OpenAI’s transition away from a for-profit corporation that’s governed by a nonprofit board is well underway — and the nonprofit could be compensated royally for it. That’s according to The New York Times, which reports that OpenAI is in discussions to pay the nonprofit billions of dollars for it to cede control. There’s pressure to

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Five years later… Netflix hit with Dutch data access fine

Five years later sounds like a half-baked sequel to a well-known zombie flick franchise. But it’s a reference to how long it’s taken a data access complaint against Netflix to deliver a penalty decision in the European Union. The fine that’s — finally — been issued under the bloc’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is

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Grubhub to pay $25M for ‘deceptive’ practices against customers, drivers

Grubhub will pay $25 million to settle a lawsuit from the Federal Trade Commission and Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul over unlawful practices, including misleading customers about delivery costs, deceiving drivers about potential earnings, and listing restaurants on its platform without their permission. The agencies claim that Grubhub hid the true cost of its delivery

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Pineapple on pizza is delicious — and if you disagree, you can’t log in to WordPress.org

There are few matters in life that divide a room more than the prudence of putting pineapple on pizza. But if you’re of the persuasion that tropical fruit has no place on a pie, you’ll have to swallow a bitter pill — if you want to access the WordPress.org developer portal and forum, at least.

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Meta to set up $50M privacy payment scheme to settle Australian proceeding

Meta has agreed to a $50 million payment program to settle a long-running proceeding in Australia related to misuse of information for political ad targeting, the country’s information watchdog OAIC announced Tuesday. The settlement concerns the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal, when data on millions of Facebook users was exfiltrated without their knowledge or consent by

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