Silicon Valley Tech News Roundup of the Week – May 30th

Bezos to leave Amazon CEO position on July 5th

At Amazon’s annual shareholders’ meeting on Wednesday, Jeff Bezos announced his plans to leave the CEO position on July 5th. On the same date in 1994, Amazon incorporated. He will take on the position of executive chair. Andy Jassy, the current head of Amazon Web Services, will take over Bezos’ position.

Bezos stated: “I’m very excited to move into the [executive] chair role, where I’ll focus my energies and attention on new products and early initiatives.” Bezos also stated he expected Jassy to be an “outstanding leader.”

The shareholders meeting raised several issues, among them a request by the shareholders to have an hourly fulfillment associate serve on the company’s board. The request was voted down. It highlighted the criticism Amazon faces over the treatment of its warehouse workers.

West Midlands police expect a cannabis farm – find crypto mine instead

Police thought they were raiding a cannabis farm after a tip-off about people coming and going all hours to an industrial unit in West Midlands. A police drone surveying the industrial unit picked up on a heat source usually associated with cannabis farms. Instead, the raid uncovered a cryptocurrency mining operation. For these operations to be lucrative, they require numerous powerful computers and have a high energy demand.

Cryptocurrency mining is not illegal in the United Kingdom. However, the operation stole thousands of pounds of electricity from the mains supply.

Police seized the equipment but made no arrests.

Arizona lawsuit reveals Google’s data collection practices

Unredacted documents from a lawsuit Arizona attorney general’s office brought against Google reveal the company’s engineers and executives are aware of how complicated Google makes it for smartphone users to hide their location data. The suit claims Google is illegally collecting data, even after their users opt-out.

Digital Content Next and News Media Alliance requested for the parts of the documents to be unredacted because, as they argued, the public needs to know. Likewise, they accused Google of using legal tactics to avoid further analysis on how they collect data. The judge granted their request.

The unredacted documents also reveal Google made privacy setting harder to find and continued to collect data even after users disabled location-sharing. The company also requested several phone manufacturers like LG to make the settings harder to find.