Silicon Valley Tech News Roundup – July 3rd

FBI adds “Missing CryptoQueen” to the most wanted list – 7/1

FBI placed Ruja Ignatova (also known as the Missing CryptoQueen) on its ten most wanted list. Ignatova, a Bulgarian, has been missing since 2017 when she boarded a plane from Bulgaria to Greece. She is the only woman on the list.

The FBI wants Ruja Ignatova in connection with the OneCoin cryptocurrency scam. The scam was a Ponzi scheme, and Ignatova defrauded more than $4 billion from her victims. In 2014, OneCoin began offering a commission to people who would sell the cryptocurrency to their friends. However, the FBI claims OneCoin was worthless because it was never safeguarded by blockchain technology like other cryptocurrencies. In 2019, Ignatova was charged with eight counts including securities and wire fraud.

On Thursday, the FBI issued a notice offering $100,000 for any information that would lead to her arrest.

Google plans to remove abortion clinic visits from users’ location history – 7/1

In a blog post published on Friday, Google announced it would attempt to remove locations of visits to medical facilities (including abortion clinics) from users’ location history.

The blog post, in part, reads: “Some of the places people visit — including medical facilities like counseling centers, domestic violence shelters, abortion clinics, fertility centers, addiction treatment facilities, weight loss clinics, cosmetic surgery clinics, and others — can be particularly personal. Today, we’re announcing that if our systems identify that someone has visited one of these places, we will delete these entries from Location History soon after they visit. This change will take effect in the coming weeks.”

Experts warned anti-abortion groups and law enforcement could abuse Google and other platforms due to the vast amount of data they collect.

Google also announced that FitBit would update the app so that users can delete their menstrual tracking information from the service.

Past and current African American Tesla workers sue the company for racial abuse – 7/1

On Thursday, 15 former and current African American Tesla workers filed a lawsuit with the California state court. They allege they were subjects of racial abuse and discrimination at the company’s factories. Most incidents happened at the company’s factory in Fremont, California.

The plaintiffs claim they experienced abusive racist behavior and comments from human resources employees, colleagues and managers. As stated in the lawsuit Tesla’s “standard operating procedures include blatant, open and unmitigated race discrimination.” Likewise, the lawsuit alleges plaintiffs were passed over for promotion and given the most physically demanding jobs in the factory. The company did not respond to requests for comment.

Tesla currently faces more than ten lawsuits for racial discrimination and sexual harassment. One of the lawsuits is by the Department of Fair Employment and Housing, a California state agency. In February, the company responded to the expected lawsuit by publishing a blog post stating: “Tesla has always disciplined and terminated employees who engage in misconduct, including those who use racial slurs or harass others in different ways. We recently rolled out an additional training program that reinforces Tesla’s requirement that all employees must treat each other with respect and reminds employees about the numerous ways they can report concerns, including anonymously.”

Google to pay $90 million to small app developers to settle antitrust lawsuit – 7/1

Hagens Berman, the law firm representing small app developers against Google, announced the company offered to pay $90 million to settle a class-action suit. The lawsuit alleged that Google’s Play store policies violated federal antitrust laws. The lawsuit claimed Google used policies that forced the developers to use the Google Play billing system with a 30% charge on all transactions. In July last year, Google lowered the fee to 15% for the first million earned.

Steve Berman, the managing partner at Hagens Berman, said: “Today, nearly 48,000 hardworking app developers are receiving the just payment they deserve for their work product — something Google sought to profit from, hand over fist… With this settlement, developers will have more room to grow and more money in their pockets to promote their hard efforts.”

Google also offered other concessions. These include highlighting the work of smaller developers via Indie Apps Corner in the Play Store app. Likewise, the company would clarify its Developer Distribution Agreement so that app developers can notify users about out-of-app subscriptions and offers.