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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Good morning! This is the tech news you need to know this Thursday.
- Google CEO Sundar Pichai sent an email to LGBTQ employees saying YouTube was taking a "hard look" at its harassment policies. The email comes a week after YouTube's controversial decision not to remove videos of conservative commentator Steven Crowder that contained homophobic slurs aimed at Vox journalist, Carlos Maza.
- Facebook internal emails appear to show that Mark Zuckerberg was aware of problematic privacy practices. Facebook emails shared with government regulators show CEO Zuckerberg debating how to address certain privacy issues, according to a Wall Street Journal report citing anonymous sources.
- Google revealed the design of its next smartphone months ahead of schedule, after it started to leak all over the internet. The tease appears to be focusing on the Pixel 4's camera, which looks nearly identical to the rumored rear camera on the new iPhone that Apple is expected to announce in September.
- A photo of Silicon Valley executives visiting an Italian designer is getting slammed for digitally adding in the female executives. The Italian fashion designer Brunello Cucinelli recently hosted a number of tech executives at his home in Solomeo, Italy, and a photo from the meet appeared to show two women executives.
- Amazon has been hit with a lawsuit that claims it's putting children's privacy at risk by recording what they say to Alexa. The suit is asking the court to force Amazon to delete all recordings of underage users and prevent future recordings unless the user grants consent.
- Epic Games, the video game publisher behind "Fortnite," acquired teen chat app Houseparty in a surprise deal. The price of the acquisition was not announced, but the unexpected deal immediately sparked speculation about what the maker of the most popular video game might do with the teen-focused chat app.
- The official app for the Spanish soccer league La Liga has been hit with a €250,000 ($280,000) fine for tapping users' microphones to spy on illegal screenings of matches, The Guardian reports. La Liga said it would appeal the decision from Spain's data protection watchdog.
- Dockless scooter startup Bird has acquired smaller competitor Scoot for roughly $25 million, sources familiar with the deal told the Wall Street Journal. The acquisition price is much lower than Scoot's last valuation in 2017, when it was pegged at $70 million.
- CERN, the famous scientific lab where the web was created, is so unhappy with Microsoft's price hikes that it's ditching all Microsoft software. When CERN's new contract began in March, Microsoft was charging it 10-times more than before to use its products.
- Twitch suspended one of its most popular streamers after he livestreamed from the bathrooms at the biggest gaming event of the year. Herschel "Guy" Beahm, better known as "Dr Disrespect" has been banned from Twitch after he livestreamed from a public restroom at E3, a massive video game conference.
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