Welcome back to TechCrunch’s Week in Review — TechCrunch’s newsletter recapping the week’s biggest news. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here.
This week, Figma CEO Dylan Field said the company will temporarily disable its “Make Design” AI feature after it was accused of “heavily” training the tool on existing apps. The feature, unveiled at the company’s annual Config conference, aimed to jumpstart the design process by generating UI layouts and components from text prompts but faced criticism after it seemingly mimicked the layout of Apple’s Weather app.
YouTube quietly rolled out a policy change this week that allows people to request the takedown of AI-generated or other synthetic content that simulates their face or voice. The move marks a shift in opinion from YouTube, where the company is now seeing deepfakes as a privacy issue, rather than just a content moderation issue.
Fisker has asked the Delaware Bankruptcy Court judge overseeing its Chapter 11 case to approve the sale of its remaining inventory of all-electric Ocean SUVs. If approved, the company will be able to offload its finished EVs to a New York-based vehicle leasing company for around $14,000 per vehicle — a steep fall from the $70,000 starting price some of them once commanded.
News
Twitter meets Myspace for GenZ: Aiming to bring the “social” back to “social media,” a new app called noplace serves as a modern-day MySpace with colorful, customizable profiles — and it’s surged to the top of the App Store. Read more
How to avoid AI-powered scams: Generative AI has made online scams easier, cheaper, and even more convincing. We put together a helpful guide of what you can do to protect yourself and your loved ones. Read more
Turn off those silly video call reactions: If you’ve seen thumbs-ups and confetti going off on your screen while on a video call, you’re not alone. Here’s how you can toggle that setting off on your Apple devices. Read more
Amazon retires Astro for Business: Amazon has decided to discontinue its Astro for Business security robot just seven months after launch as the company shifts its focus to the home version of Astro. Read more
A natural 1 for security: Popular online tabletop and role-playing game platform Roll20 suffered a data breach, which exposed some users’ personal information. The platform is currently notifying users of the breach. Read more
Cloudflare takes on AI bots: The publicly traded cloud service provider has launched a new, free tool to prevent bots from scraping websites hosted on its platform for data to train AI models. Read more
Is Gemini as good as Google claims?: Google has claimed that its AI models can accomplish previously impossible tasks like summarizing multiple hundred-page documents. But new research suggests that the models aren’t as good as the company says. Read more
1 billion stolen records and counting: This year has seen some of the biggest, most damaging data breaches in recent history. From AT&T to Ticketmaster, these are the biggest data breaches of 2024 so far. Read more
Analysis
A year of Threads: Threads, Meta’s alternative to Twitter, just celebrated its first birthday. The social network has reached 175 million monthly active users, but it’s still trying to find its own voice. Threads has found itself not as newsy as X and not as open as Mastodon or Bluesky — at least for now. Ivan Mehta reflects on the app’s first year and what it can learn from other social networks. Read more
The Supreme Court declares open season on regulators: In a 6-3 ruling, the Supreme Court swooped in with what could be one of the most consequential decisions it has ever made in the context of the tech industry by overturning the 1984 case Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council. On paper, wetlands and the EPA seem to have little to do with technology, but as Devin Coldewey writes, the decision opens up regulators to endless interference. Read more