10 things in tech you need to know today

Visual China Group via Getty Images/Visual China Group via Getty Images

Good morning! This is the tech news you need to know this Wednesday. Sign up here to get this email in your inbox every morning.

1. The CEO of TikTok's parent firm, ByteDance, has told employees that President Trump's "real objective" for TikTok is to ban it, not force a sale to Microsoft. Trump said on Monday that he has given Microsoft a deadline of September 15 to buy TikTok's US business and that a substantial cut of any deal should go to the US Treasury.

2. The EU announced it is launching a full-blown antitrust investigation into Google's Fitbit acquisition. The EU investigation will focus on whether the acquisition would give Google an unfair advantage over competitors in the advertising space by hoovering up Fitbit user data.

3. Apple's longtime head of marketing Phil Schiller is stepping aside, marking the third high-profile leadership shakeup at the company in the last 18 months. Schiller will remain at the company as an Apple Fellow, while another longtime employee, Greg Joswiak, takes his place.

4. The UK cleared Amazon's deal to buy a 16% stake in online food platform Deliveroo. The deal has been cleared less than week after Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was grilled by US lawmakers over what they described as monopolistic behavior.

5. Employees at video game publisher Blizzard were reportedly paid so little they were forced to skip meals to pay rent while the CEO made $40 million. Blizzard is facing major internal pushback after employees circulated a salary document that exposed major pay disparities.

6. WhatsApp users can now fact-check forwarded message chains as another way to fight the spread of misinformation. In early April, WhatsApp set a limit for how many times a message can be forwarded at one time in response to a rise in misinformation surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic.

7. Big YouTube accounts are being plagued by hackers promoting Bitcoin scams. This new hack bears similarities to the tactics used by hackers who compromised hundreds of high-profile Twitter accounts last month.

8. T-Mobile launched its standalone 5G network in the US. T-Mobile is the first major phone carrier to launch such a standalone architecture.

9. Amazon's UK sellers are getting hit with a fee hike next month as the company passes along the cost of a new digital tax aimed at large corporations. Amazon will be raising the fees for sellers on its UK marketplace by 2%, starting in September.

10. A new bill was introduced in the Senate on Tuesday aimed at curtailing the use of facial recognition by private companies, requiring them to obtain people's consent before scanning them with facial recognition tech. It would also ban companies from selling people's biometric identifiers, like face ID or fingerprint.

Have an Amazon Alexa device? Now you can hear 10 Things in Tech each morning. Just search for "Business Insider" in your Alexa's flash briefing settings.

Read the original article on Business Insider