Conrad was responding to a letter sent by senators in March asking Google about how it will protect and secure the data of those who use Verily's coronavirus screening site. Sens. Bob Menendez, Richard Blumenthal, Cory Booker, Sherrod Brown and Kamala Harris wrote the letter asking both Vice President Mike Pence and Alphabet Chief Sundar Pichai if users will have to hand over their data to use the site, and whether or not the tech giant will be forbidden from selling such information or utilizing it for their own gain in some way. 

In response, Conrad says Verily will not use user data for any other purposes besides those outlined in the project, and will abide by the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) in other states as well. At the same time, Conrad defended how the company makes users sign in through a Google account, something senators also criticized. Conrad explained that using another way to authenticate users would have compromised their security.

Verily's coronavirus screening site, which was launched last month, connects individuals with local testing sites. It uses a COVID-19 screener survey through Project Baseline to ask adults questions about recent travel activities and their health; those deemed high-risk are then directed to a mobile testing site, where they receive their results.

Last Friday, the tech giants announced that they were working on a system that will alert users by smartphone if they've been in contact with somebody infected with the coronavirus. The companies will embed Bluetooth-based technology into iPhones and Androids that will let smartphone owners know if they've been exposed to an infected individual in phases. Since then, the two have revealed further details about the system. In an interview with Forbes contributor David Phelan, for example, Apple and Google said every phone released since about fall 2015, or those iPhones compatible with iOS 13, will be able to use the system. The tech giants also added that the feature will not utilize too much battery.

Google Cloud will jointly administer these credits with Harvard, giving them to researchers applying computational approaches to fight the pandemic. While scientific advisers chosen by Harvard Global Health Institute will review submissions, interested researchers need to submit proposals directly to Google Cloud.

The tech giant received the first versions of the chips in the past few weeks, but they will not be ready for use in Pixel phones until 2021. Meanwhile, processors would be used in Chromebooks much later. Once implemented, the move could help Google better compete with Apple, which already uses its own chips to power its phones, while reducing its dependence on – and thus hurting – current processor supplier Qualcomm.

Last month, Google replaced the Twitter app for its PWA version, while last week, Chrome Unboxed noted it did the same for the YouTube TV app. The company has not made an official announcement about the news, or said if this is part of a larger trend they're slowly adopting.

This story first appeared in Inside Dev.

During a livestream to the Economic Club of New York, Schmidt argued that tech giants like Amazon, which he says the public often maligns, were forced to step up, while U.S. politicians responded too slowly, costing lives. Schmidt added that he hopes people will remember the role Big Tech played after the pandemic is over, and feel appreciative that these companies had the capital to build the tools and other resources the public are using now.

Advanced Google Meet video-conferencing capabilities will now be free through Sept. 30, 2020, for all G Suite and G Suite for Education customers. The company says it's extending the date to continue to support businesses and schools with remote work and online classes through the pandemic.

As part of its Google News Initiative, Google said it is launching a Journalism Emergency Relief Fund for small and medium-sized newsrooms, contributing anywhere between thousands to tens of thousands of dollars, depending upon their size. Newsrooms must apply by April 29 to be considered for funding.

In a blog post, Google researchers describe how the natural language processing systems benchmark can evaluate cross-lingual generalization capabilities using nine inference tasks for a dozen language families and 40 languages. While models tested on English come close to humans on most existing tasks, the performance is substantially lower for many other languages, Google Research senior software engineer Melvin Johnson and DeepMind scientist Sebastian Ruder wrote in the post. “Overall, a large gap between performance in English and other languages remains across all models and settings, which indicates that there is much potential for research on cross-lingual transfer," they noted. The goal of Xtreme, then, is to encourage more research in AI-based multilingual learning, according to Google. You can read the preprint paper on Xtreme here, while the code and examples are available on GitHub.

This story first appeared in Inside AI. 

The malicious actors attempted to target cryptocurrency services and users, zeroing in on services like Ledger, Trezoe, Jaxx, Electrum, MyEtherWallet, MetaMask, Exodus, and KeyKeep, specifically. Some of these lured further victims by boasting fake five-star reviews. It is believed the malicious code may be linked to an individual or group in Russia.