Bezos Ready To Take Your Keys… Facebook ‘secret Mission’ To Get Hospital Patient Data… Twitter Suspend 1.2 Million Account For Promoting Terror

Some Amazon Key features, including keyless entry, go nationwide

A handful of Amazon Key’s main features are being rolled out across the US.

That means you can now use the service anywhere in the country for keyless entry, remote lock and unlock, and guest access, the company said Thursday. Plus, five more locks now work with Amazon Key, for a total of eight locks available for Amazon Key customers.

But if you were waiting for in-home delivery using Amazon Key, that’s not part of the expansion. In-home delivery will still only be available to Prime customers in 37 US cities and surrounding areas.

Amazon is hoping to use Amazon Key to make itself an even bigger player in smart home technologies, with the company already dominant in smart speakers through its Echo brand. Amazon is focusing on the smart home so it can sell its Prime members new security cameras and smart doorbells, and hopefully convince them to use their Echo speakers for more voice shopping.

The company, though, faces loads of competition in the new market, particularly from Google, so it’s moving aggressive to keep expanding and introduce new features. Amazon since December has acquired two smart doorbell companies, Blink and Ring, and has rolled out new Echo devices to stay one step ahead of rivals. It’s also had spats with Google over Nest, Google’s own smart home business that’s also partnered with Amazon.

As Trump Bashes AMAZON, Govt Increasingly Relies on It

Amazon.com Inc. AMZN +3.06% is best known for transforming the U.S. retail industry, a feat that President Donald Trump has recently attacked. But the company has quietly been cultivating a major customer in his own backyard: the federal government.

In the past several years, the Seattle-based company has won much of the business to help the government shift computing services from legacy mainframes onto the cloud, a business where Amazon is the world leader.

This extraordinary transformation has included the provision of cloud services across Washington’s bureaucracy, from the Department of Homeland Security to the Smithsonian Institution. It also has made the U.S. government a top Amazon customer.

The company doesn’t release specifics, but GBH Insights, a research firm, predicts that Amazon’s government business will grow to $2.8 billion in 2018 and $4.6 billion in 2019, up from less than $300 million in 2015. Other company analysts say those projections are optimistic, but not implausible.

Facebook sent a doctor on a secret mission to ask hospitals to share patient data

  • Facebook was in talks with top hospitals and other medical groups as recently as last month about a proposal to share data about the social networks of their most vulnerable patients.
  • The idea was to build profiles of people that included their medical conditions, information that health systems have, as well as social and economic factors gleaned from Facebook.
  • Facebook said the project is on hiatus so it can focus on “other important work, including doing a better job of protecting people’s data.”

Twitter says it suspended 1.2 million accounts for terrorism-promotion violations

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Twitter Inc. said Thursday it suspended 1.21 million accounts from its social media platform between August 2015 and the end of 2017 for “violations related to the promotion of terrorism.”

Twitter also said the suspensions were on a downswing.

They included 274,460 suspended accounts in the second half of 2017, which were down 8.4% from the previous reporting period and the second consecutive period “in which we’ve seen a drop in the number of accounts being suspended for this reason,” Twitter said in a blog post covering its 12th biannual “transparency report.”

Twitter also said 74% of the accounts involved in the latest reporting period “were suspended before their first tweet.”

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