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Tech News Today For March 17, 2017

Tech News for Wednesday March 17, 2017

A Minnesota judge is ordering Google to determine and share the names of users who had searched for the name of a local fraud victim last December. The search leads to a photo that was used in a fraudulent passport used to transfer $28,500 illegally from an Edina Minnesota credit union. Google is being targeted alone because the same search yields no results on Bing or Yahoo. Read more at arstechnica.com.

Big brands are pulling their ads from Google’s DoubleClick Ad Exchange Service after it was shown that ads were being programmatically placed next to YouTube videos promoting hate and racism. The UK government and the Guardian newspaper were the first to pull their ads after a Times of London article revealed the unfortunate pairing. That move led to a number of other big name advertisers following suit until guarantees are made by Google that this misplacement won’t happen again. Google said in a blog post that it's working on changes to its reviews process to ensure ads appear where there should and not where they shouldn’t.   Read more at bloomberg.com.

Living in the San Francisco isn't cheap, even for well-paid tech employees. That's why Zapier, a San Francisco-founded startup made up 80 remote employees is offering a de-location package. It's offering employees up to $10,000 in reimbursed moving expenses to leave the bay area and move elsewhere. In order to get the reimbursement, the employees have to commit to working for Zapier for at least one year. Read more at inc.com.

Netflix is moving on from its star rating system for users and towards the simpler method of thumbs up thumbs down. After extensive user testing, the thumbs received 200% more ratings from users, fueling Netflix’s recommendations engine. Speaking of recommendations, Netflix is also rolling out a percent match feature that will show users when a show or movie is more than 50% of a match to their taste. Read more at variety.com.

Chance the Rapper made history this year as the first artist to win a Grammy for a steaming-only album. Now Chance the Rapper is going public with the business deal he made with Apple on that record. In a series of Tweets published Friday, Chance said thar Apple paid him half a million dollars for two weeks of streaming exclusivity for the record, Coloring Book. Apple also featured Chance in an ad. This is the first time an artist has been so transparent with the terms of a deal with Apple Music, which makes me wonder -- why talk so openly about this on Twitter?  Read more at thefader.com.

Jason Howell and guest co-host Nathan Olivarez-Giles are joined today by Mike Murphy from Quartz to talk about the success of the Nintendo Switch. Tech News Today streams live weekdays at 4PM Pacific, 7PM Eastern at twit.tv/live. You can subscribe to the show and get it on-demand at twit.tv/tnt.

 

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