Tech News Today for May 1, 2017

Tech News for Monday May 1, 2017

In a newly signed executive order, President Donald Trump says he plans to establish an American Technology Council. The order says "The Federal Government must transform and modernize its information technology and how it uses and delivers digital services," but it wasn't clear how he planned to implement this. Axios first reported that the new council was backed by presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner's mission to combine government efforts with private-sector ideas to solve long-term problems. Read more at recode.net.

Samsung is getting into the self-driving car business. According to the Verge, the South Korean giant is testing its driverless car tech in Hyundais. Like Apple and perhaps Google, Samsung isn't expected to build its own cars, just the autonomous tech insde them. Hyundai itself got permits a year ago to test their self-driving systems and since then regulations have been loosened. Now you only need one test driver in the car at all times in South Korea. Read more at theverge.com.

Amazon announced over the weekend that it would be discontinuing its Underground Actually Free program in 2019 after first debuting back in 2015 as a way to incentivize consumers to purchase Amazon’s own Fire line of mobile devices. The program allowed developers to offer completely free versions of their paid apps with Amazon footing the bill and paying developers royalties based on how those apps were used by its customers. Participating developers will receive those royalty payments until the program ceases in 2019. Read more at fortune.com.

Developer Stuart Colliani recently uploaded 40,000 Tinder profile pictures to Kaggle, a community of data scientists who share data in order to compete in machine learning competitions. This particular data cache of photos, which is now gone, was allegedly acquired by scraping the dating site Tinder and intended to be used to create an artificial intelligence database. The code is still up at GitHub and its called TinderFaceScraper. So, think before you post, anywhere. Read more at techcrunch.com.

Megan Morrone and Jason Howell are joined today by Sam Machkovech of Ars Technica to talk about Facebook analyzing its users' emotions. 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.