In what seems like a broken record, Facebook is facing another scandal related to the transparency of its user data. The UpGuard cybersecurity firm reports that it uncovered two cases in which massive buckets of third-party Facebook app data were left exposed on the public internet. In one such case, a Mexico-based media company named Cultura Colectiva amassed 146 gigabytes of data with more than 540 million records. The records are said to include user comments, likes, reactions, account names, Facebook IDs and more. Don't yell, text: The new normal of how families'talk' at home Another exposure, UpGuard says, came from a since-discontinued Facebook-integrated app called At The Pool and was apparently posted on a public Amazon cloud server.

Facebook is still a privacy nightmare. The company's history of porous data sharing continues to haunt both it and us (its fairly helpless users) on the regular. On Wednesday, researchers from the cybersecurity firm UpGuard shared that they found two massive troves of exposed Facebook user data that had been posted publicly on Amazon cloud servers. The data included users' passwords, names, comments, and likes. The scope of this particular privacy foul from Facebook is tremendous: More than 540 million user records were sitting in plain sight, available to anyone who found them.

The future of'deep fake' technology could be much worse than doctored videos of celebrities and politicians. U.S. military experts are raising concerns about a new variant of deep fakes, or videos that use AI to make subjects appear to say or do something they really didn't, that could involve doctored satellite images of the Earth, according to Defense One. It comes as social media giants, researchers and other experts have been working to outsmart deep fake videos. U.S. military experts are raising concerns about a new variant of deep fakes, or videos that use AI to manipulate its subjects, that could involve doctored satellite images of the Earth Deepfakes are so named because they utilize deep learning, a form of artificial intelligence. They are made by feeding a computer an algorithm, or set of instructions, lots of images and audio of a certain person.

It took the better part of a year to show up, but John Legend's Google Assistant cameo is finally available in the US. Ask the AI helper to "talk like a Legend" and the singer's dulcet tones will greet you when issuing certain commands, such as asking about the weather. Naturally, he'll have answers for questions about his own life, such as his wife Chrissy Teigen or his favorite type of music (take a wild guess). Some of those answers will be canned, but others will take advantage of WaveNet speech synthesis to deliver a customized response. Legend will only be available for a "limited time," and you'll have to be ready to hear the regular Google Assistant voice for those many queries where the crooner isn't available.

Self-driving cars currently need a lot of hand-holding to get around, with even Waymo's machines relying on lidar, custom rules and highly detailed maps to know exactly where to go. Wayve, however, wants driverless vehicles with more independence. It just showed a prototype autonomous vehicle (a modified Renault Twizy) driving around Cambridge, UK using only cameras and basic GPS directions from a phone. It had never seen the roads before, and was only running on 20 hours of training data -- it didn't even know to drive on the left side of the road or to slow down at intersections where it didn't have the right of way. The trick, according to Wayve, is the approach to the driving AI.

VW will need to hustle if it's going to make automated driving a practical reality by 2025, and it appears it's moving quickly. The automaker is now testing self-driving versions of the e-Golf in real-world conditions in Hamburg -- the first time its driverless vehicles have roamed a major German city. They're Level 4 vehicles (fully autonomous in most situations) that will putt around a roughly 1.9-mile section of a "digital test bed," but they'll have to contend with urban traffic like anyone else. The cars will be loaded to the hilt with sensors, including 14 (!) cameras, 11 laser scanners and seven radars, not to mention enough computing to rival "15 laptops." This is still early tech, then, although it will ensure that the car isn't caught off-guard by pedestrians or less-than-courteous cars.

Apple could finally be bringing back one of its most beloved phones. Rumours suggest that the company is working on a smaller version of its future handset, apparently in line with the size of the iPhone SE. The first version of that handset – which was much smaller than the other phones it was making at the time, as well as being low cost – proved an unexpected hit, but has gone largely unmentioned ever since. Apple released the first iPhone SE in 2016. It immediately found favour, particularly with people who because of small hands or for other reasons were turned off by the increasing size of Apple's phones.

Beats has introduced its own version of Apple's hugely popular AirPods, just days after they were updated. The new Powerbeats Pro earphones pack in all of the same technology found in Apple's own completely wireless AirPods. Primarily, that means Apple's H1 chip, which allows the earphones to quickly and easily connect to iPhone and other Apple products. But Beats also suggested that the earphones will include better sound than their Apple counterparts. We'll tell you what's true.

Silicon Valley's use of nontraditional employment arrangements, where workers typically aren't afforded the same privileges as employees, has grown faster than full-time jobs, even as tech giants come under fire for their treatment of Uber drivers, Google cafeteria workers, or Facebook content moderators. But after sustained protest from contractors and employees, Google said Tuesday it will require outside companies that supply it labor to offer better working conditions, including comprehensive health care, 12 weeks of parental leave, and a $15-per-hour minimum wage. Google's policy change arrives amid a wider reckoning over Silicon Valley's impact, from income inequality to workers rights. Last week, thousands of Uber drivers protested an abrupt move to cut per-mile fares by 25 percent, as the company prepares to go public; that was followed by an anonymous letter from an Uber engineer urging employees to support drivers. Days before Lyft's IPO, a California lawmaker declined to exempt Uber, Lyft, and other gig-economy tech companies from a bill that would limit employers' use of independent contractors and force them to classify more workers as employees, making them eligible for overtime, Social Security, unemployment, disability insurance, and other benefits.

Researchers discovered hundreds of millions of Facebook users' data was left unprotected once again, this time on Amazon's servers. The information exposed was stuff like names, passwords, comments, interests, and likes. The tl;dr: Facebook doesn't seem to have much control over what third parties do with your data, basically ever, so you might want to lock down those privacy settings. President Trump has hosted everyone from foreign dignitaries to sitting members of Congress at his home away from home--Mar-a-Lago. But after a woman was arrested for sneaking in this week, it raised the question: How safe is this place where Donald Trump conducts major presidential business?