Facebook said on Wednesday its efforts to fight fake news during Germany’s national elections included taking down tens of thousands of fake profiles in the final month of the campaign. Richard Allan, Facebook’s vice president of public policy for Europe, Middle East Africa, said the Silicon Valley-based company mounted an array of efforts to ensure […]

Your most personal information — home address, Social Security number, etc. — has likely been hacked as one of the 143 million American consumers whose Equifax credit files were breached. Equifax CEO Richard Smith resignation, potential illegal stock trades of senior executives, has drawn the attention of Congress with a Senate hearing scheduled. Policy makers […]

A majority of Americans haven’t checked to see if their information was compromised in the Equifax data breach, according to a new survey by LendEDU. While more than 84 percent of respondents said they had heard of the hack, 55 percent still don’t know if they were one of the 143 million affected. LendEDU polled […]

Amazon‘s Alexa voice technology is being used in a bunch of new hardware devices, including an upgraded Echo, a box for making phone calls and even in some upcoming BMW cars. To develop all of that technology, Amazon has quietly assembled a team of over 5,000 people working on Echo and the Alexa ecosystem, Amazon’s […]

Uber is shutting its costly car-leasing unit as new CEO Dara Khosrowshahi pushes the company to focus on businesses that make money. “We have decided to stop operating Xchange Leasing and move towards a less capital-intensive approach,” a spokesperson told CNBC. Xchange, a wholly-owned unit of Uber, had operations in U.S. cities including Los Angeles […]

When it comes to the development of artificial intelligence (AI), some are more positive than others. Tech titan Elon Musk says it will cause World War III and “is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization.” Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, on the other hand, isn’t panicking. AI, he says, is “on the verge […]

Seventy percent of hardware startups die off or become “zombies” after raising outside funding, according to a new study from CB Insights. That’s partially because it’s relatively easy to score a first seed round but not later-stage financing. In venture capital, a “zombie” is a start-up that raises money, but fails to attract a buyer […]

Amazon announced the Echo Connect on Wednesday. It’s a $35 box that lets you place phone calls through your Echo to landline phones. If you want to call someone who still has a landline, like your grandparents or a pizza restaurant, for example, this will allow that. Keep in mind that this is different from […]

Amazon announced a bunch of new products on Wednesday including: Amazon said it offers much better sound than the original Amazon Echo, thanks to support for Dolby Audio, which means it’ll compete more directly with products such as the Sonos Play:1 and even Apple’s upcoming HomePod, the latter of which is due out before the […]

Facebook Messenger is aiming to become your default messaging app. CNBC asked Facebook’s VP of messaging, David Marcus, if the company wanted to replace the default messaging apps on iPhone and Android, “By all means, yes,” Marcus said. “Absolutely.” To get there, Facebook is adding new features like locations, polls and third party experiences, such […]