Smartphone shipments in North America dropped 18 percent in Q1 2019 to a five-year low of 36.4 million units.While the region’s biggest ever recorded fall in smartphone sales is being credited primarily to Apple’s lacklustre performance, the iPhone maker remained the clear leader despite suffering a regional decline of 19%.
Data Breach
A hack discovered by us-based firm vpnMentor that has exposed a database of 80 million (nearly 65 percent) American households. The unprotected 24GB database, hosted on Microsoft Cloud servers, includes the number of people living in each household with their full names, their marital status, income bracket, age, and more. While some information is available freely, other data like title, gender, etc are coded.
Broadband
Health Secretary Matt Hancock has announced plans to upgrade every hospital, GP practice and community care service to full fibre connectivity.Almost 40% of NHS organisations are using slow and unreliable internet supplied through copper lines, which restricts the ability to offer digital services to patients.
Tech companies in the UK face new rules, sanctions and oversight as the UK government declared to end the “era of self-regulation”. The government will impose a new legal “duty of care” on companies to take steps to tackle illegal and harmful activity on their services, according to plans announced in a white paper.
ICO
The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has opened the beta phase of its Sandbox, a new service designed to support organisations using personal data to develop products and services that are innovative and have demonstrable public benefit.
Facebook
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)  is charging Facebook with violating the Fair Housing Act by encouraging, enabling, and causing housing discrimination through the company’s advertising platform.
Twitter
Several tweets circulating the Twitter platform are asking users to change their birth year to 2007 in order to make their feeds look "colourful". Falling for this hoax tweet, several users went ahead and changed their birth years to 2007. This obviously did not change the way their feeds looked, but instead, locked them out of their accounts for being under age.