MacBook Air with M2 ships next week / Meta sues data scrapers / TiKTok won't expand livestream shopping

Plus: The U.K. will use drones to deliver chemotherapy drugs.

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Apple says it will start shipping its updated MacBook Air with its new M2 processor on July 15. Pre-orders for the ultra-thin notebook open up this Friday, July 8. More: Compared to its predecessor, the redesigned MacBook Air has a faster M2 chip, flatter edges, a notch, an upgraded 1080p camera, and a slightly bigger 13.6-inch display. It includes two Thunderbolt 3 ports, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and MagSafe charging. Its M2 chip supports up to 24GB of unified memory vs. a maximum of 16GB for the M1. The laptop comes in silver, space gray, and two new color options: midnight and starlight. It starts at $1,199 in the U.S. but is $100 off with an education discount. Apple may release its largest MacBook Air yet — a 15-inch version — as early as spring 2023, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. He also predicts the release of updated 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros with M2 Max chips in late 2022 or early 2023. THE VERGE

Facebook parent company Meta has sued a Chinese-linked tech company and an individual for allegedly scraping data from users on Instagram and Facebook. On Tuesday, Meta filed separate federal lawsuits against California-based Octopus Data and Ekrem Ateş to stop the alleged data scraping. More: Data scrapers use automated tools to gather huge amounts of data from websites. The practice, though not illegal, can pose risks to consumers when combined with other information and posted online without consent or sold to criminals. Octopus Data says its offers web-scraping services for marketing purposes through a website called Octoparse, which is owned by China-based big data tech provider Shenzhen Vision Information Technology Co. Meta has accused Octopus of violating its terms and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by offering software that compromises the Facebook and Instagram accounts of the user when logged in. This included data about their Instagram followers and Facebook Friends, including email addresses and phone numbers, according to Meta. Separately, the company claims Ateş, a Turkey-based individual, used accounts to gather information on 350,000+ Instagram users and published the data for people to view on clone sites.  PC MAG

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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) put an administrative stay on its order for Juul to pull its electronic cigarettes from the market. The stay temporarily suspends, but does not rescind, the FDA's marketing denial order issued last month while the agency conducts a review. More: The FDA said it found unique "scientific issues" in the application that Juul filed to continue selling its products. A federal appeals court already blocked the FDA's order last month, allowing Juul to continue selling the e-cigarettes until a court reviews the ban. The FDA justified its ban on Juul products by arguing that the company didn't show enough evidence indicating that its products were safe. The agency has started cracking down on the vaping industry. It now requires that companies prove that their e-cigarettes don't attract minors and can help adult smokers quit or smoke less. The CDC says e-cigarettes are unsafe for children and young adults. BUSINESS INSIDER

TikTok has dropped plans to bring its live commerce initiative to the U.S. and parts of Europe after it failed to gain traction in the U.K. TikTok Shop launched in the U.K. last year, allowing brands and influencers to sell products via QVC-style livestream shopping. The service remains popular in Asia. More: TikTok had planned to expand the project into Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and the U.S. this year. The expansion plans were abandoned after the U.K. initiative failed to meet sales targets, TechCrunch reported. Despite cash incentives and other subsidies, many U.K. influencers started leaving this year, citing long hours and too little pay. TikTok said it will continue the project in the U.K., where it's "solely" focused on making the product a success. The company, owned by China-based ByteDance, has started testing a dedicated “Shop” feed tab to buy products through its app in Indonesia.  TECHCRUNCH

Toyota became the latest automaker to reach the sales cap on electric and hybrid vehicles eligible for the $7,500 federal tax credit. The consumer tax credits will now be phased out over a year-long period, starting in October. More: The credits aren't a direct discount on EVs or hybrids but a rebate for taxpayers at the end of the fiscal year. For example, a federal taxpayer owing $10,000 would only owe $2,500 with the full credit. The Toyota vehicles that qualify for the consumer tax credits include the BZ4X electric SUV, Toyota Prius Prime, and RAV4 Prime plug-in hybrid.  GM and Tesla also are no longer eligible for the tax credit after previously reaching their respective 200,000-unit caps. In 2021, President Biden and Democratic representatives proposed a tax credit of up to $12,500 that included a $4,500 incentive for union-manufactured EVs. Last month, Toyota, General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis requested that Congress lift the cap on the number of EV sales before the credits phase out.  ENGADGET

The U.K.’s National Health Service (NHS) will use drones to deliver chemotherapy drugs in southern England. The test program, announced this week, aims to curb delivery times from four hours to 30 minutes. More: The NHS will conduct the trials in partnership with Apian, a medical drone startup founded by former Googlers and NHS doctors in training. The electrical vertical takeoff and landing drones, which can carry up to 44 pounds, will ferry meds from the Queen Alexandra hospital in Portsmouth to St Mary’s hospital on the Isle of Wight. The flights will replace a ferry or hovercraft journey and two car trips per delivery. Saving time is crucial as some drug doses have short shelf lives, the NHS said. Similarly, the U.K.'s Royal Mail aims to deploy up to 200 drones to deliver mail to remote areas in the country within the next three years. The postal giant is using twin-engine drones that have an autopilot system and a 220-pound payload limit.  THE GUARDIAN

QUICK HITS End your expense reporting nightmares; get $100 to see how dreamy it can be.* The U.K.'s antitrust regulator has opened an investigation to determine if Microsoft's $68.7B acquisition of Activision Blizzard will reduce competition. U.S. senators Mark Warner (D-VA) and Marco Rubio (R-FL) have asked the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate TikTok and its Chinese parent company ByteDance due to alleged "repeated misrepresentations" about its data security and processing. Global NFT sales last month tallied $1B, a 92% decline from January's sales of $12.6B, according to Chainalysis. Nintendo announced a Splatoon 3-themed Switch OLED. A beach in central Japan is using an AI system to identify dangerous rip currents and alert lifeguards. *This is sponsored content.

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Beth is a writer and analyst at Inside.com covering artificial intelligence and daily tech news. Since starting work at Inside, she has covered various topics including virtual reality, drones, and e-commerce. Prior to that she was a public policy and investigative reporter for The Arizona Republic, where she won a Pulitzer Prize nomination and First Amendment Award for reporting on the rising costs of pensions. Reach her at Beth.Duckett@inside.com.   Editor Eduardo Garcia is a writer and editor based in New York. He is the author of "Things You Can Do," an illustrated book about climate action. Bylines in The New York Times, The Guardian, Slate, Scientific American, and others. In one of his previous lives, Eduardo worked as a Reuters correspondent in Latin America for nearly a decade.

Facebook’s parent company Meta has announced that it’s suing the U.S. subsidiary of a Chinese tech company, accusing it of offering data scraping services for Facebook and Instagram. The social networking giant also revealed that it’s suing an individual, who the company alleges set up automated Instagram accounts to scrape data from some 350,000 Instagram users. https://about.fb.com/news/2022/07/actions-against-scraping-for-hire/ Both cases have been filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. Facebook vs scrapers While Meta and other internet companies are no strangers to fighting web-scrapers — a practice that involves using automated tools to gather data en-masse from websites — the timing of these latest cases is particularly notable. It comes less than three months after a U.S. court reaffirmed an earlier ruling that web-scraping is legal, the culmination of a long-standing legal battle between Microsoft-owned LinkedIn and a data science company called Hiq Labs, which scraped personal information from LinkedIn to help its customers predict employee attrition. While the outcome was celebrated by many across the industrial spectrum, including archivists, researchers and journalists who rely on scraping publicly-available data, it also dealt a serious blow to legitimate privacy and security concerns around how people’s data can be harnessed without their permission. In this particular case, the court ruled that scraping publicly-accessible information does not contravene the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), a cybersecurity law that governs computer hacking in the U.S. Not to be deterred, Meta is now pursuing similar legal action against a company called Octopus Data, the U.S. offshoot of a “Chinese national high-tech enterprise” — the parent company’s website says that’s it’s called “Shenzhen Vision Information Technology Co.,” and it claims to have launched its core product in 2016. In addition, Meta confirmed that it’s filing a suit against a Turkey-based individual going by the name of Ekrem Ateş, who allegedly published scraped Instagram data to their own websites, or so-called “clone sites.” Igor Bonifacic ·Weekend Editor Tue, July 5, 2022 at 2:30 PM·2 min read Arnd Wiegmann / reuters Meta is taking legal action against two prolific data scrapers. On Tuesday, the company filed separate federal lawsuits against a company called Octopus and an individual named Ekrem Ateş. According to Meta, the former is the US subsidiary of a Chinese multinational tech firm that offers data scraping-for-hire services to individuals and companies. Octopus also sells software people can use to carry out their own data collection campaigns. According to Meta, this program first compromises the Facebook and Instagram accounts of the user by providing their authentication information to Octopus before proceeding to scrape all the data accessible to that individual’s accounts. The software can then obtain phone numbers, dates of birth and other personal information about every Facebook and Instagram friend connected to a particular Octopus customer. Meta alleges Octopus violated its terms of service and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by offering an automated scraping service and attempting to avoid detection by the company. “Companies like Octopus are part of an emerging scraping industry that provides automation services to any customer — regardless of who they target and for what purpose they scrape,” Meta said. “This industry makes scraping available to individuals and companies that otherwise would not have the capabilities.” As for Ekrem Ateş, the individual Meta sued, the company says he used automated Instagram accounts to collect information on more than 350,000 Instagram users and later published that data on a series of clone sites where one could view the data of those individuals without their consent. Since the start of 2021, Meta says it has taken multiple enforcement actions against Ateş, including sending him a cease and desist letter and revoking his access to its services. This isn’t the first time Meta has used legal action to try and stop data scraping. In 2020, for instance, the company sued a Turkish national who scraped more than 100,000 Instagram profiles. PC MAG

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