Good morning! This is the tech news you need to know this Wednesday.
The UK government announced it will remove Huawei from its 5G network by 2027, and telecoms companies will be banned from purchasing Huawei 5G equipment from next year. UK Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden said the decision was due to major sanctions imposed on the Chinese firm by the US government.
Amazon is launching 20 healthcare clinics in five US cities as part of a pilot program for warehouse workers and their families. The clinics were in the works before the pandemic and will not offer testing or care related to COVID-19, a company spokesperson told Business Insider.
Massachusetts filed a lawsuit against Uber and Lyft accusing the companies of misclassifying drivers as contractors and denying them benefits and workplace protections. The companies argue that reclassifying drivers as employees would put many of them out of work and reduce their flexibility.
When you search for identical videos on Google it pushes YouTube results above others, the Wall Street Journal reports. Google owns YouTube, and sources familiar with the matter told The Journal executives at Google decided to engineer it so YouTube gets priority.
The US reversed a new visa policy requiring international students to take in-person classes after it was challenged by universities and tech companies, Bloomberg reports. The US government announced the new requirement last week.
Amazon said it made a policy relaxing its rules on workers’ “time off task” to let them wash their hands, but workers suing the company say they were never told this. Amazon made the claim as part of a court case brought by six workers who claim it didn’t do enough to protect them following the onset of the pandemic.
A company half-owned by the Chinese government has been planting ‘back doors’ in the tax software American companies need to do business in China since 2018, researchers say. In June, Trustwave first published a report that the giant IT firm Aisino planted malware in its tax software.
A startup founded by former AWS engineer Bindu Reddy has released open source tools to help counteract one of the biggest problems in artificial intelligence, biased data. This new tool is launching as Abacus.AI raises $13 million in Series A funding led by Index Ventures.
Airbnb is asking guests to donate money to hosts. Airbnb rolled out a new tool that encourages guests to send “kindness cards” and cash donations to their former hosts “impacted by COVID-19.”
A class-action lawsuit was filed against Google claiming it tracks people on hundreds of thousands of apps even when they opt out. The lawsuit accuses Google of violating wiretap law and California privacy law by recording what users are looking at in apps.
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