August is almost here, and in the BIGfish office that means the team is already gearing up for CES and holiday gift guide preparations! Before we dive into that, we’re wrapping up the biggest news in tech from the past couple of weeks!

Uber and Lyft
New York City officials are moving to cap the number of rideshare vehicles (Uber and Lyft) on the roads in an effort to mitigate congestion. Since rideshare apps have skyrocketed in usage in NYC, they’ve often fallen blame to overcrowding the streets and causing lower wages for taxi drivers. If passed, this legislation would make New York City one of the first cities to restrict the maximum number of rideshare vehicles on the streets.

Facebook
It was a rough week for Facebook, as its stock price plummeted 19% in one day, marking the largest one day drop in US history. This 19% drop equates to a $120 billion loss in market value (woah). It also came out that Facebook has only grown by 22 million daily users, which is the smallest growth its experienced since 2011. What’s causing this decline for Facebook? Considering it’s faced its fair share of crises in the past few years, including the Russian interference in the 2016 election and the more recent Cambridge Analytica scandal, the platform has made some major employee hiring to figure it all out. More employees, in this case, means less revenue growth.

LinkedIn
This week, our favorite professional networking platform, LinkedIn, added a voice messaging feature. LinkedIn users will now be able to receive messages on both mobile and on the LinkedIn website and the messages can be up one minute long. This move is causing many users to ask “…why?” With LinkedIn messaging already nearly instant and the option to have messages sent to a user’s email as well, this additional messaging option seems a bit overbearing and unnecessary. However, LinkedIn is backing up this feature claiming it will make communication more convenient, streamlined and enable users to truly express themselves.

Amazon
Amazon’s facial recognition software “Rekognition” is raising a lot of eyebrows after the ACLU test results came out. In order to test the system’s accuracy, the ACLU scanned the faces of 535 members of Congress against 25,000 public mugshots. While none of the Congress members were actually in the lineup, the system falsely matched 28 Congress members with mugshots. The ACLU performed these tests with an 80% confidence threshold, which Amazon claims is not high enough. For the test to work properly enough for law enforcement to use, the threshold should be at least 95% for the most accurate results.

What were your favorite tech stories from the past couple of weeks? Let us know in the comments and be sure to follow us on Twitter @BIGfishPR to stay up to date!