Good morning! This is the tech news you need to know this Tuesday.
- Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is reportedly willing to testify before Congress after the company initially resisted making him available to address antitrust concerns. Lawmakers have threatened to subpoena Bezos, forcing him to appear before the House Judiciary Committee.
- GitHub, the world's largest site for hosting open-source software, is working to replace the terms "master" and "slave" in code. In programming speak, "master" refers to the main version of code that controls the "slaves," or the replicas.
- Two Black women publicly resigned from Pinterest, saying they faced humiliation and retaliation and were passed over for promotion. Ifeoma Ozoma, a Google and Facebook alum, said a male colleague shared her private information to scary groups on the internet and that she struggled to get higher pay and was subjected to what she believed was a retaliatory performance review.
- Former eBay executives sent a pig fetus and porn to a couple who wrote a newsletter critical of the company, according to a DOJ investigation. The employees sent the couple anonymous messages and packages to their home, including a bloody pig Halloween mask and a book "on surviving the loss of a spouse," according to court documents.
- Apple and Google are facing pressure from New York's Attorney General to impose stricter privacy rules on contact tracing apps that are currently flooding their app stores. While both companies have set out guidelines for apps built on their "exposure notification" API, the same rules aren't enforced for third-party apps in their stores.
- Activists are trying to track incidents of police misconduct by tapping into NYC's vast network of traffic cameras and sharing footage with the public. The city's Department of Transportation makes footage available to the public in real time.
- A Bill Gates conspiracy theory trended on Twitter as the billionaire continues to be at the center of false coronavirus claims. "#ExposeBillGates" was trending on Twitter over the weekend as a result of coordinated efforts by conspiracy theorists.
- WhatsApp is launching a digital payment system in Brazil in what will be the feature's first nationwide rollout. The system will use Facebook Pay and will be free to individual users, but businesses will be charged.
- Instagram says it will review its harassment and verification policies after complaints from Black creators, Engadget reports. CEO Adam Mosseri said the platform will investigate "specific safety issues" affecting Black users.
- "Fortnite" developer Epic Games is reportedly close to landing a funding deal that would value the game studio at $17 billion. New investors T. Rowe Price Group and Baillie Gifford as well as existing investor KKR will join the round.
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