Five tech stories you might have missed last week

Amazon struggles on Prime Day, TalkTalk shows why it has topped complaints table, and British Airways violates GDPR in an attempt to comply with it

CRN' s weekly round-up of the tech stories that might have skipped you by last week.

1. Duck, Duck, Google
The internet giant was fined a whopping £3.9bn by the EU for uncompetitive Android practices, by "imposing illegal restrictions" on Android smartphone manufacturers to pre-install its Chrome and Search apps, giving Google an unfair advantage in dominating the market.

The Independent reported that its rival DuckDuckGo revealed in a series of tweets how Google asserted its search dominance, which include preventing the DuckDuckGo search engine being added to Chrome on Android, and owning the domain duck.com which redirects visitors to Google's own search engine. DuckDuckGo stated that this "consistently confuses" its users.

2. Dog day for Amazon Prime
Prime Day, Amazon's annual sales extravaganza, encountered an obstacle when the site crashed as soon as the deals were launched. Potential customers were faced with Amazon's error page, which hosts a variety of apologetic-looking dogs. The crash was attributed to Amazon's not providing enough servers to accommodate the surge in customers visiting the site to get their deals. It would seem it was more of a Blue Monday rather than a Black Friday for the retail site.

3. Less TalkTalk, more ComplainComplain
The telco firm heads the table of the most complained-about providers of broadband services in the UK, City A.M. reported. TalkTalk received 29 complaints per 100,000 customers, with BT in second place with 23. The two companies also topped Ofcom's complaints list in April.

In an incident that will probably see it top Ofcom's next complaints table, TalkTalk was one of the companies whose broadband services crashed for 24 hours in Southampton and Portsmouth last week, according to The Register. Both TalkTalk and Sky saw their services crash in the areas, which they blamed on a fibre cable damaged by roadworks.

4. BA's ham-fisted attempt to navigate GDPR
British Airways' social media team was demanding customers post personal information publicly on Twitter in order to help investigate customer service claims, reported theverge.com. The information included posting passport numbers and full addresses to the company's public page - which some passengers actually did. The airline insisted this was to comply with GDPR; however, when it was brought to light, the company began telling customers to DM it instead of posting their information publicly. It was also revealed that the firm requires adblocking to be disabled when checking in, thus sending your personal information to third-party sites. So in its efforts to comply with GDPR, it was actually violating it.

5. Data-loss rumours surround new MacBook Pro model
The newest design of Apple's MacBook Pro could make it unable to recover data if the laptop fails, according to MacRumors.com. Previous models used a special port which connects to the internal logic board, which houses the computer's circuits. In the 2018 model, the data recovery connector has been removed, which means the tool cannot be used if the logic bar fails.