The hardware segment of the global smart speaker market is expected to top $10.3 billion by 2026, growing at an 18 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR), Transparency Market Research reported Friday. Among voice assistants, Amazon Alexa is forecast to hold the majority market share at 55 percent by 2026, while Google Assistant is expected to experience the most growth at a 19 percent CAGR. E-commerce will dominate distribution for smart speakers, said the report.

Google will pursue artificial intelligence applications that are socially beneficial, tested for safety, accountable to people and possess “high standards of scientific excellence,” CEO Sundar Pichai blogged Thursday. Laying out principles for AI, he wrote that the company also won't design or deploy AI for specific reasons. Google will avoid technology likely to cause overall harm, weapons and other devices meant to injure people, and technology that violates internationally accepted norms or human rights.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals shouldn't let Grindr use Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act as a shield in a case brought by a man claiming he was impersonated on the gay dating app and harassed, said Consumer Watchdog Thursday. “Other court circuits have misconstrued Section 230 immunity too broadly,” CW said, allowing all kinds of internet service providers to “avoid legal liability, never being held responsible for material on their platforms.”

Department of Education Federal Commission on School Safety recommendations for improving student safety must include “appropriate privacy protections,” Future of Privacy Forum Director-Education Privacy Project Amelia Vance told the commission Wednesday. Protecting student privacy and equity is important, she said, with schools deploying devices for social media monitoring, video surveillance with police access and visitor monitoring systems. She noted Florida plans to create a database combining data from social media, law enforcement and social services agencies, and Texas plans to scan and analyze social media data and private messages between individuals and groups.

To improve transparency of software components and digital security, NTIA Administrator David Redl Wednesday launched a multistakeholder process. The agency seeks input from software vendors, IoT manufacturers, medical device manufacturers, civil society and various sectors. The first meeting is 10 a.m. July 19 at the American Institute of Architects, 1735 New York Ave. NW. “This initiative will highlight the role of enterprise customer to understand how data can be used to better secure organizations,” Redl wrote. “Stakeholders can address the challenges and obstacles in sharing this data.” In Thursday's Federal Register, NTIA says the multistakeholder process is the result of recommendations included in a report to the president on botnets (see 1805300065).

DOJ will appeal a federal judge's decision that President Donald Trump cannot legally block users from his Twitter account for political reasons, said a court filing Monday. The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University sued Trump in July for blocking users from his @realDonaldTrump account after they criticized him. Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled last month that Trump’s actions violated the First Amendment (see 1805230077). DOJ and the White House didn't comment further Tuesday.

Apple knowingly marketed three generations of defective Apple Watches since 2015 without owning up to the flaw that causes the watch’s screen to “crack, shatter, or detach” from the body of the device, “through no fault of the wearer,” alleged a complaint (in Pacer) filed Monday in U.S. District Court in San Jose. Apple “actively concealed and failed to disclose” the defect to consumers, and “indicates that its internal policy is to deny the existence” of the flaw or claim it’s the result of “accidental damage” from the user, thereby refusing to “honor” any warranty on the product, said the complaint seeking class-action status. Without warranty coverage, consumers “are forced to incur the significant expense of repairing or replacing” their defective watches, it said. Plaintiff Kenneth Sciacca bought his second-generation Apple Watch in December 2016 from an Apple store in Colorado Springs, Colorado, said the complaint. About 15 months later, Sciacca noticed that its screen had become detached from its body when he removed it from its charger, it said. When Sciacca brought the watch to an Apple store in Lone Tree, store employees quoted him $249 to fix it because it wasn’t under warranty, an offer that Sciacca declined, it said. His experience was “identical” to that of “thousands” of other Apple Watch owners who voiced their grievances on Apple’s “Communities” forum, it said. “Apple’s response in each case is the same: it implicitly or expressly blames the consumer.” The company didn’t comment Tuesday.

Two FTC attorneys are immune from a lawsuit filed by a medical records company alleging the duo retaliated after the company criticized the agency over a data security investigation (see 1603080005), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled Friday. Michael Daugherty, owner of LabMD, claimed Ruth Yodaiken and Alain Sheer retaliated after his public criticism of their investigation into the company’s data-security practices making patient records available over public file-sharing. The response violated First Amendment rights, Daugherty claimed. “Qualified immunity protects all but the plainly incompetent or those who knowingly violate the law,” the D.C. Circuit said. “Even if the FTC attorneys sought to retaliate for the public criticism, their actions do not violate any clearly established right absent plausible allegations that their motive was the but-for cause of the Commission’s enforcement action.”

DOJ said a 50-year-old New York City man was charged with one count of cyberstalking and two counts of sending interstate threats to a woman he briefly dated. An affidavit filed in U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York said David Waldman stalked the unidentified victim intermittently from April 2014 until his arrest Friday. He sent the woman hundreds of texts, voicemails and emails, and “made voluminous posts on a variety of online platforms, in which he claimed, among other assertions, that she had been diagnosed with bipolar and narcissistic personality disorder, used drugs, and fabricated claims that she had been a victim of child sexual abuse,” DOJ alleged Friday. The victim got restraining orders. Requests for comment sent to various email addresses DOJ linked to Waldman were not returned.

General Motors is “still on track” to launch autonomous vehicles in a "ridesharing network" in 2019, “but as always, we will be gated by safety,” said CEO Mary Barra on a conference call with investors about SoftBank Vision Fund’s $2.25 billion investment in GM Cruise (see 1805310003). That GM is testing AVs in “a complex urban environment” in downtown San Francisco “gives us a dramatic increase in the rate of learning that we have,” the CEO said Thursday. Having all AV development “under one roof” in the GM Cruise subsidiary “is unique in this space, and we think it is a very important ingredient to have the speed at which we can develop these vehicles safely,” she said. SoftBank “affords us a new source of capital as we look to scale this business,” said GM President Dan Ammann.