Moscow launched “Face Pay” on Friday, a facial recognition payment system implemented in more than 240 Mosmetro stations, “the largest use of facial recognition technology in the world,” officials claim (via The Guardian). The service relies on stored photographs to validate metro payments, an obvious privacy concern given the previous uses of facial recognition technology by the Russian capital’s law enforcement.

Face Pay requires metro riders to upload a photo and connect their bank and metro cards to the Mosmetro mobile app. With everything uploaded, all you need to do is look at the camera posted above the turnstiles to make it in time for your next train. Moscow authorities expect 10 to 15 percent of riders to use Face Pay “regularly” in the next two to three years, the hope being less time swiping and paying for rides will translate to shorter lines and waits, and less close contact during the ongoing pandemic.

That’s all fine and good, at least conceptually. The relative convenience biometric recognition can add to payment systems is a concept that’s currently being floated in the US through Amazon One, the shipping giant’s palm recognition tech. As The Guardian notes, Moscow’s Department of Information Technology claims photographs collected through official channels won’t be turned over to the police and are instead securely encrypted in the GIS ETSHD system (Moscow’s Unified Data Storage and Processing Center).

That hasn’t convinced Russian privacy advocates, though. “This is a dangerous new step in Russia’s push for control over its population. We need to have full transparency on how this application will work in practice,” Stanislav Shakirov, the founder of digital rights group Roskomsvoboda, told The Guardian. “The Moscow metro is a government institution and all the data can end up in the hands of the security services.”

Shakirov has good reason to be concerned. Moscow’s implementation of facial recognition across its vast network of more than 10,000 CCTV cameras is more than a little scary. Worse than the possibility of abuse by local Moscow law enforcement, the system can apparently be hijacked for as little as $200 by enterprising hackers. That’s the real risk of applying facial recognition across even more of daily life in the city, not just that the government could have an easier time tracking the movements of citizens, but that the system itself is a vulnerable target for even worse abuses.

Apple has removed Quran Majeed, a popular app for reading and listening to the Quran, from the App Store in China, the BBC reports. The company reportedly removed the app at the request of government officials, a somewhat surprising move given Islam is a protected religion in the People’s Republic of China.

Quran Majeed is available for free and “recognized by 25 million Muslim users around the world” according to the app’s developer Pakistan Data Management Services. The app’s removal apparently had nothing to do with its religious content, “according to Apple, our app Quran Majeed has been removed from the China App Store because it includes content that is illegal,” the developer told the BBC. The developer says it’s now attempting to resolve the issue with China’s Cyberspace Administration. The Verge has reached out to both Apple and China’s US Embassy for comment.

Without clearer explanation, the move seems like a possible overreach, though it does fall within Apple’s official stance on human rights abroad (PDF):

We’re required to comply with local laws, and at times there are complex issues about which we may disagree with governments and other stakeholders on the right path forward. With dialogue, and a belief in the power of engagement, we try to find the solution that best serves our users—their privacy, their ability to express themselves, and their access to reliable information and helpful technology. 

While it’s logical for business, that framing has placed the company in questionable positions before. Apple has removed VPN apps that allowed Chinese users to avoid censorship and proactively filtered out apps that mentioned Tiananmen Square, the Dalai Lama, or Taiwanese and Tibetan independence. Apple’s suppliers in the region have also been connected to the oppression of China’s predominantly Muslim Uyghur minority.

Apple is in a difficult situation either way. It relies on the business relationships and sales it makes in China. Taking a strong stance against the government could put that in jeopardy. Just this week, Microsoft made the decision to shut down the local Chinese version of LinkedIn, acknowledging separately that it is becoming increasingly difficult to comply with the Chinese government’s demands. Apple hasn’t yet found that line for itself, and with how much it relies on China to make its iPhone business work, it might not happen anytime soon.

Block Party, the anti-harassment service that specializes in making Twitter more tolerable to use, is out of beta and available now. Block Party automates the time-consuming process of moderating your Twitter feed, filtering out content from people you don’t want to see for later review and, starting today, blocking accounts that retweet or like a bad tweet of your choice with blocklists.

Block Party’s services are available in three different tiers. Free Basic accounts can use Block Party’s moderate filters to catch @mentions and place them in a “Lockout Folder” for later review. Premium accounts, which start at $12 per month, include stricter filters, block lists, a helper view to allow friends or family to review troubling tweets, bulk actions to block or mute multiple accounts in your Lockout Folder at once, and watchlists for tracking accounts after you mute them. The $13 per month Supporter tier includes all of those features and the opportunity to try new features before they’re released.

Block Party offers a lot, but the two core ideas — filters and block lists — could make a big difference for anyone who has to use Twitter for their job or has a high-profile account that’s already a target of harassment. The company has also tried to be mindful about how it implements both features. Block lists are capped at 100 accounts per list (you can have unlimited lists) in the hopes that it’s a small enough amount you can review the list for anyone you might still want to see on your timeline. Meanwhile, filters can be set to remove spam accounts (new accounts without a profile photo, for example) or tuned even tighter to only show @mentions from people you follow or have replied to recently. Twitter offers both features in some capacity, but it lacks the flexibility, focusing on blocking and muting specific words or accounts, without all of the automation or customization.

Twitter’s made moves to offer more moderation and privacy tools, too, like the built-in soft block tool released just this week or concepts for ways to hide old tweets or limit who can see what you’ve liked. So far, though, Block Party has a head start and should make it much easier to make a difference in the quality of your timeline with just a few steps.

You can sign up and read more examples of Block Party’s uses at the company’s website.

Twitter announced on Tuesday that it plans to support Twitter Spaces creators through a new three-month accelerator program called the Twitter Spaces Spark Program. Twitter’s plans follow a similar creator three-month program that Clubhouse launched in March 2021.

The Spark Program is designed to “discover and reward” around 150 Spaces creators with technical, financial, and marketing support, Twitter says. For anyone who applies and gets in, that includes a stipend of $2,500 per month, $500 in monthly ad credits to spend promoting your Spaces on Twitter, early access to new Twitter features, support from Twitter’s official social media handles, and “opportunities for prioritized in-app discoverability for well-performing Spaces.”

To be eligible for the program, you need to meet the following criteria (Twitter has a more extensive explanation on its site):

• Be 18 years or older
• Have 5,000 or more “active followers”
• Be located in the US (at least for Twitter’s first phase of the program)
• Commit to hosting a minimum of two Spaces per week

Twitter is offering a slightly different package of perks compared to Clubhouse’s Creator First program from earlier this year. Creator First focused on connecting live audio creators with brands for sponsorships and building their audiences. For shows that were part of the Clubhouse’s “Pilot Season,” it included $5,000 per month — a bit more than Twitter’s offering — and access to new equipment.

Reporting from The Verge’s senior reporter Ashley Carman suggests the actual results of Clubhouse’s first accelerator program were a mixed bag. Creators loved the community Clubhouse has helped foster but found that the company couldn’t keep up its end of the bargain to connect shows and creators with advertising and sponsorships capable of supporting them after the program ended.

Twitter’s accelerator seems to be avoiding that “what comes after” question, at least for now. That’s somewhat understandable; it’s a hard problem to solve! But it also leaves creators with the same amount of uncertainty about jumping into another new opportunity from a social media company. A familiar place to be, but not exactly a comfortable one.

Applications for the Twitter Spaces Spark Program are open until October 22nd, 2021.

Coinbase announced Monday that it plans to sell, trade, and mint NFTs in an expansion from the marketplace’s cryptocurrency-based roots. Details on how “Coinbase NFT” will do all of that are slim, but the company sees an opportunity. “Just as Coinbase helped millions of people access bitcoin for the first time in an easy and trusted way — we want to do the same for the NFTs,” Coinbase vice president of product Sanchan Saxena writes.

The big idea seems to be social engagement. Coinbase wants to “curate your personal feed” of NFTs and display the NFTs you own on your profile so you can make connections with like-minded fans of digital cats, punks, apes, and beyond.

At launch, Coinbase NFT “will support Ethereum based ERC-721 and ERC-1155 standards,” all NFTs will be on-chain, and there are plans for multi-chain support “soon after” launch. Besides whatever curated feed the company plans to introduce, Coinbase NFT seems similar what competitor OpenSea offers as the current NFT marketplace du jour.

As TechCrunch notes, what seems to be missing from Coinbase’s plans is any kind of Layer-2 scaling integration, the popular method for reducing the costs and environmental impact of minting and trading art on the Ethereum blockchain. NFTs are criticized for the way they replicate some of the inequitable and speculative parts of the real-world art market, but they also carry plenty of environmental concerns because of how much energy is required to run the Ethereum blockchain.

Coinbase’s plans are early and could possibly change, but if another NFT showroom/trading floor sparks your curiosity, the company already has a waitlist for early access you can join.