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Man Says Apple Watch Fall Alert Saved His Life

Charlotte Henry ·

Over the years, we’ve heard various stories about how the Apple Watch has helped save people in danger – sometimes it’s been about heart rate alerts, other times the ability to contact people, even when separated from the paired iPhone. In a new story, one man told People how the device’s fall alert system helped him be found quickly after collapsing in a hospital toilet.

At one point during his visit, Schneider said he asked to use the restroom — but the events that followed are a complete blur to him. “While I was in the bathroom I went unconscious and fell to the ground, where I apparently slammed my head, fracturing my skull and suffering an emergent brain bleed,” he explained. Luckily, Schneider was wearing an Apple Watch at the time — a smart device he believes was part of the reason that he survived. “I was only found unconscious so soon after the fall because my Apple Watch detected a hard fall, calling 911 and sent an emergency notification to my emergency contacts after I failed to respond to the prompt on my watch,” he wrote in the post.

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EFF Shares Statement on Apple Scanning for Illegal Content

Andrew Orr ·

This week we discovered that Apple plans to localize its scanning efforts to detect child sexual abuse material. The move has been widely criticized and the Electronic Frontier Foundation has shared its statement on the matter.

All it would take to widen the narrow backdoor that Apple is building is an expansion of the machine learning parameters to look for additional types of content, or a tweak of the configuration flags to scan, not just children’s, but anyone’s accounts. That’s not a slippery slope; that’s a fully built system just waiting for external pressure to make the slightest change.

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COVID-19 Pandemic Delays Opening of First Apple Store in India

Charlotte Henry ·

The opening of the first Apple Store in India has been delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Indian Express reported. The Mumbai location had been set to open this year to boost the company’s retail presence in the crucial market.

While Apple has a strong franchise retail network across India, it’s online store launched last September has been helping the company reach buyers beyond its retail network. This January, in an earnings call after announcing the company’s 2020 results, Cook said Apple had sold over a million devices in the country for the first time. “If you take India for example, we doubled our business last quarter compared to a year ago,” he told analysts while qualifying that Apple’s “absolute level of business there is still quite low relative to the size of the opportunity.”

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Apple Music Now Lets Artists Share Milestones

Charlotte Henry ·

Apple Music now allows artists to share various metrics and milestones with their fans, Macrumors reported. These include highs and all-time best number of  plays, number of Shazams, and whether tracks are feature in ‌curated playlists.

The ‌Apple Music‌ for Artists feature generates automatic milestones for artists of all sizes, which artists can highlight on social media networks. Milestones include new highs and all-time bests across Plays and Shazams, and inclusion in ‌Apple Music‌’s curated playlists. Artists will see images celebrating their milestones on their iOS overview page for ‌Apple Music‌ for Artists, and can tap the share icon to open up the share sheet. Users will also see relevant milestones on the song and country detail pages. Milestones can be shared to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook and Instagram stories. Sharing milestones is a feature that’s limited to artists at the current time and the images can only be accessed through the ‌Apple Music‌ for Artists iOS app.