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Cisco lays off thousands

U.S. software company Cisco has fired thousands more employees in a second round of job cuts this year. In August, the company had announced that it would reduce its headcount by 7% or 5,600 employees. This was after letting go of 4,000 employees earlier in February. 

Despite showing robust earnings in the previous quarter, the company said the layoffs were to restructure and invest in key growth opportunities and streamline. They are planning to merge their security, networking and collaboration segments into a single unit. Cisco was also looking to leverage the increasing scope of AI technologies and had set aside funds for it. The company hasn’t yet confirmed which departments will be impacted by the layoffs but a report said that the threat intelligence and security research unit, Talos Security would be affected. 

Google offered to sell part of ad business

Google’s parent company Alphabet has offered to sell its advertising marketplace AdX to end the ongoing EU antitrust investigation. But the EU has reportedly rejected the proposal calling it insufficient sources said. The company’s thriving ad business came under the spotlight after a complaint from the European Publishers Council. 

The EU charged Google with favouring their own ad services, making a fourth case against the company. Google’s offer is unprecedented as it fights a U.S. antitrust trial too that wants the company to sell their Ad Manager product which contains AdX and the company’s publisher ad server, DFP. Sources told Reuters that the EU could instead order Google to stop alleged anti-competitive practices in the near future instead of the divestment. A majority of Google’s revenue (77%) came from advertising across Gmail, Google Play, search, Google Maps, YouTube, AdMob, AdSense and Google Ad Manager. 

LinkedIn trained AI models on user data

Users on professional networking platform LinkedIn have found that their data was being used to train AI models without consent. An option under Settings that allowed individual’s personal data and content to being trained for AI models was turned on by default, users based in the U.S. and India said. Since then, users have been advised to manually turn the option off if they wanted to opt out of letting the platform use their content. 

After the news broke, LinkedIn has updated its terms of service now. However, ideally users should have been updated much ahead of starting to collect the data. Most raised concerns around privacy and plagiarism after the finding. Stringent privacy laws in the EU still haven’t taken any action against the platform. Meanwhile, tech giant Microsoft which acquired LinkedIn for $26.2 billion in 2016, is also facing lawsuit over its alleged use of people’s data for AI training.