Technology

London, October 31, 2019 – A popular Android keyboard app, ai.type, downloaded more than 40 million times and included in the Google Play app store, has been caught making millions of unauthorized purchases of premium digital content, researchers at mobile technology company Upstream report. The app has been delivering millions of invisible ads and fake clicks, while delivering genuine user data about real views, clicks and purchases to ad networks. ai.type carries out some of its activity hiding under other identities[1], including disguising itself to spoof popular apps such as Soundcloud. The app’s tricks have also included a spike in suspicious activity once removed from the Google Play store.

31 October 2019: New research into job-seeker attitudes to digitization, automation and AI in the recruitment process has revealed how job-seekers are cheating recruitment technology platforms, to better their chances of landing a job. Seven in ten (67%) job seekers admitted to deliberately using optimization strategies to improve their chances of getting a job. 

The study, Hiring Humans vs. Recruitment Robots, by recruitment software provider TribePad canvassed the views of over 1,000 employees and job seekers in the UK. The findings revealed a worrying trend: as technology continues to permeate the recruitment and HR industry, job-seekers are looking for ways to game the system. 

London, UK, 22nd October, 2019: A recent survey of 500 retailers sponsored by Eggplant, the digital experience specialist, revealed the pressures facing online digital teams in advance of busy retail season. While 92% of digital teams are focused on business outcomes and an omnichannel experience that delights, 60% fail to measure customer churn - even though around one in three (30%) have an average drop off rate of 50% or more on online properties.

This follows recent reports that nearly 3,000 shops shut on UK high streets in the first half of this year and in July the proportion of all shops that are empty reached 10.3%, its highest level since January 2015.

London, October 17th, 2019 – Snaptube, a popular Android smartphone video app which claims some 40 million users, has been caught making millions of suspicious transactions without the knowledge of its users. The Snaptube app features the same piece of developer software code, Mango SDK, that was at the center of the Vidmate expose earlier this year - when another popular video app from a Chinese developer was found to be conducting mass scale advertising and premium services’ subscription fraud. Snaptube also displays a common traffic pattern and similar URLs and domains as those reported with Vidmate.