Safety gear for UberEats riders  

• Uber has new safety gear and technology for its Australian riders.
• From today the Uber app will be able to tell whether its riders are wearing a helmet, using object recognition is its app.
• Riders will also have to complete a checklist of their bike’s roadworthiness,
• And later this month, Uber will start distributing lights, reflective vests, bells and phone holders.  
• The changes come after the deaths of two Uber Eats riders in three days amid a spate of five deaths across the industry last year.
• As the Nine newspapers point out, “The more resources a company provides to its workers, the more likely they are to be classified as employees than independent contractors and therefore entitled to the minimum wage, workers’ compensation and unfair dismissal protections.” 
• But Uber Eats Australian general manager Matthew Denman said the legalities did not factor into its decision to deploy the new safety features. And it’s the right thing to do. 

Ensuring a minimum wage sounds like a pretty good way to improve safety… 

Social media moves beyond the feed | by Will Oremus | Feb, 2021 | OneZero

• Will Oremus argues that Clubhouse and Twitter’s Spaces offers a new way of looking at social media
• feed-based platforms are powered by scale and automation. They encourage users to friend, follow, and like liberally, building sprawling networks on the promise that aggressive ranking algorithms will filter out the chaff and surface the most compelling content
• New digital media products are focusing on low-volume, high-attention relationships rather than high-volume, low-attention feeds.

Queensland finally has its own QR code check-in app

• The Queensland government has finally rolled out a QR code check-in app that hospitality venues and other businesses can use for contact tracing purposes, iTnews reports.
• I’ve been up here for weeks putting my details into all finds of weird check-in apps… one was literally just a Google Form. 
• The Check In Qld app went live over the weekend. all other states and territories introduced similar apps last year.
• The app is voluntary for hospitality venues, which means I’ll probably still be putting my contact details into random databases...  
• (Businesses that do not take up the app will still need to continue to collect and store details electronically.) 

Google TV will soon let you turn your smart TV into a dumb screen, and that's a great thing.

• For true nerds, Google will now let your smart TV become a dumb tv. 
• The new feature, called basic tv, coming to Android powered TVs will allow users to turn off all the smarts of their tv - leaving just free to air and settings, and switch to a HDMI port on start up by default 

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