i3 - March/April 2020 - 12

By Mark Chisholm

Britain Reaches
Huawei 5G
Compromise

I N T E R N AT I O N A L FO C US

LONDON

Great Britain has
announced that it will
allow Chinese technology firm Huawei to
assist in the development of its 5G network,
though the company
and its technology will be
excluded from sensitive
sites such as military bases.
The decision comes after the
U.S. and the Trump administration voiced concerns over
security threats and suspected
ties to China's Communist
Party. The UK will consider
Huawei a "high-risk vendor"
in the plans, and rules restrict
any high-risk vendor from
exceeding 35% market share
in the network.

London Project Wins
Smart City Award
The Breathe London project,
an effort aimed at measuring
real-time air quality, has been
announced as a winner of a
SMART 50 Award by Smart Cities
Connect. The monitoring project, which combines air quality
monitors from AQMesh with two
Google Street View vehicles,
was selected as a winner in the
Digital Transformation category.
The open source data from the
Breathe London project is compared with London's existing,
stationary air quality data, and
is available to the public.

United
Kingdom Sets
New Privacy
Rules for IoT
Devices

LONDON POLICE TO
EMBRACE FACIAL
RECOGNITION TECHNOLOGY
London's Metropolitan police recently
announced plans to begin using cameras
equipped with facial recognition technology to
combat crime and terrorism on London streets.
London police, or the Met, have insisted on the
technology's accuracy, while privacy groups continue to voice their concerns over the potential
for false positives. The cameras will be linked
with a database of suspects updated with the
government's latest intelligence.

Manufacturers of smart
speakers, cameras and other
IoT devices, will need to
provide a new set of protections in the UK after new
rules were announced. The
UK's Department of Digital,
Culture, Media and Sport
now requires device makers
to ship individual products
with unique passwords,
avoiding security risks for
users who fail to change
devices' default passwords.
"[The new law] will mean
robust security standards
are built in from the design
stage and not bolted on as
an afterthought," said
Matt Warman, the UK's
digital minister.

Facebook to Create
New Jobs in London in 2020
Facebook announced that it will create 1,000 additional jobs in London this
year, mainly in the areas of software engineering and data science, according
to Facebook's Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg. The new roles will
also include the Facebook team charged with combating harmful online
content on Facebook platforms, including Instagram and WhatsApp.
12

MARCH/APRIL 2020

i3_0320_12_Tech_InternationalFocus.indd 12

Clockwise from top left: Ian Davidson/Alamy, Peter Hermes Furian/Alamy, Aleksey Funtap/Alamy, Jeff Gilbert/Alamy.

Tech

I T I S I N N O VAT I O N

3/13/20 11:59 AM

i3 - March/April 2020

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of i3 - March/April 2020