The criminal charges against Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens, who was indicted by a St. Louis grand jury on felony invasion of privacy, have been dropped after Greitens' defense team planned to call St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner, who was prosecuting the case, to the witness stand, per the Kansas City Star. Gardner's office has requested that a special prosecutor refile the charges against Greitens.
The background: Greitens allegedly blackmailed a woman with whom he had an extramarital affair with photos taken while she was blindfolded and had her hands tied, threatening to make them public if she went public with the affair. Greitens has denied the allegations.
Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos said Monday that the streaming giant plans to spend 85% of this year's estimated $8 billion content budget on original series, Variety reports.
Why it matters: Netflix isn't just competing with other subscription video on-demand companies, like Hulu and HBO, for eyeballs, but also legacy media companies, tech companies and telecom firms that are also creating their own streaming properties and funding original content projects.
Several Google employees have resigned in recent weeks in protest of the company's involvement with a military system known as Project Maven, which uses artificial intelligence to review drone footage and quickly identify certain people and objects, Gizmodo reports.
Between the lines: In addition to the resignations, more than 4,000 employees have voiced their opposition to the project in an internal petition, which urges Google to stop working with the Defense Department and to avoid getting involved with future military contracts. According to Gizmodo, the criticism centers both on ethical concerns over the use of artificial intelligence in drone warfare, as well as issues with company transparency regarding controversial business decisions.
Facebook said Monday morning that it had suspended "around 200" applications on its platform — out of "thousands" that have been reviewed — so that it can pursue a deeper probe into whether they misused data.
Why it matters: The social giant is investigating the possibility that other developers with access to large amounts of their user data gathered and mishandled information, like Cambridge Analytica, the Trump-linked firm whose data harvesting set off a privacy reckoning for Facebook.
Weekends in May are filled with commencement addresses from the country's entertainers, CEOs and politicians to the new class of college graduates. This season Oprah Winfrey, Jake Tapper, Michael Bloomberg and Tim Cook have made the rounds.
Sign of the times, from Tapper's address to graduates at UMass Amherst: "The very notion of empirical fact is being attacked and corroded. ... People decide about an article's validity based only on its headline or the language in the tweet linking to it. They judge books by their covers ... I urge you to read the story. I urge you to think for yourself. I urge you to click the link."
Apple has become the textbook example on how to grow a business in today's market while route to becoming a $1 trillion company.
"Study this one company [Apple], and you can understand the five most meaningful market trends today," Financial Times global business columnist Rana Foroohar writes (subscription).
Didi Chuxing, China's biggest ride-hailing company, has received a permit to test self-driving cars on California public roads, according to an update to the state's DMV website, first noticed by the Financial Times.
Why it matters: Didi is playing catch up to other tech companies working on self-driving cars. It opened a Silicon Valley research office last year.
Anand Chandrasekher, who had been leading Qualcomm's efforts to crack the server chip business, has left the company.
Why it matters: The move comes as Qualcomm appears poised to end its effort to challenge Intel in the data center. Bloomberg reported last week that Qualcomm was looking to sell or shutter the unit.
During his commencement speech at Duke University today, Apple CEO Tim Cook addressed the data privacy scandals currently roiling the tech industry, comparing his company to Facebook without mentioning it by name:
"We reject the excuse that getting the most out of technology means trading away your right to privacy. So we choose a different path: Collecting as little of your data as possible, being thoughtful and respectful when it’s in our care. Because we know it belongs to you. In every way and every turn, the question we ask is not what can we do, but what should we do."
