Axios

A database of more than 419 million phone numbers taken from Facebook public profiles was accessible on the internet without any security, though it is now removed, reports TechCrunch.

The big picture: The database appears to have been compiled by an unknown group, taking advantage of users that kept their phone numbers in public profiles. Facebook stopped including phone numbers in public profiles last year.

For struggling golfers out there, take heart: Nissan has an autonomous golf ball that will let you sink that 60-foot putt every time, according to Golf.com.

HUD recently proposed a rule that would protect financial institutions from liability for using algorithms to make lending decisions, as long as the technology used was produced or distributed by a recognized company.

Why it matters: AI can inadvertently rely on characteristics that include or are correlated with race, gender and socio-economic class, so under the proposed rule, financial institutions could make illegal determinations and hide behind an AI product.

Facebook on Tuesday announced a new policy for gaining user consent to apply facial recognition to photos on the service, while also expanding its use of the technology.

The big picture: The feature was initially only used to help suggest possible friends to tag in a photo, but Facebook says that, with users' permission, it will now also use face recognition to help prevent people from using your photos fraudulently.

Google will pay $170 million to settle a Federal Trade Commission complaint that its YouTube subsidiary illegally collected children's personal information, the agency announced Wednesday morning.

The big picture: The FTC touted the settlement, details of which had circulated widely last week, as a record-breaking penalty that would shape YouTube's future behavior. But critics — including the FTC's two Democratic commissioners — argued that both the size of the fine and accompanying new restrictions on the company's behavior don't go far enough to protect the public.

Attorneys general representing a majority of U.S. states plan to announce an antitrust investigation into Google, the Washington Post reports.

The big picture: Google is under fire from Republicans for alleged bias against conservatives and from Democrats for privacy violations and extremism on Google-owned YouTube. The Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission have both begun broad antitrust investigations of Google and other large tech firms.

YouTube says that changes it made to broaden its hate speech policies in June have resulted in a significant increase in problematic videos being removed from its platform.

Why it matters: The video giant says that usually it takes months for the company to ramp up enforcement of a new policy, but results from its latest quarterly report show that the June updates have quickly boosted the amount of content it's pulling off its platform.