Hasta La Gadget!

The possibilites for what you can buy in the metaverse are endless, and brands are cashing in on users’ desire to shop.

Flo, one of the most widely used period tracking apps, says it intends to launch a new “anonymous mode” in an effort to address privacy concerns in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. “We will soon be launching an ‘Anonymous Mode’ that removes your personal identity from your Flo account, so that no one can identify you,” the company said in a statement shared on Twitter. 

It’s not clear how this will work or when it might launch. We’ve reached out to Flo for more details on “anonymous mode.”

Period tracking apps have come under particular scrutiny ever since a draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade was leaked last month. Privacy advocates and legal experts have warned that data collected by period tracking apps, which is often shared with other entities, could be used to fuel investigations into people seeking abortion services. News of the Supreme Court’s decision led to renewed calls on social media for people to delete period tracking apps from their phones and remove their personal details from the services.

Notably, Flo itself has a messy history when it comes to protecting users’ privacy. The app came under fire in 2019 after The Wall Street Journal reported the app was sharing users’ sensitive information, including details about their menstrual cycles and if they were trying to get pregnant, with Facebook, Google and other third-parties.

The company reached a settlement with the FTC in 2021 over allegations it misled users about how their data was handled. Flo said at the time that the settlement “was not an admission of any wrongdoing.” The company said in an update in May that it had “successfully completed” an independent privacy audit that was a requirement of the settlement.

The future of abortion rights in Kansas will be decided this year following the Supreme Court’s ruling overturning Roe v. Wade.

If we take a step back from Obi-Wan Kenobi, the series feels like a narrative waypoint. We know Kenobi’s past, we know how he ends up, so where is the movement in this series? How does Obi-Wan Kenobi push the arc of the galaxy far, far away towards its predetermined end?

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Sky Mavis, the developer of blockchain game Axie Infinity, says it will start reimbursing the victims of a $617 million hack that took place earlier this year. The attackers took $25.5 million in USDC (a stablecoin that’s pegged to the value of the US dollar) and 173,600 ether, which was worth around $591.2 million at the time. The FBI claimed North Korean state-backed hacker groups were behind the attack.

Impacted Axie Infinity players will be able to withdraw one ether token for each one they lost in the hack, Sky Mavis told Bloomberg (the company didn’t mention a USDC reimbursement). However, as with other cryptocurrencies, the value of Ethereum has plummeted since the attack in March. 

Because of that, Sky Mavis will return around $216.5 million to users. It’s possible that the price of Ethereum will rise again, but as things stand, affected users will get back around a third of what they lost.

In April, Sky Mavis raised $150 million in funding to help it pay back the victims. The developer plans to reimburse affected users on June 28th, when it restarts the Ronin software bridge that the hackers targeted. 

Axie Infinity is widely considered the most popular play-to-earn game. Players collect and mint NFTs representing creatures that battle each other, Pokémon-style. These NFTs can be sold to other players, with Sky Mavis charging a transaction fee. By February, Axie Infinity had facilitated $4 billion in NFT sales.

However, the NFT market has all but bottomed out, which has had a significant impact on Axie Infinity. For one thing, according to Bloomberg, the daily active user count dropped from 2.7 million in November to a quarter of that by the end of May.