7 attention-grabbing tech facts to know about

1. Former Facebook chief product officer Chris Cox will return after a year-long absence to his previous role at the company, which includes overseeing the main Facebook App, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Cox, one of Mark Zuckerberg’s top lieutenants, left in March 2019 over “artistic differences” with the CEO over his plans to make Facebook more privacy-focused.

2. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel addressed concerns of racism at the company during a company all-hands meeting but said he would not release numbers. Snap’s decision not to release diversity reports is a break from major tech companies, which have generally released their diversity numbers to the public.

3. Joe Biden’s campaign has demanded that Facebook fact-check political ads and crack down on misinformation. Facebook is refusing, arguing that it’s up to elected officials to decide the rules on political advertising and campaigning.

4. The secretive data analytics firm Palantir is preparing to file an S-1 ahead of a potential September IPO. The IPO prep, first reported by Bloomberg, has been long anticipated at the 17-year-old company whose earliest backers include Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the US intelligence and defense communities.

5. Online events platform Hopin is in talks to raise around $40 million in fresh funding led by Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), according to two market sources with knowledge of the deal. Hopin is only a year old and has yet to publish its first financials, but appears to have attracted frenzied interest from backers as the coronavirus puts conferences and live events on hold.

6. A customer is suing Apple for $1 trillion over claims that the company stole his iPhone after he brought it in for a repair. Raevon Terrell Parker claims that Apple kept the phone because it had “new features” that were used to aid in the development of iOS 12.

7. Sony will launch the PlayStation 5 during the 2020 holiday season with a standard model and a digital edition with no disc drive. Upgrades include a solid-state hard drive and a graphics card capable of ray-tracing technology.