Monthly Archives: March 2022

The Google Home app is getting a fresh design that should make it a lot more intuitive, according to a report from 9to5Google. The upcoming 2.49 update will let you interact with your devices from a single screen, resembling the device control panel on phones with Android 11 and up.

Judging by the updates release notes on the App Store, it seems Google is hoping to make the app a lot more user-friendly than what it is right now, saying it should help you quickly find what youre looking for, dim your compatible lights, and change the music volume in a snap. More specifically, youll be able to tap on a device to turn it on or off, slide left or right on certain elements, like lights or speakers to make adjustments to brightness and volume, as well as long press on a device to see more options.

Google Home received its last major design change in 2018 and later added controls to change the color of your lights but has largely remained the same ever since. This has left us with a clunky app that forces us to tap into each device to make specific adjustments (although there are still some single-tap controls like turning things on or off).

Google says the redesign will roll out over the next few weeks, and even having the most recent version of the app on iOS or Android might not be enough to see the changes. Some users, like former editor in chief of XDA-Developers Mishaal Rahman, have successfully sideloaded the 2.49.1.8 update on Android and accessed the new settings.

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Google Home app gets much-needed redesign with interactive buttons - The Verge

Google grabbed headlines last week when it announced it will pay $5.4 billion to buy cyber firm Mandiant. While the size of the deal alone is impressive, it may also be a harbinger for a record-setting year of M&A in the space.

Less than three months into the year, some noteworthy deals aside from the Mandiant/Google acquisition have already been announced both by companies in cyber and outside the space, including:

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Other companies, including Darktrace, ForeScout and Cloudflare, all announced deals early in the year. In total, more than two dozen deals have been announced thus far in 2022. While only a handful of announced deals disclosed terms, those that did were worth nearly $7.4 billion, easily on pace to beat the $13.7 billion for deals with announced terms in 2021which was a record year in terms of volume with 134 deals.

While the Google/Mandiant proposed marriage made big headlines because of what it could mean for cloud security, last year had an even larger deal in the greater cyber ecosystem when Okta paid $6.5 billion in a stock deal for Bellevue, Washington-based Auth0.

However, that was a very different spaceidentification and authenticationand did not involve one of the largest tech giants in the world in its cloud battle with Microsoft and Amazon.

Google is a late comer to the enterprise (space) in general, said Ofer Schreiber, partner and head of the Israel office for cyber venture firm YL Ventures. This is the cloud vendors war.

Those involved in the cybersecurity sector agree the Mandiant dealGoogles second-largest acquisition everand the Siemplify buy are both aimed at taking on AWS and Microsoft for cloud supremacy. Perhaps more specifically, it is to take on Microsoftwhich had been a rumored suitor for Mandiant earlier this yearand the security it has built around its Azure cloud offering.

Through the years, Microsoft has prioritized securityparticularly around the Azure cloudboth through internal development and through dealmaking, picking up cybersecurity startups such as Adallom, CyberX, Aorato and Hexadite.

Microsoft has a better standing in the enterprise market, Schreiber said.

With the acquisition of Mandiant, which can help automate incident response, Google strengthened its cloud security offering to potential customers. Schreiber said he believes the next buzzword in the industry could be XDRor extended detection and responsewhich collects and correlates data across multiple security layers such as cloud workloads, servers and endpoints.

Security really is a data issue, he said. You need data for sophisticated attackers.

Taking its cloud offering more to large enterprises was something Google had in mind back in 2019 when it named Thomas Kurian CEO of Google Cloud after his time at Oracle, said Alberto Ypez, co-founder and managing director at Forgepoint Capital, which specializes in cybersecurity and infrastructure software investments. Ypez sold his last cyber company to Oracle while Kurian was there, and Kevin MandiaMandiants founderserves on Forgepoints advisory council.

Ypez said he can see both the Mandiant and Siemplify deals working in unison for Google Cloudas Siemplifys orchestration aspect acts as a middleware layer and helps with integration.

Ypez, whose portfolio company Area 1 Security was acquired by Cloudflare just last month, does not necessarily expect the dealmaking to cease any time soon. Along with large players like those mentioned above continuing to buy select point solution specialists with strong IP, Ypez said he also believes the current uncertainty in the market will play a role.

I think this is a prime time for exits, said Ypez, who also was an early investor in Attivo. Companies may have to raise money at lower valuations these overfunded companies will have to make a choice.

Companies will look at targets in cybersecurity to expand their total addressable market, Ypez said. Acquisition targets that can do that and have high intellectual property can still see 20x trailing revenue, said Ypez, adding that potential acquirers consistently reach out to his portfolio investments.

However, Schreiber said due to the sheer amount of capital poured into the space through the last few years, valuations remain high and he is seeing a bit of slowing in dealmaking.

While deals in the range of $150 million to $400 million used to be seen in cyber, it now has become small deals for very young companies or big home run swings by tech giants.

You are seeing a lot of companies get bought early, he said. There just are not a lot of exits for a few hundreds of millions of dollars.

Illustration: Dom Guzman

Stay up to date with recent funding rounds, acquisitions, and more with the Crunchbase Daily.

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Google Sets The Pace In What Could Be A Record Year For Cyber M&A - Crunchbase News

Googles big annual developer conference, Google I/O, will take place May 11th and 12th, the company announced Wednesday. The event will once again be fully online, though it sounds like at least some of the conference will be streamed live from the Shoreline Amphitheatre, a frequent Google I/O venue.

This years event will be broadcast in front of a limited live audience, and is completely free and open to everyone virtually, Google spokesperson Alex Garcia-Kummert said in a statement to The Verge. That limited audience will be comprised primarily of Google employees and some partners, according to a Google statement shared with Axios Ina Fried.

Registration will be free and will begin sometime this month, according to an FAQ. There will be no tickets, which seems to mean that everyone who wants to attend will be able to.

Google I/O was canceled in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and returned as an online event in 2021. The company made a number of big announcements at last years event, including debuting Android 12s Material You design, revealing updates to Google Workspace, and saying that Googles Wear OS and Samsungs Tizen would be merging into one platform (now known as Wear OS 3).

We dont know exactly whats coming this year, but given that Google has already released the first preview of Android 13, it seems likely that one of the focuses will be that OS.

Update March 16th, 6:08PM ET: Added Google statement and additional context from Axios.

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Google I/O takes place May 11th and 12th, and it will be fully available online - The Verge

Google Domains, the companys domain registration service, is losing the beta tag after first launching more than seven years ago, Google announced Tuesday. The service is now generally available in 26 countries, and the company says it already has millions of active registrations.

If you register with Google Domains, you can pick from more than 300 different domain endings, have access to high performance DNS (Google says its the same infrastructure it uses for itself), around-the-clock customer support from real people, and more. The company is also offering a 20 percent discount off any single domain registration or transfer-in to Google Domains for new and returning users with the code DOMAINS20.

However, if you register a domain with Google Domains, youll still need to actually build a website to use with it. Google unsurprisingly suggests its Google Sites product but also recommends its premium partners, which include Wix, Shopify, Squarespace, Weebly, and Bluehost.

Google Domains has been in development for quite a while it first launched in an invite-only beta in June 2014 and was opened up to a public beta in the US in January 2015. Even Gmail wasnt in beta for that long.

Continued here:

Google Domains is finally out of beta after more than seven years - The Verge

Google is rolling out a new feature in its Docs thats designed to make it easier to use its word processor to draft emails, the company has announced. Its part of Googles smart canvas initiative, which aims to seamlessly weave together the search giants productivity software like Meet, Docs, and Gmail.

Much like Google Docss other smart canvas features, the email draft template is accessed with the @ symbol, before selecting Email draft from the context menu. You can then draft the email, including defining recipients, a subject line, and its body text. When its ready to send, click the Gmail icon on the left to open the email service.

The feature seems most useful for emails that multiple people need to contribute to, allowing everyone to collaboratively edit them in a Google Doc and post comments and suggestions. Sure, there was nothing to stop you from copying and pasting text between the two Google services before, but the whole point of smart canvas is to make switching between products like this more seamless.

Google says the email draft feature, which it teased last month, will be available to all Google Workspace customers, as well as anyone on legacy G Suite Basic and Business plans. Its gradually rolling out to rapid release domains now, but will start appearing for most users from next week.

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Google Docs update lets you draft emails and send them to Gmail with a click - The Verge

Google today announced two new tools for businesses that operate extensive delivery fleets: the Last Mile Fleet Solution and the Cloud Fleet Routing API. The new Last Mile Fleet Solution, which is part of the Google Maps platform, puts an emphasis on optimizing every step of the last-mile delivery process from ordering to delivery. As the name implies, the new Routing API, which is part of Google Cloud, focuses on route planning across fleets of delivery vehicles.

The Last Mile Fleet Solution is now in public preview. The Cloud Fleet Routing API will become generally available in the second quarter of the year. Since both are enterprise services, theres no public pricing information available, and potential customers of either product have to work with Googles sales team.

The pandemic further accelerated both e-commerce and the number of deliveries, which were already growing rapidly. The increased strain on delivery networks, plus many other factors like driver shortages, poor address data, factory closures, and an increase in fuel prices have impacted delivery time and success, said Hans Thalbauer, Google Clouds managing director for Global Supply Chain & Logistics Industries. With Google Maps Platforms Last Mile Fleet Solution and Cloud Fleet Routing API, were making it easier for delivery fleet operators to address these issues and create seamless experiences for consumers, drivers and fleet managers.

Image Credits: Google

Google Maps Platform already features the On-demand Rides & Delivery solution, which helps businesses dispatch on-demand drivers. The company said the new Last Mile Fleet Solution builds upon this service.

The Fleet Routing API, on the other hand, is a completely new Google Cloud service that helps businesses with their route planning. Users will be able to use it to build tools for their internal fleet management systems and have the system optimize delivery routes based on their specific constraints like time window, package weight and vehicle capacity and in the process, they can also optimize their routes to meet their sustainability targets.

At Paack, we are obsessed with helping some of the largest e-commerce retailers in Europe create exceptional delivery experiences for the millions of orders they receive each month, said Olivier Colinet, the CTO and CPO of U.K.-based courier service Paack. To scale quickly, we adopted Last Mile Fleet Solution and Cloud Fleet Routing, which enables our drivers and fleet managers to maintain peak efficiency and go beyond our 98% on-time, first-time delivery rates.

Original post:

Google launches new tools to help businesses optimize their delivery operations - TechCrunch

Googles Threat Analysis Group has observed a financially motivated threat actor working as an intermediary for the Russian hackers, including the Conti ransomware gang.

The group, which Google refers to as Exotic Lily, acts as an initial access broker, finding vulnerable organizations and selling access to their networks to the highest bidder. By contracting out the initial access to a victims network, ransomware gangs like Conti can focus on the execution phase of an attack.

In the case of Exotic Lily, this initial access was gained through email campaigns, in which the group masqueraded as legitimate organizations and employees through the use of domain and identity spoofing. In the majority of cases, a spoofed domain was nearly identical to the real domain name of an existing organization, but changed the top-level domains to .us, .co or .biz. In order to appear as legitimate employees, Exotic Lily set up social media profiles and AI-generated images of human faces.

The attackers, which Google believes are operating from Central or Eastern Europe due to the threat actors working hours, would then send spear-phishing emails under the pretext of a business proposal, before ultimately uploading a payload to a public file-sharing service such as WeTransfer or Microsoft OneDrive.

This level of human interaction is rather unusual for cybercrime groups focused on mass-scale operations, notes Google researchers Vlad Stolyarov and Benoit Sevens in a blog post shared with TechCrunch before publication.

These malicious payloads initially took the form of documents containing an exploit for a zero-day in Microsofts MSHTML browser engine (tracked as CVE-2021-40444), before the attackers switched to the delivery of ISO disk images containing hidden BazarLoader payloads. Google researchers say this shift confirms Exotic Lilys relationship with a Russian cybercrime group tracked as Wizard Spider (also known as UNC1878), which is linked to the notorious Ryuk ransomware that has been used to target businesses, hospitals including U.S-based Universal Health Services and government institutions since 2018.

While the nature of this relationship remains unclear, Google says that Exotic Lily appears to operate as a separate entity, focusing on acquiring initial access through email campaigns, with follow-up activities that include deployment of Conti and Diavol ransomware.

Exotic Lily, which was first observed in September 2021 and is still active today, was sending more than 5,000 phishing emails a day to as many as 650 organizations during the peak of its activity, Google said. While the group initially seemed to be targeting specific industries such as IT, cybersecurity and healthcare, it has more recently begun attacking a wide variety of organizations and industries, with less of a specific focus.

Google has also shared indicators of compromise (IOCs) from Exotic Lilys large-scale email campaign to help organizations defend their networks.

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Google discovers threat actor working as an initial access broker for Conti ransomware hackers - TechCrunch

Google announced that some ChromeOS users would finally be able to start testing Steam during its Google for Games Developer Summit but later revised that message to say that the alpha would be coming soon.

During the keynote, Googles product director for games, Greg Hartell, announced that the Steam alpha just launched for select Chromebooks and pointed viewers to the Chromebook Community Forum for more information. At the time, the promised post didnt seem to be there yet, but it was later added with a slightly revised message:

Hello Chromebook Community,

As you may have already heard, our team is working with Valve to bring Steam to Chrome OS. We are very excited to share that well be landing an early, alpha-quality version of Steam on Chrome OS in the Dev channel for a small set of Chromebooks coming soon. Please come back to the forum for more information!

Anyone holding their breath for Steam on ChromeOS is probably used to it, as its been a long time coming Google announced that it was working on supporting the software on Chromebooks in the beginning of 2020, and there hasnt been much info since. There have been whispers that wed see it soon, though, as recent reports indicated that companies are working on gaming-focused Chromebooks.

Despite how long weve been waiting, Hartells announcement came as a bit of a surprise. As 9to5Googles Kyle Bradshaw tweeted, people have been trying to learn more about Steam on ChromeOS for months, combing through code and developer comments only for Google to announce it with a casual mention during a developer keynote.

That keynote also went over Googles revised plans for its Stadia service the TL;DR is that it plans to introduce free demos and trials, as well as make things easier for developers. You can watch it here, or below (the Steam mention is about 14 minutes in).

It is understandable why Google would want to be relatively quiet about the launch; since its slated to arrive as an alpha, itll probably be a little rough around the edges. Theres also limited availability. Google didnt mention which computers Steam will be available on, but 9to5Google has a list that it discovered last month. It includes the x86-powered laptops like the Acer Chromebook Spin 713 and the Asus Flip CX5, along with a few other models.

Update, March 16th 5:18PM ET: Updated to reflect Googles community post, which stated that the Steam alpha wasnt immediately available and was instead coming soon.

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Google said Steam had arrived on Chromebooks, but now says it's 'coming soon' - The Verge

The patient had just undergone a cesarean section, and now was struggling to put words to her pain in her native Taiwanese. The physician making rounds, Natasha Mehandru, was used to communicating with patients who didnt speak English as a first language at her county hospital in Phoenix. But this time, calling in an interpreter by phone wasnt working.

The service was not really good, she said and soon, she realized the patient and the interpreter werent even speaking the same dialect. It was difficult to communicate, even with the interpreter.

So Mehandru turned to a familiar tool: Google Translate. Typing translations back and forth Taiwanese to English, English to Taiwanese she and the patient slowly came to an understanding with the help of the interpreter still on the line. Her pain wasnt from the C-section, in her abdomen, but from a separate and long-standing issue, lower in her body. That changed how I managed her that day, said Mehandru, who was at the time a gynecological resident and is now a surgeon at Kaiser San Jose Medical Center. With the help of the machine translation tool, we changed around medications, and then over the course of a couple days she ended up feeling better.

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Like many health systems, the hospital complied with federal requirements for meaningful access to language services by staffing in-person interpreters for frequent needs like Spanish, and could call up interpreters for less commonly spoken languages. But it was an imperfect system there were sometimes delays, or a dialect that it was difficult to track down a translator for and Google Translate came to serve as a fallback.

Google Translate has become a ubiquitous, if under-examined, part of patient care. Its sort of [used] under the table, said Elaine Khoong, an internist and assistant professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. The practice is hidden in part because it is formally discouraged by health systems and state medical registration boards that see it as a liability. Theres a growing push by Khoong and other researchers to bring it to the surface both to study Google Translates use and risk in the clinic, and to build better versions to backstop traditional language services.

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I do think it is the future, said Breena Taira, a clinical emergency medicine researcher at UCLA Health whose recent study evaluated Google-translated discharge instructions in seven languages. Tech giants like Google and Microsoft, which have invested heavily in voice recognition software, have expressed interest in exploring medical translation.

We just have to be really aware of what the limitations are, Taira said, including significantly lower accuracy rates for languages that arent widely spoken. Machine translation could fill an especially large gap in services to provide personalized written instructions for non-English speakers. Sanjana Rao, a doctor at a family medicine practice in Tacoma, Washington, said shes seen colleagues provide patients with after-visit notes theyve translated in full with Google Translate with no vetting, a practice she doesnt trust.

We have to do the work to make sure that we can convey written information in non-English languages in a safe way, said Taira.

Research from Khoong, Taira, and others has highlighted that Google Translate can specifically be unsafe to use to translate emergency room discharge instructions, delivering inaccurate results that could lead to serious errors. While the tool has gotten more accurate since Google switched its algorithmic approach, mistakes are still common when the acronym- and jargon-filled lexicon of clinical communication collides with an algorithm trained on everyday language.

Obviously, Google Translate wasnt built for health care applications, said Nikita Mehandru, a Ph.D. student in clinical artificial intelligence at the University of California, Berkeley and the sister of Natasha. Maybe something should be.

Along with fellow student Samantha Robertson and human-computer interaction researcher Niloufar Salehi, Mehandru recently surveyed 20 health care providers about their interpretation and translation resources, aiming to understand the scope of communication challenges before trying to design something like a Google Translate for doctors starting with the written instructions emergency doctors give patients when theyre discharged.

They plan to train their tool on the text it aims to translate: more than 1,500 emergency discharge records from UCSF, accessed in collaboration with Khoong. One of the things that makes it a hard problem is that almost none of these black box deep learning models are trained on medical data, said Salehi. Theyre mostly trained on web form data, so they dont work really well with medical information.

But theyre not simply turning neural networks loose on a new clinical corpus. Discharge instructions are often very structured and modeled after a template, so it doesnt really make sense to use a black box deep learning model, said Salehi. Instead, theyre trying to combine deep learning with a pre-translated dictionary of common phrases, making certain results highly reliable and leaving the potential to show providers where uncertainty remains. We could say, 80% of this discharge info is verified translation, and we could even mark the parts where were not so sure, said Salehi.

Like other clinical decision support tools, such a system could nudge clinicians toward smarter actions rather than providing a pat solution. A tool could prod doctors to write their English instructions in simpler ways, for example, making the machine translation more likely to be accurate, said Khoong.

Even if machine translation tools prove accurate enough for clinical use, there are still significant regulatory and legal hurdles for companies to make them and for health systems to embrace them. The tools would have to be HIPAA compliant, and providers and developers would have to sort out who is liable for failed translations that cause harm potentially in very public ways.

Were already using ML and AI tools in health care, but its usually hidden on the backend where people dont see it for image interpretation, risk stratification tools, said Khoong. But when you bring it up to the front end where patients can see it, the legality issues and the liability issues are a lot more concerning.

Thats one reason why Khoong is calling to advance the type of research done on medical machine translation systems. In a paper she recently penned with Jorge Rodriguez, a hospitalist and technology equity researcher at Brigham and Womens Hospital, they lay out a framework for analysis that focuses not just on translation accuracy, but patient outcomes.

The viability of machine translation, they argue, should be judged not just by comparing it with gold-standard interpretation, but current practice which sometimes is nothing at all.

For a lot of patients who have non-English language preference, what actually happens is either the clinical team doesnt talk to them, or they use sign language, or they try to mime, said Khoong. Interpretation can be especially scarce in safety net facilities, which often end up paying higher rates for call-in services. And physicians can be reticent to call in an interpreter for anything but the most mission-critical moments in a patients stay, like surgical consent, because it can take away precious minutes from their interaction with a patient.

That leaves out many of the small moments that make up a patients care. If you want to ask the patient, Are you cold? Open your eyes, take a deep breath, the time it can take to prepare for those two sentences can be untenable, said Won Lee, an anesthesiologist at UCSF who is investigating Google Translates accuracy in those interstitial moments of care. Research consistently shows that patients who do not share a language with their provider fare more poorly.

Is [machine translation] better than whats going on there? asks Khoong. I think we dont have a good sense, and thats what we should evaluate.

Understanding patient outcomes is especially critical because of the potential for machine translation to introduce new disparities in health care. If a validated but imperfect technology makes it easier for health systems to avoid calling on interpreters, non-English speaking patients could still get shortchanged on care and communication. I dont want it to feel like once we have Google Translate validated, interpreters will go by the wayside, said Rodriguez. Research will be necessary to understand how to use the tools without undermining patient care and when human interpreters are needed.

Thats why, once Salehi and her team finishes building their discharge translation tool, they hope to conduct a randomized controlled trial of patient outcomes, testing to see whether giving people information in their own language is more helpful, she said.

Its the kind of expensive research that commercial developers with their deeper pockets and broad reach could help conduct. The technology is there to be able to build these algorithms, said Rodriguez. Its just a matter of getting all the right players in the room, and incentivizing it.

For Nuance Communications, the voice recognition company that was acquired by Microsoft earlier this month for $16 billion, the incentives may already be in place. The company has a tool, DAX, that listens into doctors appointments and produces automatic English transcriptions to feed into visit records. Machine translation of those transcripts into other languages is a leading request from its users, said Peter Durlach, chief strategy officer for Nuance.

Its one of the first things were going to be looking to integrate with Microsoft, since they have world class machine translation, he said. Since DAX is already recording the conversation, it already identifies the different speakers, why couldnt it automatically translate in real time? Its not a massive technical lift to do it.

For patients and providers still wrestling to understand each other, validated clinical machine translation could be a boon. Weve wanted this for so long, and its just not there, said Rao. Were doing last resort things like Google Translate because different providers have to make different calls, knowing that theyre underserving many patients who speak less common languages. This technology is absolutely imperative to be launched and be used as soon as possible.

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Doctors often turn to Google Translate. They want a better option - STAT

An app produced by the Malaysian government that promised to help the LGBTI community return to nature has been removed from the Google Play store, after it was found to be in breach of the platforms guidelines.

The app was first released in July 2016, but attracted fresh attention after it was shared on Twitter by the Malaysian governments Islamic development department. It claimed the app would enable LGBTI people to return to a state of nature or purity, and that it included an e-book detailing the experience of a gay man who abandoned homosexual behaviour during Ramadan.

When approached by the Guardian, Google said in a statement: Whenever an app is flagged to us, we investigate against our Play store policies and if violations are found we take appropriate action to maintain a trusted experience for all.

The app has since been removed from the Play store. Its guidelines do not allow apps that attempt to deceive users or enable dishonest behavior including but not limited to apps which are determined to be functionally impossible.

Malaysias Islamic development department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Rachel Chhoa-Howard, Amnesty Internationals Malaysia researcher, said such material was dangerous and hateful.

Conversion therapy is a deeply discriminatory and harmful practice which can cause long-lasting damage to those who are subject to it. It has been criminalised in many countries. We call on the Malaysian authorities to immediately abandon its use of Hijrah Diri, and instead ensure respect and protect LGBTI rights in the country, she said.

Numan Afifi, the founder of LGBT+ rights group Pelangi Campaign, said Google and other platforms should improve the moderation of content they host on their platforms. Community groups that try to counter harmful material already face an uphill battle, he added, including the risk of surveillance, censorship and raids on in-person gatherings.

Now that the general election is looming I am pretty sure that the demonisation of the LGBT community is going to get more intense, especially among those who are trying to [win] conservative votes, he said.

Malaysias LGBTI community faces widespread discrimination, including laws that ban same-sex relations and non-normative gender expression.

The Play store has previously removed an app from a US-based group Living Hope Ministries that promoted so-called conversion therapy. The app, which suggested that users could pray away the gay, was removed in 2019.

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Malaysian governments gay conversion app pulled by Google Play - The Guardian