Indian startups spent years getting consumers accustomed to having groceries and everyday goods delivered within minutes. Now Walmart-owned Flipkart is rapidly closing the gap with those quick-commerce pioneers, as global rival Amazon mounts its own push into instant delivery.
Flipkart Minutes, which debuted in August 2024 as the e-commerce giant’s foray into quick commerce, is now delivering 1.1 million to 1.2 million orders a day, up from about 390,000 to 400,000 in November, people familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. That puts the two-year-old service close to Swiggy’s Instamart, which is delivering about 1.4 million orders a day, according to a person familiar with its operations.
The gap is notable as Flipkart is a relative latecomer to a market whose top ranks have been dominated by Instamart, Blinkit, and Zepto. Food-delivery giant Swiggy launched Instamart in 2020 and Zepto arrived the following year, both during the pandemic, while Blinkit traces its roots to online grocery platform Grofers, founded in 2013. The three have since established themselves as India’s top quick-commerce players.
Blinkit continues to dominate the market with around 3.4 million to 3.6 million daily orders, followed by Zepto at about 2.4 million to 2.6 million, per recent estimates from market research firm Datum Intelligence. Flipkart is now rapidly narrowing the gap with Instamart, the smallest of the three established leaders by order volume.
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Instamart still has substantial scale. Earlier this month, Swiggy said the quick commerce service has more than 14 million monthly transacting users and operates over 1,200 dark stores across over 130 cities. The company has also been narrowing Instamart’s contribution-margin losses, with more than 45% of its dark-store network now contribution-margin positive.
Nonetheless, Flipkart has fueled that growth with an aggressive expansion of its delivery infrastructure. Minutes now operates about 1,020 to 1,050 micro-fulfillment centers — essentially small warehouses located close to customers specially to handle quick deliveries — up from 600 in January and about 340 a year ago, one of the sources told TechCrunch. The company is adding around 100 such facilities a month, the source said, aiming to have 1,500 by the end of 2026.
Flipkart’s advantage goes beyond adding dark stores. The company can tap an enormous pool of existing e-commerce customers it has already spent years and billions of dollars acquiring, giving Minutes a ready audience for faster deliveries, Satish Meena, an adviser at Datum Intelligence, told TechCrunch.
“Flipkart is already a serious player,” Meena said. “Once you open 1,000 dark stores and [are] doing a million orders per day, it’s serious enough.”
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Minutes is also seeing customers return and shop more frequently. About 65% to 70% of customers making purchases on the service each month are repeat buyers, while transactions per customer have increased 50% to 60% from a year earlier, people familiar with the matter said.
Those customers are spending an average of about ₹400 to ₹500 (about $4.20–$5.20) per order, with fruits and vegetables, staples, dairy, and meat among the fast-growing categories, the sources said. Flipkart is also expanding its selection of higher-end gourmet products, including organic and artisanal items, as it looks to capture more of customers’ spending on Minutes.
Even as Minutes has expanded, its average delivery time has fallen to about 11 minutes, from 13 minutes a year ago, one of the sources told TechCrunch.
A battle for India’s shoppers
Flipkart’s growth comes as quick commerce takes a bigger role in how Indians shop online, even as broader consumer demand has shown signs of weakness. In a recent report, Bernstein analysts said while the country’s consumption growth softened in July, a shift toward quick commerce and e-commerce continued, with quick-commerce platforms recording healthy growth in monthly active users.
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Similar to Flipkart, Amazon is striving to gain its share in the Indian quick-commerce market. The Seattle-based company has been expanding Amazon Now, its quick-commerce service, as it seeks to bring the instant-delivery model to its existing e-commerce customer base.
During CEO Andy Jassy’s visit to India in June, Amazon stated that Now became its fastest-growing business in India, with orders doubling every quarter since launch. The company also laid out plans to take the service to more than 300 cities and set up a network of more than 1,000 micro-fulfilment centers, alongside larger facilities aimed at expanding the range of products it can deliver within minutes.
Amazon, Flipkart, Swiggy, Zepto, and Blinkit parent Eternal did not respond to requests for comment.
The quick commerce expansion is increasingly defensive as well as offensive for both Flipkart and Amazon, Meena told TechCrunch. As consumers grow accustomed to receiving certain purchases almost immediately, the e-commerce giants risk losing those transactions to specialist quick-commerce platforms if they cannot offer comparable speed.
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“Can you go back to scheduled delivery now in grocery? No,” Meena said. “You will not go back.”
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Inherent, a London AI lab founded by Google DeepMind alumni, says its AI agent just outperformed much larger models from Anthropic and OpenAI using a fraction of the size.
Of all the startups launched by Google DeepMind alumni, Inherent has gotten relatively little attention. But while better-funded rivals have yet to show the world anything concrete, the London-based team is starting to share what it’s been building.
Just weeks after emerging from stealth with a $50 million seed round, the British startup says its newly released AI agent, Faraday, has outperformed larger, better-known models at a specific task: independently reproducing the findings of published scientific papers without being told the answer in advance.
That may sound like a mere party trick given Inherent’s much loftier goal — building AI that can discover new scientific knowledge and not just verify old results. But paper replication is a standard training exercise for human scientists, too, cofounder and chief scientist Edward Hughes said. “Many PhD students actually start by doing this.”
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Beating other AI systems at the task wasn’t the point, Hughes told TechCrunch; how they got there was. “What was most interesting to us about this was not so much the result of beating those frontier agents — which of course we liked — but was actually the way we went about building this.”
Here’s the part that should catch an investor’s eye: measured against Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 — both much larger, frontier-scale systems — Faraday runs on a comparatively tiny model called Qwen 3.6 that has just 27 billion parameters. (Roughly speaking, “parameters” is a proxy for a model’s size and, typically, its training costs, as well.) Inherent’s bar for success was also higher than simply accuracy. Beyond replicating results, it wanted Faraday to demonstrate “research taste” — an instinct for what experiments are worth running and how to design them well.
Teaching something as intangible as taste is hard, which is where reinforcement learning comes in. It’s a training method that rewards an AI system for good outcomes rather than spelling out rules for it to follow. Rather than training its agents primarily on the study of how science itself is conducted, Inherent leans on this reward-based approach, betting it will generalize better to its longer-term goal of agents capable of contributing across many scientific fields.
“We’re always guided by that north star of building an AI scientist agent and imbuing our agents with taste,” Hughes said. That focus has also shaped what Inherent chooses not to build. Rather than developing its own coding tool, it had Faraday use OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 Codex instead, much the way human scientists lean on existing software rather than building everything themselves, according to the company.
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Inherent is also trying to avoid building agents that simply tell users what they want to hear. Instead, Hughes said, the goal is modeled on his favorite kind of teammate — the kind who comes back and says: “I got curious about this, and I went off and I did these experiments. What do you think of these results?”
That collaborative instinct extends to how Inherent operates as a company. Its dozen employees all work in person out of an office in King’s Cross — the once-rundown London neighborhood that Google DeepMind’s presence helped turn into one of the world’s top AI hubs. “We believe that London is the place to be,” Hughes said.
Hughes is bullish on London’s density of AI talent, but he has also added his voice to calls to end “garden leave” — the practice, common in the U.K., of barring departing employees from joining or starting a rival company for months after they resign. It’s a restriction American researchers generally don’t face, giving U.S. startups a head start on hiring talent who’ve left a prior role. “This is a personal view rather than a company view, but I was affected by the garden leave problem,” he told TechCrunch.
Hughes eventually got around that constraint and started Inherent alongside two other DeepMind alumni and a fourth cofounder. The startup isn’t slowing down either. It plans to grow its headcount to “about 20 to 25” by the end of the year. Given its ambitions in world models as well, and with Demis Hassabis’s new role leaving some DeepMind staff unsettled, Inherent’s hiring push could make it an appealing landing spot for DeepMind employees weighing a move.
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Pictured from left to right: Inherent co-founders Louis Kirsch, Kaloyan Aleksiev, Tantum Collins and Edward Hughes.
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There’s a new publicity stunt tapping into widespread opposition to AI data centers, and it’s using bathroom humor to make a statement.
Former NFL player Jason Kelce, who is also the co-owner of Garage Beer and the co-host of the New Heights podcast with his brother Travis (Taylor Swift’s husband), is the unlikely face of a marketing campaign, launched Tuesday, that puts artificial intelligence on notice. And, well, it’s all about the power of pee.
You read that right, and I apologize in advance for the amount of urine jokes in this article. Tread lightly, I guess.
The now-viral ad opens with Kelce using the bathroom. It cuts to him holding a jar of yellow liquid, issuing a call to action to a happy mob of folks frolicking through grassy terrain, singing, “Let’s pee on computers together and save humanity.” It immediately conjures up that iconic 1970s Coke commercial where hippies harmonize a message of peace, love and unity on a sunny hillside. Except instead of teaching the world to sing, Kelce is asking you to bottle up your pee in a collectible mug and send it to the AI data center of your choice.
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If you’re not yet up to speed on the matter, AI data centers are large facilities that store the massive amount of hardware needed to train and run AI models. These warehouses are stocked with high-performance graphics processing units, which provide the power for you to use AI for researching, streamlining video production and, well, creating all the slop your heart desires.
Despite the unserious angle of the marketing stunt taking the piss out of AI (I’m sorry), Kelce’s ad carries a deeper message about the threat data centers pose to our neighborhoods, our resources and our future.
AI data centers guzzle resources
An aerial view of the construction of Meta’s AI data center in El Paso, Texas.Brandon Bell/Getty Images
To keep data centers running, an excessive amount of fresh water is required to cool servers so they don’t melt down or explode. Evaporative cooling towers use water to absorb heat generated by servers.
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The Environmental and Energy Study Institute published a report in 2025 that says large data centers can consume up to 5 million gallons each day, which is equivalent to the amount of water used by a town populated by 10,000 to 50,000 people.
As massive amounts of potable water are being redirected, people who live near these data centers have growing concerns about how this water extraction will affect their daily lives, farming and basic household needs. Another fear: Who will be stuck paying these ginormous utility bills? Consumers are left holding the bag.
The other resource to discuss is electricity. New facilities, like the recently announced data center from OpenAI and Nvidia that would be built in Pike County, Ohio, are projected to use a lot of compute. The Ports-Pike Technology Campus is projected to consume roughly 8 gigawatts of power, equivalent to the annual energy use of 6 million average US households.
Then there’s Meta’s Hyperion, the 4-million-square-foot AI campus being constructed in Louisiana. It’s flattened an area known for its soybean crops and river cane, and when it’s all built and operational, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy says the gargantuan data center will consume three times the power New Orleans uses on any given day.
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In other words, more than a piss load of energy.
AI backlash across party lines
People in the city of Imperial, California, took to the streets to join a nationwide protest against AI data center expansion.SANDY HUFFAKER/AFP/Getty Images
Resource consumption, uncertainty over costs and environmental concerns have helped fuel a growing AI backlash.
So, antics aside, Kelce’s trolling ad touches a hot-button issue. The collective sentiment against AI data centers is trending downward. A recent Gallup poll indicated 71% of Americans oppose the construction of new AI data centers in their community.
With the midterm elections a few months away, this negative sentiment has blossomed into a major talking point for both Republicans and Democrats in their campaigns. Another major issue with these data centers is a glaring lack of transparency.
As reported by Brockovich in a blog post, a trend of backdoor deals, elusiveness and secrecy has accompanied the facilities as they pop up all over the country, with the trust of community members tanking. “They’re watching their utility bills climb, finding sick animals they can’t explain, and worrying about the long-term impacts on their health and property values,” Brockovich wrote.
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This brings me back to Ohio, an important state for the GOP during the midterms if the party wants to maintain a slim Senate majority. A memo circulated by the National Republican Senatorial Committee warned of a potential defeat for incumbent Sen. Jon Husted unless there’s a fix to the public relations strategy toward AI data centers.
“If voters’ perceptions of data centers are not fixed quickly, the campaign against them will expand far beyond Ohio,” the NRSC stated in the memo, as reported by Axios.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and President Donald Trump enjoy a lunch during the G7 summit in France.
Real-life action versus promotional gimmicks
I now return you to the matter of, ahem, the general public sending urine to an AI data center to cool the machinery of the future.
The marketing ploy here is to equate pee with water and, considering the massive water consumption that keeps AI data centers running, put the public disdain into the type of prank (which you’d normally see in a Jackass episode) to make its point loud and clear.
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But you could also argue that it makes no point at all. Ordinary people (those without Super Bowl rings) who have protested data centers IRL have gotten arrested for it. There is real work to be done policy-wise. A trolling ad like this fits into the performative and parasocial attention economy, not into genuine activism.
Remember, this is a commercial for Liquid Death and Garage Beer — a product is being sold here. A collectible mason jar, which is currently sold out, is listed on the Liquid Death website for $18. The product is currently rated five stars, with a single review saying, “the perfect product for shipping your locally sourced urine to your friendly neighborhood data center.”
So, are people actually sending their excreta through the mail? A spokesperson from the United States Postal Service didn’t immediately respond to our request for comment.
That said, USPS rules say urine specimens can be sent by mail, but only for medical purposes such as drug and alcohol testing. To do this right, you’d need to carefully package the fluid in a leakproof container, then place it in appropriate packaging to prevent a messy spill.
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Truth is it was never meant to be an action at all. Small print at the bottom of the ad says, “The suits want us to tell you to please don’t actually send your pee.” So yeah, Liquid Death and Garage Beer are really just pissing in the wind.
One thing is certain: Jason Kelce’s reach is strong, and his blue-collar persona can help give this campaign — and the message behind it — legs in rural America, the exact place battling against the spread of water-guzzling AI data centers.
Aaron is a writer for the streaming entertainment team. Previously, he wrote about TV and movies for places like Rotten Tomatoes, Inverse, TheWrap, Washington Post and The Hollywood Reporter. Aaron is also an actor and played a nerd on TV a lot in the ’90s. Seriously.
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Bluecore’s floating reactor could power about 15,000 homes near the port
California has banned new nuclear reactor construction since 1976
The reactor would sit on a barge leased at Berth 48
The Port of Long Beach is exploring small modular reactors that could eventually supply electricity for port operations and ships.
Bluecore Energy, a startup building compact nuclear reactors meant to operate from floating barges, is leading the proposal.
This marks a potential return of nuclear power development in California after nearly five decades under state restrictions.
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A startup’s barge-based reactor plan
Bluecore has leased space at Berth 48 within the Port of Long Beach, where it intends to develop and test its floating reactor system.
The company’s initial system is rated at 10 MWe, a capacity the startup says can scale through pairing multiple units together, an approach which suits continuous port operations partly because individual reactors are designed to run for years on a single fueling cycle.
The port has also signed a cooperation agreement with the US Maritime Administration to help establish safety standards for maritime nuclear power use.
“The company has taken nuclear reactor technology used in power generation and developed a smaller system designed to operate from a barge,” said Kofi Asante, founder and CEO of Bluecore.
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Asante told CBS News that a single reactor could generate enough electricity to power roughly 15,000 homes.
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The proposed system is water-cooled and would generate heat through nuclear fission, similar to conventional nuclear plants on land.
Port officials say nuclear power could eventually supply around-the-clock electricity as cargo operations become increasingly electrified across Long Beach’s terminals.
The technology could also extend to ships, data centers, and other coastal facilities located near water access points.
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Regulatory hurdles still unresolved
California has maintained a moratorium on new nuclear fission reactor construction since 1976, tied to unresolved questions about high-level radioactive waste disposal.
It remains unclear how this long-standing state restriction would apply to Bluecore’s proposed floating reactor design.
At the federal level, Bluecore has not yet filed a formal application with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for deployment approval.
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The company was scheduled to meet with the NRC this week to present its reactor design and regulatory plans.
An NRC report reportedly raised questions about how maritime nuclear deployments would address hazards such as sinking, capsizing, and severe weather extremes.
The Port of Long Beach, the Maritime Administration, and federal agencies including the Coast Guard and Department of Energy are jointly developing operational and safety protocols.
The Maritime Administration also began seeking industry input earlier this year on scalable, US-built small modular reactors for the marine transportation sector.
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For now, the Long Beach initiative remains firmly in the development and regulatory-planning stage, with no construction timeline confirmed.
If the project eventually advances past these early hurdles, Long Beach could become an early American test case for maritime small modular reactors serving port infrastructure.
Whether the state’s decades-old nuclear moratorium ultimately blocks or accommodates this barge-based approach remains an open and unresolved question — one that regulators, port officials, and Bluecore itself have yet to answer.
Mercury Research blames costly memory and scarce GPUs for 20% processor shipment slide
The processor market is sending mixed signals, with server and mobile shipments rising while desktop CPU volumes decline amid higher system prices. Meanwhile, AMD’s House of Zen has taken market share from Intel across every category.
For Q2 2026, Mercury Research says total processor shipments were lower than in the same period a year ago, attributing this to much lower system-on-chip (SoC) and embedded volumes due to AMD’s declining games console business, plus a large drop in desktop CPU volumes.
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Mercury associates the decline in desktop chips with weaker demand for high-end gaming PCs. Although the second quarter is not typically strong for consumer sales, it adds: “We believe that higher PC prices and limited GPU supplies are having a significant impact on end demand for desktop PCs, and thus desktop CPUs, as well.”
Those higher PC prices are the result of increases in the cost of memory components due to a shortage caused by chipmakers prioritizing output of more profitable high-bandwidth memory chips used in AI servers, as The Register has been covering for some time. A shortfall in the availability of consumer GPUs appears to have much the same cause.
According to Mercury, desktop CPU shipments fell by more than 20 percent year on year, although AMD’s decline was smaller than Intel’s. As a result, AMD gained market share, taking nearly 35 percent of desktop chips compared with about 32 percent a year ago.
In contrast, shipments of mobile processors for laptops and tablets were up strongly on the previous quarter, running counter to Mercury’s earlier expectations, although there was only a modest increase compared with a year ago.
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The growth followed a sharp increase in Intel’s output, particularly of mobile chips, after two heavily supply-constrained quarters. Intel added millions of units of mobile CPU capacity during Q2, significantly narrowing the gap between supply and demand.
However, AMD’s share of this mobile segment is now up to nearly 29 percent, a significant increase from the 20.6 percent it stood at in the same quarter a year ago.
Server processor shipments also rose, increasing 20 percent year on year and more modestly from Q1. According to Mercury, demand was higher for both datacenter-class CPUs (Xeon SP and AMD Epyc) and chips aimed at networking and storage applications.
Once again, AMD gained market share, accounting for 34.5 percent of server processors compared with 27.3 percent a year ago. Mercury adds that if the calculation included only Intel Xeon SP and AMD EPYC chips, AMD’s share would reach 46.4 percent.
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The research firm also keeps an eye on the Arm-based CPU market for PCs and servers, with the usual caveat that its estimates have significant uncertainty as there is no centralized reporting of Arm server or client CPU revenues.
It recorded significant growth in Apple’s Mac products, including the new lower-cost Neo line, while Arm-based Chromebooks also posted strong gains.
Mercury estimates that Arm-based systems captured 15.3 percent of the client market in Q2 2026, up 0.9 percentage points to a record high. In servers, it estimates that Arm’s share reached a record 13.6 percent, up 0.5 percentage points. ®
A trial date has been set in a $1 billion defamation case against Elsevier that alleges the company published what plaintiffs say was a manipulated study about an air purifying technology over objections from peer reviewers. The case has already cost Elsevier a $10,000 sanction from a judge.
Global Plasma Solutions (GPS), which makes air quality products, sued Elsevier in 2022 after the publisher declined to retract a 2021 paper in Building and Environment about GPS’ needlepoint bipolar ionization technology, which it heavily marketed during the COVID-19 pandemic as an air purifier. The complaint claims Elsevier is responsible for the authors’ alleged omission of data and misleading conclusions in the paper that fueled “massive” financial losses for the company, its lawyers claim. Elsevier knew the paper “failed peer review” under its “own standards,” but moved forward with the article despite this knowledge, according to GPS, which now goes by GPS Air.
The complaint has survived a bid by Elsevier to dismiss the case, and a trial has been set for Dec. 7. In allowing the case to proceed, U.S. Magistrate Judge David Keesler said in a May 2024 opinion that GPS has “plausibly alleged actual malice” by Elsevier defined as “knowledge of falsity or reckless disregard for the truth.” Chief Judge Martin Reidinger of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of North Carolina upheld Keesler’s recommendation in July 2025…
Citing internal and discovery documents, GPS alleges an assessment of 19 journals revealed Elsevier has published more than 1,200 articles either without any peer review, or against the recommendations of the reviewers.
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Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader sandbagger for sharing the article.
First look: Widely regarded as China’s homegrown YouTube alternative, video-sharing platform Bilibili has rekindled its global ambitions, launching a new mobile app for international markets. The company has also removed the strict identity verification requirements that often prevented global users from accessing its content.
The international Bilibili app is currently available on Android, with an iOS version expected soon. The company is also reportedly working on an English-language website that will offer content from popular creators.
New job listings on LinkedIn and marketing materials distributed to influencers also suggest the company has started hiring in the US, Europe, Japan, and other key markets.
According to the job listings, Bilibili is hiring community managers in Los Angeles, London, Mexico City, São Paulo, Istanbul, and Tokyo. Another job listing, for a Singapore-based position, revealed that the company is developing “AI-powered content moderation systems” for the international platform.
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In a post on a newly created X account, Bilibili confirmed its international expansion plans but did not reveal a timeline for the official launch. In another post, the company stated that both the Chinese and global versions will offer the same content, but noted that the global version will offer “better localization & easier sign ups” for international users.
The global version of the Bilibili app uses a pink color scheme, with a small globe icon in the top-left corner of the app icon to distinguish it from the Chinese version.
As part of its global ambitions, Bilibili has been urging popular global influencers, including MrBeast, to upload their content to the existing Chinese-language platform, which the company says has more than 376 million monthly active users.
The company has already taken several steps to make its platform more accessible to international visitors. For starters, it has quietly dropped the identity verification process that required users to provide a passport or ID document to upload content.
According to Semafor, Bilibili has created a Discord server where it’s marketing its international platform as an additional income opportunity for creators and influencers. The company also reportedly shared a document with global creators describing itself as the perfect platform to connect with “Gen Z Coded, affluent and well-educated” users.
The idea of AirPods with cameras has already made some people uneasy, even though Apple has not announced such a product yet. Online forums have highlighted growing skepticism around the possibility of camera-equipped earbuds, with concerns ranging from privacy to whether such devices could eventually be restricted in workplaces and other public spaces.
Those concerns may become harder to dismiss after a separate discovery reported by MacRumors offered a more detailed look at how Apple’s camera-equipped AirPods could potentially work.
According to MacRumors, forum member mactracker uncovered a hidden macOS framework called “AccessorySensorManager,” which appears to contain references to sensors capable of collecting visual and environmental information from connected AirPods. The findings do not confirm a final product, but they offer a glimpse into the kind of technology Apple may be testing.
The privacy question arrives before the product does
The prospect of putting cameras into earbuds has already triggered a skeptical response online. Unlike a smartphone or even a pair of smart glasses, earbuds are small, discreet, and often worn for hours at a time, making it far more difficult for people nearby to know when a camera might be active.
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That creates an obvious challenge for Apple. Camera-equipped AirPods could make AI assistants considerably more useful by allowing them to understand what a wearer is seeing or provide information about their surroundings without requiring a phone to be pulled from a pocket.
Caleb Denison / Digital Trends
Convenience, however, may not be enough to overcome the social discomfort surrounding always-worn cameras.
Users on Reddit noted concerns that such devices could face restrictions in offices, schools, or other sensitive environments. Similar unease appeared in discussions surrounding the MacRumors report, where readers questioned whether the potential benefits justified adding cameras to a product designed to disappear into everyday life.
MacRumors’ findings show what Apple may be working on
The framework uncovered by mactracker suggests each earbud could contain a camera sensor capable of capturing synchronized RGB images at up to one megapixel, according to MacRumors. The system appears to focus on still-image capture rather than conventional photography or video recording, potentially feeding information into Visual Intelligence and other AI features.
The report also references active and passive capture modes. One could potentially be triggered through Siri, while another may collect lower-resolution environmental information related to nearby speech, sound changes, posture, head movement, and other contextual signals. The code also references a hardware indicator that could visibly signal when image capture is taking place, addressing at least part of the privacy problem.
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Aaron / X
None of the findings confirm when, or even whether, Apple will release camera-equipped AirPods. MacRumors notes that the code could relate to an earlier design, while Bloomberg has previously reported that Apple is working on a camera-equipped AirPods model that could arrive in 2027.
Apple may have figured out how to make AirPods see. The harder task will be convincing everyone else that they should be comfortable with them looking.
You can keep Instagram from using your activity outside the app to influence the ads you get.
Charles-McClintock Wilson/Shutterstock
Instagram can make an ad feel almost telepathic. Browse a product on another site, and an ad for the same thing may appear in your feed minutes later. Despite its uncanny accuracy, Meta says it doesn’t use your phone’s microphone to listen in on your conversations to serve those ads. A retailer, app or other business may instead have sent it information about your visit, purchase or another interaction.
There’s no master switch that stops Instagram from collecting or using data. Meta can still learn from what you search for, watch, like, follow, post and click inside Instagram. It also receives device and network information, location-related signals, data from businesses and information shared across connected accounts. On top of that, Meta AI can use Facebook and Instagram activity to tailor its recommendations, too. The best approach to limiting what Instagram can track is to check settings for each of these sources separately.
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Turn off personalization from other businesses
Novak Bozovic for Engadget
Meta began rolling out a broader Activity from other businesses control in July 2026. It’s replacing Your activity off Meta technologies and expanding an older ad setting called Activity information from ad partners. The new control decides whether businesses can use the information they already send to personalize ads, Feed content and AI responses.
To adjust this setting, open Instagram, go to your profile, tap the three-line menu and open Accounts Center. Look for Activity from other businesses. Because Meta is introducing the setting by country, some accounts may still show Ad preferences > Ad settings > Activity information from ad partners instead. Choose the option that prevents Meta from using this activity for personalization.
This won’t stop businesses from sending the data or Meta from using activity generated inside Instagram. Ads can still reflect the accounts you follow, posts or Reels you engage with, searches, ad clicks, profile details or customer lists uploaded by advertisers. The setting makes it so your activity off Meta’s platforms doesn’t inform your ad experience rather than shutting down all ad personalization.
In the European Region, Accounts Center also offers personalized or less-personalized ads under Ad preferences > Ad settings > Ad experience. The second option uses fewer signals, but Meta says it can still use details such as age, location, device information, ad interactions and content on screen during the current session.
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Restrict Instagram’s access to your phone and accounts
Novak Bozovic for Engadget
On an iPhone, open Settings > Privacy & Security > Tracking and turn off Instagram’s permission. Apple’s Ask App Not to Track control blocks tracking across other companies’ apps and websites for advertising or sharing information with data brokers. It doesn’t stop Instagram from recording activity inside its own app.
On Android, the path is usually Settings > Apps > Instagram > Permissions. Review access to location, contacts, photos and videos, camera and microphone, then deny anything you do not need. Turning off location removes one direct source, but Meta may still estimate where you are from an IP address, network information, device signals and account activity.
Contact syncing needs its own check. Go to Accounts Center > Your information and permissions > Upload contacts, select the Instagram account and turn off Connect contacts on every device. That stops future syncing but does not delete contacts already uploaded. To remove those, use Manage contacts in Accounts Center on Instagram.com. Meta says deletion can take up to 90 days.
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Meta also uses information across accounts added to the same Accounts Center to personalize ads and suggest accounts to follow. Removing an account under Accounts Center > Accounts takes it out of that Accounts Center, but may disable shared logins and other connected features. It does not delete the account or its existing information.
Limit what Meta can learn from AI chats
Novak Bozovic for Engadget
Meta began using interactions with its AI features as signals for content and ad personalization on December 16, 2025, in most regions. A conversation about hiking, for example, could contribute to later recommendations for hiking posts or products. That said, Meta did not introduce a separate setting that lets users keep chatting with Meta AI while excluding those conversations from this use.
However, there are two cleanup commands in Instagram AI chats. Type /reset-ai to delete that AI’s copy of the conversation and the details it saved, or /reset-all-ais to reset every AI chat in the app. Your visible chat remains until you delete it separately. These commands clear saved context, and they don’t serve as opt-outs from advertising, ordinary data collection, or model training.
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Model training is separate from personalization. Meta uses public posts and comments from adult accounts, along with interactions with its AI features, to improve generative AI models in regions where it relies on legitimate interests. Users in the EU and UK can object through Meta’s Privacy Center and that right isn’t a universal Instagram setting.
Do not put names, addresses, financial details, medical information or anything else you would not post publicly into a Meta AI chat. Use the reset commands after a conversation you don’t want the AI to remember, and use the objection form where it’s available.
Sony is expected to introduce its next Xperia phone in just a couple of days, but a new leak may have already revealed what the upcoming Xperia 10 VIII will look like.
An image shared by Android Headlines shows what is claimed to be the Xperia 10 VIII ahead of Sony’s August 25 event in Japan. Sony has only confirmed that a new “Xperia Product” is coming, though recent leaks have consistently pointed toward the Xperia 10 VIII. If the image is accurate, Sony does not appear to be changing much on the outside this year.
The Xperia 10 VII resemblance is difficult to miss
At first glance, there is very little separating the leaked phone from last year’s Xperia 10 VII. Sony appears to be retaining the horizontal camera module, with two rear cameras, an LED flash, and the company’s branding sitting alongside them.
Android Headlines
The phone is shown in a pale green finish, while the right side appears to retain the familiar volume controls and recessed power button. The latter would suggest Sony is once again using a side-mounted fingerprint scanner. Only the rear and part of the side are visible, so the leak does not reveal whether Sony has made any noticeable changes to the display or front-facing design.
The specifications may be familiar too
The design is not the only thing that could carry over from the Xperia 10 VII. A recent Geekbench listing for the Sony XQ-GH54, believed to be the Xperia 10 VIII, showed a Snapdragon 6 Gen 3 processor paired with 8GB of RAM.
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Geekbench
That is the same chipset used inside last year’s model. The device recorded 871 points in Geekbench’s single-core test and 3,028 points in multi-core, suggesting there may not be a major performance upgrade this generation.
As we reported earlier, Sony’s event begins at 11 a.m. Japan time on August 25, or 10 p.m. ET on August 24 for U.S. viewers. Xperia phones are still sold in Japan and select markets such as the UK and Germany, but Sony has scaled back its smartphone presence considerably and no longer officially sells Xperia phones in the U.S. A stateside release for the Xperia 10 VIII therefore looks unlikely.
Sony should fill in the remaining gaps around the cameras, battery, pricing, and availability at the event.
A sale price at a Seattle grocery store. A proposed city ordinance would bar grocers from setting different prices for individual shoppers based on their personal data. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)
Seattle is in the final stages of becoming the first city in the country to ban so-called “surveillance pricing” in grocery stores. Experts disagree about whether it will actually save consumers money.
The proposed Fair Pricing and Transparency Ordinance would ban grocers from setting variable prices for individual consumers based on their personal data, both in-store and online.
This was one of Mayor Katie Wilson’s biggest campaign promises, and it comes after Maryland, Connecticut, and New Jersey passed the first state-level surveillance pricing regulations this spring. The City Council will hold a public meeting this Friday, Aug. 21, to hear amendments to the proposed ordinance.
The bill has received fierce criticism from tech and grocery industry representatives who say the ordinance would prohibit personalized discounts that benefit customers.
A City Council Central Staff Memo, which was first circulated last Thursday and will be presented at Friday’s meeting, raises some of those same concerns. Despite opposition from one councilmember and requests for major amendments from another, the bill seems well on its way to getting the requisite votes.
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Impact on consumers
At the heart of the controversy is a disagreement about whether personalized pricing harms or benefits consumers.
The use of algorithmic pricing by Instacart last December met with so much backlash that the platform stopped using it. A 2025 Consumer Reports investigation had found that Instacart varied the total cost of the same cart at a Seattle-area Safeway by roughly $10, with only 8% of shoppers getting the lowest price. Those were randomized experiments to test price sensitivity rather than prices set from individual profiles, and Instacart stopped offering the technology behind them in December after the investigation was published.
In brick-and-mortar stores, electronic shelf labels have not yet been shown to offer individualized list prices. Instead, grocers such as Krogers and Albertsons personalize the effective price through the distribution of individualized digital coupons to loyalty club members.
The federal government is moving to regulate those. The FTC on Wednesday proposed an enforcement policy that would treat undisclosed personalized pricing, including discounts, as a violation of federal law, and opened it for public comment.
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Amanda Dalton, who represents the Northwest Grocery Retail Association, said personalized discounts make groceries cheaper overall. Her organization was involved in drafting the bill but ultimately testified against it out of concern that it would prohibit those deals.
“We support what the council is trying to do as it relates to using personal information to drive higher prices,” Dalton told GeekWire. “Where we diverge is the need and ability to continue what we call pro-consumer common practices that are happening in grocery stores every day, like discount programs, coupons, fuel rewards, student discounts, and volume based deals.”
Contrary to messaging from some industry advocates, the current bill does allow some discounts. Loyalty programs, volume-based discounts, third-party manufacturer coupons, and discounts based on a broad identity, such as students or seniors, are all explicitly permitted.
Industry groups predict, however, that the liability exposure will make it too risky for stores to continue to offer those deals.
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“There will be hoops that companies need to jump through to deliver those discounts, and a lot of legal exposure to liability,” Drew Ambrogi, a policy manager at Chamber of Progress, said.
As a solution, industry groups including Chamber of Progress, TechNet, and NWGRA have suggested that the bill be amended so that algorithmic pricing is prohibited for raising prices but is permitted for lowering them.
Advocates on the other side worry that would gut the bill entirely.
“That creates an incentive for retailers to inflate the list price and offer personalized discounts to each person based on their individual willingness to pay,” said Grace Gedye, a policy analyst for Consumer Reports.
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UFCW 3000, which represents workers at major grocery chains, has also endorsed the bill, opposing individualized pricing regardless of whether it raises or lowers prices.
“It’s easy to figure out when your neighbors are getting a different price,” said union member J’Nee DeLancey, who works at Ballard Town and Country. “We grocery workers will have to handle the fallout of angry, confused customers.”
Loyalty programs
One Kroger and Albertsons-funded group called Protect Seattle Savings has claimed, online and in mass text blasts to Seattleites, that the proposed ordinance “puts your loyalty rewards program on the chopping block” — a claim that is not backed up by the bill itself.
In fact, the bill does exactly the opposite: it includes a carve-out for loyalty programs that allows retailers to use a customer’s purchase history to determine pricing so long as that customer has opted into a loyalty program and the criteria for the discount are disclosed.
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That exception has drawn criticism from the NWGRA, which warns it may unintentionally penalize consumers who can’t afford to join the loyalty program. On DoorDash, for example, users have to pay $10 a month to be a “DashPass” loyalty rewards member. If DoorDash is only allowed to offer discounts to those members, then the bill may unintentionally make orders more affordable only for customers who can afford the membership fee.
NWGRA is calling on the city to expand the carve-out so that a retailer can offer purchase history-based discounts to non-loyalty members as well. The Central Staff Memo circulated last week highlighted the push from industry to preserve the use of purchase history for all customers, but wrote that it is “difficult to ascertain whether the limitations on personalized discounts would result in a net cost increase for consumers,” since consumer data could be used to raise prices as well as lower them.
Input from industry
Supporters of the regulation say they’ve already made significant compromises with industry. Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck, who sponsored the bill, initially planned to ban electronic shelf labels, as New Jersey did, but dropped the provision after grocery workers said the new labels made their jobs easier. Now, the Seattle bill simply prohibits a store from using electronic shelf labels to display a price that has been determined using algorithmic pricing.
Another compromise was the narrowing of the regulation to exempt small grocers and convenience stores. The bill will apply only to grocers with 20 or more retail locations globally, as well as mixed-use retailers that sell groceries, like Costco; and delivery services, like Instacart and DoorDash.
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Councilmember Rinck said the bill is the product of engagement with retailers, and that she hopes to keep them on board.
“We were at the table with grocers, and the proposal changed in response to their business concerns,” Rinck said. “We will be watching what folks in industry have to say about the legislation and amendments this Friday.”
Private right of action
The last major sticking point is the proposed enforcement mechanism, which industry representatives criticize for being overly aggressive.
The bill splits enforcement between the City Attorney’s Office and consumers. Both avenues allow civil penalties of up to $3,000 for a first violation and $10,000 for subsequent offenses, plus damages. The private right of action can only be pursued against stores with 25 or more locations instate, and civil penalties for a single collective action are capped at $1 million.
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“The private right of action will have a chilling effect on the offering of discounts altogether,” Ambrogi said. “What is not explicitly banned by the bill may be presumptively banned because a business’s compliance department doesn’t think it’s worth exposing them to ambiguity.”
Dalton also opposes the private right of action for being too broad. Customers can seek damages for being offered an individual price, even if they did not buy the product in question.
“Our argument has been for clarity and simplicity,” Dalton said. “Now you’ve got a $1 million class action threat on every single product in your grocery cart.”
Consumer advocacy groups say the expansive private right of action is what gives the bill teeth, pointing to the similar clause in New Jersey’s surveillance pricing ban.
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“If it was only public enforcement, there are practical limits on how frequent enforcement could be,” Gedye said. “Compliance might not be as rigorous as it would be if any consumer who thinks they’ve really been harmed by this practice can start looking into it and potentially initiate a case.”
City Attorney enforcement
The Central Staff Memo warned that the City Attorney’s Office may not be up for enforcing this law, either. Stores will be required to retain records on prices and discounts for three years. The bill charges the CAO with the task of auditing stores and ensuring compliance with the record keeping requirements.
Unlike the law that passed last year regulating algorithmic rent-fixing in Seattle, this bill does not enlist a city agency to help the CAO with enforcement. The regulation also applies to a far larger potential pool of complainants, and it does not arrange for additional funding in its fiscal note.
“The CAO may have to develop new systems and procedures to handle intakes directly and may not have capacity to conduct thorough investigations that would involve analyzing large volumes of data,” the memo said.
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In response, a CAO spokesperson told GeekWire their office does not share the memo’s concerns and is in “full support” of the proposed ordinance.
“The City expects that grocery retailers will voluntarily comply with the legislation once it’s adopted, which includes a 1-year phase-in while the City will inform and educate retailers about the bill’s provisions,” a CAO spokesperson told GeekWire. “We anticipate the expected level of work can be managed using existing resources and funds recovered through litigation.”
The council will vote on the bill in September after they return from recess. But first, Friday’s committee meeting will reveal which councilmembers are in support of the legislation and what kinds of amendments will be considered.
Councilmember Rinck said she “feels good” about getting the bill passed, and looks forward to making Seattle the first city to regulate algorithmic pricing on groceries.
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“Government gets a bad rap for being reactive,” Rinck said. “This is an opportunity for us to be proactive in trying to regulate this kind of practice before it really takes hold in our city.”
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