The National Labor Relations Board announced over the weekend that 65 Apple employees at a Towson, Maryland store (near Baltimore) have voted to unionize (33 voted against). The Apple CORE (Coalition of Organized Retail Employees) will become part of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM). The decision follows a growing labor trend across restaurant, retail and tech industries, while marking a first for Apple’s more than 270 U.S. retail locations. The Towson facility is the third Apple Store to conduct a union drive this year, but the first to hold an official vote. Read more

Twitter’s 8,000 employees were treated to a question-and-answer session with Elon Musk on Thursday, the first staff meeting the tech entrepreneur has conducted since his bid to purchase the company for $44 billion. The hour-long meeting, which was live-streamed to the Twitter staff, touched on a wide range of topics, including aliens and “the nature of reality” as well as interests closer to home, such as layoffs, growth plans and, of course, TikTok. The move seemed to reinforce Musk’s intent to close the Twitter deal after suggesting in April that it was “on hold.” Read more

E-commerce company eBay is launching eBay Live, a live shopping platform that lets people browse, chat and purchase items from anywhere in the world using beta technology that combines entertainment with instant purchasing. The first series will offer a curated selection of rare trading cards from top eBay seller Bleecker Trading, and will be hosted by trading card enthusiast DJ Skee. The new platform is designed for social shopping, “allowing our community to come together over shared interests and merchandise,” explained eBay vice president of collectibles, electronics and home Dawn Block. Read more

Mozilla has made Total Cookie Protection the default setting for Firefox worldwide, turning it into what the company calls “the most private and secure major browser available across Windows, Mac and Linux.” Total Cookie Protection works by “confining cookies to the sites where they were created, thus preventing tracking companies from using these cookies to track your browsing from site to site.” The feature — which Mozilla promises won’t negatively affect the browsing experience — creates a separate “cookie jar” for each website visited, limiting behavioral insights to that one site rather than letting trackers link behavior across multiple sites. Read more

Facebook is trying to make its feed operate more like TikTok’s, according to recent reports that indicate the company recently directed employees to adjust the platform’s algorithms to prioritize popular posts, regardless of their source, over its traditional approach of serving posts from friends or accounts followed. Parent company Meta Platforms is also said to be reuniting Facebook with the Messenger app in order to align its message functionality with that of TikTok. Combined with an increased emphasis on short-form video with Reels on Facebook and Instagram, the changes reflect TikTok’s threat to Meta’s social media dominance. Read more