Digital Trends Live: Marriott data breach, Android Auto, and more

By Brie Barbee December 1, 2018

On today’s episode of Digital Trends Live, we discussed trending headlines such as the Marriott data breach, as well as Apple Music making its way to Alexa-enabled devices. We were also joined by editor-in-chief Jeremy Kaplan in New York to discuss the future of Android Auto, and welcomed special guest Pete Williams to talk about his first feature-length film, The New Breed.

We learned today that the Marriott hotel chain is currently dealing with the aftermath of one of the biggest corporate data breaches in history. While hackers have supposedly had access to the company’s Starwood reservation database since 2014, Marriott only became aware of the breach last week. This marks the second largest corporate data breach in history, second only to the Yahoo breach in 2017, which affected over 3 billion accounts.

It is estimated that nearly 327 million guests had their information hacked, including their names, phone numbers, email addresses, passport numbers, dates of birth, and arrival and departure information. For millions of others, their credit card information has been potentially compromised.

It is unclear how the company plans to deal with the breach, but they are currently giving guests a free membership to WebWatcher, a personal information monitoring service, and are urging guests to monitor their accounts for suspicious activity and change existing account passwords.

In other news, Apple Music can now be streamed to your Echo, giving music lovers one less reason to buy a Home Pod. It’s rare to see Apple products show up on other devices, but is probably a smart move if they hope to keep up with Spotify in the music-streaming game. This is also good news for the over 50 million people currently subscribed to Apple Music, and suggests the platform may become available on other Android devices soon as well.

We were also joined by Digital Trends’ editor-in-chief Jeremy Kaplan to discuss Android Auto in his Hear Me Out segment. “I think there is a real problem with Android Auto, which could cause our dashboards to become dumpster fires,” Kaplan said. “The problem is advertising.”

While driving has remained one of the last relatively ad-free environments in our lives, that might soon be changing as Android Auto looks to implement ads to their service. This is also concerning for the future of self-driving cars, which may eventually add even more advertisements.

And last but not least, we sat down with special guest Pete Williams, a director and filmmaker whose new documentary, The New Breed, follows three social entrepreneurs as they create businesses to solve social or environmental problems.

Digital Trends Live airs Monday through Friday at 9 a.m. PT, with highlights available on demand after the stream ends. For more information, check out the DT Live homepage, and be sure to watch live for the chance to win a $100 Amazon gift card, among other prizes.

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