Smartphone users know that sharing personal data with apps can be part of the price of free apps, but when it comes to how frequently those apps give that data to third parties, the numbers will shock you.

A new study by Carnegie Mellon found that some smartphone users’ data is shared more than 5,000 times with third parties in a two-week period. Most people are totally clueless this is happening, but the study found that when people learn how much frequently data is being shared, they act rapidly to shut down the spread of personal info.

What happens when a multi-billion-dollar social network steals your app’s name?

Independent developer Mike Swanson asked that question Monday when he learned that Instagram had released Layout, the Facebook-owned company’s new iPhone app for creating photo collages.

Disneyland is about to celebrate its 60th anniversary on July 17th, but before Walt’s playground become one of the world’s most popular tourist attractions, it was just an ugly patch of dirt outside L.A.

If you’ve ever visited Disneyland, it’s hard to imagine a time when the Matterhorn and Tower of Terror didn’t peak up above the Anaheim skyline while cruising up I-5, so Disney released a timelapse video of the park’s original construction that shows Disney’s Main Street popping up in the middle of nowhere.

Watch the full video below:

Steve Wozniak thinks he and co-founder Steve Jobs could never have found employment at the company they created together, had they been in their twenties in 2015.

“I look at the experience and education levels you need to get a job at Apple today and I think, ‘Well, Steve Jobs and I never could’ve gotten a job at Apple today,'” Woz told The Australian Financial Review in an interview.

The reason, he says, is that the rigorous Apple hiring process (like the ones at other tech giants like Google and Microsoft) would never have favored two college dropouts like himself and Jobs. This bias means the companies are potentially missing out on finding the next person to come along with a world-changing idea.

Apple’s new MacBook is brilliance reimagined. They’ve taken what was arguably one of the most popular computing products on the market and made it even better.

Even though the new MacBook doesn’t drop until next month, Cult of Mac Deals is proud to offer its readers a chance to win one with The New MacBook Giveaway.

Apple’s spaceship-style Campus 2 isn’t the only impressive Apple building on the horizon. The first render for the company’s giant R&D center in Yokohama, Japan, is out — and it looks spectacular!

I’ve always found the people who work in Apple Stores to be incredibly helpful and, considering that their job is to sell you on expensive products, honest. One thing that’s never happened to me, however, is having an Apple Store employee suggest that I consider choosing a Samsung handset or Windows Phone over an Apple device.

But that’s exactly what happened the day that YouTube pranksters NelkFilmz dressed up as Apple employees and hit their local Apple Store, with the aim of selling Surfaces instead of iPads. They’re quickly weeded out by the real store employees, of course — at which point things just get awkward.

You can check the video out below.

We’ve been waiting seemingly for years for the Mac to get gesture recognition. Accessories like the Leap Motion have tantalized us with the possibility of aftermarket solutions, while secret Apple patents have hinted at future Macs with Kinect-like possibilities. Heck, Apple even purchased the company that designed the Kinect’s technology back in 2013, yet we’ve still seen nothing.

Turns out we might not need to wait for Apple to release special hardware for a gesture-controlled Mac. By making use of a very simple phenomenon in physics, Apple could actually enable gesture control in the Mac, iPhone and iPad … no hardware required.

Fantastical has been my go-to calendar app for years. It’s interface and ease of use is second to none, especially Apple’s terrible Calendar app.

But Fantastical hasn’t received much love on the Mac in awhile. While the iOS version has continued to steadily iterate, the app’s design and basic feature set on the desktop has basically stayed the same.

Today Fantastical 2 for Mac arrives, bringing a complete design revamp for OS X Yosemite and several major new features.

Your iPhone and iPad are decent options for gaming on the go, but they can’t do everything. Sometimes touch controls work, and sometimes they don’t.

If you’re a dedicated gamer who wants something that combines the simplicity of touch controls with the precision of actual buttons, I recommend Nintendo’s newest handheld gaming device.

The latest incarnation of the 3DS handheld system is appropriately named the New Nintendo 3DS XL (North America didn’t get the smaller version, but my massive man hands and I are not complaining). It offers a wider viewing angle for its glasses-free stereoscopic 3D graphics, a faster processor and even more buttons than the old one. And if you can swing the $200 price, you’ll be buying a lot of fun. But as commenters love to point out to me, this is Cult of Mac and not Cult of Whatever I’m Writing About, so we’ll skip to the big question:

Will this replace your iPhone or iPad for gaming?

Tim Cook wasn’t lying when he claimed Apple’s new spaceship-style Campus 2 would be the company’s most cutting-edge, environmentally friendly construction to date.

A new $17.5 million project — approved by the Santa Clara Valley Water District board Tuesday night — will involve the laying of 13,300 feet of pipeline that will pipe recycled water to both Cupertino and Apple’s Campus 2 HQ.

“Apple drove this project,” said Katherine Oven, deputy operating officer of the water district, describing it as “a true partnership of both public and private agencies.”

BERKELEY, Calif. — ILE is big in Japan. The California bag company has found a market with the Japanese bike website Blue Lug, and the collaboration keeps pushing ILE into new bags, materials, hardware and color choices.

Eric Fischer, 26, launched ILE (short for “Inside Line Equipment”) out of his apartment four short years ago. He was racing bikes, buying fabric and making bags one at a time for himself, his friends and friends of friends.

“I always liked making things, but building buildings didn’t seem scalable,” Fischer told Cult of Mac. “Making bags seemed more like a painting rather than building a house.”

When Apple announced the new 2015 MacBook Air a couple weeks ago, there was at least a couple of disappointments.

First of all, for those of us who love the current form factor, power, keyboard, ports, and trackpad of the MacBook Air, there was no Retina Display in the 2015 model of the ultraportable.

In fact, the new MacBook Air’s Intel HD Graphics 6000 chip allegedly didn’t support Retina, with the maximum resolution it could pump out to an external monitor 2560 x 1600: a few million pixels below the 4K resolution necessary to make an argument for a desktop monitor being Retina.

It turns out, though, that Apple has undersold the graphic performance ability of the new MacBook Air.

Short of Samsung, there’s no other company that gets as bad a rap for copying Apple as Xiaomi. The Chinese gadget maker, though, has just beaten Apple to market in at least one category. Although a proper Apple HDTV has been rumored by the likes of Gene Munster for ages, Xiaomi has beaten Cupertino to the punch with a beautiful — and affordable! — Android smart TV.

Apple has bought a boring database company you’ve never heard of called FoundationDB. While not as sexy as buying Beats, the acquisition is good news for Apple’s increasingly important cloud services.

The Virginia-based startup, which has raised a little over $20 million in funding, specializes in handling large chunks of data very quickly. TechCrunch first reported news of the acquisition.

Apple could definitely use help on the server side, especially after its cloud services just recently suffered the worst outage in their history. With the iTunes Store, App Store, iCloud, iMessage, Siri, and a forthcoming TV service, Apple needs all the data power it can get. Hopefully FoundationDB will help.

It looks like that cheap cassette adaptor I bought for my first iPhone and that universal remote for all my TV gadgets at RadioShack in the last ten years may come back to haunt me.

If you’re like me and you’ve shopped at RadioShack within the last several years, your personal information may be included in the sale of all of the failed electronics retailer’s assets in an auction that concluded Monday of this week.

The sale also includes Radio Shack trademarks, patents, leases, and the court presiding over the matter will likely decide whether Radio Shack can continue its retail operations at a smaller scale.

The reported winner of the bid, Standard General, is also RadioShack’s largest shareholder, making this an odd one. The winning bid still needs to be approved by a bankruptcy judge, who will have to consider the pending legal challenges to this sale.

Like, for example, whether a retailer that bragged, “We pride ourselves on not selling our private mailing list,” can sell them once bankrupt.

You can’t get an Apple Watch until April 24th. But that doesn’t mean you can’t pretend to have its fine metals rubbing your naked wrist right now.

By printing out a tiny piece of paper and downloading an app, a horrible render of the Apple Watch will appear on your wrist like magic.

Police in Somerset County Maine have finally apprehended a man wanted for charges of burglary after the suspect, 24 year-old Christopher Wallace, made a crucial mistake after weeks of evading the cops: he snapchatted his hiding spot.

A warrant for Wallace’s arrest had been issued in connection to the theft of propane and wood stoves that were recovered at his home in February. Wallace hid for weeks after it was made known publicly that authorities were searching for him. Eventually he got cocky posted a message of Snapchat that he was back home.

Friends tipped off the sherif’s department that he was at house, which quickly brought officers to his door. They didn’t find him at first, but then Wallace decided to double-down on the stupidy and posted that the cops were looking for him and that he’s hiding in the cabinet.

More tips came in and the cops eventually located Wallace and posted this celebratory message on Facebook:

You just knew that when Apple announced its new “Shot on iPhone” ad campaign — crowdsourced from the millions of photos shot by regular iPhone owners each year, and displayed on billboards and bus stops around the world — it wouldn’t take long for someone to parody it.

Well, that day has come, thanks to a Tumblr parody page called “Also Shot on an iPhone” which shows an array of oddball bathroom selfies and other images blown up to poster size and displayed around San Francisco by a pair of local guerrilla street artists.

The results are suitably hilarious.

Rock band OK Go contains some incredibly talented folks. Their crazy-creative videos keep us dancing and guessing “how did they do that?” while they make iOS games and manage a successful touring and record-making career along the way.

Now the foursome is advertising for Red Star Macalline, a Chinese furniture company, with an advertisement using their hit song “I Won’t Let You Down,” including a video shot in China itself, as well as a remix of the tune for the ad.

Check it out below, but don’t say we didn’t warn you. Chair dancing will probably ensue (if you’re sitting down).

If you’re like me, you’ve got a ton of unread iMessages on your iPhone and tapping through them all just to get rid of your app badge anxiety seems like a bit too much effort.

Apple has your back, though, with a nicely designed way to mark all your iMessages as read. It might not be apparent at first glance where to find this magic trick. Here’s how.

You’re driving home late one night with your friend following. You lose him at a red light and, realizing he doesn’t have your address, need to tell him where to go.

You ask Siri to share your route with your friend, and voila, he’s able to follow your location as you drive with the Maps app.

Such is the kind of scenario that could arise in the future, thanks to a new Apple patent.

The 650 politicians who win seats at the U.K.’s House of Commons on May 7 are set to be given iPad Air 2 devices as part of a new deal.

Not everyone is happy about it, though. Shadow Cabinet Office minister (and possible Android user?) Chi Onwurah has attacked the plan — saying that, “Locking some of the most powerful people in the country into a platform that most of my constituents can’t afford seems like a mistake.”

Standing in front of a classic turntable, you might not expect to be impressed by the brick work

But it’s the first thing that comes to mind when beholding the sci-fi hi-fi created by Korean Lego artist Hayarobi.

No detail is overlooked on Hayarobi’s record player, which he called The Planet. It consists of more than 2,400 pieces and is powered by a Lego Power Functions Battery Box and LEGO Power Functions M-Motor, according to Huh Magazine.

Lesser brands like Samsung have to splash some serious cash to give the impression that they’re cool pieces of technology, but Apple’s so ubiquitous that pop stars are seemingly lining up to feature its products in their music videos.

The latest to create an unofficial Apple ad is pop songstress Charli XCX (a.k.a. the girl who sang the hook on Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy”). In her new video “Famous” — debuted as part of this week’s YouTube Music Award Show — Charli dances around her bedroom texting and watching videos on her iPhone and iPad, before both devices run out of battery, at which point she’s whisked off on a surreal adventure.

Check it out below: