UPDATE: See the statement received from Google at the bottom of this story.
You might want to think twice about buying used Nest security cameras.
A new report reveals that secondhand models can allow previous owners to spy on new users — even if they correctly follow Nest’s instructions on resetting the device. There’s currently no fix for the security flaw.
I hate my friends. I want to show them a photo, or that screenshot I took of those cute otters, and all they can do is take one look, and then swipe off into the rest of my photos. And trust me, you don’t want to know what I have lurking back there. And I also hate myself, because I do the exact same thing without thinking. It’s human nature.
Some apps let you load up a few photos to show to other people, so they can’t pull back the virtual shower curtain and peek at your private photos. But these require that you do extra work to prepare them.
Happily, iOS offers a way to lock down a single image. That way, when you hand your iPhone or iPad over to a friend, or anyone else, they can’t swipe to other photos. In fact, they can’t do anything at all, because you’ve locked the whole touchscreen. Best of all, you can toggle this on and off in a second.
During his stint as Apple CEO, Tim Cook has repeatedly credited his predecessor, Steve Jobs. But he’s also worked to make Apple into a company that doesn’t slavishly follow the path laid out by Jobs. This is most clearly seen by Cook’s doubling down on privacy, and push to embrace social causes such as LGBT rights.
That mixture was on display Sunday, when Cook delivered a commencement speech at Stanford University. In doing so, he paid homage to the legendary June 2005 Stanford address delivered by Steve, while putting his own stamp on things.
Here’s how:
A Facebook app banned by Apple gathered personal and sensitive data from 187,000 users before it was booted from iOS devices.
According to a letter from Facebook to Senator Richard Blumenthal’s office, the Research app gathered data on 31,000 users in the U.S. The rest of the data came from users in India.
This post is presented by VPNRanks
By now, you ought to know that going online without a VPN is downright irresponsible. There are countless threats to your security and privacy roaming the web, not to mention the irritation of location-based content restrictions. But there are seemingly just as many VPN options to choose from, so where to begin?
Background refresh is what lets your iPhone and iPad download your email while your iPhone is sleeping, to update your weather app while you are sleeping, and to grab all kinds of data so that it’s ready before you need it — news feeds, notes-app syncing, and pretty much anything else.
However, as revealed this week by the Washington Post, plenty of bad apps are abusing the background refresh mechanism. They are using it to send your private data — you location, your email address, your phone number, and much much more.
It’s likely that this is happening to you, because background refresh is enabled by default for newly-installed apps. Fortunately, it’s an easy problem to fix. Today we’ll see how.
Apple has joined Google, WhatsApp and 44 other signatories in penning an open letter to the U.K.’s cybersecurity agency GCHQ. The open letter asks the agency to abandon plans for the so-called “ghost protocol.”
This would force encrypted message services to allow eavesdropping by silently adding “a law enforcement participant to a group chat or call.” In essence, it would make it possible to inject hidden participants into secure messaging services.
Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, has addressed Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s shots at Apple’s stance on privacy.
In a recent New York Times op-ed, Pichai dismissed unnamed (but clearly Apple) tech giants who sell privacy as a “luxury good.” Unsurprisingly, Federighi doesn’t agree.
A U.K. court ordered Apple to provide a widow access to her late husband’s iPhone photos, after a lengthy legal battle that ended Sunday when the woman and her daughter could finally look at the pictures.
Matt Thompson did not leave a will when he took his own life in 2015, and Apple makes clear that user accounts are non-transferable after death.
Google and Apple’s feud has cooled a lot in recent years. But like a married couple who are staying together until the kids are at college, neither company is beyond throwing a bit of undercover shade at the other.
Tim Cook has previously taken issue with tech giants which gobble up user data. Now Google CEO Sundar Pichai has taken to the New York Times to blast unnamed tech giants which sell privacy as a “luxury good.”
Apple should be building a data marketplace for its users, not raising fears about privacy. Privacy is about preventing the leakage of personal data and does nothing about the ownership and monetization of that data.
Individuals should be getting paid for their data directly, not the companies that collect that data. And that should be the focus of Apple’s efforts.
The CEOs of the big four US wireless carriers were asked by an FCC commissioner whether they’ve stopped selling their customers’ real-time location data, as they had promised to do.
Published reports in recent months indicated that the locations of Americans were being sold without their permission of even knowledge.
Everyone who uses Google services, whether on iPhone or Android, will soon be able to have some of the data being collected about them automatically erased after a span of time.
It’s already possible to order Google to erase everything it stores about your search history, but this new feature will allow for on-going deletion.
Apple has responded to a New York Times report, claiming that it has removed various parental control apps from the App Store. Apple allegedly removed apps which offered similar features to its own Screen Time tool.
In response, Apple confirms that it did remove “several” such apps — but says that this was done due to privacy and security risks.
Apple CEO Tim Cook made an appearance at the TIME 100 Summit in New York City today where he spoke about leadership and innovation.
Cook sat down with Time managing editor Nancy Gibbs who asked about everything from education to privacy policy. Of course, politics came up as well. While Cook refrained from talking about his conversations with Donald Trump, he did warn the crowd that some issues like global warming are too big for us to rely on the government to fix.
Have you got some embarrassing entries in your Safari browsing history? Or maybe it’s a question of security: You don’t want your iPad’s history to fall into the wrong hands, etc.
Smutty jokes aside, there are plenty of legit reasons to clear your Safari history on your iPhone or iPad. And the good news is that Safari for iOS has some great tools for doing so. For example, did you know that you can clear just the last hour of browsing history, or the past couple of days?
Get ready to learn how to sanitize your Safari history on iOS devices.
An Apple employee was allegedly illegally harassed by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) while passing through Customs. Andreas Gal, founder of Silk Labs, an AI startup acquired by Apple, says he was asked for the passwords to his Apple-issued phone and computer.
When he asked to speak with a lawyer, due to the contents being covered by a nondisclosure agreement, CBP officials reportedly refused. Instead, Gal was threatened with prosecution.
Apple is again using humor to get across a serious message. Its latest video has a young man using his iPhone to answer a personal question, and assures him that he isn’t being tracked while he’s doing so.
Watch it now:
One of the big threads running through Apple’s Monday keynote was the company’s insistence on user privacy. Apple would not, it suggests, share data with companies for Apple Card or Apple News+.
The new Apple TV channels, however, could be a little different. At least, according to an interview with AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson. Speaking at the Fintech Ideas Festival, Stephenson included Apple when talking about customer data analytics in HBO’s digital distribution deals. HBO is a division of AT&T’s WarnerMedia.
Want to delete your tweets? Maybe you don’t like keeping all those years-old opinions hanging around. Or maybe you just don’t like Twitter having so much info on you, all in one place. Or maybe you’re just sick of Twitter and want out, but not without nuking it from orbit before you go.
The trouble is, it takes an age to manually delete all your tweets. Unless you want to drive yourself crazy, you’ll need to use a third-party tool to do it.
While authorizing a third-party service to use your Twitter account might seem a bit scary, if you’re deleting everything anyway, who cares?
I picked Cardigan for this how-to, as it seems like the nicest of the tweet deleters. Here’s how to use it.
Apple’s latest video is a humorous take a serious topic. It reminds users of this company’s commitment to privacy with the tagline: “If privacy matters in your life, it should matter to the phone your life is on.”
Watch it now:
Even in the age of social media, our phones are one of the easiest ways for uninvited or unwanted contact. Privacy is hard to come by these days, so imagine being able to give your craigslist seller or Tinder date a phone number other than your real one. Or just having a dedicated line for work.
Apple’s CEO is optimistic about his company’s plan to have the iPhone store all our health records, even though it got a black eye recently: turns out some third-party iOS apps leaked health-related data to Facebook.
But Tim Cook says that people trust Apple because the company has a deep commitment to user privacy, and people know that.
Australia recently passed a law forcing tech companies to give law enforcement greater access to encrypted messages from users. The U.K. already has a similar law, and India is considering one.
There’s no new legislation in the U.S., but the FBI and other police agencies still want easy access to iPhones and other computers, as well as private conversations.
Deleting your Facebook account isn’t enough to stop some apps from sending deeply personal information about you to the social network.
The Wall Street Journal found a wide range of apps that send personal information to Facebook even if you don’t have an account. Health apps and real estate apps were discovered sending a lot of information to Facebook and the type of data might surprise you.