Lockdown Apps is a new firewall app for iOS. Like Guardian Firewall, which we covered last month, Lockdown uses iOS’ VPN framework to intercept all incoming and outgoing network traffic, and allows you to block connections to any address.
Unlike Guardian Firewall, Lockdown operates entirely on your device. It is also open source.
DuckDuckGo is a private search engine. Unlike Google, it doesn’t track your internet use, save your searches, or track your location. DuckDuckGo’s reason for existing is to protect your privacy on the internet, but it’s also a great search engine. And when it doesn’t find the results you want, it’s easy to run that search in Google.
Today we’ll see how to switch all your searches to DuckDuckGo, and how to add a one-tap Google backup search.
The good news is that you don’t have to do anything weird or difficult to switch to DuckDuckGo. Both iOS and macOS offer it as a default option in their settings. On the Mac, this setting is in Safari. On the iPhone and iPad, you’ll find it under Safari in the Settings app.
US lawmakers say Apple CEO Tim Cook has actively urged them to pass legislation that better protects the privacy of US consumers. However, congresspeople also say the iPhone maker isn’t doing enough to actually get laws passed.
Apple’s iWork platform has been banned from German schools alongside Microsoft Office 365 and Google Docs.
Privacy regulators say that using the cloud-based services “exposes personal information about students and teachers.” They also suggest that the data might be accessed by U.S. authorities.
Apple’s co-founder Steve Wozniak thinks that people who value privacy should quit Facebook.
Woz, who quit Facebook last year after the Cambridge Analytics scandal, said that users could never be sure when they were being listened into.
Users running the latest iOS 13, iPadOS 13 or macOS Catalina betas can now sign into iCloud using either Face ID or Touch ID.
If you’re using these beta versions, visiting iCloud in Safari will present a pop-up asking if you want to log in using biometrics.
Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei says that, when it comes to user privacy, Apple is the company he models his approach on.
Huawei has been under fire for possibly posing a spying-related security risk, resulting in a temporary U.S. ban. However, Zhengfei says that it would not provide data to the Chinese government at any cost.
Privacy is one of Apple’s biggest selling points — and it’s continuing the push with a series of billboards in Canada.
Images of the billboards were posted on Twitter by CBC Toronto‘s Matt Elliot and one time-tech journalist Josh McConnell. One billboard in Toronto reads, “We’re in the business of staying out of yours.” Another, also in Toronto, facing King Street West, reads “Privacy is King.”
When you send a photo to somebody in iOS 12 or earlier, you also share that photo’s location. If you upload a picture to a classified ad or auction site, you potentially show everyone exactly where you live. And if you send a photo to a friend or family member, they may share that image publicly (on Facebook, for instance) — and share your home address along with the picture.
In iOS 13, you can disable location sharing for any photo you share. Some annoying limits hurt this new feature, and you have to remember to do it every time you share an image or video, but it’s still a lot better than what we have in iOS 12.
Apple has banged heads with the Trump administration before, but its biggest clash could be yet to come.
According to a new report, senior White House officials met this week to discuss banning end-to-end encryption. This would affect a number of tech companies — including Apple, which has long touted its focus on user privacy.
You can now ask the Google app on iOS to automatically wipe your location and activity history.
The new feature, which was showcased during Google I/O in late May, takes the hassle out of covering your tracks. You only have to set it up once and it will take care of itself going forward. Here’s how to get started.
USB is dirty. Just like you’d never stick your body parts into a mysterious public hole, neither should you plug your iPhone into a public charging station. iOS is pretty good at rejecting unknown connections from USB, but why take the risk?
There are a few ways to make public iPhone charging safe. One is to plug into a power outlet using your own plug and cable. But what about on a plane or train, or other public spot where only USB outlets are available? Or a friend’s computer, one that might be riddled with malware? Then you need a custom USB cable, one that only passes power, and not data. The good news is that, if you have an old Lightning USB cable laying around, you can easily fashion your own, just by yanking out two pins from inside the USB plug.
Here’s how.
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.
