Apple said in a statement Thursday it will update AirTags item trackers with new privacy warnings, better warning sounds and smarter Find My tracking. The efforts comes as the company tries to improve security in the wake of criminal activity involving the devices, such as theft and stalking.
It’s the latest of several privacy updates Cupertino announced for AirTags since releasing them last year.
Apple moved to address many of the privacy concerns raised after the release of AirTags. The item trackers launched with anti-stalking features, but a new firmware update is tightening them up further.
AirTags will start more quickly warning people if they’re being used to follow someone. And an Android app that can detect these trackers is in development.
In a civilized society, there would be no such thing as a “read receipt” for messages or emails. You’d send your message, and that would be it. But read receipts are here, and if you’re one of the folks that doesn’t turn them off, then you’re going to love this WhatsApp tip.
You already know the meanings of the checkboxes that indicate successfully sent, delivered and read messages in WhatsApp. Today we’ll see how to check the exact time a recipient read your WhatsApp message.
Your iPhone probably knows more about you than your husband or wife. It knows what websites you visit, and who’s in your VIP contact list. It knows your credit card numbers, and it knows what apps you like to read with your morning coffee. And it also knows where you are, at all times, and even what direction you’re moving in.
Apps like Facebook love to drain as much of this information as they can, but thanks to Apple’s privacy-first policy of giving control to you, the user, it’s easy to deny any app access to this sensitive data. Today we’ll see how to stop Facebook, or any other app, from tracking your location.
Stalking complete strangers on Facebook is about to become as easy as snapping a pic thanks to a new facial recognition app.
Launching later this month, Facezam promises to be able to identify people by matching a photo to a person’s Facebook profile. If it works as well as advertised, it might be time to kiss your anonymity goodbye.
Can’t get enough of celebrity gossip? You’re not alone. Up in Redmond, Microsoft is so obsessed with keeping up with the Kardashians that they have just released a custom-built an attractive new celebrity news app called Snipp3t. And while the use to which Snipp3t is meant to be put may look a little tawdry, the app design itself is actually really nice.
The IMDB app has finally – finally – been updated to fit in with iOS 7’s tasteful decor. Heavy users of the app won’t really notice anything different in the layout, which remains as easy to use as ever (and way better than the terrible web version), but everyone will appreciate the new lick of paint, and the other new features that have been added to v4.0.
Thanks to a great article by our own John Brownlee, we now know how easy it is for apps and people to stalk you using location-sharing services like FourSquare and Facebook. And now the more paranoid among you might be wondering, just how do I turn these things off?
Theoretically, you would have already checked the privacy settings when you signed up. But that’s like reading the manual before you switch on a new gadget: Almost nobody ever does it. So here’s a quick guide to locking down FourSquare, and a rather more involved guide to shutting down Facebook.
When the creepy girl stalking app Girls Around Me went missing from the iTunes App Store last night, it wasn’t immediately clear who had pulled it: Russia-based i-Free, the developer behind the app, or Apple itself.
Now i-Free has clarified matters. They pulled the app themselves… but not because they think they did anything wrong. In fact, they’ve gone as far as to say that it is “unethical to pick a scapegoat to talk about the privacy concerns. We see this wave of negative as a serious misunderstanding of the app’s goals, purpose, abilities and restrictions.”
Oh really?
