Apple has temporarily suspended its Siri “response grading” program that had contractors listen in on Siri recordings. That’s good, but it’s unfortunate that it took media coverage to push the company to change its practices.
Apple has increasingly used its stance on privacy as a selling point, but The Guardian has revealed that, like Amazon, Apple lets contractors listen in on conversations held while Siri is active. The audio may be difficult or impossible to trace back to the individuals who are speaking, but Apple should still find a better way to improve Siri.
Lots of people trust Virtual Private Network apps to protect their privacy, but they seldom ask who made them—an investigation by Top10VPN.com suggests that they should.
At WWDC 2019, Apple made numerous announcements that show both how important the company believes privacy to be and how far it’s willing to go to encourage privacy-protecting technologies in its own products. But these efforts will face challenges from all sides.
Investigative journalist Geoffrey Fowler of the Washington Post has discovered that numerous iOS apps include trackers that constantly send information about you back to data brokers.
Over at Fast Company, Glenn Fleishman documents the rise and fall of the Do Not Track browser setting, a well-intentioned but ultimately doomed effort to make privacy easy for users.
A new Vermont law that requires data brokers to register with the state has enabled a Fast Company article revealing just how many of these companies there are, and how much they know about us. You can sometimes opt out.
In a lengthy blog post, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has promised to support end-to-end encryption and ephemeral content in the company’s messaging apps. That sounds good, but it doesn’t mean Facebook will stop exploiting all the rest of your data.
Apple spent the past week engaged in a dizzying back-and-forth with Facebook and Google over shady research apps trying to make an end-run around App Store rules. Here’s a quick timeline of events and some thoughts on what it all means.
A bug in Group FaceTime has been discovered that enables anyone initiating a FaceTime Video call to hear audio from the other person’s iPhone before they accept or reject the call. Apple has disabled Group FaceTime and promises a fix “later this week.”
Apple continues to take the high ground when it comes to user privacy, and CEO Tim Cook has penned an op-ed to encourage comprehensive privacy legislation.
After Motherboard found that a bounty hunter could locate any cell phone for $300, the major US cellular carriers are ending their practice of selling location data. About time.
Apple is opening up its TV ecosystem to rivals, bringing iTunes content and AirPlay to Samsung TVs, and AirPlay and HomeKit to others. “Take Control of Apple TV” author Josh Centers explores what this move could mean for the Apple TV.
Facebook has been caught sharing data on its 2.2 billion users with other tech companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, Spotify, and even Russian search giant Yandex. Apple is in the list too, but not in a way that makes sense.
A relatively new form of spam is making the rounds on the Internet. It purports to be from a hacker who has taken over your computer and who will reveal your porn browsing to all your contacts unless you pay a Bitcoin blackmail. It’s fake, but its use of breached passwords as “proof” points toward a concerning future.