Topic: user privacy
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Apple Reveals Strategy for Smarter AI Using Your Data, Promises Privacy Stays Paramount
Apple finds itself navigating a familiar tightrope: advancing its artificial intelligence capabilities while upholding its long-standing commitment to user privacy.
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AI Browser Agents: The Hidden Security Threat
A new generation of AI-powered browsers is emerging to challenge Google Chrome, offering automated online task assistance but raising significant privacy and security concerns. These browsers face critical vulnerabilities, particularly from prompt injection attacks that can manipulate AI agents i...
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Apple Removes Controversial Dating Apps Tea & TeaOnHer From App Store
Apple removed the dating safety apps Tea and TeaOnHer from its App Store due to content moderation failures and privacy violations, including sharing minors' data without consent, though they remain on Google Play. The apps breached Apple's guidelines by lacking proper reporting tools, mishandlin...
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Facebook's AI Can Now Edit Your Phone Photos
Facebook is introducing an optional AI feature in the U.S. and Canada that analyzes private photos to suggest creative edits, requiring user permission for cloud processing to enable these enhancements. Meta states that photos are not used for advertising or AI training unless edited or shared, b...
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Texas Age Verification Law: How It Impacts Your App Use
A new Texas law (SB 2420) will require mandatory age verification for users of major app stores like Apple and Google starting in 2026, aiming to protect minors but raising privacy concerns. Tech giants Apple and Google will comply with the law but warn it forces users to share sensitive personal...
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Discord Data Breach Exposes User Info and Photo IDs
A security breach at Discord's third-party customer support vendor exposed limited user information including email addresses and partial payment details, though Discord's own systems remained secure. The compromised data includes support ticket information such as names, usernames, and the last ...
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Microsoft's AI Lets You Control Your PC With Your Voice
Microsoft is embedding AI deeply into Windows 11, transforming PCs into intelligent companions that respond to voice commands and aim to make AI central to the user experience. The company is introducing features like "Hey, Copilot!" for voice control and Copilot Vision for contextual screen anal...
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Meta forces targeted ads from your AI chats
Meta will soon use conversations with its AI assistant to personalize content and ads across its platforms, with this mandatory feature starting on December 16th and no option for users to disable it. Users will be notified of the change on October 7th, but the initial alert may not clearly menti...
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Apple Pulls Women's Dating Safety App from App Store
Apple removed the women's dating safety app Tea from its App Store for violating terms related to content moderation and user privacy, including the exposure of minors' personal information. Tea experienced multiple security breaches that exposed users' driver's licenses, selfies, and private mes...
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Trump Administration Forces Anti-ICE Apps Off Apple App Store
The ICEBlock app was removed from Apple's App Store after federal intervention, eliminating a key anonymous tool for reporting nearby Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations. Developers created the app to address concerns over ICE's alleged constitutional violations, prioritizing user anon...
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OpenAI's Deleted Chats Policy Change Leaves Some Users Impacted
OpenAI will no longer preserve most deleted and temporary ChatGPT conversations, following a legal dispute and a court's reversal of an earlier mandate for indefinite retention. The change resulted from a lawsuit by media organizations, including The New York Times, which argued users exploited C...
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My Slippery Slope Into Sora's World
OpenAI's new Sora app enables users to create ten-second AI-generated videos from any concept, including digital cameos of people, and has quickly become a top free app on the Apple App Store. Public and internal reactions are mixed, with concerns about misinformation from hyper-realistic videos ...
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TikTok Puts Shop Products on Gaza War Videos
TikTok's new AI-powered shopping feature is sparking controversy after it suggested products on videos depicting the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, raising ethical concerns about monetizing sensitive content. The tool scans objects in videos, such as clothing, and prompts users to buy similar items...
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Signal Launches First Paid Feature: Encrypted Backups
Signal has launched its first paid service, offering encrypted backups for media older than 45 days and full text message history at $1.99 per month, aligning with its nonprofit, ad-free model. The subscription helps cover infrastructure costs for data storage, while a free tier allows limited ba...
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Libby's New AI Feature Sparks Debate Among Readers
Libby has launched an AI-powered "Inspire Me" tool to provide personalized book recommendations from a library's digital collection, aiming to help users discover and borrow available titles quickly. The feature has faced criticism from some librarians and users who are concerned about AI replaci...
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Nick Turley: Making ChatGPT Your Operating System
Nick Turley aims to transform ChatGPT into an operating system-like platform, integrating third-party apps for tasks like writing, shopping, and coding to create a seamless user experience. OpenAI's strategy involves embedding apps from major services such as Expedia and Uber to turn ChatGPT into...
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Samsung's $3,499 Smart Fridges Will Soon Show Ads
Samsung will introduce advertisements on its Family Hub smart refrigerator screens through a software update this month, affecting the 2024 lineup and turning idle displays into marketing platforms. The ads will appear during "Cover Screen" idle periods as a rotating widget, showing contextual ad...
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AT&T's AI Receptionist Answers Calls & Blocks Spam Automatically
AT&T is launching an AI-powered digital receptionist to automatically screen and manage incoming calls, distinguishing legitimate calls from spam or scams. The system uses voice-to-voice interaction and provides users with live transcripts and summaries, allowing them to intervene or decide on ca...
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Ex-Google X Trio Raises $6M to Build Your AI Second Brain
TwinMind is an AI-powered app that captures ambient speech to build a personal knowledge base, operates entirely offline, and recently secured $5.7 million in seed funding. The app distinguishes itself by running unobtrusively in the background on mobile devices, offering real-time translation an...
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Yubico Unveils Post-Quantum Crypto & Digital ID Breakthroughs
Yubico introduced new passkey capabilities that extend beyond password replacement, enabling secure digital identity management and credential signing directly from YubiKeys. The company showcased a prototype for Post-Quantum Cryptography on hardware security keys, highlighting the need for new h...
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Create Your Own Deepfakes with OpenAI's New Sora App
OpenAI has launched Sora, a new AI video app with a TikTok-style "For You" feed, offering user-generated clips and integrating AI-generated audio, currently available by invitation only on iOS. The app enables users to create digital replicas of themselves and others, with controls over likeness ...
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Apple Delays More EU Features Over Digital Markets Act
Apple is delaying several features for European consumers, including AI Live Translation and iPhone Mirroring, due to challenges in complying with the Digital Markets Act (DMA). The company cites concerns that opening its ecosystem to third parties, as required by the DMA, could compromise user d...
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WhatsApp Adds In-App Message Translation for iOS and Android
WhatsApp has launched a new in-app message translation feature for iOS and Android to help users communicate across different languages. The feature allows manual translation by long-pressing messages and supports offline use, with Android users also getting automatic translation for entire chats...
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Spotify Adds Messaging to Boost Social Features
Spotify is introducing a new in-app messaging feature to enhance social interaction by allowing users to chat about shared music and podcasts directly within the platform. The feature requires mutual approval for chat initiation, is encrypted but not end-to-end, and is currently available to user...
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Apple Intelligence Now Open to Third-Party Developers On-Device
Apple has expanded its Apple Intelligence platform, offering third-party developers access to on-device AI capabilities like real-time translation and broader language support. The upgrades are available across iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch, enabling offline AI functionality and privacy-focu...
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Google Unveils First-Party Data Tools & iOS Conversion Tracking
Google launched new advertising tools to enhance first-party data use and improve iOS conversion tracking amid tightening privacy regulations. Key updates include Google Tag Gateway for server-side tagging, Data Quality Diagnostics for troubleshooting, and On-Device iOS Conversion Tracking for pr...
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Master Your AI Video Presence with Sora
OpenAI has introduced new user controls for Sora, its AI video platform, allowing individuals to restrict how their digital likenesses are used, such as blocking appearances in political content or with specific language. The platform, often compared to a "TikTok for deepfakes," enables the creat...
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ChatGPT's Allure: The Rise of Its Most Addictive Era
OpenAI will allow verified adult users to generate mature content, including erotica, in a significant policy shift from previous restrictions. CEO Sam Altman describes this change as part of a "freedom for adults" philosophy, moving away from acting as moral police for users. This update could d...
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OpenAI's New Browser Challenges Google Chrome
OpenAI has launched Atlas, an AI-powered browser that replaces the traditional URL bar with a chatbot interface to streamline internet navigation and compete with Google Chrome. Atlas features an "agent mode" that browses the web autonomously using user history, but critics raise concerns about d...
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Ring Partners with Flock to Expand Video Surveillance Network
Ring has partnered with Flock Safety, an AI surveillance firm, expanding its Community Request program which previously included Axon, following Flock's history of data sharing with government agencies like the Secret Service. Law enforcement using Flock's platforms can now request video footage ...
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Discord Hack Exposes 70,000 Users' Government IDs
A security breach at Discord exposed sensitive government identification documents of approximately 70,000 users, occurring through a compromised third-party customer support provider and highlighting risks tied to mandatory digital ID verification. The incident poses a substantial identity theft...
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Judge Rules Google Can Keep Chrome in Antitrust Case
A federal judge ruled that Google will not have to divest its Chrome browser but must share valuable search data with competitors and avoid exclusive distribution agreements to foster competition. The decision represents the most significant antitrust action against a major tech firm in decades, ...
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UK Steam Users Now Require Credit Card for Mature Content Games
Steam now requires UK users to store a valid credit card to verify age for accessing mature-rated games and content, in compliance with the UK's Online Safety Act. Valve uses credit card verification instead of facial recognition to protect user privacy and prevent account sharing, shifting age c...
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Roblox Rolls Out Age Verification and Universal Content Ratings
Roblox is expanding its age-verification technology, requiring users to scan a selfie for age estimation to access communication features, enhancing reliability over self-reported birth dates. The platform is adopting globally recognized content ratings through a partnership with IARC, replacing ...
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Threads Adds Disappearing Posts Feature
Threads has launched "ghost posts," ephemeral messages that vanish after 24 hours to meet demand for temporary content and reduce users' digital footprints. Users can create ghost posts by selecting a ghost icon, and these appear in a gray chat bubble, with replies sent privately to the inbox whi...
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Too Burned Out to Travel? Fake Your Vacation Photos With This App
Endless Summer is an AI-powered iPhone app that generates fake vacation photos of users in exotic locations, offering an escape from demanding work cultures like the "996" model. The app uses Gemini’s Nano-Banana image-model for creation, includes privacy controls and a paywall after six free ima...
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I Tested ChatGPT's Atlas Browser Against Google
Atlas is a new browser from OpenAI that integrates a conversational chatbot, but its advanced features are limited behind a subscription paywall, requiring users to upgrade for full functionality. The browser aims to transform web navigation by offering personalized assistance, such as suggesting...
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Brave Search Unveils AI-Powered Detailed Answers
Brave Search has launched Ask Brave, an AI feature that provides detailed, comprehensive responses to queries, operating alongside the existing AI Answers function which offers brief summaries. Ask Brave automatically identifies when a query needs an in-depth response and can be accessed via the ...
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Character.AI Bans Minors From AI Chatbots
Character.AI is banning users under 18 from open-ended conversations with AI characters, implementing a two-hour daily limit immediately and a full ban by November 25, enforced by a proprietary age assurance model. The policy change responds to legal challenges and regulatory trends, including la...
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