Browsing: Privacy

A developer chasing a Bluetooth headphone glitch found AliExpress running silent audio through the Web Audio API to fingerprint visitors. No microphone involved, no way to see it happening, and no setting that turns it off.

iOS 26 let you set a custom background for individual iMessage chats. What Apple did not put in front of anyone is that the background is shared, so the person you are texting gets it on their screen too. Here is how to check and how to opt out.

A Haines City police officer searched his estranged wife’s license plate in Flock’s camera network 717 times over 22 months, picking fake justifications from a dropdown menu. Nobody noticed until the Washington Post called her.

OpenAI’s new Apple Messages plugin lets ChatGPT read, draft and send texts from your Mac. In its own documentation, OpenAI warns against persistent send approval. Here is what the plugin does, why prompt injection makes that warning serious, and how to switch the setting back.

Privacy researchers are urging women in 13 US states to drop cycle tracking apps. The catch is that uninstalling does nothing to the copy on the company servers. Here is what these apps collect, what actually deletes it, and which apps never send it anywhere.

Flock says it operates more than 120,000 license plate cameras across 49 states. Crowdsourced maps have verified tens of thousands of them, down to the pole. The result is a country where you can now look up what is watching your commute, and a growing list of councils cancelling their contracts.

France’s Constitutional Council struck down the under-15 social media ban on August 14, weeks before it was due to take effect. The ruling was not about whether kids should be online. It was about how broadly the law was written and how badly it handled age verification.

Google removes every remaining Manifest V2 extension from the Chrome Web Store on August 31, and Edge began the same rollout this month. Here is what breaks, why the Manifest V3 replacement is weaker, and which browsers still run uBlock Origin at full power.

Apple sent threat notifications to users in 110 countries on August 13, and for the first time the warning lands on the iPhone Lock Screen. Here is what the alert means, how to spot a fake, and the six things to do in the first hour.

A flaw in Zoom’s annotation feature let any meeting participant run code on another participant’s device with no clicks and no warning. The researchers who found it needed fewer than 20 AI prompts and less than a day.