Do you hate robocalls enough to let an app give your data to third parties in exchange for blocking the spam?
A study found that there were 26.3 billion robocalls made in the US in 2018, and it's the No.
1 source of complaints to the Federal Communications Commission and Federal Trade Commission.
Hastings found that a majority of them were collecting personal data on people's devices without their explicit consent and sharing it with analytics firms.
Hastings is presenting his findings at Defcon's Crypto & Privacy Village on Sunday.
Free apps that provide one solution can turn out to be creating another problem for people's privacy, like when an innocuous-seeming weather app turns out to be selling your location data.
Welcome to TNW Basics, a collection of tips, guides, and advice on how to easily get the most out of your gadgets, apps, and other stuff.
Shortcuts for iOS is a useful app for automating actions on your iPhone or iPad.
In this series, we’ve been looking at a variety of workflows to make your Apple device a lot more powerful to accomplish specific tasks.
Today, we’ll take a look at another simple automation to combine multiple PDF documents or image files into a single PDF document.
While there are lots of websites and apps that offer this functionality, Shortcuts makes it dead simple and doesn’t require you to upload files.
Here’s how you do it:
Apple is once again clashing with makers of parental control apps, but this time it is reportedly being investigated by Russia’s anti-monopoly watchdog.
The investigation began after a complaint from cybersecurity company Kaspersky Lab, that the iPad maker may be abusing its dominant market position.
Apple had already clashed with the makers of a number of parental control apps back in April after it had removed or restricted at least 11 of the 17 most downloaded screen-time and parental-control apps.
Last month Apple restored a parental control app called OurPact, after the app was revised and satisfied its scrutineers.
But it seems that Apple is again rejecting those parental control apps it deems violations its terms and conditions.
According to Reuters, the Russian FAS watchdog said it was investigating why a new version of Kaspersky Lab’s Safe Kids application had been declined by Apple’s operating system, resulting in a significant loss in functionality for the parental control app.
Step forward Russia’s Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS), which has opened an official probe of Apple — following a complaint lodged in March by security company Kaspersky Labs.
Kaspersky’s complaint to FAS followed a change in Apple’s policy towards a parental control app it offers, called Kaspersky Safe Kids.
Discussing the complaint in a blog post the security firm says Apple contacted it in 2017 to inform it that the use of configuration profiles is against App Store policy, even though the app had been on Apple’s store for nearly three years without it raising any objections.
Apple told Kaspersky to remove configuration profiles from the app — which it says would require it to remove two key features that makes it useful to parents: Namely, app control and Safari browser blocking.
It also points out that the timing of Apple’s objection followed Apple announcing its Screen Time feature, in iOS 12 — which allows iOS users to monitor the amount of time they spend using certain apps or on certain websites and set time restrictions.
Kaspersky argues Screen Time is “essentially Apple’s own app for parental control” — hence raising concerns about the potential for Apple to exert unfair market power over the store it also operates by restricting competition.
I’m told Apple is at last looking into the privacy and security of free VPN apps made available across its platforms, following a report from researcher, Simon Migliano.
The researcher has flagged up several concerns that really should be recognized by anyone choosing a VPN service from both the Apple and Google App Stores:
Ownership: Migliano claims that almost 60 percent of the most popular VPN apps are actually owned (sometimes opaquely) by Chinese companies.
Privacy: The researcher also found that as many as 77% of these VPN apps may have what he calls “serious privacy flaws”,including no privacy policy at all, generic policies with no mention of VPN or no detailed logging policy.
That last allegation is particularly concerning.
That’s fine when your traffic is kept in a private space, but much less fine when information about what you are doing online is sold on to third parties without any oversight.
Step forward Russia’s Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS), which has opened an official probe of Apple — following a complaint lodged in March by security company Kaspersky Labs.
Kaspersky’s complaint to FAS followed a change in Apple’s policy towards a parental control app it offers, called Kaspersky Safe Kids.
Discussing the complaint in a blog post the security firm says Apple contacted it in 2017 to inform it that the use of configuration profiles is against App Store policy, even though the app had been on Apple’s store for nearly three years without it raising any objections.
Apple told Kaspersky to remove configuration profiles from the app — which it says would require it to remove two key features that makes it useful to parents: Namely, app control and Safari browser blocking.
It also points out that the timing of Apple’s objection followed Apple announcing its Screen Time feature, in iOS 12 — which allows iOS users to monitor the amount of time they spend using certain apps or on certain websites and set time restrictions.
Kaspersky argues Screen Time is “essentially Apple’s own app for parental control” — hence raising concerns about the potential for Apple to exert unfair market power over the store it also operates by restricting competition.
I’m told Apple is at last looking into the privacy and security of free VPN apps made available across its platforms, following a report from researcher, Simon Migliano.
The researcher has flagged up several concerns that really should be recognized by anyone choosing a VPN service from both the Apple and Google App Stores:
Ownership: Migliano claims that almost 60 percent of the most popular VPN apps are actually owned (sometimes opaquely) by Chinese companies.
Privacy: The researcher also found that as many as 77% of these VPN apps may have what he calls “serious privacy flaws”,including no privacy policy at all, generic policies with no mention of VPN or no detailed logging policy.
That last allegation is particularly concerning.
That’s fine when your traffic is kept in a private space, but much less fine when information about what you are doing online is sold on to third parties without any oversight.