As people work and socialize from home, video conferencing software Zoom has exploded in popularity. What the company and its privacy policy don't make clear is that the iOS version of the Zoom app is sending some analytics data to Facebook, even if Zoom users don't have a Facebook account, according to a Motherboard analysis of the app. From the report: This sort of data transfer is not uncommon, especially for Facebook; plenty of apps use Facebook's software development kits (SDK) as a means to implement features into their apps more easily, which also has the effect of sending information to Facebook. But Zoom users may not be aware it is happening, nor understand that when they use one product, they may be providing data to another service altogether. "That's shocking. There is nothing in the privacy policy that addresses that," Pat Walshe, an activist from Privacy Matters who has analyzed Zoom's privacy policy, said in a Twitter direct message. Upon downloading and opening the app, Zoom connects to Facebook's Graph API, according to Motherboard's analysis of the app's network activity. The Graph API is the main way developers get data in or out of Facebook.
UPDATE: On Friday March 27, Zoom updated its iOS app to stop sending data to Facebook. "We originally implemented the 'Login with Facebook' feature using the Facebook SDK in order to provide our users with another convenient way to access our platform," Zoom told Motherboard. "However, we were recently made aware that the Facebook SDK was collecting unnecessary device data. We sincerely apologize for this oversight..."

Video-game fans suddenly have their pick of a huge menu of titles thanks to a raft of new mobile subscription services from Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet's Google and Nvidia. But for the more than 1 billion users of Apple's iPhone and iPad, the only real option is Arcade, the subscription service launched by the company in September. From a report: That's because Apple imposes strict limits on the kinds of apps users can access on its devices. For example, App Store guidelines ban services that rely on streaming from the cloud. Arcade adheres to the requirements, in part, because it's included as a feature within the App Store itself. This is the latest example of what critics say are arbitrary rules favoring Apple's own apps at the expense of similar software from outside developers. "There's a fraught relationship between developers and Apple precisely because of rules like this," said David Barnard, a longtime independent developer and advocate at RevenueCat. "In some ways, I am incredibly grateful to their marketplace for helping me make millions of dollars I wouldn't have made without it. On the flip side, them being so heavy handed at times does kill apps and does cause developers to miss out on other potential revenue." If software developers want to reach as many consumers as possible, they have to be on Apple's iOS. The operating system powers more than 1 billion smartphones and tablets and it's the only way to access the iOS App Store, which accounted for 65% of app spending globally last year, according to Sensor Tower. The Cupertino, California-based company can also make or break mobile gaming businesses: More than half of the $62 billion spent on smartphone gaming last year happened on Apple products.

Apple today officially released versions 13.4 of iOS, iPadOS, and tvOS to the public, alongside macOS 10.15.4 and watchOS 6.2. While many of their improvements are minor, there are a few standout features across the updates. From a report: One of the most noteworthy additions is a dramatic expansion of iPadOS 13's prior trackpad and mouse support, which was limited solely to an Accessibility option before evolving to full system-wide support across all iPad models capable of running iPadOS 13.4. Now, keyboard-trackpad hybrids (such as the upcoming Magic Keyboard for iPad), standalone trackpads, and standalone mice can create a cursor that highlights and selects on-screen text and objects, paving the way for more Mac-like apps on Apple's tablets. Another major improvement is cross-platform support for a new universal app purchase option, enabling a single app developed using Apple's shared Catalyst framework to be purchased and run across Macs, iPhones, iPads, and Apple TVs. This feature went live for developers yesterday, and it uses the iOS App Store as the base for universal apps. Standalone Mac App Store app listings will likely need to be abandoned for the transition to universal apps.

One of the biggest new additions to Apple's new iPad Pro is a new "Light Detection and Ranging" (LIDAR) system on the rear camera, which Apple argued was the missing piece for revolutionary augmented reality applications. "It claims that by combining the depth information from the LIDAR scanner with camera data, motion sensors, and computer vision algorithms, the new iPad Pro will be faster and better at placing AR objects and tracking the location of people," reports The Verge. "But it doesn't change the fact that, right now, there still aren't a lot of compelling reasons to actually use augmented reality apps on a mobile device beyond the cool, tech-demo-y purposes that already exist." From the report: R apps on iOS today are a thing you try out once, marvel at how novel of an idea it is, and move on -- they're not essential parts of how we use our phones. And nearly three years into Apple's push for AR, there's still no killer app that makes the case for why customers -- or developers -- should care. Maybe the LIDAR sensor really is the missing piece of the puzzle. Apple certainly has a few impressive tech demos showing off applications of the LIDAR sensor, like its Apple Arcade Hot Lava game, which can use the data to more quickly and accurately model a living room to generate the gameplay surface. There's a CAD app that can scan and make a 3D model of the room to see how additions will look. Another demo promises accurate determinations of the range of motion of your arm.

The fact that Apple is debuting the iPad for AR doesn't help the case, either. While Apple has been rumored to be working on a proper augmented reality headset or glasses for years -- a kind of product that could make augmented digital overlays a seamless part of your day-to-day life -- the iPad (in 11-inch and 12.9-inch sizes) is effectively the opposite of that idea. It's the same awkwardness of the man who holds up an iPad to film an entire concert; holding a hardcover book-sized display in front of your face for the entire time you're using it just isn't a very natural use case.

It's possible that Apple is just laying the groundwork here, and more portable LIDAR-equipped AR devices (like a new iPhone or even a head-mounted display) are on their way in the future. Maybe the LIDAR sensor is the key to making more immersive, faster, and better augmented apps. Apple might be right, and the next wave of AR apps really will turn the gimmicks into a critical part of day-to-day life. But right now, it's hard not to look at Apple's LIDAR-based AR push as another hardware feature looking for the software to justify it.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: NFC is usually only used to for quick text transfers, like a tap-and-pay transaction at a register or a quick data transfer from an NFC sticker. A company called "Waveshare" is really pushing the limits of NFC, though, with a 7.5-inch e-ink display that gets its data, and its power, from an NFC transfer. The $70 display doesn't have a battery and doesn't need a wired power connection. E-paper (or e-ink) displays have the unique property of not needing power to maintain an image. Once a charge blasts across the display and correctly aligns pixels full of black and white balls, everything will stay where it is when the power turns off, so the image will stick around. You might not have thought about it before, but in addition to data, NFC comes with a tiny wireless power transfer. This display is designed so that NFC provides just enough power to refresh the display during a data transfer, and the e-ink display will hold onto the image afterward.

NFC data transfers max out at a whopping 424 kbit/s. While that's enough for an instant transfer of credit card data or a URL, the 800x400 image the display needs will take several seconds. Waveshare says the display takes five seconds just to refresh, and that doesn't count the data transfer, which will vary depending on how complex your image is. The video shows a start-to-finish refresh that takes 10 seconds. If you want to use a phone, an Android app will convert your image into several different black-and-white styles and beam it to the display. Sadly, there's no iOS app yet. iOS apps didn't have the ability to write to NFC devices for the longest time. Writing to NFC was added with the launch of iOS 13, which only happened a few months ago.

Google Translate today launched Transcribe for Android, a feature that delivers a continual, real-time translation of a conversation. From a report: Transcribe will begin by rolling out support for 8 languages in the coming days: English, French, German, Hindi, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Thai. With Transcribe, Translate is now capable of translating classroom or conference lectures with no time limits, whereas before speech-to-text AI in Translate lasted no longer than a word, phrase, or sentence. Google plans to bring Transcribe to iOS devices at an unspecified date in the future.

Transcribe users can change the size of text that appears on screen for real-time translations or pause or resume a translation at any time. This is the latest real-time speech-to-text AI from Google. News today follows the announcement that Google Assistant now has the ability to read or translate 43 languages from a website with simple voice commands. Both the text-reading feature for Google Assistant and Transcribe for Translate were first previewed by Google in January.

Apple's A14 processor that's expected to debut this fall in Apple's iPhone 12 models is rumored to have a frequency reaching 3.1GHz. "This would be 400MHz higher than Apple's current A13 Bionic chip with a frequency of 2.7GHz," reports MacRumors. From the report: At such a frequency, the chip's Geekbench 5 running points have surged. The report mentions that the A14's single-core performance shows a score of 1658 (up 25% from the A13), and a multi-core score of 4612 points (up 33% from the A13). The extra processing power will be helpful in running simultaneous workflows, navigating through apps, and more. Apple chipmaker TSMC is expected to ramp up production of Apple's 5nm-based A14 chipsets in as early as April of this year. Also, according to 9to5Mac, Apple is reportedly planning to launch a new 5.5-inch entry-level iPhone with a solid state home button, Touch ID, and support for Apple Pay's Express Transit feature.

The 5.5-inch iPhone is expected to be priced $100 more than the 4.7-inch model that will start at $399, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. It's slated to launch at the end of March, but it's possible the launch will be delayed due to the coronavirus.

"Motherboard built and analyzed a database of over 500 iPhones seized by law enforcement," writes Slashdot reader em1ly. "It's a deep dive into the ongoing "Going Dark" conversation." Here's an excerpt from the report: Most of all, the records compiled by Motherboard show that the capability to unlock iPhones is a fluid issue, with an ebb and flow of law enforcement sometimes being able to access devices and others not. The data solidifies that some law enforcement officials do have trouble accessing data stored on iPhones. But ultimately, our findings lead experts to circle back to the fundamental policy question: should law enforcement have guaranteed access to iPhones, with the trade-offs in iPhone security that come with that?

Out of 516 analyzed cases, 295 were marked as executed. Officials from the FBI, DEA, DHS, Homeland Security and Investigations, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were able to extract data from iPhones in investigations ranging from arson, to child exploitation, to drug trafficking. And investigators executed warrants against modern iPhones, not just older models. In some cases, investigators obtained photos, text messages, call records, browsing data, cookies, and location data from seized iPhones. Some executed search warrants explicitly mention the type of extraction performed, such as so-called "Logical" or "Advanced Logical" extraction. The latter is a term with a meaning that varies between different phone data extraction companies, but generally it relates to creating a device backup as iTunes does normally and obtaining some more data on top of that, Vladimir Katalov, the CEO of iOS forensics firm Elcomsoft, told Motherboard. Katalov said those backups can contain the sorts of pieces of data that investigators obtained, and is available to all models of iPhone.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Banjo, an artificial intelligence firm that works with police used a shadow company to create an array of Android and iOS apps that looked innocuous but were specifically designed to secretly scrape social media, Motherboard has learned. The news signifies an abuse of data by a government contractor, with Banjo going far beyond what companies which scrape social networks usually do. Banjo created a secret company named Pink Unicorn Labs, according to three former Banjo employees, with two of them adding that the company developed the apps. This was done to avoid detection by social networks, two of the former employees said.

Three of the apps created by Pink Unicorn Labs were called "One Direction Fan App," "EDM Fan App," and "Formula Racing App." Motherboard found these three apps on archive sites and downloaded and analyzed them, as did an independent expert. The apps -- which appear to have been originally compiled in 2015 and were on the Play Store until 2016 according to Google -- outwardly had no connection to Banjo, but an analysis of its code indicates connections to the company. This aspect of Banjo's operation has some similarities with the Cambridge Analytica scandal, with multiple sources comparing the two incidents. [...] The company has not publicly explained how it specifically scrapes social media apps. Motherboard found the apps developed by Pink Unicorn Labs included code mentioning signing into Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Russian social media app VK, FourSquare, Google Plus, and Chinese social network Sina Weibo. The apps could have scraped social media "by sending the saved login token to a server for Banjo to use later, or by using the app itself to scrape information," reports Motherboard, noting that it's not entirely clear which method Banjo used. "Motherboard found that the apps when opened made web requests to the domain 'pulapi.com,' likely referring to Pink Unicorn Labs, but the site that would provide a response to the app is currently down."

Last weekend, Motherboard reported that Banjo signed a $20.7 million contract with Utah in 2019 that granted the company access to the state's traffic, CCTV, and public safety cameras. "Banjo promises to combine that input with a range of other data such as satellites and social media posts to create a system that it claims alerts law enforcement of crimes or events in real-time."

Apple Watch will add the ability to detect blood oxygen levels for the first time, 9to5Mac has learned based on an exclusive look at iOS 14 code snippets. From the report: Blood oxygen levels between 95 and 100% are considered healthy; blood oxygen levels below 80% may lead to compromised heart and brain functionality. Risk of respiratory or cardiac arrest is common after continued low blood oxygen saturation. To that end, Apple is developing a new health notification based on the vital measurement. When Apple Watch detects low blood oxygen saturation below a certain threshold, a notification will trigger alerting the user similar to current heart rate notifications.

It's unclear at this point what hardware and software will be required for blood oxygen detection and notifications. It's possible future Apple Watch Series 6 hardware will be required for the new health feature. It could also come to all or newer Apple Watch models with watchOS 7 in the fall. The original Apple Watch hardware is believed to be capable of measuring blood oxygen levels through the built-in heart rate monitor. Apple upgraded the heart rate monitor with Apple Watch Series 4, adding electrocardiogram features, but Apple Watch hasn't offered blood oxygen measurement features yet. Other hardware and software features have also been leaked, such as details about an upcoming iPad Pro with three cameras and Apple's Tile-like item trackers, called AirTags.

News outlet 9to5Mac, which tracks Apple news, has gotten hold of an iOS 14 build that uncovers a range of hardware details and software features that Apple intends to reveal later this year. The devices are: 1. An upcoming iPad Pro will include three cameras -- like the iPhone Pro -- plus an additional time-of-flight sensor for help with AR.
2. An iPhone with Touch ID is in the works. This is presumably the lower-end iPhone 9 or iPhone SE 2.
3. A new Apple TV box is in the works along with a new Apple TV remote.
4. AirTags, Apple's rumored Tile-like item tracker, will have user-replaceable batteries. Software features: 1. The iOS home screen will get a new list view, letting you more easily find and filter through your apps. It's not clear exactly where this screen will appear, but it'd offer a major change from the grid.
2. A new AR app will let you point your phone's camera at objects in the real world and have the phone display more information about what you're seeing. At an Apple store, for instance, it could display pricing information and product features. Apple is reportedly working with Starbucks to support the feature, too.
3. Third-party apps will be able to integrate wallpapers into the wallpapers section of the Settings app. This should make it easier to switch wallpapers and could finally open dynamic wallpapers up to outside developers.
4. HomeKit will be able to change the color temperature of lights throughout a day to match the sunlight.
5. An accessibility feature will let phones identify sounds like alarms and doorbells for people with hearing loss.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BuzzFeed News: Sensor Tower, a popular analytics platform for tech developers and investors, has been secretly collecting data from millions of people who have installed popular VPN and ad-blocking apps for Android and iOS, a BuzzFeed News investigation has found. These apps, which don't disclose their connection to the company or reveal that they feed user data to Sensor Tower's products, have more than 35 million downloads. Since 2015, Sensor Tower has owned at least 20 Android and iOS apps. Four of these -- Free and Unlimited VPN, Luna VPN, Mobile Data, and Adblock Focus -- were recently available in the Google Play store. Adblock Focus and Luna VPN were in Apple's App Store. Apple removed Adblock Focus and Google removed Mobile Data after being contacted by BuzzFeed News. The companies said they continue to investigate.

Once installed, Sensor Tower's apps prompt users to install a root certificate, a small file that lets its issuer access all traffic and data passing through a phone. The company told BuzzFeed News it only collects anonymized usage and analytics data, which is integrated into its products. Sensor Tower's app intelligence platform is used by developers, venture capitalists, publishers, and others to track the popularity, usage trends, and revenue of apps. Randy Nelson, Sensor Tower's head of mobile insights, said the company's apps do not collect sensitive data or personally identifiable information and that "the vast majority of these apps listed are now defunct (inactive) and a few are in the process of sunsetting." But, as BuzzFeed points out, most of the apps are no longer available "because they were removed due to policy violations."

bigwophh writes: As the number of publishers pulling out of Nvidia's GeForce Now cloud game streaming service continues to grow, the company has found an ally in Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, who vowed on Twitter to "wholeheartedly" support the company's efforts. He also took potshots at Apple and Google over the royalty rate each one charges on their respective app stores and expects them to go to battle as game streaming gains momentum. "Just waiting till later this year when Google is lobbying against Apple for blocking Stadia from iOS, while Google blocks GeForce Now, xCloud, and Fortnite from Google Play, and this whole rotten structure begins collapsing in on itself," Sweeney added. It remains to be seen how things will pan out with GeForce Now. Nvidia maintains that "game removals will be few and far between" and that it has 1,500 additional games queued up. However, Nvidia only has so much control over the developers willing to continue supporting the platform. "Epic is wholeheartedly supporting Nvidia's GeForce Now service with Fortnite and with Epic Games Store titles that choose to participate (including exclusives), and we'll be improving the integration over time," Sweeney wrote. He also called GeForce Now "the most developer-friendly and publisher-friendly of the major streaming services," which is based on Nvidia not charging any "tax" on game revenues.

"Game companies who want to move the game industry towards a healthier state for everyone should be supporting this kind of service!" Sweeney wrote.

According to code seen by 9to5Mac, Apple is set to roll out rich system-wide support for mouse cursors with iOS 14. From a report: Apple added rudimentary compatibility with external mice in iOS 13 Accessibility settings, but iOS 14 (iPadOS 14) will make it mainstream. The iOS 14 build also referenced two new Smart Keyboard models in development. The changes coming to the software will bring most of the cursor features you recognize from a Mac desktop experience to iOS. One difference may be that the pointer disappears automatically after a few seconds of not touching the connected mouse or trackpad, a concession to the touch-first experience of the iPad. It would reappear when the user attempts to move the cursor again.

This includes support for multiple pointers depending on what is being hovered over, like switching from a standard arrow pointer to a pointing hand when hovering over links. It is possible these APIs could then automatically translate over to Mac apps using Catalyst, which currently lacks an API for changing mouse cursor type. Apple is also developing support for Mac-like gesture, like tap with two fingers to right-click.

Fast Company's Mark Sullivan argues that cancelling this year's tech conferences could have a silver lining -- by encouraging a movement toward virtual conferences: There are developers across the U.S. and around the world who get shut out when the conferences get sold out. Even more of them simply can't afford the admission fee (last year's WWDC was $1599) and travel expenses required to spend time in the Bay Area or Seattle. Apple uses a lottery system to pick registered developers at random, who then get the opportunity to buy a ticket for the event. "Not having a set of 5,000 people who paid to be there, and potentially millions of other people who don't get access to things exclusive to those attending, such as labs and all of the networking, but instead having everyone on the same level can be a good thing," says iOS developer Guilherme Rambo.

Even before the coronavirus came along, the major developer conferences were developing more robust online elements. Far more people stream the keynotes than watch them in person. Many conference now stream the developer sessions as well. And an increasing body of sessions from the events is archived online... With all the cancellations this year, big tech companies like Apple may get some time to really think about the value of big events in the age of live streaming. Apple, for one, might think about ways of further virtualizing WWDC.

Apple will now allow push notifications to be used for advertising, so long as users agree to receive the ads first. From a report: Apple updated its App Store guidelines today with a change to its traditionally strict restrictions around push notifications. Apple has long banned apps from using notifications for "advertising, promotions, or direct marketing purposes," but that changes today. Apps can now send marketing notifications when "customers have explicitly opted in to receive them." Users must also be able to opt out of receiving the ads.

TikTok, the hugely popular social media app, found a lot of early traction by giving users a way to create funny lip-synced versions of clips from well-known songs and then share them with friends (its predecessor in the West was even called Musically). Now at long last, TikTok's owner, China's ByteDance, is doubling down on the music connection with the release of its first standalone full music streaming app, starting first in India. From a report: Today, the company is launching Resso, which describes itself as a "social music streaming app": users are encouraged to share lyrics, comments and other user-generated content with each other, alongside full-length tracks of music that they can consume and also share with others. And the music begins to auto-play as soon as you open the app. Unlike its sister app TikTok, which is free to use and is built on an ad-based model, Resso is following the freemium route that a number of other big music apps, such as Spotify, have taken. A free tier includes ads and limits streaming quality to 128 Kbps; a premium, ad-free tier boosts streaming to 256 Kbps, includes downloads and the ability to skip tracks and costs INR 99/month ($1.35/month) on Android and INR 119/month ($1.62) on iOS.

The latest "feature drop" for Google's Pixel line of Android phones includes the ability to "firmly press" on the screen "to get more help from your apps more quickly." If that sounds familiar, it's because it's a lot like iPhone's 3D Touch, which Apple stopped supporting in all of its 2019 iPhones. The Verge reports: "Firmly press" sets off alarm bells because it sounds a lot like the iPhone's 3D Touch, which enables different actions depending on how hard you press on the touchscreen. It was a beloved feature for some people because it gave faster access to the cursor mode on the iPhone's keyboard (I think long-pressing the space bar works fine for that, but I get that people love it). It's also gone on the latest versions of the iPhone -- Apple has seemingly abandoned it because the hardware to support it was too expensive/thick/complex/finicky/whatever. But now, it seems that Google has done the same thing for the touchscreen that it does with the camera: use its software algorithms to make commodity parts do something special. That is a very Googley thing to do, but not quite as Googley as the fact that there was virtually no information about this feature to be found anywhere on the internet beyond a speculative note over at XDA Developers.

After a few hours of back and forth, I finally got more details from Google. Here's what this feature does, according to Google: "Long Press currently works in a select set of apps and system user interfaces such as the app Launcher, Photos, and Drive. This update accelerates the press to bring up more options faster. We also plan to expand its applications to more first party apps in the near future." Essentially, this new feature lets you press harder to bring up long-press menus faster. In fact, Google's documentation for Android's Deep Press API explicitly says it should never do a new thing, it should only be a faster way to execute a long press. The answer to why it only works in certain apps is that a lot of Android developers aren't using standard APIs for long press actions. Because Android. Okay, but how does it work? It turns out my hunch was correct: Google has figured out how to use machine learning algorithms to detect a firm press, something Apple had to use hardware for.

To make its iPhone messaging app run better -- especially on older phones -- Facebook rewrote it from the ground up. The new version is going live now. From a report: In August 2011, Facebook introduced Messenger, an iPhone and Android app that spun off the social network's chat feature into a stand-alone experience. [...] Messenger hit one billion monthly active users in 2016 and was the world's most-downloaded app in 2019, according to App Annie. Along the way, it supplemented its original text-based conversations with everything from voice and video calls to games to payments to bots to Snapchat-style stories. As its user base and ambitions grew, so did its size. What had been a wafer-thin 8.5MB download in 2012 expanded to take up 130MB of space on users' iPhones. That's about twice the size of WhatsApp, another Facebook messaging app that offers many similar features.

But now Facebook has put the iOS version of Messenger on an extreme weight-reduction plan. By rewriting it from scratch, it's shrunk Messenger's footprint on your iPhone down to an eminently manageable 30MB, less than a quarter of its peak size. According to the company, the new version loads twice as fast as the one it's replacing. The update is so compact that Facebook was able to quietly build it into the existing version and test it by exposing it to a subset of users. As a giant piece of programming, the downsizing is even more dramatic. Messenger is going from 1.7 million lines of code to 360,000, for an 84% reduction.

Apple has agreed to pay up to $500 million to settle litigation accusing it of quietly slowing down older iPhones as it launched new models, to induce owners to buy replacement phones or batteries. From a report: The preliminary proposed class-action settlement was disclosed on Friday night and requires approval by U.S. District Judge Edward Davila in San Jose, California. It calls for Apple to pay consumers $25 per iPhone, which may be adjusted up or down depending on how many iPhones are eligible, with a minimum total payout of $310 million. Apple denied wrongdoing and settled the nationwide case to avoid the burdens and costs of litigation, court papers show. Friday's settlement covers U.S. owners of the iPhone 6, 6 Plus, 6s, 6s Plus, 7, 7Plus or SE that ran the iOS 10.2.1 or later operating system. It also covers U.S. owners of the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus that ran iOS 11.2 or later before Dec. 21, 2017.