Apple Archives - Tena Stetler

Jun 10th Apps, Check Them, If Privacy Matters in Your Life

In an effort to provide better privacy, recently I received a notice upon sign in from one of the scheduling apps I use that you would no longer be able to sign in using Facebook or Twitter. Hummm… I wondered why, but complied by setting up an individual sign in and password.

The reason became clear this morning as I read the local newspaper and made note of Apple’s new tagline. “If privacy matters in your life, it should matter to the phone your life is on.” Apple has a mobile update planned for fall 2019 that would offer users the option to remain anonymous when signing into certain apps in the App Store. What difference will this make you ask? Well, it will better protect users’ privacy and threatens to choke off data to companies including Facebook and Google that use the information to track users and sell ads based on their habits.

Relationships between app developers and third parties have thrived for years on the convenience of letting users sign in through their respective social-media accounts. Yep, I’m guilty of this, all though, less recently than ever before. App developers receive either names and email address from direct sign-ups or related info such as gender from Google, Facebook, Linkedin, or other accounts.Now you know how all those unsolicited emails wind up in your inbox. As we all know, certain tech companies have had highly publicized scandals with millions of user’s personal data exposed. Not good.

Just this week, Apple, who has pioneered authentication factors like FaceID and touted file encryption and other safety devices on its iOS devices, added yet another safeguard. As Apple users we can already opt out of continuous location tracking. But now we can use the new feature to share our location with an app only once to perform a specific task, in addition makes it easy to see which apps are still tracking your location when the apps are not in use. Cyber stalking. Creepy.

The bottom line these companies are going to need to find and collect data more directly from us consumers rather than using third-party services like Google and Facebook to do the work for them. As always when signing up new apps, think about just how much info you want these apps to have.

Next week, we’ll dive into whether ultra-powerful and still experimental technology entitled quantum computers will be friend of foe?

Posted in My Say What Blog and tagged Apple, Apps, Email, Facebook, google, iOS by Tena Stetler with comments disabled.

Jun 19th Technology Corner – Did You Know?

I guess I’m kinda a geek at heart. I love new technology and things it can do for us. Sometimes its more what it does to us. LOL Anyway… I’ve been collecting all kinds of exciting news and decided to share.

Let’s start with SPAM MAIL. I get frustrated spending the first ten minutes of my day deleting all the ad’s from my email that I didn’t sign up for. Click the unsubscribe link, fill in your email and unsubscribe, right? All kinds of WRONG! I found out all you are doing is confirming your email for the unscrupulous marketer to send you more from different companies. Ugg! Unfortunately there is no way to completely eliminate span, but a couple of things will minimize it. 1. Don’t click on questionable on line offers. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. 2. DON’T try to unsubscribe by filling in your email after clicking on the unsubscribe button. 3. Send the unwanted email message to your spam file. Email providers spam- filtering software will take it from there.

On to APPLE. Apple’s security gap that allowed law enforcement agencies to pry personal information from locked iPhones without a password is slamming shut. The loophole involving iphones vulnerability to intrusion via the Lightning port used to transfer data and charge the device will be shut down with an impending update to apple’s iOS software that powers the iPhones. Wednesday, Apple outlined its decision to tighten iPhone security further as part of a crusade to protect the highly personal information its customers store on iphones.

Wish you hadn’t sent that SNAPCHAT message? In the coming weeks Snapchat will roll out a new feature to help with damage control regarding messages you really didn’t want or shouldn’t have sent. It’s not fool proof and the person you sent the message to will be able to see a message was scrubbed, but it’s a step in the right direction. Don’t you think? Or perhaps you should consider my mom’s advice. “Never put in writing or pictures anything you don’t want splashed over the front page of your local newspaper.”

Well that’s all the time I have today, but never fear, next week we tackle privacy settings, what Twitter wants to predict, what the next generation of wireless technology 5G will mean for you, and maybe my ongoing battle to learn Instagram. See you next time! Got some tech news? Let everyone know, leave a comment.