The iOS 17 and iPadOS 17 updates include a number of privacy and security improvements that make your devices safer than ever, with Apple restricting access to photos and calendar events and cutting down further on how websites track you across the web. Private Browsing Upgrades in Safari In Safari, Private browsing windows are now locked and require secondary authentication to unlock and access. If you hand your phone over to someone and they attempt to open your Safari private browsing tab, access will be denied without a Face ID/Touch ID scan or a passcode. The Private tab is locked automatically. Tracking URL Removal Opening up a URL in a private browsing window automatically strips all tracking information added to…

Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge If you’ve got an active Google account — or especially if you’ve got one you haven’t used in a while — you’ve probably got more apps and services hooked up to your account than you realize. There are all those places where you’ve “signed in with Google,” all those browser extensions you’ve given permissions to, all those add-ons that you’ve installed on top of Gmail and Google Drive, and so on. While it’s always a good idea to be selective and cautious in choosing which apps and sites get these privileges, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with using your Google account instead of an email address and password combination or in giving another app…

Macworld Do Macs get viruses? Do Macs need antivirus software? The answers to these questions aren’t as simple as they might seem. In this article, we look at the dangers faced by Mac users, and the pros and cons of using Mac antivirus software. Historically, the Mac has been considered safe and secure for a number of reasons that we will go into below, but in recent years the consensus has fluctuated. In its 2020 State of Malware report, Malwarebytes said it saw “a significant rise in the overall prevalence of Mac threats in 2019, with an increase of over 400 percent from 2018.” The following year, the company found that overall malware detected on macOS decreased by 38 percent…

Macworld Do Macs get viruses? Do Macs need antivirus software? The answers to these questions aren’t as simple as they might seem. In this article, we look at the dangers faced by Mac users, and the pros and cons of using Mac antivirus software. Historically, the Mac has been considered safe and secure for a number of reasons that we will go into below, but in recent years the consensus has fluctuated. In its 2020 State of Malware report, Malwarebytes said it saw “a significant rise in the overall prevalence of Mac threats in 2019, with an increase of over 400 percent from 2018.” The following year, the company found that overall malware detected on macOS decreased by 38 percent…

Macworld To use Apple’s two-factor authentication (2FA) with your Apple ID account–something that the company has effectively mandated for the last few years–you must have at least one “trusted phone number” associated with your account. A trusted phone number can receive a code via SMS or an automated voice call speaking the code to validate a login on a new device. This contrasts with a trusted device, which is any iPhone, iPad, or Mac logged into that Apple ID account. You can add more than one trusted phone number, which is useful for backup in case a phone is lost or a phone number is hijacked. But you must have at least one. Some readers find that they can’t set…

In all-hands meeting and email to employees, Meta CEO says that the Apple Vision Pro is “not the one that I want,” and “there’s no kind of magical solutionsmagical solutions… that our teams haven’t already explored and thought of.” Apple Vision Pro: Apple’s first spatial computer Jon Swartz for MarketWatch: In an all-hands meeting Thursday, Meta Platforms Inc.’s chief executive played down the significance of Apple’s play for the mixed-reality world, a market that prompted Facebook to change its corporate name and plunge into the field with its Quest goggles. “From what I’ve seen initially, I’d say the good news is that there’s no kind of magical solutions that they have to any of the constraints on laws and physics…