Wish your would always show your watch face when you glance at it? Be default, Apple Watch will launch certain apps or show the Smart Stack based on your activity. If you prefer to always see your watch face, however, there are a few things to tweak.
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Apple is refuting rumors that it ever let advertisers target users based on Siri recordings in a statement published Wednesday evening describing how Siri works and what it does with data.
The section specifically responding to the rumors reads:
Apple has never used Siri data to build marketing profiles, never made it available for advertising, and never sold it to anyone for any purpose. We are constantly developing technologies to make Siri even more private, and will continue to do so.
The conspiracy theory the company is responding to resurfaced last week after Apple agreed to pay $95 million to settle a lawsuit over users whose conversations were captured by its Siri voice assistant and potentially overheard by human employees.
While Apple’s settlement addresses an issue that The Guardian reported in 2019. The report showed human contractors tasked with reviewing anonymized recordings and grading whether the trigger was activated intentionally, would sometimes receive recordings of people discussing sensitive information. But it doesn’t include any reference to selling data for marketing purposes.
After The Guardian’s report in 2019, Apple apologized and changed its policy, making the default setting not to retain audio recordings from Siri interactions and saying that for users who opt-in to sharing recordings, those recordings would not be shared with third-party contractors.
However, reports about the settlement noted that in earlier filings like this one from 2021, some of the plaintiffs claimed that after they mentioned brand names like “Olive Garden,” “Easton bats,” “Pit Viper sunglasses,” and “Air Jordans,” they were served ads for corresponding products, which they attributed to Siri data.
Apple’s statement tonight says it “does not retain audio recordings of Siri interactions unless users explicitly opt in to help improve Siri, and even then, the recordings are used solely for that purpose. Users can easily opt-out at any time.”
Facebook responded to similar theories in 2014 and 2016 before Mark Zuckerberg addressed it directly, saying “no” to the question while being grilled by Congress over the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018.
So, if Apple (and Facebook, Google, etc.) is telling the truth, then why would you see an ad later for something you only talked about?
There are other explanations, and attempts to check the rumors out include an investigation in 2018 that didn’t find evidence of microphone spying but did discover that some apps secretly recorded on-screen user activity that they shipped to third parties.
Ad targeting networks also track data from people logged onto the same network or who have spent time in the same locations, so even if one person didn’t type in that search term, maybe someone else did. They can buy data from brokers who collect reams of detailed location tracking and other info from the apps on your phone, and both Google and Facebook pull in data from other companies to build out profiles based on your purchasing habits and other information.
After being hit by a lawsuit over “unlawful and intentional recording” of Siri interactions, Apple has agreed to pay $95 million in a settlement. Even so, the company has just published an article reaffirming its commitment to privacy and clarifying how Siri works.
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I’ll see your arm and raise you an arm and two legs. It was the battle of the bots on the CES show floor as robot vacuum manufacturers Dreame and Roborock each added limbs to their rival robovacs.
Dreame launched its X50 Ultra at the show earlier this week, debuting the first robovac that can use its legs to navigate steps and room transitions up to 6cm high. But elsewhere at the show, competitor Roborock was showing off its latest flagship, the Saros Z70, which has an arm that can pick up items like socks.
Not to be outdone, Dreame then showed off a soon-to-be-released model at its CES booth, combining those two step-climbing legs with a robotic arm of its own.
Dreame’s model has a chunkier-looking arm than the Roborock’s, and it says it can pick up items up to 500 grams, whereas Roborock’s can only tackle items up to 300 grams. Dreame says its arm can pick up sneakers as large as men’s size 42 (a size 9 in the US) and take them to a designated spot in your home. The concept could apply to small toys and other items, and you’ll be able to designate specific areas for the robot to take certain items, such as toys to the playroom and shoes to the front door.
However, I didn’t see the robot picking up a sneaker — or anything at all — apparently, the infamous CES show floor Wi-Fi couldn't hack it. Instead, they showed the robust-looking arm moving up, down, and around while the robot lifted itself up on its two small legs. It looked like a tiny horse.
Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge
Another interesting invention is a separate toolbox with various brushes that Dreame says the arm can connect to, enabling it to reach into corners and tight spaces where the bot itself cannot go and sweep out the dirt and dust. They also had a new base station that dispenses multiple mopping pads. This allows the robot to choose different pads for different jobs around your home — one for the kitchen another for the bathroom — to help avoid cross-contamination around your home.
Dreame’s Longdong Chen told The Verge that the step-climbing, tool-using, arm-touting bot should be available later this year. A price hasn’t been announced, but it’s a safe bet that it’ll cost an arm and a leg.
At CES 2017, Faraday Future introduced its futuristic luxury EV, the FF 91. Seven years later, following repeated delays, bankruptcy, lawsuits and other controversies, the company has sold “15 or 16” FF 91s. Now the company is detailing its latest strategy shift, with a plan to sell cheap EVs under its new low-cost “FX” brand. FX CEO Max Ma came to CES, along with two prototype vehicles, to pitch the plan that he described as a “fresh start” for the embattled company.
As you might expect with Faraday, the exact details are somewhat hazy, but it involves sourcing parts from Chinese car-makers and bringing them to the US to produce “mass volume mainstream vehicles” with some of the premium touches Faraday is known for. “We want to take that $300,000-car expertise from a technology and features and performance [standpoint] into a $30,000, $40,000 car to try to upgrade the overall user experience,” Ma said during a briefing with Engadget. The first FX vehicle, the flagship product of the brand’s lineup, will be a minivan (or, as Ma referred to it, “an AI MPV") called the "Super One."
Faraday showed off two prototype minivans to demonstrate the concept. We were not permitted to take photos but the vehicles in the photo at the top of this post are the ones I saw.
One was meant to show the kind of premium in-cabin experience Faraday is envisioning for the low-cost car. It had two rows of white leather captain seats. The second-row seats had reclining footrests, heated seats and built-in massagers. There was also a small fridge underneath the center console for keeping drinks cold. The vehicle was missing its door handles and several other pieces. “Obviously, we’ll have door handles,” a Faraday rep assured us.
The second minivan was even less finished. The entire interior, including the dashboard and instrument cluster, was covered in black fabric held together with binder clips. But a Faraday rep took me and other reporters for a ride in it, driving in small, slow circles around a Las Vegas parking lot. Later, Faraday offered to let me take the minivan for a spin and I — apparently the “first lady” to pilot the vehicle — also drove it in slow circles around the parking lot. I’m not sure what I was supposed to get out of it, though, it felt like driving a minivan.
There are two other vehicles planned for the initial FX lineup, the FX 5 and FX 6, which were previously announced by the company. Faraday is aiming for a $20,000 - $30,000 price for the FX 5 and $30,000 - $50,000 for the FX 6. There aren't many other details yet about either, though Faraday shared a teaser image of an FX 6 prototype, which it described as an "extra-large luxury AIEV."
Faraday claims it will start producing one of its planned vehicles later this year, with the first "pre-production" model rolling off the production line by the end of 2025, according to a timeline shared by Ma. That’s a lofty promise considering the company’s past history of mismanagement and delays. Faraday Future CEO Matthias Aydt also acknowledged that the company has yet to finalize its partnerships with the companies that will supply its parts. He also didn’t address how tariffs may affect those plans.
Ma said he understood the skepticism. “Basically, this is a kind of fresh start. We really want to demonstrate that through our dedication of hard work, we can achieve what we promised.”
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/transportation/evs/faraday-future-pitches-a-fresh-start-with-a-minivan-prototype-at-ces-2025-010050459.html?src=rss
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© Faraday Future
A month ago, a video circulated around social media of a Waymo robotaxi stuck in a roundabout loop – an isolated incident with no passengers in the vehicle, according to Waymo. Apparently, it wasn’t a one-time thing. Around the same time, in another Waymo robotaxi headed for the Phoenix airport, Mike Johns, founder and CEO […]
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The White House this week announced a new label for internet-connected devices, the U.S. Cyber Trust Mark, intended to help consumers make more-informed decisions about the cybersecurity of products they bring into their homes. To earn the U.S. Cyber Trust Mark, which is being administered by the Federal Communications Commission, companies have to test their […]
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I’m old enough to remember musicians getting angry over Guitar Hero. But they always seemed to be missing the point. Nobody was seriously suggesting that a video game controller would replace an instrument that’s been going strong since the 15th century. Guitar Hero was a fun game, and if it persuaded a new generation to […]
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Google is rolling out a redesign of the Pixel Phone app’s in-call UI that gives more prominence to Call Notes and Audio Emoji.
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Microsoft is rolling back a model upgrade to its AI-powered Bing Image Creator, reports TechCrunch. The rollback came after weeks of complaints by users that the tool just didn’t work as well after Microsoft “upgraded” to a new version of the DALL-E 3 model on December 18th.
Microsoft declined to comment on its decision to roll things back or offer specifics on what may be causing the gap between user’s expectations and its output.
Today, Microsoft’s head of search, Jordi Ribas, tweeted that they could reproduce “some of the issues reported” and are reverting to an older version of the DALL-E model for now, although it could take a few weeks until it’s complete.
Since the launch of Bing Image Creator last spring, users have generated billions of images with text prompts. I'm pleased to share our latest updates to enhance your creative experience. Starting today, we’re rolling out the latest DALL-E 3 model PR16, which will create images… pic.twitter.com/3p9HsYMlr6
— Jordi Ribas (@JordiRib1) December 18, 2024
Thanks again for the feedback and patience. We've been able to repro some of the issues reported and plan to revert to PR13 until we can fix them. All Pro users and about 25% of the requests using boosts are now on PR13. The deployment process is very slow unfortunately. It…
— Jordi Ribas (@JordiRib1) January 8, 2025
As soon as Ribas posted about the change in December, there were complaints that Bing Image Creator was producing less-detailed results or images that didn’t accurately reflect their prompts. In his initial replies, Ribas said the model’s output quality “should be a bit better on average” than before.
It was the same story in posts and comments on Reddit and OpenAI’s community forums. On OpenAI’s forums, a person complained about the model’s handling of fabric on an anime-style character’s dress. The person who posted the below images says the one on the left is “perfect quality” while the one on the right is “over-lit.”
Screenshot: OpenAI community forum
Another didn’t like the way Bing placed starburst effects:
Screenshot: OpenAI community forum
All of these things are subjective, and I can’t claim to think any of them look better than any others. If anything, it feels like an indication that Microsoft doesn’t just have to deal with complaints about bugs or people upset about feature changes — now it has to deal with AI art critics comparing the machine’s output to what they imagine it should create. Perhaps they should ask the artists whose work the generators were trained on for tips about managing a client’s expectations?
Apple and Google have been fined R$19 million (about US$3.1 million) in Brazil after a judge ruled that the companies contributed to allowing the controversial photo editor FaceApp to improperly collect data from its users. The app has a long history of questionable privacy policies.
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The people overseeing the security of Google’s Chrome browser explicitly forbid third-party extension developers from trying to manipulate how the browser extensions they submit are presented in the Chrome Web Store. The policy specifically calls out search-manipulating techniques such as listing multiple extensions that provide the same experience or plastering extension descriptions with loosely related or unrelated keywords.
On Wednesday, security and privacy researcher Wladimir Palant revealed that developers are flagrantly violating those terms in hundreds of extensions currently available for download from Google. As a result, searches for a particular term or terms can return extensions that are unrelated, inferior knockoffs, or carry out abusive tasks such as surreptitiously monetizing web searches, something Google expressly forbids.
A search Wednesday morning in California for Norton Password Manager, for example, returned not only the official extension but three others, all of which are unrelated at best and potentially abusive at worst. The results may look different for searches at other times or from different locations.
It’s 2025, and companies still don’t know what AI is good for. That’s the impression I got from this year’s CES, which featured AI-powered kitchen appliances, baby cribs, and other products that really weren’t calling for AI. See: Spicerr, an “intelligent” touchscreen-equipped spice dispenser that learns your taste as you cook to recommend unique recipes. […]
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Despite the big Material You redesign happening in 2022, the Google Home app did not adopt Dynamic Color, though that’s finally changing.
more…MacPaw, the company behind many great Mac apps such as CleanMyMac and Setapp, unveiled Eney at CES 2025. It’s an all new AI assistant for your Mac, aiming to simplify your digital life. Eney will help you complete tasks quickly, effortlessly, and with ease.
more…The following article discusses adult themes.
There was a legend in my high school about turning your PlayStation 2 into an ersatz vibrator by creating a custom skate park in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3. Build a circular grind rail, turn off the ability to fall, jump on it and your DualShock would launch into a never ending frenzy of haptic feedback. It’s an idea the team at Motorbunny is taking to its logical conclusion, adding a wireless controller for its eponymous ride on sex toy that can connect to a DualSense controller. Its pitch is that you’ll be able to combine getting your game on with getting off. And yes, I am ashamed for writing that sentence.
The company was at CES 2025 in Las Vegas, Nevada, showing off PlayMate, its wireless dongle that can control the beefy saddle-style toy. In its demo, the PlayMate was plugged into the USB-C port on the back of a DualSense controlling a PS5 playing Rocket League. Except there’s no way to pull the haptics data from the DualSense, or any other gaming handset, for that matter. Instead, it has a built-in gyroscope that will track how aggressively you pitch and tilt your controller, and uses that information to control the Motorbunny. This isn’t as good as the Tony Hawk plan from 2001, but will at least enable some folks to merge both of their hobbies at the same time.
PlayMate is one of a suite of products the company is releasing, including a series of less expensive vibes under the Fluffer label. This is a sub-brand designed to tie in the worlds of gaming and sex, with the app even having some arcade games that you can use to control your toys. In one demo, there was a Flappy Bird clone that would increase the intensity of the vibration the longer you were able to keep the bird in the air. Sadly the company wasn’t ready to share details of pricing and availability just yet, but said a whole host of products would be hitting the market in the following months.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/motorbunnys-playmate-lets-your-console-kinda-control-your-vibe-233001475.html?src=rss
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© Daniel Cooper for Engadget
Meta is continuing to overhaul its moderation and content rules. Instagram head Adam Mosseri posted today that Instagram and Threads will start including political content in recommendations. It's a reversal from the policy the two platforms adopted last year, which made political content something users had to choose if they wanted to see. Now, Mosseri said that there will be three levels of political content that Instagram and Threads users can pick to see: less, standard (which will be the default) and more.
"It’s proven impractical to draw a red line around what is and is not political content," Mosseri wrote. The change will begin rolling out this week in the US and in the rest of the world over the coming weeks.
This announcement is the latest in a series of shifts Meta is making that seem like efforts to curry favor with President-elect Donald Trump. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the company would eliminate third-party fact-checkers in favor of a Community Notes model for Facebook, Instagram and Threads, mimicking the approach taken at X (formerly Twitter). Nick Clegg stepped down as Meta's president of global affairs to be replaced by Joel Kaplan, who is well-connected to Republicans in Washington DC.
Yesterday, Instagram was also discovered to have blocked several LGBTQ hashtags and treated them as "sexually suggestive material" for months. The company said this was an error.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/threads-and-instagram-will-recommend-political-content-after-all-232343107.html?src=rss
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© Ezra Acayan via Getty Images
