Whether or not you subscribe to them, New Year’s resolutions are a capital-T Thing for many people in the US. Thankfully, if your goals for 2025 revolve around health and fitness, the 42mm Apple Watch Series 10 is on sale at Amazon, Walmart, and Best Buy starting at $329 ($70 off), matching its Black Friday low. You can also pick it up in the 46mm sizing at Amazon, Walmart, and Best Buy starting at $359 ($70 off), which remains the best price we’ve seen on the larger model.

While there are certainly better fitness trackers for hardcore athletes, none of them offer the kind of robust third-party support you’ll get with a flagship Apple Watch, nor do they integrate as well with Apple’s larger device ecosystem. The Series 10 is a pretty minor update over the previous model, but it’s still a solid bet for casual athletes, with a terrific wide-angle OLED display, sleep apnea detection, a thinner design, and a larger charging coil that lets you juice it from zero to 80 percent in just 30 minutes.

The more substantial fitness updates come in the form of watchOS 11, Apple’s latest software update for the Apple Watch, which brings a selection of new training features to the midrange wearable. These include the new Training Load feature, an app called Vitals that can contextualize a set of recovery metrics, and the long-overdue ability to pause your Activity Rings (praise be). I wouldn’t say any of them are revolutionary, but if you’re upgrading from an older model or you’ve never owned an Apple Watch before, they’re certainly welcome.

Read our Apple Watch Series 10 review.

More deals, discounts, and ways to save

• Nomad is still running its annual Holiday Hangover Sale, offering you a chance to save 20 percent on select items with coupon code HOLIDAY20. The promo applies to an assortment of Apple Watch bands and mobile accessories, including Nomad’s Traditional Leather Case for the iPhone 16 Pro (now $48), the keychain-friendly ChargeKey (now $20), and the second-gen Stand One charger (now $88). You can even grab a sleek leather case for the latest AirPods Pro for $32, assuming you want something a bit more rustic.
• Anker’s Soundcore Sport X10 earbuds are available from Amazon and Anker (with promo code WS7DV2YU66HE) for $49.99 ($30 off), matching their all-time low. The relatively cheap pair of earbuds offers quite a bit for the money — including powerful bass response, an IPX7 rating for water and sweat resistance, and flexible, wraparound hooks — all of which make them a great pick if you want a pair of wireless workout buds for the new year.
• Looking for an Android-based alternative to the Apple Watch Series 10? The Google Pixel Watch 3 is currently on sale at Amazon, Best Buy, and the Google Store starting at $299.99 ($50 off), which remains its second-best price to date. The handsome third-gen smartwatch is one of the best fitness trackers you can buy thanks to a host of excellent Google integrations and a slew of running features, not to mention a new battery-saver mode that activates when your watch falls below 15 percent. Read our review.

We take a look back at 20 of our favorite projects from 2024.

Read the full story at The Verge.

LG has announced additions to its ultra-light Gram and Gram Pro laptop lineup, adding cloud-based and on-device AI-powered features that go beyond its current Gram laptops.

The 16-inch Gram Pro will also be the first Copilot Plus PC in the LG Gram lineup and is further distinguished as the only model using the Intel Lunar Lake Core Ultra V-Series processors. The 17-inch Gram Pro and 16-inch 2-in-1 use Intel’s Arrow Lake Core Ultra H-Series processors.

Image: LG

The LG Gram Pro will be available in 17-inch and 16-inch models featuring 2,560 x 1,600 displays, up to 32GB of LPDDR5X memory, and up to 2TB Gen4 NVMe SSDs. The 16-inch Gram Pro and the 16-inch LG Gram Pro 2-in-1 will have Intel Arc GPUs, while the 17-inch Gram Pro will instead feature an Nvidia GeForce RTX4050 graphics card.

Gram Chat On-Device, which uses a “small language model derived from LG AI Research’s EXAONE large language model,” powers offline features, including Time Travel, which lets users quickly revisit “web pages, documents, videos and audio files” they’ve recently accessed. LG’s software is adding tools similar to Microsoft’s Copilot Plus suite and Apple Intelligence, but given the trouble Microsoft has had with Recall, we’ll have to wait and see how it all measures up.

It also might make those features available on more PCs, but LG hasn’t specified which AI features will be available on which laptops in the new Gram lineup.

Gram Chat Cloud is powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4o and responds to inquiries using “vast web-based datasets for detailed and comprehensive responses” while integrating with calendar and email services. It requires an active internet connection and will only be free for the first year.

All of the new Gram laptops also support LG’s Gram Link 2.0, which streamlines document and file sharing with other PCs and iOS or Android-based smartphones. It also allows incoming phone calls to be answered through the Gram laptops, so you don’t have to swap headsets or Bluetooth headphones to another device temporarily.

LG will also introduce its entry-level Gram Book to the US market next year. Powered by an Intel Core i5 processor, it features a 15.6-inch 60Hz full HD display, a 720p webcam, and configurations of up to 1TB of SSD storage and 16GB of DDR4 memory.

The US Treasury Department suffered a “major” security incident after a China state-sponsored hacker broke into the third-party remote management software it uses, as reported earlier by The New York Times.

In a letter to lawmakers seen by The Verge, the Treasury Department said BeyondTrust, the company behind its remote management software, notified the agency of a breach on December 8th.

The threat actor stole a key used by BeyondTrust “to secure a cloud-based service used to remotely provide technical support for Treasury Departmental Offices (DO) end users.” With the key, they overrode the security to remotely access those users' workstations and “some unclassified documents” they maintained.

The Treasury Department said it worked with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the FBI following the attack, which has been attributed to a China state-sponsored Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) hacker. “The compromised BeyondTrust service has been taken offline and there is no evidence indicating the threat actor has continued access to Treasury systems or information,” US Treasury Department spokesperson Michael Gwin said in a statement to The Verge.

The attack seems to be linked to a security incident BeyondTrust disclosed earlier this month, impacting customers using its remote support software. At the time, BeyondTrust attributed the attack to a compromised API key for its remote support software, adding that it “immediately revoked the API key, notified known impacted customers, and suspended those instances the same day.” The Verge reached out to BeyondTrust with a request for comment but didn’t immediately hear back.

“Treasury takes very seriously all threats against our systems, and the data it holds,” Gwin said. “Over the last four years, Treasury has significantly bolstered its cyber defense, and we will continue to work with both private and public sector partners to protect our financial system from threat actors.”

New York governor Kathy Hochul signed landmark climate legislation into law last week, showing how states can keep holding polluters accountable even when President-elect Donald Trump rolls back environmental protections.

New York’s Climate Change Superfund Act will require the biggest multinational oil and gas companies to contribute to a fund that’ll be used for infrastructure projects meant to protect New York residents from increasingly dangerous climate disasters like storms and sea level rise.

Trump will soon step back into office and is expected to dismantle existing climate policies and gut the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), having openly disparaged clean energy and federal environmental regulations on the campaign trail. So for the next four years at least, Americans will have to rely on local and state efforts like this to deal with the pollution from fossil fuels that’s causing climate change.

“New York has fired a shot that will be heard round the world: the companies most responsible for the climate crisis will be held accountable,” State Senator Liz Krueger said in a statement after Hochul...

Read the full story at The Verge.

For months, the location information of around 800,000 electric Volkswagen vehicles was available online due to a data leak, according to a report from the German news magazine Der Spiegel. The leak reportedly stemmed from the software running inside Volkswagen vehicles and could've allowed a bad actor to trace a driver’s exact movements, as noted by Electrek.

A whistleblower first notified Der Spiegel and the European hacking association Chaos Computer Club of the vulnerability, which also affects EVs from Volkswagen-owned car brands on a global scale, including Audi, Seat, and Skoda.

Der Spiegel found that Cariad, the Volkswagen subsidiary behind the automaker's software, made it possible for an attacker to find and access driver data housed in Amazon’s cloud storage service. The data, which “could be linked to the names and contact details of the drivers,” reportedly included details about when EVs were switched on and off, along with the emails, phone numbers, and addresses of drivers in some cases.

It included the “precise” locations of about 460,000 vehicles, as Der Spiegel says the data was “accurate to within ten centimeters” for Volkswagen and Seats vehicles, and within 10km (~6 miles) for Audi and Skoda models.

Cariad has since addressed the issue, telling Der Spiegel customers have ”no need to take any action, as no sensitive information such as passwords or payment details are affected.” The Verge reached out to Cariad and Volkswagen with requests for comment but didn’t immediately hear back.

If anything, this leak serves as yet another reminder of the immense amount of data collected by modern-day vehicles, which Mozilla has called a “privacy nightmare.”

We still haven’t seen the “next generation of CarPlay” that Apple first announced in 2022 and continues to say on its CarPlay webpage is arriving in 2024, as MacRumors points out. And barring some spectacular surprise, it’s not coming today or tomorrow. What gives?

So far, we’ve only seen changes like CarPlay mapping directions appearing in the instrument cluster in cars from manufacturers like Polestar, Porsche, and Lincoln. That’s even the case for vehicles like the 2024 Lincoln Nautilus, which has the screen real estate to support Apple’s vision for its dashboard-spanning infotainment software. Porsche and Aston Martin had announced their cars would be the first to get the new CarPlay, but both recently declined to give Wired a timeline for its rollout.

Screenshot: Apple

Other companies that Apple said would support its new CarPlay have been noncommittal about the software since it was announced. Some have closed the door on full support more forcefully since then, like when Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Källenius told The Verge’s Nilay Patel in April that Apple won’t be taking over all the screens in its cars.

Outside of Apple’s initial pronouncement that so many cars would use its big CarPlay update, automakers like General Motors and Rivian have taken a stand against both it and Google’s Android Auto. That’s not a popular position, particularly for GM, but both have indicated it’s about having more control over their vehicles.

Despite the lukewarm reception of Apple’s ideas, the company has continued to talk about its plans for the software. It’s just not clear what cars, if any, it will ever show up in.

As we head into 2025, there aren’t many things preventing homeowners from building out a basic home security system. You can start small and cheap with the battery-powered Blink Outdoor 4. If you don’t mind that they’re refurbished (with the same one-year warranty as the new models), you can get two of them with a Sync Module 2 for $74.99 ($90 off) at Amazon, which is only $10 more than the all-time low. A single Blink Outdoor 4 retails for $99.99 new, and its lowest price is $39.99, so you’re still getting a slightly better value than usual.

The weatherproof Blink Outdoor 4 offers a 1080p wide-angle feed with motion detection, infrared night vision, and two-way audio. If you opt for a Blink Subscription Plan ($10 a month or $100 a year for Blink Plus, which is required to run multiple cameras), you’ll get person detection, up to 90 minutes of continuous live view, and unlimited cloud storage for up to 60 days. But if you have subscription fatigue, you can also save clips locally to a USB drive thanks to the included Sync Module 2. Blink says the cameras can last up to two years on just two AA batteries, too, which should make them easy to maintain over the long haul.

More Monday deals to mull over

• You can get the Anker 321 Power Strip with a five-foot cable for as little as $13.99 ($12 off) at Amazon, which is an all-time low price. The 10-foot version is also matching its best price to date at $17.99 ($12 off). The cuboid charger has three AC outlets occupying their own sides of the block, with the fourth side dedicated to two USB-A ports and a 20W USB-C Power Delivery port. It’s a great alternative to a traditional extension cable if you’re looking for one that’s easy to travel with.
• The 8Bitdo Ultimate Wireless Controller is one of the best Nintendo Switch controllers. If you’ve been waiting for a good chance to see for yourself why, Amazon and Best Buy are selling it for $50.99 ($19 off), which is only a few dollars more than the lowest price we’ve seen. It has a pair of drift-free Hall Effect sticks, is easily configurable with custom mappings and profiles thanks to 8Bitdo’s excellent software support, and lasts up to 22 hours (it comes with a charging base, too). In addition to Switch compatibility, you can also use it on Windows PCs, Steam Deck, mobile, and other devices that support Bluetooth controllers.
• The SteelSeries Arctis Nova Pro Wireless is a great multi-platform gaming headset with tons of features and a hefty price tag to match. But thankfully, you can get the PlayStation version starting at $259 ($91 off) at Amazon right now, which is an all-time low. The Xbox version is also on sale for $263.99 ($86 off), which is its second-best price to date. The multiplatform headset has a retractable noise-canceling microphone, and I can confirm it’s comfortable to wear for hours. The included base station can charge one of two included hot-swappable batteries, but it also recharges over USB-C. It also enables PC and console connectivity (plus Bluetooth devices), includes line-in and line-out ports, and has an OLED display with a dial and button for customizing EQ, sound modes, volume levels, and more. Read our review.

Apple TV Plus will be free to stream this weekend from January 4th through the 5th, similar to HBO’s old free weekends on cable. The company posted the news on social media alongside a short trailer featuring some of its top shows, with the tagline “see for yourself.”

A press release from Apple indicates the free weekend covers the TV Plus “library of award-winning original series and films” and says it starts on January 3rd, not the 4th as listed in its video and tweet — we’ve contacted Apple for more details of exactly when the promotion starts.

Apple:

Apple TV+ is ringing in the New Year by offering an all-access pass to customers all around the world. Enjoy Apple TV+ for free the first weekend of 2025 (January 3 through January 5), Apple TV+ will be free on any device where Apple TV+ is available. All you need is an Apple ID to see what all the buzz is about.

Streaming services like Netflix have offered limited free streaming on some of their top content before, but this is a new approach from Apple, which teased last week that it might provide some free streaming days soon.

A full weekend may be enough to binge some of Apple’s top shows, including Severance, which has its hotly anticipated season 2 launching on January 17th. The free days could also help potential subscribers get a taste of Apple’s eclectic mix of sci-fi shows, such as the space race drama For All Mankind, postapocalyptic thriller Silo, and the Godzilla serial Monarch: Legacy of Monsters.

Update, December 30th: Added information from Apple’s press release.

One of the big benefits of buying a “Pro” iPhone is currently that you get a fancy high-refresh rate OLED display, but that may become standard across the iPhone 17 lineup, according to a Weibo leak from Digital Chat Station spotted by MacRumors. The outlet notes that Digital Chat Station leaked accurate details about the iPhone 15 line’s camera sensors and the display panel of the iPhone 12.

The rumor is a bit vague, saying only that the base iPhone 17 will have a high refresh rate. But it follows some more specific supply chain whispers we’ve heard in recent months. MacRumors pointed to one in February that suggested Apple will use the same LTPO panel tech, which drives Apple’s variable refresh rate “ProMotion” iPhone 16 Pro displays, for all of next year’s phones. That was later echoed by others, including display supply chain analyst Ross Young in September.

The next set of iPhones is also expected to replace the base model “Plus” iPhone with an iPhone 17 “Slim” in 2025, which Young suggested will have ProMotion, too. Instead of differentiating by display tech, Apple could stratify the lineup in different ways, like by giving the iPhone 17 Pro Max a smaller Face ID sensor and Dynamic Island cutout, as well as 12GB of RAM for both sizes of iPhone 17 Pro and 8GB for the standard and Slim models.

The whole line is rumored to have 24MP front-facing cameras instead of the 12MP found in current iPhones, and they may all use an Apple-designed Wi-Fi / Bluetooth chip for the first time.

PlayStation had a rocky 2024 but still put out some great games.

Read the full story at The Verge.

The first time I installed Bazzite on a Windows gaming handheld, I laughed. It looked like such a blatant clone of Valve’s Steam Deck interface. Its many bugs kept me at bay.

Now, an Asus ROG Ally X running Bazzite has all but replaced the Steam Deck in my life. For the moment, it may be the best handheld your time and money can buy — because it brings 90 percent of the Deck’s ease of use to the Ally’s more powerful hardware, larger 80 watt-hour battery, and variable refresh rate screen. Depending on the game, it can even offer better performance and battery life than the very same handheld with Windows. I’ve been testing it for five months, and I’ve rarely looked back.

This combination won’t be for everyone, because the $800 Ally X costs far more than a Steam Deck, and Bazzite still has annoying quirks. But because Bazzite can so convincingly transform a Windows handheld into a true Steam Deck rival, I believe it singlehandedly proves that handheld manufacturers are making the wrong choice if they doggedly stick with Windows, and that others should join Lenovo in hedging that bet as soon as possible. Bazzite is one way — another may come as soon as next month, when we’re...

Read the full story at The Verge.

DJI has quietly introduced a powerful new car charger for its giant portable batteries. The $299 / €269 Power 1kW Super Fast Car Charger can charge the company’s expanding lineup of power stations at up to 1000W from your car’s alternator when the engine is running.

This new class of (nearly) do-it-yourself alternator chargers are having a moment now that the most popular makers of solar generators and power stations have embraced DC-to-DC chargers. I wouldn’t have survived without one when remote working from my van last summer.

Once the Power 1kW is mounted inside your vehicle and connected to the car’s battery via the included 5m (16 feet 5 inches) fused cable, it then connects to the proprietary SDC port of the dongle-happy DJI Power 1000 power station I recently reviewed. It’ll also charge DJI’s 2048Wh Power 2000 Expansion Batteries when daisy-chained together with SDC cables for up to 11kWh of stackable storage capacity. The Power 1kW can also be configured to reverse-charge your car’s battery to prevent battery drain.

At full power the DJI Power 1kW Super Fast Car Charger can charge the Power 1000’s 1024Wh battery in just over an hour’s drive. However, out of the box the Power 1kW is pegged to 500W of charging output. To reach 1000W you have to purchase yet another dongle — the $25 DJI Power Dongle — and then adjust the setting to 1000W in the app. Fortunately, DJI is bundling that dongle as a “free gift” with new purchases of the DJI Power 1kW Super Fast Car Charger, at least in the US.

DJI’s announcement follows the arrival of the 800W EcoFlow Alternator Charger I reviewed last summer and the new 560W Bluetti AC500 announced in the fall (review is coming). EcoFlow’s charger, like DJI’s, uses a proprietary connector making it best suited to charge its own giant batteries, whereas the Bluetti AC500 can charge solar generators and power stations from nearly every manufacturer, but at half the rate of the DJI. Of course, all this assumes that your vehicle is fitted with a high-capacity alternator that can spare the amps.

LG has responded to Samsung in the battle to slap displays on every home appliance you own, culminating in the LG Signature microwave which puts a superfluous 27-inch LCD touchscreen and speakers into an appliance you probably don’t even need.

LG says the microwave’s display provides “an immersive entertainment experience” that’ll surely prevent the onset of buyer’s remorse at having overpaid for a potential advertising machine centrally located in your kitchen. And when paired with LG’s oven, it “conveniently shows the cooking progress of dishes in the range, eliminating the need to bend down and check the oven manually.”

In 2023, LG announced plans to transform its hardware-based business into a platform-based service model that continuously generates profits. In September, the company started displaying full-screen ads on its idle televisions.

Image: LG

The company’s second-generation Signature lineup of Wi-Fi appliances continues the tradition of putting a giant transparent OLED “Instaview” touchscreen on its fridge, alongside smaller LCDs on its washer and dryer. LG’s Signature displays can be used to operate the local appliance, access entertainment, and control devices in the LG smart home.

The announcement follows Samsung recently announcing a wider variety of display choices on its home appliances, ranging from 4.3 inches all the way up to 32 inches. It’s all part of the company’s strategy to put “screens everywhere,” instead of easy-to-use buttons and dials that rarely fail and are cheap to replace.

LG hasn’t announced any prices, countries of availability, or shipping dates for its new Signature lineup of appliances. But we’ll surely learn more when everything is demonstrated at the giant CES show which kicks off on January 7th in Las Vegas.

LG isn’t waiting until CES begins to reveal its new collection of gaming monitors. The 2025 lineup is led by the UltraGear OLED Bendable Gaming Monitor, which LG claims is the “world’s first 5K2K-resolution bendable OLED display.” That strikes me as extremely specific, but hey, it’s always worth bragging when you’re first, I suppose. The 45-inch monitor has an expansive resolution of 5120x2160, so you’re getting the same vertical pixel count as a typical 4K screen but a much wider canvas to game on.

And with a 21:9 aspect ratio, LG believes it provides “a more immersive gaming experience than standard 16:9 displays, while maintaining better content compatibility than 32:9 monitors.” This format also makes the display a great fit for productivity work when you’re not immersed in gameplay.

The UltraGear OLED Bendable Gaming Monitor (model 45GX990A) can transition from completely flat to a 900R curvature, and the latest version of LG’s Dual-Mode feature “allows users to switch effortlessly between resolution and refresh rate presets, and customize the aspect ratio and picture size.” It’s certified for Nvidia G-Sync and AMD FreeSync Premium Pro, but the press materials don’t specify a maximum refresh rate. I’ve asked for more details there.

Image: LG

LG is also releasing a non-bendable model with a permanent 800R curve. Otherwise, it’s the same 45-inch size, same aspect ratio, and same 5K2K resolution. LG’s press release says you can expect “sharp, lifelike images with the stunning colors and exceptional contrast LG OLED products are known for.” Shared specs between both monitors include a 0.03ms (GtG) response time and support for DisplayPort 2.1, HDMI 2.1, and USB-C with 90W power delivery. The 45GX950A uses a RGWB subpixel layout to improve readability of text on the screen and make the aforementioned productivity work easier on your eyes.

Along with these two monitors, LG is also introducing the curved UltraGear 39GX90SA, a webOS-powered “home entertainment hub” with easy access to streaming services — just like LG’s TVs. It seems like the company has taken some cues from Samsung’s smart monitors here. At 39 inches, this one’s a bit smaller than the other GX9 displays, but it retains the 21:9 aspect ratio and 800R curve. “Equipped with USB Type-C ports, it offers convenient connectivity, and incorporates LG’s ergonomic and space-saving L-shaped stand for a clutter-free desk setup,” LG said in tonight’s press release.

As per usual with CES news, pricing and a specific release date are still to come later in 2025. But we’ll be getting our first in-person look at the UltraGear GX9 series in Las Vegas, so stay tuned for impressions early next month — along with an avalanche of stunning screens from many other companies, too.

New images of the rumored DJI Flip folding drone hit late last week, showing the compact, light-colored drone both folded and unfolded, and even in a carrying case. The images appeared in posts by Igor Bogdanov, who has shared other credible DJI leaks in the past.

Bogdanov added in a post yesterday that DJI is preparing a new Cellular Dongle 2 module for the compact drone. The new leaks join earlier images of ND filters for the Flip, its propeller set, and charging hub, which Bogdanov wrote can charge two batteries in a minimum of 45 minutes, and can use “a 65W parallel charger.”

Below are some of the other pictures Bogdanov posted, including of its front screen, which drone leaker Jasper Ellens notes shows “all the handsfree Quickshots we know from the Neo.”

Ellens posted a short video of the drone yesterday, writing that the Flip’s registration numbers put it in DJI’s FPV drone category, meaning that it could allow for first-person streaming during flight. In early December, he also leaked details like the drone’s compact folding approach and that it should get about 30 minutes of flight thanks to a battery that’s bigger than the one in DJI’s Neo selfie drone.

YouTube is testing a new floating “Play something” button that will pick a video for you, 9to5Google spotted in the YouTube app for Android. The button floats just above the bottom bar of the app, and when tapped, it picks a YouTube video to play for you.

Just as in earlier versions of this feature YouTube’s been testing, the new button reportedly uses the portrait-oriented YouTube Shorts player to show videos, regardless of whether they’re vertically formatted Shorts or standard YouTube videos. Hopefully that changes by the time the feature gets a wide release.

Other incarnations the company has been testing for over a year include a “Play Something” banner and a simple button that looks like a black-and-white YouTube logo. If the feature’s name sounds familiar, perhaps it’s because Netflix retired a similar random video picker last year called “Surprise Me,” which originally launched in 2021 as “Play Something.”

A Reddit user posted a screenshot overnight of a Spotify search that brought a surprise: a pornographic video tucked into suggested results for the rapper M.I.A. Here’s a NSFW link to the thread. The video shown in their screenshot didn’t appear for us, but we found others after scrolling through dozens of results in the “Video” tab.

One of the accounts that posted videos we saw has published erotic audio for years but has sprinkled in sexually graphic videos more recently. Another account, which was named with a long string of alphanumeric characters, has been publishing equally nonsensically-titled explicit videos as a podcast account since mid-November.

Spotify representative Laura Batey told The Verge in an email that the examples we provided “have been removed due to violation of our policies.” Those policies include forbidding sexually explicit material. We asked Spotify for more information on how the videos made it past its moderation and will update here if it responds.

The videos we found appear to be unmoderated podcast uploads, and reporting them isn’t very convenient. The Spotify app lacks a button for doing so — instead, users have to copy the content’s URL and head to a webpage for reporting possible violations.

Porn on Spotify isn’t a new thing. Other recent Reddit posts contain examples of unexpected explicit video in search results and even erotic audio tracks being suggested in one user’s Discovery Weekly algorithmic playlist. A 2022 Vice story also detailed sexually explicit audio on the platform, as well as other content like graphic nudity in user-made playlist cover art.

Apple occasionally makes choices that tarnish its strong privacy-forward reputation, like when it was secretly collecting users’ Siri interactions. Yesterday, a blog post from developer Jeff Johnson highlighted what feels like such a choice: an “Enhanced Visual Search” toggle for the Apple Photos app that is seemingly on by default, giving your device permission to share data from your photos with Apple.

Sure enough, when I checked my iPhone 15 Pro this morning, the toggle was switched to on. You can find it for yourself by going into the Photos settings on your phone (through the iOS Settings app) or a Mac (in the Photos app’s settings menu). Enhanced Visual Search lets you look up landmarks you’ve taken pictures of or search for those images using the names of those landmarks.

To see what it enables in the Photos app, swipe up on a picture you’ve taken of a building and select “Look Up Landmark,” and a card will appear that ideally identifies it. Here are a couple of examples from my phone:

Screenshots: Apple Photos

On its face, it’s a convenient expansion of Photos’ Visual Look Up feature that Apple introduced in iOS 15 that lets you identify plants or, say, find out what those symbols on a laundry tag mean. But Visual Look Up doesn’t need special permission to share data with Apple, and this does.

A description under the toggle says you’re giving Apple permission to “privately match places in your photos with a global index maintained by Apple.” As for how, there are details in an Apple machine-learning research blog about Enhanced Visual Search that Johnson links to:

The process starts with an on-device ML model that analyzes a given photo to determine if there is a “region of interest” (ROI) that may contain a landmark. If the model detects an ROI in the “landmark” domain, a vector embedding is calculated for that region of the image.

According to the blog, that vector embedding is then encrypted and sent to Apple to compare with its database. The company offers a very technical explanation of vector embeddings in a research paper, but IBM put it more simply, writing that embeddings transform “a data point, such as a word, sentence or image, into an n-dimensional array of numbers representing that data point’s characteristics.”

Like Johnson, I don’t fully understand Apple’s research blogs and Apple didn’t immediately respond to our request for comment about Johnson’s concerns. It seems as though the company went to great lengths to keep the data private, in part by condensing image data into a format that’s legible to an ML model.

Even so, making the toggle opt-in, like those for sharing analytics data or recordings or Siri interactions, rather than something users have to discover seems like it would have been a better option.

Correction December 29th: An earlier version of this story misstated the location of the Enhanced Visual Search toggle. It is in iOS Settings under Apps > Phone and in Photos > Settings in the macOS Photos app. The headline was also made clearer.

Brady Corbet’s 3.5-hour saga is a tale of one man’s journey through architecture and assimilation — and one of the year’s best films. The director tells The Verge how he got away with it.

Read the full story at The Verge.