Digital life
fromCbsnews
9 hours agoIs your phone listening to you?
Phones are not listening to conversations; targeted ads are based on user behavior and interests.
Apple removed Bitchat from the China App Store on February 28, 2026, citing local legal violations. The Cyberspace Administration of China claims Bitchat violates Article 3 of its security assessment provisions.
If you use WhatsApp for your personal and professional messaging, it can quickly become pretty busy. It also means that any professional contacts can see your photos, status updates, and where you are. To keep things separate its a good idea to use a different phone number for each, but having two numbers doesn't mean you'll need two phones.
Apple had already announced in January that Google's Gemini AI models would help power the upgraded version of Siri it delayed last year, but The Information's report indicates Apple might lean even more on Google so it can catch up in AI.
Now, you might argue that I'm stretching the term "news" a little, since we've had ads in App Store search since 2016, and even this latest expansion of the program, creating multiple paid slots per query, was first floated last month. But you would be wrong, because we just learned two new nuggets of knowledge: the timeframe, and the markets which will get the extra ads first (the U.K., followed by Japan, followed by everyone else). So there.