privacy

WhatsApp has long relied on phone numbers as the only identity for accounts. Users need a phone number to create an account. Anyone in an individual or a group chat can see your phone number. This mig

New usernames aren’t the only change coming to the popular chat app Discord, now used by 150 million people every month. The company is also testing a suite of parental controls that would allow

Amazon One, the retailer’s palm-scanning payment technology, is now gaining new functionality with the addition of age verification services. The company announced today that customers using Ama

Yesterday, we looked at a new hardware startup called Telly that’s giving away half a million of its new smart televisions for free. The catch is that the 55-inch smart television is fitted with

Twitter confirmed that a security error that made Circle tweets — posts that only go out to a small subset of trusted friends — surface publicly. TechCrunch reported the glitch in early Ap

OpenAI says that it plans to introduce a new subscription tier for ChatGPT, its viral AI-powered chatbot, tailored to the needs of enterprise customers. Called ChatGPT Business, OpenAI describes the f

Following last month’s NBC News investigation into Pinterest that exposed how pedophiles had been using the service to curate image boards of young girls, the company on Tuesday announced furthe

For years, online alcohol recovery startups Monument and Tempest were sharing with advertisers the personal information and health data of their patients without their consent. Monument, which acquire

Parents are still looking for answers weeks after hackers stole the personal data of thousands of users from kids’ tech coding camp iD Tech, with some fearing that their children’s data wa

Firefox announced today that its Total Cookie Protection (TCP) feature that protects users from trackers is now available on Android. The feature, which will be turned on by default, will prevent cros

A steady stream of new startups pitch their ideas, concepts, products and services on a daily basis to TechCrunch reporters: Startups that claim to predict when employees might want to leave for a new

Twitter’s Tor service, a version of the site that could be accessed even in countries where the social network is banned, has gone dark after the company failed to renew its certificate. The certifi

Google added privacy nutrition labels for apps on the Play Store last April, bringing more transparency to its Android marketplace in response to Apple introducing similar stringent rules. These label

Apple took a big PR hit as news spread that its item tracker the AirTag was being used for stalking and car thefts, which led the company to retool its software with a closer eye on user safety. AirTa

Online pharmacy GoodRx has agreed to pay $1.5 million in civil penalties for years of sharing the health information of consumers with third parties like Facebook, Google and Criteo for advertising pu

In late April, police in Nebraska received a tip saying 17-year-old Celeste Burgess had given birth to a stillborn baby and buried the body. Officers soon learned that her mother, Jessica Burgess, and

President Biden published an op-ed yesterday in the Wall Street Journal putting Big Tech on notice that his administration was working — in fact, has been working — to rein in its worst abuses. Bu

This is my week of debriefs. CES has a way of hurling you into the new year, kicking and screaming, and it can be hard to find your bearings as you emerge on the other side. As the dust has cleared, o

This holiday season, consider giving the gift of security with an ad blocker. That’s the takeaway message from an unlikely source — the FBI — which this week issued an alert warning that cyb

Meta is bringing its age verification technologies to another of its products, Facebook Dating. Though the service has not taken off as a significant Tinder rival, it will now serve as the testing gro