Privacy is a growing concern in today’s world. Follow along with all our coverage related to privacy, security, what Apple and other companies are doing to keep your information safe, and what steps you can take to keep your information private.

Amazon apparently thought the world would respond with a collective “awww” when it announced an expansion of its Ring Search Party feature to help find lost dogs, promoted via a 30-second Super Bowl ad (below). Instead, it’s being widely panned as a dystopian move inthe current climate.

Since the company has recently rolled out a facial recognition capability for theRing video doorbell, people drew the obvious and exceedingly short line between surveilling for dogs to surveilling for people …

During Alphabet’s Q4 2025 earnings call, CEO Sundar Pichai added to the confusion regarding where, exactly, the upcoming Gemini-powered Siri will run. Here’s what he said.

Both the founders of WhatsApp and current owner Meta state that the app uses end-to-end encryption, meaning that nobody outside the chat can access the content. A lawsuit claims that this isn’t true and that anyone inside Meta can get full access to all of the messages sent or received by any WhatsApp user.

Johns Hopkins University professor and cryptographer Matthew Green has weighed in with a blog post analyzing the claims and likely reality …

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is out with a new campaign that presses tech companies to move faster to protect user data through end-to-end encryption, and stronger defaults and privacy settings. Here are the details.

Publicly available information reveals thatApple was fined a total of $851 million last year forprivacy andantitrust violations, down from $2.1B in 2024.

The data was collated by Proton, which reports that it would have taken the iPhone maker just three days, three hours and 28 minutes to pay off the total …

A Californian court has awardedApple a partial victory in a class action lawsuit alleging that the company violated theprivacy of some iPhone owners.

The case followed asecurity researcher discovering data collection practices by Apple which hedescribed at the time as “shocking” …

An effort led by security research lab CovertLabs is actively uncovering troves of (mostly) AI-related App Store apps that leak and expose user data, including names, emails, and chat history. Here are the details.

9to5Mac Security Bite is exclusively brought to you by Mosyle, the only Apple Unified Platform. Making Apple devices work-ready and enterprise-safe is all we do. Our unique integrated approach to management and security combines state-of-the-art Apple-specific security solutions for fully automated Hardening & Compliance, Next Generation EDR, AI-powered Zero Trust, and exclusive Privilege Management with the most powerful and modern Apple MDM on the market. The result is a totally automated Apple Unified Platform currently trusted by over 45,000 organizations to make millions of Apple devices work-ready with no effort and at an affordable cost. Request your EXTENDED TRIAL today and understand why Mosyle is everything you need to work with Apple.

Talk of the largest grocer in the world not supportingApple Pay or any Tap to Pay solution for that matter is making the rounds on social media again, as9to5Macnoted yesterday. It is worth mentioning that there are real security benefits behind this technology. While the vast majority of users choose tapping for payment because it is quick and easy, there is a lot happening behind the scenes to keep your information private.

Today Appleconfirmed a new partnership with Google to power future AI features, including the upcoming Siri overhaul. But how will that impact user privacy? Here’s what Apple says.

Roblox, one of the most popular kids’ apps in the world, is now requiring children as young as nine years old to submit a video selfie for age verification.Update: Following a partial launch in December of last year, the requirement is now beingrolled out globally. The company says you will see the update within the next week.

While the developer is doing this for good reasons, it adds further weight to the argument thatApple andGoogle, rather than individual app developers, should be responsible for age verification …

9to5Mac Security Bite is exclusively brought to you byMosyle, the only Apple Unified Platform.Making Apple devices work-ready and enterprise-safe is all we do. Our unique integrated approach to management and security combines state-of-the-art Apple-specific security solutions for fully automated Hardening & Compliance, Next Generation EDR, AI-powered Zero Trust, and exclusive Privilege Management with the most powerful and modern Apple MDM on the market. The result is a totally automated Apple Unified Platform currently trusted by over 45,000 organizations to make millions of Apple devices work-ready with no effort and at an affordable cost.Request your EXTENDED TRIAL today and understand why Mosyle is everything you need to work with Apple.

Let’s say you have screenshots of sensitive information sitting on your desktop that you’d like to password protect. You know that images of tax, banking, wire transfer forms, etc. in the clear can easily be viewed by anyone with physical or remote access to your machine, but you’re unsure how to secure them. Unfortunately,macOS Preview doesn’t support file-level password protection, but there are quick workarounds that don’t require third-party software or downloading anything not already on yourMac.

9to5Mac Security Bite is exclusively brought to you byMosyle, the only Apple Unified Platform.Making Apple devices work-ready and enterprise-safe is all we do. Our unique integrated approach to management and security combines state-of-the-art Apple-specific security solutions for fully automated Hardening & Compliance, Next Generation EDR, AI-powered Zero Trust, and exclusive Privilege Management with the most powerful and modern Apple MDM on the market. The result is a totally automated Apple Unified Platform currently trusted by over 45,000 organizations to make millions of Apple devices work-ready with no effort and at an affordable cost.Request your EXTENDED TRIAL today and understand why Mosyle is everything you need to work with Apple.

When Apple dropped App Tracking Transparency (ATT) prompts in iOS 14.5 back in 2021, it was a watershed moment for user privacy within third-party applications. Nothing like it had existed prior. The initiative gave iPhone users control over whether their in-app data could be aggregated and shared with third parties for advertising or other purposes.

Still, today, I often find comments online from people who don’t really know what it does and find the wording very taboo. Like, why “Ask” the app? And is it still effective? Let’s briefly look at App Tracking Transparency in 2025…

While Apple iscurrently lobbying against being given a legal responsibilityfor age verification when it comes to downloading apps, I think the company’s customers would very much benefit from it taking on this role.

Given the company’s track record in finding privacy-respecting approaches to personal data, I would like to see it go even further than the proposals we’ve seen to date …

Many social media apps encourage you to give them access to your contacts. If you do so, they will let you know which of your contacts are on the platform so that you can send them a friend request.

This can be problematic because you may not wish to share your online presence with everybody in your contacts, and because you are effectively sharing the personal data of other people without their consent.Bluesky says its own “privacy-first” approach is different …

Authoritarian governments don’t like their citizens being able to haveprivate conversations using end-to-end encrypted messaging apps. This is the reasonRussia has just banned FaceTime, but it was surprisingiMessage had escaped a ban.

A potential reason for this has now been discovered:Apple may have accidentally made it almost impossible for a government to ban its end-to-end encrypted text messaging app …

The saga of a mandatory governmentsecurity app which Apple and Google had to preinstall on their phones didn’t last long after Apple refused to play ball.

The Indian government had already backed down on preventing iPhone owners from deleting the “security” app, and has now made a complete U-turn in the space of just 48 hours …

TheIndian government has orderedApple and other smartphone manufacturers to pre-install a state-owned “security” app on all phones before they are sold to users.Update: As we predicted, Apple has pushed back, but more aggressively by statingoutright thatit will not comply.

Adding fuel to theprivacy fire, the government is also requiring smartphone makers to ensure that the app cannot be removed by users …

If you receive a notification fromChatGPT provider OpenAI that one of its partners has suffered adata breach, it’s likely that your own data is safe. Only those who have an API account may have been affected

The company says it is being transparent by notifying all subscribers, even though only a small subset of them will have been impacted …

A competition regulator has accusedApple of misleading users about the level of privacy offered by theApp Tracking Transparency feature. That accusation, while made in good faith, is based on a misunderstanding.

The iPhone maker has responded by saying that it may be forced to withdraw theprivacy protection from EU users …

Hackers have obtained customer data from a third-party company used by major Wall Street banks, including JPMorgan Chase and Citi. The disclosure comes just days aftera Doordash data breach exposed names, addresses, phone numbers, and more.

SitmusAMC helps banks process mortgage applications and other real estate loans, and says that accounting records and legal agreements have been impacted by the hack …

9to5Mac Security Bite is exclusively brought to you byMosyle, the only Apple Unified Platform.Making Apple devices work-ready and enterprise-safe is all we do. Our unique integrated approach to management and security combines state-of-the-art Apple-specific security solutions for fully automated Hardening & Compliance, Next Generation EDR, AI-powered Zero Trust, and exclusive Privilege Management with the most powerful and modern Apple MDM on the market. The result is a totally automated Apple Unified Platform currently trusted by over 45,000 organizations to make millions of Apple devices work-ready with no effort and at an affordable cost.Request your EXTENDED TRIAL today and understand why Mosyle is everything you need to work with Apple.

Plastic webcam covers—especially of the sliding kind—boomed in popularity sometime in the 2010s as a low-tech way to keep hackers from eavesdropping on compromised machines. The concern felt justified at the time. But by 2020, Apple was beginning to issue warnings that those covers aren’t actually needed and can even damage a MacBook’s display.

For this Security Bite, let’s set the tin-foil hats aside and talk about why webcam covers don’t meaningfully improve privacy, can cause features likeTrue Tone to not work properly, and are far more likely to damage your screen than stop someone from spying on you.