privacy risks

If you’re about to hand off, sell, donate or recycle a Windows PC, the right way to wipe it matters — not just to protect your privacy, but to avoid hours of post‑sale headaches for the next user. The sensible playbook is simple: migrate what you need, make personal data irrecoverable, and...

Samsung and LG’s 2025 TV lineups put generative AI front-and-center by baking Microsoft Copilot into their smart-TV software, turning living-room displays into conversational assistants and new hubs for discovery, personalization, and device control. Background The Consumer Electronics Show...

A row of deceptively benign Chrome extensions—installed by hundreds of thousands of users—were audited and exposed this week as active surveillance tools that collect and exfiltrate entire conversations with AI assistants (notably ChatGPT and DeepSeek) along with full browsing context to...

Snap VPN can be run on a Windows or macOS PC — but the path to get there, the level of protection you actually get, and the privacy trade‑offs are more complicated than most “download for PC” guides suggest. This feature explains what the PrioriData-style walkthrough gets right (easy emulator...

Security researchers have exposed a family of seemingly benign Chrome and Edge extensions that quietly intercepted entire conversations with major AI chat services and forwarded those chats to remote analytics servers—an exposure that affects millions of users and raises urgent questions about...

Microsoft’s AI ambitions and a separate mass data extortion attempt collided this week into a stark reminder: powerful machine intelligence and sprawling analytics ecosystems can both improve productivity and create new, outsized privacy risks when the implementation or supply chain fails...

Researchers at the University of Oxford have published a benchmarking study showing that modern AI tools — including Microsoft’s Azure de‑identification service and GPT‑4 — can automatically detect and redact many personally identifiable data elements from real-world electronic health records...

Microsoft’s AI push has shifted from a set of optional helpers to the declared center of Windows’ roadmap, and that pivot is already reshaping what it means to own — and trust — a Windows PC. The MakeUseOf piece captures the unease many users feel: built‑in assistants that watch, index, and in...

Microsoft’s new Agent Workspace turns Copilot from a suggestive helper into a proactive, background-capable assistant that can read and act on files in your user folders — and that change has immediately reignited debates about privacy, attack surface expansion, and the trust model for AI on...

The browser you know — tabs, bookmarks, and the occasional extension — is being refitted into an active, agentic assistant that can read, remember, and act on your behalf, and that shift brings enormous productivity upside coupled with fresh privacy, security, and economic risks that every...

The era of free, feature-stable web browsers is ending — not because browsing itself is suddenly expensive, but because browsers have become the primary surface for generative AI assistants that cost real money to run, maintain, and secure. Over the last year the industry has shifted from “AI...

Microsoft Edge’s new Copilot integration has been flagged by independent testers for a troubling privacy gap: the assistant can reportedly read content from non-focused browser tabs — including visible text and, in one user’s test, values entered into form fields such as login credentials — even...

Genealogy websites and at‑home DNA tests have given millions of people a new way to explore family stories, but a recent Northwest Arkansas Democrat‑Gazette piece underscores a familiar truth: these platforms do not always get heritage quite right. The article — which reports on users who found...

PC “optimizer” apps promise a magic fix: one click to clean junk files, repair the registry, free RAM and make Windows run like new — but in practice some of the most popular tools have done the opposite, introducing privacy risks, background bloat, and even security incidents that worsened the...

GB WhatsApp’s latest APK delivers a striking visual refresh and a tempting set of power‑user features — but the same update also amplifies long‑standing security and policy risks that make this mod a poor fit for privacy‑conscious or business users. Background / Overview GB WhatsApp is one of...

The abrupt removal of ChatGPT’s “Make this chat discoverable” feature has once again cast a spotlight on the ever-contentious intersection of innovation, privacy, and user safety in the world of generative AI. When OpenAI introduced this opt-in function, they framed it as a bold experiment in...

The evolution of digital privacy remains a hot-button issue, particularly as tech giants like Microsoft refine their approaches to data collection, user transparency, and regulatory compliance. At the heart of this conversation lies the Microsoft privacy dashboard—a centralized hub designed to...

In the ongoing arms race between tech giants, software vulnerabilities are increasingly weaponized not only by cybercriminals but by the vendors themselves in the battle for narrative control. Microsoft’s recent public exposure of a serious macOS security flaw—dubbed "Sploitlight" and tracked as...

Windows 11 ushers in an era where the user experience is increasingly shaped not by unobtrusive empowerment but by what can only be described as an unrelenting barrage of distractions, advertisements, and unsolicited interventions. For many who migrated eagerly—or were coerced—into upgrading...

Microsoft’s Copilot—the AI assistant that’s quickly becoming inseparable from the modern Windows experience—has taken a bold, and for some, unsettling step forward: it’s now being quietly tested within the InPrivate browsing mode of the Edge browser. This development, first discovered in the...