privacy

Google’s Chrome appears to be moving beyond passive browsing toward an active, assistant-driven experience, after a Canary build surfaced a hidden “Contextual tasks” option that hints at deeper Gemini integration and the beginnings of what the industry calls agentic browsing. Early artifacts in...

When you unpack a new Windows 11 laptop or desktop, the operating system often arrives with more than just the OS: promotional games, trial utilities, vendor utilities, and background helpers that quietly launch at startup. Removing that clutter the right way—not hastily or with blind script...

Title: Microsoft Wants to Know Who Isn’t Using Copilot — What the New Viva Insights Benchmarks Mean for Work, Privacy and Management Lead Microsoft has quietly added a new layer to its workplace analytics: Copilot adoption benchmarks inside Viva Insights. The tool gives managers comparative...

Preview users reporting that OneDrive’s new “People” face‑recognition toggle is enabled by default — and that Microsoft will only let you turn it off three times a year — has opened a fresh debate about corporate AI defaults, legal risk and the practical cost of large‑scale biometric features in...

Artificial intelligence on the iPhone has moved from novelty to necessity: the newest generation of mobile AI apps now blends real-time multimodal assistance, on-device privacy options, and deep ecosystem integrations that change how people write, create, search, and work on the go. The roundup...

Microsoft is adding a new set of Copilot adoption benchmarks to the Viva Insights Copilot Dashboard, a feature that will let managers compare how different teams are using Microsoft Copilot — both inside their own organization and against anonymized industry peers — and is entering private...

Snipping Tool in Windows now saves many captures automatically by default, but you can stop it from doing that in a few clicks — and there are important caveats to know about when and why the option may or may not appear on your PC. Background Windows’ built‑in Snipping Tool has evolved from a...

Microsoft’s latest Insider Preview has removed the last easy tricks that let people set up Windows 11 with a purely local account during the Out‑Of‑Box Experience (OOBE), and the resulting round of patches has reignited a familiar cat‑and‑mouse struggle between privacy‑minded users and...

Microsoft’s latest Insider update tightens the screws on Windows 11 setup by removing the easiest ways to create a local account during OOBE (Out‑Of‑Box Experience), but the story is more complicated than a single patch: determined users and imaging tools still have options, and the move exposes...

Windows 11’s setup is changing again: Microsoft has begun removing the well-known in‑OOBE (Out‑Of‑Box Experience) workarounds that let users avoid signing in with a Microsoft Account and complete a fully local installation — a shift that tightens control over the consumer install path and raises...

Microsoft's documentation makes a simple but important distinction: Microsoft Edge will always prompt before sharing your precise location with a website, but websites can still estimate an imprecise location (for example by IP address) without the browser asking permission—and that behavior is...

The "Do Not Track" switch in your browser is not a magic privacy shield — it is simply a polite HTTP header that says "please don't track me," and because that request is voluntary, turning it on has almost no guaranteed effect on the advertising and analytics networks that actually follow you...

Microsoft Edge is quietly being rebuilt around Copilot: recent tests show you can now point the browser’s AI at the tabs you have open — literally sending those tabs into a Copilot conversation — and Microsoft is preparing a complementary feature called Journeys that would summarize days of your...

Microsoft is putting a face — deliberately stylized, tightly guarded, and experiment-first — on Copilot by rolling out a new Copilot Labs feature called Portraits, a real‑time animated portrait system that lip‑syncs, nods, and emotes during voice conversations and is currently available only to...

I started my new Windows PC with a local account to avoid “big‑tech” tracking and keep everything on the machine — but within a week I switched back to a Microsoft account because the conveniences I’d taken for granted simply stopped working, and that trade‑off is now the clearest practical...

Most people who try Linux for the first time are surprised by how small changes — a lighter update schedule, a different package manager, a new desktop environment — can feel like reclaiming control over their PC. Background / Overview The argument to "move to Linux instead of Windows 11" is no...

A recent Business Column in the Norman Transcript — “Privacy and computers should go together, Part Three” — picks up the same thread readers have been arguing about for years: the convenience of modern computing increasingly clashes with the privacy expectations of everyday users, and the...

SURF’s updated Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) has moved two of four previously flagged high privacy risks for Microsoft 365 Copilot in education down to medium, but important hazards — notably AI inaccuracy (hallucinations) and an 18‑month retention window for pseudonymized telemetry —...

Apple, Google, and Microsoft are racing to be the platform that powers your next search, email reply, meeting summary, and photo edit — but those conveniences come with sharply different approaches to where and how your data is processed, stored, and potentially reused. A recent ecosystem...

Microsoft's Copilot button on the Windows 11 taskbar was designed to be a single, always-available gateway to AI assistance — but for a sizeable and vocal segment of Windows users, that convenience has become a nuisance, a privacy risk, and a reason to disable the feature entirely. Background...