From the location data, an app can extract personal information and asks users to give feedback on the correctness of such information as well as to rate its relevance in terms of privacy sensitivity.

An umbrella group comprising 44 consumer-privacy watchdog organizations filed a complaint against TikTok, saying the wildly-popular video-sharing platform has “misleading” data-collection policies.

The Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) has confirmed that Agora, a Shanghai-based provider of real-time engagement software, supplies back-end infrastructure to the Clubhouse app.

Telstra said it is now blocking 6.5 million suspected scam calls a month, at times up to 500,000 a day, thanks to automating the former manual process that sat at around 1 million monthly scam calls.

With the release of iOS 14 last fall, Apple has added a new security system to iPhones and iPads to protect users against attacks carried out via the iMessage instant messaging client.

Apple said that new privacy pop-up notifications will start appearing on most iPhones as soon as early spring, a requirement that major digital ad firms have warned will harm their businesses.

Apps must now include so-called privacy labels, which list the types of data being collected in an easily scannable format. The labels resemble a nutrition marker on food packaging.

A researcher who noted that using the "People Nearby" feature of popular messaging app Telegram exposed the exact location of the user has been told that it's working as expected.

Israeli phone-hacking firm Cellebrite can now break into Signal, an encrypted messaging app considered safe from external snooping, it claimed in a blog post on Thursday.

Google has begun rolling out end-to-end encryption for Rich Communication Service, the text-messaging standard the industry giant is pushing as an alternative to the older SMS protocol.