It’s time to put the phone down, and Google — yes, the company behind the world’s most popular smartphone operating system — wants to help with that. At Google I/O on Tuesday, the company announced a set of new features for Android designed to manage how much time people spend on devices. It may seem …

Google’s Advanced Protection program isn’t exclusive to Google’s own apps anymore. It’s now bringing iOS users under the umbrella. The company on Thursday announced that it’s expanding its high security features to iOS apps, including Apple Mail, Contacts and Calendar. Google first rolled out the program last October, designed to protect high-risk internet users, like politicians, campaign staffers, business leaders, …

Facebook is looking to be a jack of all trades with new features coming to its apps.  At F8, the social network’s annual conference, CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduced several new additions for the company’s apps, including Instagram and Messenger, that position Facebook to take on other apps, like Snapchat, Tinder and Houseparty.  The features dive into the worlds of augmented …

Facebook wants to help people change their relationship status.  Mark Zuckerberg announced a new feature for the social network on Tuesday focused on dating, taking a jab at dating apps like Tinder and Bumble.  Now playing: Watch this: Find a date on Facebook 2:39 “Today, we are announcing a new set of features, coming soon, around dating,” Zuckerberg said during …

The company behind low-priced, top-selling phones on Amazon has reached a settlement with the US Federal Trade Commission over privacy practices. After security researchers discovered in 2016 that Blu’s phones were sending personal data — including text messages, contact lists and locations — to servers in China, the Florida-based company said it would update the software to fix the “mistake.” …

Now playing: Watch this: Gmail gets a big reboot (The 3:59, Ep. 392) 4:19 On this podcast, we talk about: The new Gmail and what features it comes with A hack that turned Amazon’s Alexa into a listening device How digital currencies are helping the poor out of poverty The 3:59 gives you bite-size news and analysis about the top …

Virtual reality systems like the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift are so immersive that they require digital barriers so you don’t run into a real wall in the middle of an intense game. But there’s nothing stopping an attacker from changing what you see in VR, according to researchers from the University of New Haven in Connecticut. The researchers found …

Now playing: Watch this: Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV just got a much cheaper choice… 4:07 On this podcast, we talk about: Philo, the cheapest live-TV streaming service around, heading to Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV The US government dropping the hammer on ZTE, a Chinese phone company Facebook’s problem with memes and disinformation The 3:59 gives you …

TaskRabbit has a job for cybersecurity experts: find out what happened to their own network. The handyman-for-hire app, which connects workers with people who have a task they’d rather pay someone else to do, sent an alert to its users on Monday, informing them that they were “investigating a cybersecurity incident.” The company, which Ikea acquired in September, said it’s working with …

When the team behind Google’s Chrome OS software and Chromebooks set out to reinvent the laptop, it quickly zeroed in on security as an area where it could bring a fresh perspective. “On Chrome OS, we were like, ‘We control all the pieces. We can do better,'” Will Drewry, a principal software engineer for Google’s devices, and one of the …