WhatsApp for iOS added over the weekend the ability to lock and hide your chats instantly with your face or fingerprint. The Facebook-owned messaging app now lets you add a layer of biometric security using Apple’s Face ID (if you have any iPhone X model) or Touch ID, which was introduced with 2013. You can …

Samsung might have given us another look at its upcoming foldable phone in a leaked teaser for an event later this month. The company’s Vietnam branch posted a video meant for its Feb. 20 Samsung Unpacked event on YouTube, XDA reported Thursday. The foldable phone video has since been deleted from their channel (but not before it was picked up …

Microsoft is helping you battle fake news on your phone: Its Edge browser now tells you how reliable sites are. The company started installing the NewsGuard plug-in — which you previously had to download manually — on all mobile versions of the browser, as reported by The Guardian. After turning on news rating in Edge’s settings menu, you can see …

Google+ content will start vanishing on April 2, the company said Wednesday. We’ve known the search giant planned to “sunset” the consumer side of its also-ran social network since its October admission that the personal data of up to 500,000 users was exposed between 2015 and March 2018. Originally, Google said the service would close in August 2019, but it …

Snap is looking at letting photos stick around longer on its Snapchat app, according to a report Monday. The social media company is thinking about making public posts live longer or even permanently, as well as revealing the identities of those making the posts, according to Reuters, which cited an anonymous source. Snap is also carefully considering the privacy, technical and …

Activists seeking greater transparency for online political ads say they’ve been struggling to monitor ads on Facebook after changes by the company. Tools created by WhoTargetsMe and ProPublica, groups based in Britain and the US, respectively, have been limited by the social networks’ crackdown on third-party plug-ins, The Guardian reported over the weekend. The browser extensions have allowed the groups …

China’s government may not have censored Microsoft’s Bing search engine after all. The service’s outage stemmed from a technical problem, Reuters reported Monday, citing an anonymous source. Microsoft didn’t get any prior notice of a block from the Chinese government and it wasn’t an intentional move, the source reportedly said. The Financial Times reported last week that the outage was …

Google is reportedly working to bring secure facial recognition support to Android Q. Code discovered in a leaked build of the upcoming 17th version of the search giant’s Android operating system hints at native support for facial recognition, according to XDA. The Android Q system would be used to sign into your phone, authorize purchases and sign in to apps, …

Facebook reportedly duped kids into spending their parents’ money in online games. The social media giant targeted kids in an aggressive effort to pump up revenue from games like Angry Birds, PetVille and Ninja Saga, Reveal reported Thursday, citing court documents from a 2012 class action lawsuit. Reveal is the website run by the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR), a …

Huawei’s CEO has confirmed that we’ll see a foldable 5G phone from the company at Mobile World Congress in February. Richard Yu, the Chinese company’s boss, announced the launch in the closing moments of a pre-MWC 2019 briefing in Beijing. “We look forward to seeing you in Barcelona in February, where we will launch the world’s first 5G smartphone with …