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Instagram Asking Users to Share Their Birthday

Charlotte Henry ·

Instagram announced Monday that it is asking users to confirm their birthday if they have not shared it with the photo-sharing service before. Pavni Diwanji, VP of Youth Products at the Facebook-owned app, said in a blog post that it was aiming to create better safety features for younger users.

First, we’ll start to ask you for your birthday when you open Instagram. We’ll show you a notification a handful of times and if you haven’t provided us with your birthday by a certain point, you’ll need to share it to continue using Instagram. This information is necessary for new features we’re developing to protect young people. Second, if you see warning screens placed on posts, we’ll ask you for your birthday before you can see the post. These screens aren’t new, and we already show them on posts that may be sensitive or graphic, but we don’t currently ask for your birthday when viewing these posts. Now, we’ll start asking for your birthday on some of these screens if you haven’t shared it with us previously.

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Was That a Notchless Next-Gen iPhone on Ted Lasso?

Jeff Butts ·

We’ve been hearing speculation that the next generation of the iPhone will have a smaller camera notch than current models. Through either an unintentional leak or just a post-production editing mistake, the Ted Lasso audience got a peek of a notchless next-gen iPhone in the August 27 episode. The handset looks like an iPhone 12 from the rear, but images of the screen seem to show iOS 14 wallpaper without the usual cutout from the camera notch.

Apple is notorious for its secrecy, so it seems unlikely that this is a deliberate signal that the notch is disappearing from the iPhone 13. That said, it’s been rumored for months now that the iPhone 13 would have a much smaller notch or a hole-punch selfie camera. However, a completely notchless display isn’t believed to be in the cards for this year’s iPhone.

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Examining Apple's Carefree Attitude Towards Employee Privacy

Andrew Orr ·

Zoe Schiffer, writing for The Verge, investigates Apple employees and “the blurring of personal and work accounts.”

This is how it starts: a new Apple employee is told during onboarding that collaborating with their colleagues will require them to make extensive use of iCloud storage, and their manager offers a two terabyte upgrade. This will link their personal Apple ID to their work account — in fact, the instructions for accessing this upgrade explicitly say “you must link your personal Apple ID with your AppleConnect work account.”

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Private Search Engine 'Xayn' Releases Web Version of its App

Andrew Orr ·

An AI company based in Berlin, Germany called Xayn has launched a web version of its private search engine app.

Both versions of Xayn use Masked Federated Learning to protect users’ data privacy while still providing them with an individually tailored web experience. They are created with the same code base in Flutter, a developing framework that’s designed to function both on mobile and web. The team transferred the AI to work directly in the respective browsers with high speed via WebAssembly so that all personal data stays privately within the browsers.

Looks like it doesn’t work yet on Safari.