Sofia Elizabella Wyciślik-Wilson

Google is not a company synonymous with privacy, but the company increasingly recognizes the importance people place on it. With this in mind, it has launched a new initiative called Privacy Sandbox which aims to increase online privacy.

The bold goal is to "develop a set of open standards to fundamentally enhance privacy on the web", and one of the first proposals seeks to limit online track of users. It will limit fingerprinting, change the way targeted advertising works, and more.

Google has famously named each version of Android after a dessert or confectionery. With Android Q this changes. As well as introducing a new naming scheme, Google is also updating the branding for Android.

Android Q is to be called Android 10 -- bringing Google's mobile operating system in line with Microsoft's Windows 10, and Apple's iPhone X. The new name is accompanied by a new logo and a new color scheme.

Microsoft, Google, Red Hat, IBM and Intel are among those to join the newly formed Confidential Computing Consortium (CCC). The new organization will be hosted at the Linux Foundation, having been established to help define and accelerate the adoption of confidential computing.

The company explains that, "confidential computing technologies offer the opportunity for organizations to collaborate on their data sets without giving access to that data, to gain shared insights and to innovate for the common good". Microsoft will be contributing the Open Enclave SDK that allows developers to build Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) applications using a single enclaving abstraction.

There have been lots of exposés over the last few weeks about the fact that numerous companies -- including Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon and Google -- have been listening to recordings of interactions between customers and digital assistants. The latest revelation is that Microsoft contractors have been listening to Xbox users.

A new report says that contractors working for Microsoft listened to audio clips recorded when Xbox users interacted with Kinect and Cortana on their consoles.

Google has announced that it is killing off yet another of its messaging tools. This time rather than terminating a standalone messaging tool, it is the direct messaging feature of YouTube that is for the chop.

The cut-off date is less than a month away, but Google warns that some messaging elements -- including the sharing of videos through messages -- may vanish before the ultimate end date of September 18.

With a new beta of the Chromium-based version of Edge now available, Microsoft has unveiled details of a new bug bounty program for the browser.

Through the Microsoft Edge Insider Bounty it is possible to earn a maximum payout of $30,000 for discovering vulnerabilities in the Dev and Beta builds of Edge. Microsoft says that it intends to complement the Chrome Vulnerability Reward Program, meaning that any report that affects the latest version of Microsoft Edge but not Chrome will be eligible.

Hackers have taken advantage of a vulnerability in iOS 12.4 to release a jailbreaking tool. This is the first time in many years that it has been possible to jailbreak iPhones running the most recent version of iOS.

Security researchers discovered that in iOS 12.4, Apple has unpatched a vulnerability it previously fixed and it didn't take long for hacker Pwn20wnd to release a free jailbreak tool.

Facebook has launched a new privacy tool, giving users the chance to see and control the data the social network collects about them from other websites.

Called Off-Facebook Activity, the new tool lets users restrict what is shared to Facebook by apps and websites. More than this, it enables Facebook users to sever ties between websites and the social network, with a view to limiting the personalization of ads on Facebook.

Following an initially limited launch earlier this month, Apple's take on the credit card -- the Apple Card -- is now available to everyone in the US.

For now, it is just the US that is being treated to the card. The rest of the world will almost certainly get a look-in at some point in the future, but for now Apple is focusing its attention on Americans.

At a weekend meeting with Donald Trump, Tim Cook made a "compelling" argument for Apple to be exempt from tariffs.

Cook is said to have argued if Apple was forced to pay tariffs, it made it difficult to compete with other companies, such as Samsung. Trump acknowledged that it was "tough" for Apple to be paying tariffs on its China-made products when Samsung was not subject to them, but made no indication that exemption for Apple was on the cards.

Microsoft may have canceled the Super Duper Graphics Pack update for Minecraft, but the blocky game is still due for a graphical improvement... for some people, at least.

At Gamescon in Germany today, Nvidia and Microsoft announced that a real-time ray tracing technique called path tracing will be coming to the Windows 10 version of Minecraft -- but only for systems with NVIDIA GeForce RTX GPUs. The graphic improvements will give Minecrafters better lighting, colors and shadows, and will be delivered by a free update to the game.

Microsoft is investigating a problem that has struck many users installing KB4512508 Cumulative Update for Windows 10 1903.

People whose systems are affected by the problem complain that updates do not install, and Error 0x80073701 is displayed. The issue affects both Windows 10 and Windows Server 1903.

Google is rolling out updates to its Nest Cam, Dropcam and Nest Hello cameras that removes the option to disable status indicator lights.

Citing privacy, Google says that users should "always see a clear visual indicator when your Nest cameras are on and sending video and audio". The company might be introducing the change in the name of privacy, but owners of the devices are far from happy about it.

Microsoft is trying to fix a mysterious issue with Surface Pro 6 and Surface Book 2 devices which is causing CPU speeds to be throttled to a painfully slow 400 MHz.

At the moment it is not clear what is causing the problem, but it appears to be related to an Intel CPU flag -- BD PROCHOT which throttles processor speeds in a bid to reduce temperature.

Apple has updated its WebKit policy, increasing the company's focus on privacy. The new WebKit Tracking Prevention Policy now states that any circumvention of its anti-tracking feature is treated in the same way, and as seriously, as security issues.

The aim is to prevent web tracking completely because "these practices are harmful to users because they infringe on a user's privacy without giving users the ability to identify, understand, consent to, or control them". Apple says it wants "to see a healthy web ecosystem, with privacy by design".