The Bluetooth tracker maker is adding free and paid SOS features to its products, including emergency contact alerts, silent alarms, and real-time location sharing. All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links. Think of Bluetooth trackers and safety in the past few years and your first thought might be the misuse of Apple AirTags and similar devices against women in domestic abuse and stalking cases. Alongside collaborative initiatives to counter and shut down these malicious uses (such as the IETF's Detection of Unwanted Location Trackers, or DULT, standard), tracker makers themselves are flipping the script, turning tech that has been used to monitor women against their will into tech that protects them.

But if you use Google Maps, you might want to check your app is working properly. A bizarre software bug has wiped out years of users' search history with no warning. Hundreds of concerned users have taken to Reddit to share their confusion, with one posting: 'Every single day for the last 3 years just disappeared.' Another replied: 'I'm panicking, I have the same issue.' And one vented: 'Almost 10 years and countless international and domestic timelines gone.

Google Maps users have been urged to act now to avoid permanently losing their important data. Starting next year, the popular navigation app will begin deleting users' personal Timeline from its servers. Originally known as Location History, this feature tracks Google Maps users' every movement, keeping a record of places visited and routes taken. However, according to emails received by Google Maps users, this feature is set to vanish from June 9, 2025, along with almost a decade of user data. Google says it will be moving users' movement history from the cloud to a more secure on-device option.

Everything Google knows about you can be laid bare with a few simple clicks on your smartphone or computer. It goes far beyond where you live, your age, your interests and your favorite stores - the search engine knows more than some of the people closest to you. Google Maps knows all the countries, cities, attractions and local routes you've ever visited. And its Ad Personalization system uses your search history, browsing data and screen time to generate. If you have Location History enabled on your Google account, take a trip down memory lane with the Google Maps Timeline.

Whether it's a romantic weekend away or a relaxing spa break, many of us have enjoyed being able to travel again following the Covid-19 pandemic. If you're planning any holidays, Google Maps' latest feature could be just the thing to make sure the destination passes the'vibe' check first. The app has launched a new'immersive view' tool that combines Street View and aerial images to allow you to virtually explore neighbourhoods. 'With our new immersive view, you'll be able to experience what a neighbourhood, landmark, restaurant or popular venue is like -- and even feel like you're right there before you ever set foot inside,' Miriam Daniel, VP of Google Maps, explained. 'So whether you're traveling somewhere new or scoping out hidden local gems, immersive view will help you make the most informed decisions before you go.'

Technology changes so fast that our lives are radically different from even a decade ago, yet slowly enough that sometimes we don't even notice the changes. We live in the future, in other words, and sometimes it takes a moment to realise what an odd, and perhaps unsettling, future it is. So I'm going to try laying it out for you in plain English. Not one, but two, controversial billionaires have created projects aimed at reading minds. Elon Musk, the South African co-founder of PayPal, unveiled the latest step in his plan to build mind-reading implants two weeks ago.

It is now slightly easier to opt out of Google's panopticon, with the introduction of new controls from the search engine to automatically clear your data after a set period of time. By default, Google saves a permanent history of everything a user has searched for, every website they have visited, activity from any other app, site or device that uses Google services, and a record of their physical movements gleaned from using Google Maps or an Android device. Users have always been able to turn off – or "pause" – that tracking in a settings page, Activity Controls, and, if they remember to, they can manually clear the saved information using the Delete Activity page. But both those options have downsides: if tracking is turned off entirely, some Google products and services no longer work, while deleting activity manually can be a chore, particularly for users with more than one Google account. In May, the company launched the ability to delete saved information automatically after a fixed period of time (three or 18 months are the only options).

Analyzing mobility behavior of users is extremely useful to create or improve existing services. Several research works have been done in order to study mobility behavior of users that mainly use users' significant locations. However, these existing analysis are extremely intrusive because they require the knowledge of the frequently visited places of users, which thus makes it fairly easy to identify them. Consequently, in this paper, we present a privacy-aware methodology to analyze mobility behavior of users. We firstly propose a new metric based on the well-known Shannon entropy, called spatio-temporal entropy, to quantify the mobility level of a user during a time window. Then, we compute a sequence of spatio-temporal entropy from the location history of the user that expresses user's movements as rhythms. We secondly present how to study the effects of several groups of additional variables on the evolution of the spatio-temporal entropy of a user, such as spatio-temporal, demographic and mean of transportation variables. For this, we use Generalized Additive Models (GAMs). The results firstly show that the spatio-temporal entropy and GAMs are an ideal combination to understand mobility behavior of an individual user or a group of users. We also evaluate the prediction accuracy of a global GAM compared to individual GAMs and individual AutoRegressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) models. These last results highlighted that the global GAM gives more accurate predictions of spatio-temporal entropy by checking the Mean Absolute Error (MAE). In addition, this research work opens various threads, such as the prediction of demographic data of users or the creation of personalized mobility prediction models by using movement rhythm characteristics of a user.

Google is facing an onset of privacy concerns after it announced it plans to dissolve the Nest brand in favor of a new, all-purpose smart home division, called Google Nest. As part of the decision, existing users of Nest smart thermostats, security cameras and other products will be forced to migrate their information over to a Google account. The announcement, made at Google's I/O developer conference last week, has caught the eye of some users and experts who say it gives them little control over the future of their Nest data and, as a result, their privacy. When Google acquired Nest in 2014 for $3.2 billion, Nest pledged to keep the data it collects on its users separate from Googles other services. 'When you work with Nest and use Nest products, that data does not go into the greater Google or any of its other business units,' Tony Fadell, former CEO of Nest, told BBC in 2015.

Ever wish that you could get compensated for perusing the internet? Turns out a new web browser is willing to make your dreams come true -- that is, if you're willing to look at a few ads in the process. The privacy-focused browser, Brave, which was designed to eliminate advertisements and allow users to peruse the web without other companies collecting their information, will now compensate users who allow some ads. Under the new feature, when a user decides to opt-in on the Brave supported ads, they will be paid 70 percent of the ad revenue through crypto tokens when they decide to interact (click). The tokens called Basic Attention Tokens will be given out once a month according to Gizmodo.