The world's largest drone manufacturer has announced plans for a new smartphone app that lets users identify mysterious drones flying around their neighborhood. Developed by DJI, the Shenzhen based drone giant, the unnamed app is targeted for a release in early 2020 pending approval by government regulators. The app will have a range of around .6 miles using WiFi Aware, a new communication protocol that allows WiFi-enabled devices to communicate with one another. DJI announced the new app at the United Nations-sponsored Drone Enable conference in Montreal this week. 'We've created a remote identification solution that works with what people already have,' DJI's Brendan Schulman told Reuters.

Developed by UK tech company Babylon, the initiative follows widespread criticism of the much-maligned hotline, which has been beset by problems. The app, initially available to people in Camden, Islington, Enfield and Barnet, will address urgent but non-life-threatening conditions. Users will be able to type details of their ailments and the artificial intelligence will ask further questions to assess their condition, while matching the responses with medical databases. According to the Financial Times, the process requires 12 messages and an average of ninety seconds to make a provisional diagnosis. In comparison, the average call time for a 111 user spanned from 10 to 12 minutes.

Researchers are developing a personalised privacy assistant app that can simplify the task of setting permissions for your smartphone applications. That is a job that requires well over a hundred decisions, an unmanageable number for the typical user, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in the US said. The privacy assistant can learn the user's preferences and quickly recommend the most appropriate settings, such as with which app to share the user's location, or contact list. In the field test, people accepted almost 80 per cent of the recommendations made by the privacy assistant and, at the end of the study, these people indicated they were more comfortable with their privacy settings than users who did not have a privacy assistant, researchers said. "It is clear that people just cannot cope with the complexities of privacy settings associated with the apps they have on their smartphones," said Norman Sadeh from CMU.