Do third-party app developers read your Gmail? Google responds

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After a Wall Street Journal report described how third-party developers might be reading your emails on Gmail, Google responded with a blog post, describing the measures the company takes to ensure your security and privacy within the service.

The post, signed by Suzanne Frey, Director of Security, Trust and Privacy at Google Cloud, admits that Google allows third party developers to access your Gmail messages, but only if you've granted them permission, and only after they pass a strict review process.

Google has been a little more careful than Facebook when it comes to protecting your privacy. But if you're not careful about granting permissions in Gmail to third-party apps, your emails could still theoretically fall into the wrong hands. To check which third-party apps you've allowed to access your Gmail, go to myaccount.google.com and click on "Apps with account access."


Send message feature to empower WhatsApp’s group admins

The instant messaging application – WhatsApp – has incorporated a "Send message" option which will only allow the admin of a group to send a message. In simple words, by enabling this feature, only the group admin will be able to send messages in the group and no one else.

Members will not be able to participate in any group discussions or chats after the feature has been enabled by the admin. None can respond to the messages, they can only read the message sent by the admin. With this feature, the admin of a WhatsApp group can basically disable the chat feature. This means, only the admin can send messages in the group. It is noteworthy that the feature can be controlled only by the group admin, one or more.


This 'mobile airbag' will save your smartphone if it crashes to the floor

A good case and a screen protector might protect you from the worst of the damage, but those things can only do so much. That's where this inventive "mobile airbag" comes into play.

Conceived by Philip Frenzel, a German engineering student, this specialised case deploys springy, spider-like legs as it starts to fall. The legs appear to soften the impact of a fall more than your average case, while also making it less likely your smartphone's more fragile bits come into contact with a hard surface.

Frenzel's design secured him a 2018 award from the German Society for Mechatronics and he pursued the idea because of his personal experience with a broken phone. This "ADcase" – "AD" stands for "active damping" – was inventive enough to secure Frenzel his award.

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