Pushbullet has to be one of the most widely adopted apps for Android. It lets you share links, notifications, images, and more across your smartphone and virtually any other device. Today, the company announced that it has added a new SMS UI to its desktop presence. With today’s update, you can now you can see entire conversations on your computer.
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Former Android head and Xiaomi VP Hugo Barra has apologized to owners of its smartphones for “any concern caused” by collecting contact data from address books without permission.
A recent […] report by F-Secure raised privacy concerns by stating that Xiaomi devices are sending phone numbers to Xiaomi’s servers. These concerns refer to the MIUI Cloud Messaging service. As we believe it is our top priority to protect user data and privacy, we have decided to make MIUI Cloud Messaging an opt-in service and no longer automatically activate users […]
We apologize for any concern caused to our users and Mi fans. We would also like to thank the media and users who have been sending us feedback and suggestions, allowing us to improve and provide better Internet services …
We reported earlier this year that Google has plans to eventually roll Google Voice’s features into its Hangouts service and retire the former product, and we’re slowly seeing that transition play out now. Google’s Alex Weisen, who works on Google Voice, shared last night in a Google+ post that they’re making calling via Hangouts an option from the Google Voice website. Furthermore, the functionality will not require a Google+ account to work either. The option appears to be live on the Google Voice web interface now.
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In a study conducted by security research firm Zscaler, 28% of Android apps request permission to read old SMS logs, while a whopping 68% request permission to send SMS messages from your phone. They also found that 36% of apps request GPS permissions, while over 46% request access to the “phone’s state”, allowing the app to gather information related to the SIM card, IMEI number, serial number and more. For the study, Zscaler analyzed over 75,000 apps from the Google Play store and logged the requested permissions from each app. Being a security firm, Zscaler considers SMS and GPS related permissions to be the two most “high risk” permissions to grant access to, with “device information related permissions” landing sixth on the list.
Android Police has screenshots suggesting that both SMS and MMS messaging are being integrated into Google Hangouts, with the standalone Messaging app likely to be dropped from KitKat (Android 4.4) – first on Nexus devices and later on others.
The screenshots claim to be from Hangouts 1.3. It’s just speculation that this will ship with KitKat – it’s possible that it may be released before or after. We have recently seen claimed screenshots of KitKat that include the Messaging app, but that isn’t inconsistent with the idea that it would be dropped from the Nexus first …
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