Once a Upon a Time, Phones Were Phones. Then the iPhone Came Along

Vox has launched the newest season of its podcast Land of the Giants. In the first episode they talked to Apple executives about how the iPhone changed everything.

True story. Once upon a time, mobile phones were … phones. You used them to make phone calls. Maybe you’d send some texts, if you were kind of advanced. The iPhone changed all that. And it changed more than the way we used phones: It changed Apple, and it changed culture, and it overturned industries and created new ones. And all of that happened really, really fast: Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone just 14 years ago. But it’s already almost impossible to imagine what life was like before that.

Mozilla Adds Facebook Messenger, Houseparty, and WeChat to 'Privacy Not Included' Guide

In a review of the privacy features of 21 popular video call apps, Mozilla said Apple’s FaceTime is safe, while WeChat, Houseparty, and Facebook Messenger are not.

Says Jen Caltrider, *Privacy Not Included Lead at Mozilla: Video call apps are now a routine part of millions of people’s lives. And even when the pandemic recedes, that won’t change. In this new world, people deserve to know if the apps they’re using everyday respect their privacy — or if they’re snooping on them. While video call apps may feel more intimate than social media platforms, there’s still a ton of data being collected, stored, and shared. For that reason, users should assume that anything they say on a video call app could be made public.