How To

ChatGPT, Gemini, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn use your data for AI training unless you object. Where the setting or form is, what an objection covers and why it only applies from now on. Plus the state of the GDPR reform in which EU member states want to rewrite the right to object to AI training.

OpenAI is rolling out GPT-6 in the regular ChatGPT Chat tab, and Free and Go users start getting it on October 8. They get GPT-6 Luna, while paid plans get GPT-6 Sol. The update also adds Intelligent UI, with diagrams, buttons and small calculators inside answers. Here is what older desktop apps miss, how to reduce the visuals and where OpenAI contradicts itself.

One UI 9 is rolling out to Galaxy phones, but not every protection is active after the update. Theft protection has to be switched on by hand, and older models may still have Auto Blocker turned off. Scam Detection for calls is limited to a few countries. Here is what to check after updating.

Google is rolling out the October 2026 update for Pixel phones, and the Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro are included. It is likely their last monthly update, since Google's five-year promise for both phones ends this month. The article explains how to check your patch level and lists the support end dates for the Pixel 6a, Pixel 7 and Pixel 7a.

OpenAI plans to base ChatGPT ads in Europe on profiles built from chats, memory and usage data. The data protection authorities of Hamburg and Berlin have warned against it. Personalized ads are not yet available in the EEA, and there is no start date. Here are the settings worth checking now and why declining does not remove the ads.

Amazon's Prime Big Deal Days run on October 6 and 7 in 22 countries, and scammers are registering lookalike domains by the hundreds. In Germany, a court ruling has Amazon sending real emails about Prime fees at the same time. Here is how to check whether a message comes from Amazon and how to lock down your account before the sale.

Starting Thursday, October 9, Google will limit the free Gemini app to its smallest model, Flash-Lite. Flash and Pro will no longer be available without a subscription. Google AI Plus also loses Pro, and subscribers will get the date by email. AI Pro subscribers gain Deep Think, which is currently limited to AI Ultra.

Apple plans to make Full Disk Access on macOS harder to grant. The permission lets apps and AI agents such as Meta's Muse read files, mail, messages and Safari history. Apple has not said when the change arrives. You can already check in System Settings which apps have it.

ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Copilot all work without a subscription. Each one still takes something in return, whether that is ads, your chats as training data or a smaller model. Here is what each free plan offers, what is switched on by default and which settings to check before your next chat.

ChatGPT Plus and Pro subscribers can now let apps such as Notion, Vercel and Devin use their ChatGPT plan. OpenAI announced the option at DevDay. The app gets your name, email address and profile picture, but not your chats. Signing out of the app does not end the connection. That has to happen in ChatGPT.

Plenty of guides still name October 13, 2026 as the end of the Windows 10 grace period. Microsoft has quietly extended Extended Security Updates for home users to October 2027. In the European Economic Area, though, the free option still ends for anyone who stops signing in with a Microsoft account.

Google is retiring Gems in Gemini. From November 17, 2026, custom, premade and shared Gems will be converted to skills automatically, and Gemini already shows the notice to users in Germany. According to Google, skills require the Keep Activity setting and are limited to users over 18. Here is what to check before the switch.

With iOS 27, Apple rebuilt Screen Time for families, adding Ask to Browse, Time Allowances and a pause for school hours. Installing the update does not turn any of it on, and several protections stay off by default once a child turns 13. Here is what parents on iPhone and Android need to set up themselves.

OpenAI's AI agents posted 53 images that ChatGPT users had uploaded to image-hosting sites. Only content that was eligible for model training was affected, and OpenAI cannot tell anyone whether their images were among them. Which setting keeps your images out of training from now on, and the exception OpenAI names itself.

Since Wednesday, ChatGPT's voice mode can pull data from connected apps such as Gmail, Google Calendar and Slack, including on the free plan. OpenAI does not accept spoken approval, so any action that needs a yes still has to be confirmed on the display. One setting decides what ChatGPT may read without asking, and disconnecting an app is a separate step.

Google has added 14 connected apps to Gemini, including Adobe, Peloton, Experian and Airtable. According to Google's own availability table, 10 of them work only in the US. Outside the US, just Adobe, monday.com and Wispr AI are available, and only in English. Disconnecting an app later does not delete what Gemini has already saved.

Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 5.5 on Tuesday. Pro subscribers get it without paying extra, which is not how Fable 5.1 arrived, and the five-hour limits go up at the same time. Every subscriber also gets a rate limit reset to spend when they want. The app puts a deadline on it that the announcement leaves out.

OpenAI sets a cookie called __obi on ChatGPT, keeps it for a year and ties it to your account. Visit a site that buys ChatGPT ads and your browser hands that identifier back to OpenAI along with what you were looking at. OpenAI's own cookie policy files it under analytics. Here is what travels with it and what you can switch off.

Apple shipped a feature with iOS 27 that spots the moment someone is pressuring you into a payment. It covers the gap two-factor authentication cannot close. The feature arrives switched off, changes take up to 24 hours, and it only works in apps Apple has not named.

Sharing a file by link does not hand the link back when you are done. It keeps working, it shows your email address to anyone who opens it, and Google lists those readers as anonymous animals. The expiration date everyone recommends is a paid feature at Google, Microsoft and Dropbox alike.

About 347,000 Trezor newsletter subscribers received a warning about a fake hardware defect, sent from the real address mailing@trezor.io. It passed every authentication check because the newsletter provider Brevo had been breached. BitBox and CoinTracking were hit too. Here is what actually protects you.

GMX and WEB.DE are allowed to empty an unused free mailbox after 6 months and hand the address to another user after 12. Section 5.3 of their terms says so at both providers. Anyone still using that address at a shop, an insurer or an old account is sending their password resets to a stranger.

Turning on two-factor authentication gives you 10 backup codes and the instruction to keep them safe. Almost nobody says where. Microsoft says not to store them on the device you sign in with, Instagram suggests a screenshot, and Google's own help page names the file the codes are saved as. Infostealer malware searches for exactly that.

A new password does not sign out every session, and most providers never say what it actually does. Google keeps showing devices you factory reset, Amazon leaves Kindles signed in, Netflix hides anything idle for 90 days. Where the device lists of Google, Microsoft, Apple, WhatsApp, Netflix, Instagram and Amazon are, and how to clear them in 10 minutes.

The retail box of the Nintendo Switch 2 sold in Europe doesn't say if it is the launch version or the revised version with a user-replaceable battery. Here's how to know which one it is before you make payment.

The Huawei Watch GT 7 is compatible with Android and iOS and can be easily paired with multiple smartphones. Find out how it works here.

ChatGPT, Claude and Grok all went down within hours of each other on Wednesday. How often that happens is public: OpenAI reports 99.64 percent uptime for ChatGPT over 90 days, Anthropic 99.4 percent for claude.ai. That works out to roughly 8 and 13 hours. Here is where the numbers live and what to do next time.

Google is promoting four network protections in Android 17. The most important one, Encrypted Client Hello, hides the websites and apps you open from your carrier. Google's own developer docs show it only kicks in for apps built against the new API level, and without encrypted DNS it does nothing at all.

ChatGPT Work's cloud browser got its own sign-in form on August 25. You type the username and password yourself, and OpenAI says the model never sees them and does not store them. The session it keeps afterwards is a different matter, and it lives on a computer at OpenAI. Here is where the off switch sits.

OpenAI switches on ChatGPT Ads in 31 European markets on 24 August. Only Free and Go users see them, and in the EEA and Switzerland there is no personalization at launch, so there is nothing to consent to yet. The free plan still hides an ads-free option that costs you messages and tools.

Germany has no legal waiting period before a disconnected mobile number is handed to someone new. Deutsche Telekom itself describes cases where numbers are released after 30 days. Whoever gets that number also receives the one-time codes for the previous owner's accounts. The US regulates this. What you should clear out today.

Six signs are supposed to give away a synthetic voice on the phone. Two of them appear in no source at all, three are technically obsolete, and the one that still works has nothing to do with sound. The largest listening study to date also shows that people are not getting better at catching fakes. They are getting worse at believing real voices.

OpenAI has switched on Computer History in the ChatGPT app for macOS. It records clicks, keystrokes and app switches, then turns them into a timeline and memories. OpenAI's own documentation says the files are not encrypted and that other programs on your Mac may be able to read them.

Twitch uses creator content to train Amazon's generative AI models. The setting arrived on August 12 already switched on for every account, with no announcement. It covers streams, chat, VODs, clips and images. Here is where the setting can be found and what it does not cover.

Microsoft's support page names four AI components inside a Copilot+ PC. Its own delivery list has nine, among them Semantic Analysis, Content Extraction and Image Search. Exactly one can be removed since late July, and Microsoft only turned it into a separate package on that very day. What really goes, what only switches off and what stays.

Your phone is gone. You still know the password, but the second factor lived on that exact device. We read the recovery procedures at Google, Apple and Microsoft, and the ones at 1Password, Bitwarden and Dashlane. All six come down to the same thing. Nothing can be set up after the fact, and at one provider the account is gone for good.

Zenity Labs demonstrated at Black Hat USA 2026 that Claude in Chrome, Gemini in Chrome, Perplexity Comet, ChatGPT Atlas and Copilot Edge can all be turned against their own users by ordinary content. An email, a calendar invite or a link under a social post is enough, and the victim never clicks anything. Here is what the attacks did and how to lock your agent down.

OpenAI has been testing ads in ChatGPT since February. The booking tool for businesses is now live in seven countries, Brazil and Mexico are still waiting, and Germany is not on the list at all. You can get rid of the ads, but you pay in daily messages or in subscription fees.

Two FIDO2 keys, same standard, same price. One asks for a PIN, the other just needs a tap. On most models no PIN is set at the factory, and whether you are asked at all is usually the website’s decision. We read the manuals from Yubico, Token2, Nitrokey, OnlyKey, Feitian and Google.

OpenAI removes the official DALL-E GPT from ChatGPT on August 30, 2026. If you created images through it, download them before then. ChatGPT Images takes over and is available on every tier, free accounts included. Custom GPTs with image generation are not affected. Here is what goes, what stays and how to save your images.

OpenAI is discontinuing its AI browser ChatGPT Atlas on August 9, 2026, less than ten months after its launch. Bookmarks, open tabs, and browsing history will not be automatically transferred to another browser. Users who want to keep them must export them themselves beforehand. Atlas will no longer receive security updates anyway.

A strong password alone won't be enough in 2026. Data breaches and phishing get past it. Two-factor authentication and, above all, passkeys make your accounts truly secure. We show you which methods protect best, how to set them up in a few minutes, and who should consider a hardware key.

An AI chatbot doesn't have to run in the cloud. With LM Studio or Ollama, you can run it right on your laptop, without an internet connection and without your data ever leaving your device. What your hardware needs to be capable of, which model is right for you, and how to get started in ten minutes.

Memory and training are controlled separately, and deleting a chat does not erase saved facts. Here's how to control what ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude store and use for training while protecting customer and company data.

Well-known AI assistants got a memory in 2026. They remember how you work and what matters to you beyond individual chats. What ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini can do with it, how you stay in control, and why Gemini can remember preferences but cannot access the Google data of European users.

CheckMag Inspiration can strike at any time, and in this case, it happened while running. With the help of Gemini, I was able to take an idea into a working prototype all in the span of a six-mile run.

A new web app uses the Steam Controller’s haptic motors to make the gamepad slide deliberately across a table through vibrations. Anyone who owns a Steam Controller can try it right away – no installation required.

Learn how to check if your PC is ready for Microsoft's Secure Boot certificate update using official built-in tools like the Windows Security app.

A pair of headphones supports a specific audio codec like LDAC—but what does that actually mean? More importantly, how do you use it to improve sound quality? Using the Marshall Milton as an example, we'll show you how to enable the codec and when the difference is actually noticeable.

Learn how to use the Windows 11 Shared Audio tool to broadcast sound to two Bluetooth headsets at once, along with the hardware requirements.