Instant messaging

WhatsApp will begin rolling out the new features this month. Photo: Karl-Josef Hildenbrand (AP)WhatsApp will be rolling out a number of new privacy features that allow its users to be a lot more discreet with their online chats. The new features include exiting a group chat without notifying its members, hiding your online status, and preventing other users from screenshotting ‘view once’ messages. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the new features via a brief Facebook post on Tuesday. “We’ll keep building new ways to…

Snapchat has introduced its first ever parental controls, under an app section called Family Center. The company described the new feature in a blogpost on Tuesday. Parents and guardians will now be able to keep tabs on who their teens are friends with and who they’ve chatted with recently (provided the aforementioned teens agree to the monitoring in-app). Notably though, the content of those conversations won’t be visible to parents. “Family Center is designed to reflect the way that parents engage with their teens in…

If you’ve followed the history of chatbots at all, you’ll know many of them tend to have a pretty pesky racism problem.In 2016, Microsoft released its “Tay” chatbot on Twitter to learn from users’ conversations, only to have the artificial intelligence transform into a racist asshole espousing sympathy for Hitler within 24 hours. Another chatbot trained on 4Chan users earlier this year quickly racked up more than 15,000 racist posts within a day. So, naturally when Gizmodo found out Meta, the company formerly known as…

SmarterChild is a chatbot near and dear to my heart. Although it’s not the original one to surface, it was the first I had an interaction with that freaked out my teenage brain to the extent that I remember asking myself, “Is this real?”SmarterChild was a bot developed to work with the instant messaging programs at the time, including AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), Yahoo! Messenger, and what was previously known as MSN Messenger. The company behind SmarterChild, called ActiveBuddy, launched the chatbot in 2000. I vividly…

Photo: KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV/AFP (Getty Images)Leaked documents from within TikTok reveal how the company games out responses to tricky questions — and highlight what the company thinks its biggest public perception problems are. Chief among them: China. The PR documents, which Gizmodo obtained from within the company, are titled “TikTok Master Messaging” and “TikTok Key Messages.” Both are explanations of press talking points in English and include a version translated into a European language. (Gizmodo is not naming the…

Google Chat is officially the dominant chat app on the Google Workspaces platform. Photo: Florence Ion / GizmodoGoogle is officially urging Hangouts holdouts to migrate over to the new messaging suite, called Chat. Starting today, if you’re still using Hangouts on your mobile device, you’ll see an in-app screen urging you to move to Chat in Gmail or the separate Chat app. If you’re on Chrome, you’ll start to see the prompt encouraging you to accept the inevitability of what’s happening beginning in July. Hangouts on the…