OPINION: It’s Sunday, which means it’s time to pick our winner and loser for the bank holiday weekend.
This past week saw Bang & Olufsen launch a new speaker, the CMA block the Microsoft and Activision deal and some exciting new rumours regarding the Motorola Razr (2023).
Scroll down to discover who we crowned our winner and loser this week.
Our winner this week is Meta, after the company finally began rolling out multi-phone support for WhatsApp.
The feature – which has long been requested by users – allows users to remain signed in to the app on up to four phones at the same time. This means they won’t need to sign out and sign back in when moving between multiple devices.
Users have had the option to access chats across web browsers, tablets and desktops as well as smartphones for a couple of years, but, until now, there wasn’t the option to sign in on multiple phones.
This previously made moving between multiple devices tricky for users that travel often or move between two devices for work and personal use. It also created problems for WhatsApp Business users wanting to add multiple employees to the same account.
If you’re concerned about security, you’ll be happy to hear that personal messages, media and calls will all remain end-to-end encrypted. WhatsApp also says that it will log you out of a second device if you remain inactive for long periods (though it isn’t clear exactly what length of time they consider a long period).
All-in-all, this update will make messaging friends, family and customers a lot easier for those regularly juggling two or more devices.
Loser: Snapchat
Last week, Snapchat announced it would be rolling out its My AI chatbot to all users after initially testing the feature with Snapchat+ subscribers.
My AI is a chatbot powered by the incredibly popular ChatGPT, though Snapchat’s version has limited functionality. My AI is designed to complete simple tasks, such as answer questions, suggest plans for you and your friends and offer directions to nearby shops and locations.
Despite taking a more casual direction than ChatGPT, My AI has already come under fire for misleading users on a number of subjects, with perhaps the most dangerous being the way Snapchat handles location data.
Twitter user @rewolfe27 shared a conversation with My AI, in which the chatbot assured it him it did not have access to his location before offering directions to the nearest McDonalds. When asked how it knew that, the AI stated that it used the location data the user had provided earlier.
When @rewolfe27 reiterated that he hadn’t provided any location data, my AI did a 180 and apologised, responding “You are right. I apologize for the confusion. I don’t have access to your location information, so I can’t tell you where the closest McDonald’s is”.
Another user claimed My AI told them they were wrong about Queen Elizabeth having passed away last year.
Snapchat took to its privacy and safety hub on Tuesday to reassure users that My AI is not able to collect any new location information and instead relies on data that has already been provided to Snapchat to facilitate features like the Snap Map.
Crucially, if you do revoke location permissions, it can take time for My AI to catch up.
“If Snapchatters stop sharing their location with Snapchat, it may take a little time for this to take effect in My AI”, wrote Snapchat. “We encourage Snapchatters to continue to share feedback with us about My AI and to report any inaccurate responses to our teams — so we can keep working to make My AI more accurate, fun, and useful”.
While this will hopefully clear up some confusion for Snapchat users, it nevertheless caused My AI to get off to a bumpy start.
