Clubhouse has finally made direct private messaging available right on the app instead of having to go to IG, it’s called BACKCHANNEL. One of the biggest weaknesses of Clubhouse (the Clubhouse app) has been its complete lack of a way for users to privately message between themselves. With the July 14th update, Clubhouse now officially as a way to private message users without having to leave Clubhouse.

While ‘archive’ had always been an option previously, now the only options for dealing with a received message in the Facebook Messenger app are ‘Mark as Unread’, ‘Ignore Messages’, blocking the sender, or deleting the message. Ignoring the message is the closest message option to archiving it, however that moves the message to “Message Requests”, which is not at all what you want to do.

If you’ve ever been asked “what is your IP address”, or just wondered “what is my IP address”, here’s an easy way to find out. And if you are now wondering “what is an IP address”, we explain that too!

One of the first things that people do when researching someone – be it a potential employer or employee, a vendor, or even a date – is to search for them in Google or another search engine. And often this will turn up a link to their LinkedIn profile. But you know that Linked In shows members who has visited their profile, and you don’t want them to know that you were checking up on them. It turns out that there is a way to visit someone’s profile on LinkedIn privately, and even anonymously. Here’s how to enable private, anonymous viewing of LinkedIn profiles.

You know that old adage, that something is only as strong as its weakest link? Well, private Facebook groups are only as private as the admins keep them. Which means that all it takes is for one admin to accidentally (or intentionally) make the group public for a period of time, during which people who aren’t members of the closed Facebook group can see both the members, and what they posted. So how safe is it to rely on the private, closed status of a Facebook group? Not very, it turns out.

By now you may have heard that Twitter has added a group messaging feature, i.e. the ability to send a private direct message to a group of up to 20 people at once, and of course they can reply back to the group as well. Here’s how to use Twitter’s new group messaging function.

Wondering how to download and archive all of the private Facebook chat messages you have exchanged with one particular person? Facebook does not make it easy to figure out how to save your entire private Facebook message chat thread with one particular person, so we will. Here’s how.

Blackberry has certainly had its share of problems. From global Blackberry outages to Yahoo making Blackberry not an option at Yahoo, to CEO Thorsten Heins rather ridiculously predicting the death of tablets, the Blackberry has certainly seen better days.

Proposed California law AB 242, introduced by Assemblyman Ed Chau, is creating quite a buzz due to its wording, or rather, proposed lack of wording. AB 242 would require that all commercial websites and services offered through the Internet which collect personal information about California consumers make its privacy policy be written at a level of 8th grade reading, and be no longer 100 words.

Tired of having to resort to eBay or Craigslist to sell the stuff you no longer want? Or trying to give it away on FreeCycle only to have some overzealous moderator reject it? So was the creator of GTSList.com, the online garage sale where you can sell your stuff to friends and family, for free, and while keeping it private so you are not opening your home to random strangers. GTS List takes the idea of the online yard sale that often takes place on sites such as Craigslist, and combines it with the experience of having an old-fashioned yard sale, by making it a virtual yard sale. While a virtual garage sale is nothing new, we think they’re on to something by giving sellers the ability to keep their sale as private as they’d like.

Today Google posted some news on their blog, along with the release of their Transparency Report, which shows increasing requests from the government for private user data. In fact, the report shows that, of all the governments in the world, the U.S. leads the pack in personal information requests.

Do you use Google Calendar? If you answered “no”, well, are you sure that you don’t use Google Calendar? Because even if you don’t use Google Calendar directly, if you use a calendar on the iPhone, or on an Android phone, you may well be using Google Calendar on the back end without even thinking about it. The same is true if you “share” your calendar from your Mac. And here’s the thing, your calendar on Google may be set to “public” view by default. Meaning that anyone can read your calendar. And it will turn up in public Google search results.

We’re betting that some in the Google inner circle are ruing the day that someone at Google HQ first uttered “Don’t be evil.” Like Bush’s “Read my lips, no new taxes”, it has become the iconic soundbite with which they are most associated. How that gels with the news that Google is now forcing anyone with a Google Profile to make that profile public or lose it, well, we’re sure we don’t know. But there it is: where users used to be able to keep their Google Profile private, Google has made clear that private profiles will no longer be permitted. Either take your Google Profile public, or lose it when they do a mass deletion of all private Google profiles on July 31st.

More information is coming to light about the situation with Google and David Barksdale, a Google engineer who used his access to the massive stores of data that Google has gathered about its own users to spy on the private lives (and data) of several Google users, who also happened to be minors. That’s right – Google employee David Barksdale was spying on children, even cyberbullying them, using the access that his position with Google afforded him to look at the private information of children. What’s more, it was going on for months.