The one tiny image of the new silver Mac Mini shows what appear to be a headphone jack and two front-facing USB-C ports, presumably with at least Thunderbolt 4 support. It’s available with a base or Pro version of the new M4 chipset, with up to 14 CPU cores, 20 GPU cores, 64GB of memory, and 8TB of storage. The backside ports will remain a mystery for now.
The M4 will be a significant jump from the M2 found in current Mac Minis, last refreshed in January 2023. That boost in power should help with current and future Apple Intelligence processing, jumping from 15.8 TOPS to 38 TOPS according to previous reporting by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.
Image: MacRumors
Amazon’s pulled Mac Mini comparison chart.
Gurman also notes that the new smaller Mini approaches the size of an Apple TV streamer. And judging by the side-by-side with the Mac Studio, it certainly looks small which should make it a very compelling Mac in terms of size and power.
The Mac Mini is rumored to be getting an official announcement later today with full details and pricing so stay tuned.
How Russia, China and Iran Are Interfering in the Presidential Election Eight years after Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election, foreign influence with American voters has grown more sophisticated. That could have outsize consequences in the 2024 race.
No, poll workers aren’t handing out Sharpies to invalidate ballots. The writing utensils figured prominently in conspiracy theories in previous elections. But they’re often fine to use on paper ballots.
The grievance-driven blueprint for the next Trump administration
Image: Mr.Nelson design for The Verge / Getty Images
The Verge’s guide to Project 2025.
For the better part of this year, Project 2025 has been a catchall among Democrats for the threat former President Donald Trump poses to American society. The more than 900-page Mandate for Leadership, crafted by conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, is a sprawling and often contradictory mix of ideas from more than 100 organizations. It’s tied together not by unified policy predictions but by a series of preoccupations: China; “wokeness”; climate denialism; and a commitment to gutting or abolishing federal agencies. It includes plans that would remake America’s approach to technology, but like many things in the document, its authors can’t exactly agree on how.
Trump has attempted to distance himself from the policy plan, but it’s tied to him by numerous threads. His running mate, JD Vance, is friends with Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, and Vance even wrote the introduction to Roberts’ forthcoming book, Dawn’s Early Light. (The book’s publication, initially slated for September, was postponed until after the election.) And some of Project 2025’s chapters were written by Trump’s own former administration officials, including FCC commissioner Brendan Carr and Department of Homeland Security official Ken Cuccinelli.
If Trump is elected, it’s highly likely that some of Project 2025’s ideas would be implemented — we just don’t know which ones. The most provocative proposals, like banning pornography, are prominently highlighted but never explained. Authors, in turn, recommend fighting and embracing tech companies. “I don’t think I’ve encountered a single person in America who agrees with 100 percent,” Roberts said at the Reboot Conference in San Francisco in September. “It’s like the menu at the Cheesecake Factory.”
Much of what’s on the menu is notably less delicious. We’re not going to break down every piece of Project 2025 here — you can find more general guides at CBS News, which showed how many of Project 2025’s policy recommendations match Trump’s own; ProPublica, which obtained secret training videos created for Project 2025’s Presidential Administration Academy; and TheNew York Times, which interviewed several former Trump officials involved in the creation of Project 2025. Instead, we’re taking a look at how its recommendations would affect tech at every level, from how companies can hire foreign workers to the social media platforms we use every day.
Though there are some contradictions between and within chapters — signs of fissures or points of contention among the dozens of participating organizations — Project 2025 does, in the end, amount to a coherent vision. The document calls for a radical expansion of government power to punish conservatives’ enemies in tech, oust potential dissenters within the federal bureaucracy, and enforce right-wing wish list items like mass deportations and a national abortion ban. All of this would be combined with mass deregulation and the defunding of social services and federal agencies that contribute to the public welfare. Project 2025’s authors want small government for social goods — but big government for retribution.
Federal Trade Commission
Authored by:Adam Candeub, a professor of law at Michigan State University. Candeub served as the acting assistant secretary of commerce for telecommunications and information under Trump. From 2020 to 2021, he was the deputy associate attorney general in Trump’s Department of Justice.
Project 2025’s FTC guidelines are perhaps the clearest example of conservative ambivalence toward tech. The section doesn’t actually offer a set of policy proposals. Instead, it outlines two diametrically opposed approaches: one where the Trump administration fiercely enforces antitrust law to break up monopolies; and another where it does barely anything at all.
In the enforcement route, Project 2025 suggests using the FTC to rein in major corporations, especially big tech companies. It puts forward the European Union’s “less friendly regulatory environment” as a good model, possibly referring to EU laws like the Digital Markets Act, which have forced tech companies to make major hardware and software changes to their products. It encourages the FTC to partner with state attorneys general to scrutinize or block hospital, supermarket, and big tech mergers. And it recommends that the FTC look into whether social media platforms’ advertising to and contract-making with children constitute unfair trade practices.
While there’s overlap with Democratic antitrust priorities here, there’s also a focus on clearly partisan concerns. The chapter suggests investigating whether social media platforms censored political speech in collusion with the government, following up on probes by the Republican-led House of Representatives and Republican state attorneys general. (Hunter Biden’s laptop, unsurprisingly, gets a mention.) You’ll also see references to issues like the “de-banking” of controversial figures, which the Trump family has cited as an inspiration for its mysterious crypto platform. “We are witnessing in today’s markets the use of economic power — often market and perhaps even monopoly power — to undermine democratic institutions and civil society,” the chapter claims.
Each of these points is contradicted by a long-standing conservative counterpoint: the government should let the market regulate itself. If the FTC regulates how children use internet platforms, for example, it could undermine conservatives’ calls for “parental empowerment on education or vaccines.” Expanding cooperation between the FTC and state attorneys general could “tie middle America to big progressive government.”
Ultimately, though, the chapter seems to favor intervention. Conservatives “cannot unilaterally disarm and fail to use the power of government to further a conservative agenda,” it warns, even if their goal is to do away with the regulatory state.
Federal Communications Commission
Authored by:Brendan Carr, a member of the Federal Communications Commission who was appointed by Trump in 2017.
Much of this chapter focuses on “reining in” major tech companies. Carr proposes a host of policies, including eliminating certain immunities under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and “clarifying” that Section 230’s key 26 words should only be used in cases about platforms failing to remove illegal material posted by users, not as a broader shield for moderation decisions.
Carr’s real concern is with social media platforms’ alleged suppression of conservative speech. The chapter suggests requiring “Big Tech” to follow net neutrality-like rules similar to those for broadband providers, like disclosure on practices such as blocking and prioritizing content. Platforms should also be required to “offer a transparent appeals process” when user content is taken down.
The chapter also suggests that the FCC regulatory power should be expanded with “fundamental Section 230 reforms” that let it regulate how online platforms moderate content — or, in Carr’s words, “no longer have carte blanche to censor protected speech.” Carr describes Texas’ HB 20 — the law that forbids platforms from removing, demonetizing, or downlinking posts based on “viewpoint,” which set the stage for NetChoice v. Paxton — as a possible model for federal legislation.
As companies must stop “censoring” conservative speech, they’re supposed to restrict children from accessing certain social media platforms. Carr quickly notes that these views “are not shared uniformly by all conservatives,” but as is the case in other chapters, the notion of expanding government powers to punish right-wing opponents ends up winning out over a more laissez-faire approach.
Congress should also require big tech to pay into the FCC’s Universal Service Fund, which helps fund broadband access in rural communities and is currently funded by broadband providers. It’s another example of Project 2025’s movement away from Reagan-era “small government” conservatives in favor of punishing disfavored targets with more regulation.
The chapter also recommends that the FCC and White House work together to free additional airwaves for commercial wireless services and generally do more to “move spectrum into the commercial marketplace.” Carr also recommends that the government build out internet infrastructure on federally owned land. The latter, however, can’t be accomplished by the FCC alone, and Carr notes that it would require working with the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service, among other agencies. The chapter also recommends that the FCC more quickly review and approve applications to launch new satellites, specifically for the purposes of supporting StarLink, Kuiper, and similar efforts.
And then there’s China. One of the primary recommendations is that the FCC “address TikTok’s threat to national security.” (Congress has, since the time the Mandate for Leadership was published, done just that by attempting to ban the app unless it divests from its parent company, ByteDance; whether the courts will let that happen remains to be seen.) Others include creating a more regular process to review entities “with ties to the CCP’s surveillance state” and stopping US entities “from indirectly contributing to China’s AI goals.”
Financial regulatory agencies
Authored by:David R. Burton, a senior research fellow in economic policy at the Heritage Foundation; and Robert Bowes, a senior adviser to the assistant secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development under Trump and former adviser to Trump aide Stephen Miller.
While other sections are often ambivalent about government regulation, this chapter straightforwardly suggests giving major concessions to cryptocurrency and loosening restrictions on who can invest in private companies.
Anyone who’s been following Trump’s attempts to court the crypto community should know what’s coming here. There are a host of recommendations for the Securities and Exchange Commission, which the authors say has “chosen regulation by enforcement” for cryptocurrency. The biggest change would be redefining digital assets as commodities, instead of securities, so they’re no longer regulated by the SEC.
The chapter also recommends making private capital raising less restrictive by changing a rule known as Regulation D. Under Regulation D, companies can raise unlimited funds for securities from an unlimited number of “accredited investors,” with no disclosure needed to the SEC. “Accredited investors” must currently have a salary of $200,000 (or $300,000 combined with their spouse) or a net worth of at least $1 million, excluding their primary residence. As of 2022, more than 24 million American households met these requirements. Project 2025 recommends broadening these qualifications or eliminating them altogether.
In practice, this would let anyone invest in any private company, not just — as the rule stands today — companies on the public market. To go public, companies have to meet certain requirements and file a registration statement with the SEC, where they’re subject to reporting requirements. In exchange, they currently get access to a much broader pool of potential investors. Eliminating the accredited investor requirement would effectively allow companies to skirt the requirements of going public — and the oversight they’re subject to afterward.
Department of Commerce
Authored by:Thomas F. Gilman, the director of ACLJ Action, a conservative organization affiliated with the American Center for Law and Justice. Gilman was the chief financial officer and assistant secretary for administration of the US Department of Commerce under Trump.
This sprawling chapter touches on nearly every major Project 2025 theme, from fears of China to the “alarm industry” of federal climate monitoring. Like practically every other section, it recommends expanding the federal government’s reach if it will advance conservative interests and doing away with any agencies that don’t.
In keeping with the goal of dismantling federal bureaucracies, this chapter suggests doing away with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which it says should be privatized or placed under the control of states and territories. Other agencies, like the National Weather Service (NWS) and Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, would be severely downsized. (In a statement provided to the Los Angeles Times, Steven R. Smith, the CEO of AccuWeather — which Project 2025 suggested could replace the NWS — said AccuWeather’s forecast engine partly relies on NOAA data.) These agencies provide the data used in weather forecasts accessed by millions of Americans each day and also give the public crucial information about impending hurricanes, heatwaves, and other natural disasters and extreme weather events.
The Republican libertarian wing may get its goal of privatizing federal agencies, but most of this chapter argues for more — not less — government interference in the market. Noting that China has made significant advances in semiconductor design, aerospace technologies, and other crucial industries, it recommends new rules to prevent tech transfer to foreign adversaries. It also suggests an executive order expanding the Export Control Reform Act of 2018 to restrict exports of Americans’ data. And it opposes intellectual property waivers for “cutting-edge technologies” like covid-19 vaccines — which an earlier chapter says the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shouldn’t encourage people to get — through international agreements. These waivers, which were hotly debated for years following the onset of the pandemic, give low- and middle-income countries access to life-saving immunizations, though advocates say more needs to be done to achieve global vaccine equity.
The chapter also suggests adding certain app providers — including WeChat, TikTok, and TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance — to the entity list, which would prevent the apps from issuing program updates in the US, effectively making them nonoperational. The Heritage Foundation apparently didn’t get the memo that Trump loves TikTok now.
Department of Transportation
Authored by:Diana Furchtgott-Roth, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment.
Unlike other chapters that are openly antagonistic toward tech companies, this chapter suggests partnering with the private sector to “revolutionize travel.” There’s an emphasis on private transportation over public transportation — not just in terms of opposing government funding for mass transit but also supporting ridehailing apps, self-driving vehicles, and micromobility, which only gets a passing mention in the chapter but likely refers to e-bikes and electric scooters.
Current policies, the document says, “strangle the development of new technologies” like drones. Instead, the DOT should encourage the use of small aircraft for air taxis or for quiet vertical flights. It should also push for a shift to digital or remote control towers for planes, letting flights be managed “anywhere from anywhere.”
Department of the Treasury
Authored by:William L. Walton, a trustee of the Heritage Foundation and the founder and chair of the private equity firm Rappahannock Ventures LLC; Stephen Moore, a visiting fellow in economics at the Heritage Foundation; and David R. Burton, a senior research fellow in economic policy at the Heritage Foundation.
Under Project 2025, the US would effectively abandon its commitment to stopping climate change. The chapter suggests getting rid of the department’s Climate Hub office and withdrawing from international climate change agreements, including the Paris agreement and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Instead of focusing on clean energy or climate change-resilient infrastructure, the chapter suggests that the government should invest in domestic energy, especially oil and gas.
Like several other sections, this chapter takes aim at “wokeness” and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs. As part of Project 2025’s plan to gut the federal workforce, it suggests identifying all Treasury officials who have participated in DEI initiatives, publishing their communications about DEI, and firing anyone who participated in DEI initiatives “without objecting on constitutional or moral grounds.”
Department of Health and Human Services
Authored by:Roger Severino, a vice president at the Heritage Foundation and former director of its DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society, who served as the director of the HHS’s Office of Civil Rights under Trump.
The bottom line: Project 2025 would limit the government’s ability to do basic health governance while setting up a surveillance state for pet conservative issues like abortion and gender-affirming care for trans people.
Much of the HHS chapter focuses on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s response to covid-19, which the author characterizes as near totalitarian. The chapter recommends barring the CDC from saying that children should be masked or vaccinated against any illness and says that the CDC should be investigated for “colluding with Big Tech to censor dissenting opinions during Covid.” The author also suggests moving several CDC programs — including the Clinical Immunization Safety Assessment project, which researches vaccine safety — to the Food and Drug Administration.
Unsurprisingly, abortion would be severely restricted. Under Project 2025, the FDA would reverse the approval of pills that facilitate medication abortions, which the document calls the “single greatest threat to unborn children.” The FDA would also eliminate policies allowing people to order abortion pills by mail or online. As the CDC would stop encouraging vaccinations — which some conservatives believe infringe on bodily autonomy — the agency would increase its surveillance and recordkeeping of abortions and maternal mortality. This includes a recommendation that the HHS “use every available tool, including the cutting of funds” to force states to report “exactly how many abortions take place within its borders.”
A separate study, through the National Institutes of Health, is recommended to investigate the “short-term and long-term negative effects of cross-sex interventions,” i.e., gender-affirming care. The report also recommends using AI to detect Medicaid fraud, which costs the US an estimated $100 billion a year and is typically perpetrated by healthcare providers, not individual beneficiaries of public healthcare.
Department of Homeland Security
Authored by:Ken Cuccinelli, who served in various capacities under Trump, including as the director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services and, later, the “senior official performing the duties of the Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security.”
Perhaps counterintuitively given Republicans’ laser focus on the US border, Project 2025 recommends abolishing the Department of Homeland Security. The goal, though, is to replace it with the Border Security and Immigration Agency, a new, more draconian, and less accountable immigration enforcement apparatus.
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) would be privatized, and the Coast Guard would be moved to either the Department of Defense or the Department of Justice. Dismantling the DHS almost certainly won’t happen — it would require an act of Congress, and lawmakers haven’t passed an immigration bill in decades.
Project 2025 doesn’t just recommend more stringent restrictions on unauthorized immigration; it also lays out a vision of severely restricted legal immigration. It recommends scrapping the family-based immigration system that has been in place since 1965 and replacing it with a “merit-based system that rewards high-skilled aliens.” Other suggestions include eliminating the diversity visa lottery and altering the work visa system. This, too, would largely require congressional action.
As it prioritizes “merit-based” immigration to the US, the chapter proposes limiting foreign students’ ability to study here. In a move that (unlike much of this chapter) could be accomplished through executive action, it proposes ending what it calls Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) “cozy deference to educational institutions,” i.e., the issuing of student visas to most foreign students admitted to US universities. It also calls to “eliminate or significantly reduce the number of visas issued to foreign students from enemy nations” — implicitly, China.
Intelligence community
Authored by:Dustin J. Carmack, Meta’s director of public policy for the Southern and Southeastern US. Carmack, a former research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, was the chief of staff for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence under Trump from 2020 to 2021.
Concerns about China are far more explicit in this chapter, which looks at the “vast, intricate bureaucracy of intelligence agencies within the federal government.” The chapter raises the threat of Chinese (and to a lesser extent, Russian) espionage, online influence campaigns, and “legitimate businesses serving as collection platforms,” a possible allusion to TikTok. The Mandate for Leadership recommends amending Executive Order 12333 — which was signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981 and, among other things, authorizes mass data collection for intelligence purposes to address the threats the US and its allies face “in cyberspace.”
But the chapter also claims intelligence agencies have dedicated far too much time to surveilling the former president, which allegedly proves a “shocking extent of politicization” among the agencies and the officials who lead them. (Its evidence includes the letter signed by 51 former intelligence officials ahead of the 2020 US presidential election claiming that the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop was likely a Russian information operation.) The author calls for an investigation into “past politicization and abuses of intelligence information.”
The chapter also recommends that Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) — the controversial law allowing warrantless wiretapping that was reauthorized earlier this year — be reformed with “strong provisions to protect against partisanship,” pointing to the use of FISA to surveil former Trump campaign associate Carter Page as part of the FBI’s investigation into Trump’s ties to Russia. There is little mention of how these vast surveillance powers affect regular people. In fact, the chapter notes that an independent review found that Section 702 surveillance powers were “not abused,” though it does recommend that Congress review further reports to determine whether any FISA reforms are needed.
Buried amid all these claims, it also recommends the Department of Defense examine the possibility of joint satellite and space programs with “potential allied nations” to counter the threat posed by Russia and China. Additionally, it suggests agencies spy on the space programs of foreign adversaries and collect more data on adversaries’ potential threats to US space programs.
Media agencies
Authored by:Mora Namdar, a former State Department official who worked as a senior policy adviser and acting assistant secretary of state in consular affairs under Trump; and Mike Gonzalez, a former journalist and current senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation.
These agencies aren’t as consequential as juggernauts like the FTC, but the usual slash-and-burn recommendations apply. Project 2025 encourages undercutting the Open Technology Fund, a subagency within the US Agency for Global Media dedicated to protecting free speech around the world that has funded open-source projects like Signal. It calls the OTF a “wasteful and redundant boondoggle” that makes “small, insubstantial donations to much larger messaging applications and technology to bolster its unsubstantiated claims” and — contra its name and stated mission — suggests it fund closed-source technology instead.
The chapter also notes that there is “vast concern” about the vulnerability of undersea cable trunks that power the internet and says that major global conflict could cause widespread damage to these cables, potentially leading to long-lasting power outages. There is no mention of what can be done to prevent this, though the chapter does say that the US Agency for Global Media’s shortwave radio capabilities could help carry broadcasts and maintain communication in areas where online traffic is limited or restricted.
The pragmatist’s guide to the 2024 presidential election
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Your vote matters. Here’s how it will change the future.
It’s easy to look at a gridlocked legislature or unpredictable judicial decisions and feel like American presidential elections don’t matter. What’s the point of getting someone in the White House if they can’t get legislation on their desk to sign or veto and courts can shut down their every move? Politicians always break their promises, goes the cynical — and often reasonable — grumble. Why pay attention in the first place?
In many respects, the president is a figurehead, but the office of the presidency is a job with a concrete description and very specific levers of power that connect to many of the areas The Verge covers. For these issues and more, whoever wins on November 5th will set a direct course for the next four years and perhaps longer.
Most significantly, the president appoints executive branch personnel, such as heads of independent agencies, who then go on to set and enforce policy on antitrust, broadband, and climate change. There’s a direct chain of cause and effect between Joe Biden taking office and the Federal Trade Commission forcing gyms to let you cancel your membership, because Biden appointed a specific person known to be tough on consumer protections; similarly, Republican control of the Federal Communications Commission under former President Donald Trump resulted in the end of federal net neutrality rules, while Democratic control of the FCC under Biden resulted in a revival.
Of course, the return of net neutrality is on hold because of conservative judges, and that’s yet another explicit power the president has — they nominate judges to federal courts, a power that has lasting repercussions for every area The Verge covers. (Incidentally, that click-to-cancel rule has also been challenged in court.) Other specific powers encompass pardons, immigration, and foreign policy, including everything from war to international trade and tariffs.
There are also more nebulous powers that the president holds. Although the White House does not control the budget — that’s a power reserved for Congress — the president submits a budget proposal for the executive branch, which impacts the federal government’s priorities in a given year. And even though the president does not make laws, they will nevertheless play a big role in what kind of laws will pass — or will at least attempt to pass — in Congress.
As president, Donald Trump or Kamala Harris will help determine the future of electric vehicles, ecological disasters, and internet infrastructure in the US and, in some cases, the whole world. They’ll shape how Silicon Valley holds and wields power over consumers. More broadly, they’ll play a role in whether the government can address these kinds of questions at all.
Neither Trump nor Harris has detailed everything they’ll do in office. Harris hasn’t said whether she’ll keep key figures like FTC Chair Lina Khan. Parsing Trump’s myriad long-winded and contradictory statements is a job unto itself. And there are lingering questions about how closely Trump could hew to Project 2025: a technically unrelated series of recommendations by the Heritage Foundation that’s linked strongly to Trump’s own campaign. The proposals in Project 2025 could gut or eliminate parts of the system we have now.
By the same token, neither candidate’s previous terms in office are a precise blueprint for their future plans. Harris obviously wasn’t the key decision-maker in the Biden administration. Trump is expected to dramatically weaken the institutions that checked his power during his first term, stopping actions that ranged from a sweeping immigration ban to an attempt to overturn the 2020 election results. If we’re looking for clues about the direction of a Harris or Trump administration, though, the candidates’ own words, past actions, and track records as elected officials are reasonable guideposts.
The topics below aren’t the only ones that matter to Verge authors and readers. But they’re pressing issues that will determine what kinds of stories you’ll be reading here in the coming years as a direct result of whoever takes office in January 2025.
Climate change
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Harris: “We know that we can actually deal with this issue. The young people of America care deeply about this issue. And I am proud that as vice president over the last four years, we have invested $1 trillion in a clean energy economy while we have also increased domestic gas production to historic levels.” – presidential debate, September 10th, 2024
Trump: “The biggest threat is not global warming, where the ocean’s going to rise one, one-eighth of an inch over the next 400 years. The big — and you’ll have more oceanfront property, right? The biggest threat is not that. The biggest threat is nuclear warming, because we have five countries now that have significant nuclear power, and we have to not allow anything to happen with stupid people like Biden.” – interview on X with Elon Musk, August 13th, 2024
The president’s powers
The president appoints key regulatory personnel, including the heads of the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and has the power to place scientists or skeptics in key leadership roles. The president also proposes annual budgets for these agencies.
As the world’s leading oil and gas producer and the biggest historical polluter of carbon dioxide emissions, America’s diplomatic cooperation, as well as actual action or inaction on climate change, has global consequences. The president has the authority to make treaties for the United States, giving them control over whether the country joins international agreements on climate change such as the Paris agreement. Should the US stay in the Paris agreement, the next administration will be tasked with submitting an updated climate action plan by early next year.
The next administration will also be tasked with continuing the distribution of funds from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which was passed in 2022. The IRA includes $369 billion in spending on clean energy and climate action, which is expected to cut US greenhouse gas emissions by roughly 40 percent by 2030.
The candidates’ track records
The Trump administration rolled back more than 100 environmental regulations in the US and isolated the country from global climate negotiations. Trump weakened rules meant to rein in pollution from power plants and transportation, the two sectors that produce the most greenhouse gas emissions in the US. He put fossil fuel lobbyistsin charge of the Environmental Protection Agency and stacked the US Supreme Court with justices whose deregulatory agenda has made it harder for federal agencies to crack down on pollution.
Trump has said that he would “rescind all unspent funds under the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act.” He has also said he’d withdraw the US from the landmark Paris agreement, which he briefly did during his first term in office. If Trump follows the recommendations in Project 2025, he could gut key agencies responsible for regulating greenhouse gas emissions and studying the effects of climate change so that there are tools in place, like updated flood maps, to help Americans adapt.
Harris’ environmental track record precedes her term as vice president, stretching back to lawsuits she filed to hold polluters accountable as California’s attorney general. She’s been relatively mum about climate change on the campaign trail, however, as she courts key swing states. That includes Pennsylvania, which produces more gas than any other state aside from Texas — much of which comes from fracking. As California’s attorney general, Harris filed suit against the Obama administration to stop offshore fracking but now says she would not support a ban on fracking as president.
The Biden administration has pledged to reduce the nation’s greenhouse gas pollution by at least 50 percent from 2005 levels by the end of the decade under the Paris climate accord. The keystone legislation that gets the US most of the way there is the IRA. Harris has regularly touted her role in helping pass the IRA as well as the legislation’s success in creating jobs and boosting energy production.
Antitrust
Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos from Getty Images
Harris: “As President, she will direct her Administration to crack down on anti-competitive practices that let big corporations jack up prices and undermine the competition that allows all businesses to thrive while keeping prices low for consumers” – 2024 campaign site
Trump: “Google has been very bad. They’ve been very irresponsible and I have a feeling Google is going to be close to shut down because I don’t think Congress is going to take it, I really don’t think so. Google has to be careful.” – interview with Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo, August 2nd, 2024
The president’s powers
The White House nominates two of the country’s most important antitrust watchdogs: the assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s antitrust division (currently Jonathan Kanter); and the chair of the Federal Trade Commission (currently Lina Khan). Not only can they launch investigations and file lawsuits against individual tech companies but they can also shape broader regulatory guidelines, like the rules for when a merger should be blocked. Any federal judges who oversee an antitrust lawsuit are also presidentially appointed — albeit, obviously, not all by the current president.
That said, these officials must be confirmed by the Senate before they can take office. Agency policies can be changed by a future administration. And Congress would have to pass new laws to change the fundamentals of antitrust law, like the much-criticized “consumer harm” standard.
The candidates’ track records
The Trump administration made some efforts to attack tech giants. Following a general investigation of several companies, Trump’s FTC and DOJ, respectively, sued Facebook (now Meta) and Google in late 2020. But the Trump administration’s antitrust work was frequently mixed up with Trump’s personal anger at the supposed liberal bias of tech companies, which produced confounding results like a demand that agencies rewrite speech law. During this election cycle, he’s promised to prosecute Google for “only” showing “bad stories” about him.
Biden’s appointment of Khan and Kanter put two of big tech’s biggest critics in high-level government positions. Kanter’s DOJ argued the Google search antitrust suit filed under Trump, leading to arguably Google’s biggest US legal defeat. The DOJ and FTC also filed numerous suits against a range of tech companies, including a DOJ complaint against Google’s ad tech dominance, an FTC monopoly suit against Amazon, and (failed) attempts to stop acquisitions by Microsoft and Meta. The administration has gone after tech-adjacent businesses like Live Nation-Ticketmaster and signaled stricter merger scrutiny as well.
Harris hasn’t signaled how closely she would hew to Biden’s path here — including whether she’ll keep Khan around. She was relatively quiet on antitrust during her time as a senator. But with several of the cases above still brewing, it’s an issue she likely won’t be able to avoid.
Net neutrality
Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos from Getty Images
Harris:Harris has not spoken recently on net neutrality.
Trump:Trump has not spoken recently on net neutrality.
The president’s powers
The Federal Communications Commission has five commissioners, including one chair. Each must be appointed by a president and confirmed by the Senate, but then goes on to serve a term of five years. The chair usually resigns when there is a new president, who then appoints someone of their own choosing. A maximum of three commissioners may come from the same party.
The math-minded will understand what these rules mean, generally: when the president is a Democrat, the FCC is 3-2 in favor of Democrats; under a Republican, the commission is 3-2 in favor of Republicans.
The FCC does many things, but most importantly, the FCC makes regulations that affect internet service providers, telecoms, and how broadband access subsidies are used. The most famous among these regulations: net neutrality.
The candidates’ track records
While neither candidate has spoken directly to the issue of net neutrality during this campaign, due to the structure of the agency, the very recent history of the FCC is a good indication of what would happen under either candidate.
Almost immediately after Trump’s election in 2016, FCC commissioner Ajit Pai signaled a strong interest in overturning the net neutrality rule that was established during the Obama administration. Trump tapped him to become the new FCC chair, and the rest is history. Despite the policy’s enormous popularity among ordinary people, in late 2017 the FCC voted 3-2 along party lines to kill net neutrality.
When Biden became president, Pai — as is tradition — resigned his seat, and Biden appointed Democrat Jessica Rosenworcel as the new chair. He also nominated the legendary open internet advocate Gigi Sohn as a third Democratic commissioner. The Senate stalled on Sohn’s appointment, ultimately managing to kill her nomination. The FCC remained deadlocked until 2023, when Anna Gomez was sworn in. In April of this year, the FCC finally voted — 3-2, along party lines — to restore net neutrality.
At the moment, the net neutrality rule is on hold, blocked by an appeals court as a direct result of a Supreme Court decision this summer. In Loper Bright v. Raimondo, the court’s conservative supermajority, which is stacked with Trump-nominated justices, overturned longstanding precedent and kneecapped regulatory agencies like the FCC.
Electric vehicles
Image: Hugo Herrera / The Verge
Harris: “Millions of children ride on diesel school buses daily, breathing toxic fumes that can harm their health. This week, we announced nearly $1 billion to fund electric and low-emission school buses across the nation—an investment in our children, their health, and their education.” – tweet, January 12th, 2024
Trump: “I will end the electric vehicle mandate on day one, thereby saving the US auto industry from complete obliteration.” – speech at the Republican National Convention, July 19th, 2024
Trump: “I’m for electric cars. I have to be because, you know, Elon endorsed me very strongly. So I have no choice.” – speech at a rally in Atlanta, Georgia, August 3rd, 2024
The president’s powers
One of the main ways the executive branch can influence the kind of car you buy is through tailpipe rules. The Environmental Protection Agency regulates how much pollution the auto industry is allowed to spew into the atmosphere. By setting tighter limits, the agency can effectively force the industry to sell more environmentally friendly vehicles — or risk paying steep fines for noncompliance.
The executive branch can also incentivize consumers by offering tax credits to bring down the cost of vehicles that are pricier but produce less pollution. It can spend taxpayer money on building out the EV charging infrastructure and investing in other alternative fuel sources like hydrogen. And it can offer tax breaks to manufacturers to retrofit factories for battery production.
It can also do the opposite of all of that: loosen pollution rules; eliminate favorable tax breaks; and slow roll (or cancel) infrastructure improvements. Doing so would send an enormous signal to automakers that they can keep polluting as usual.
The candidates’ track records
When he was president, Trump did everything in his power to forestall the inevitable rise of electric vehicles. He rolled back regulations passed under the Obama administration to force automakers to produce less-polluting vehicles. He tried to revoke California’s authority to set its own emissions standards. And he championed a plan to rewrite the tax code to eliminate credits for EV purchases.
And yet EVs continued to sell at record numbers, an indication that market forces were having more influence over consumer demands than Trump’s policy decisions. When Biden took office, most of those efforts were reversed. But even before the Biden administration could pass its first EV-friendly policy, EV sales took off like a rocket before eventually flatlining.
Still, the Biden administration saw EVs as a crucial piece of its plan to fight climate change. Biden directed the Environmental Protection Agency to pass new tailpipe emission standards to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 55 percent by 2032. He passed new tax credits for EVs that were made in North America or by its trade partners, using parts and battery components sourced from the same allies. He poured billions of dollars into EV charging infrastructure and battery manufacturing, and he did the same for trucks and other heavy-duty vehicles.
Harris has promised to keep most of Biden’s policies in place, but she has responded to criticism from Trump that she would “force” consumers to buy expensive EVs by vowing to never ban gas car sales.
Crypto regulation
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Harris: “She’s going to support policies that ensure that emerging technologies and that sort of industry can continue to grow.” – statement from senior campaign adviser Brian Nelson to Bloomberg, August 21st, 2024
Trump: “If crypto is going to define the future, I want it to be mined, minted, and made in the USA. It’s going to be. It’s not going to be made anywhere else. And if Bitcoin is going to the moon — as we say, it’s going to the moon — I want America to be the nation that leads the way.” – 2024 Bitcoin Conference speech, July 27th, 2024
Trump: “On day one, I will fire Gary Gensler and appoint a new SEC chair.” – 2024 Bitcoin Conference speech, July 27th, 2024
The president’s powers
The main thing a president does to create policy is appoint personnel. When it comes to crypto policy, the key role is that of the chair of the SEC, who is currently the much-embattled Gary Gensler. Trump has promised to fire Gensler “on day one” and install someone more friendly to crypto, such as Robinhood’s Dan Gallagher.
Whether the president can actually “fire” Gensler is a more complicated legal question than one would think. But regardless, Trump probably would not actually be firing Gensler. By tradition, an outgoing president directs political appointees like Gensler to submit their resignation sometime between Election Day and mid-December, leaving the next president the choice to accept that resignation and install their own pick. (Trump broke with that tradition in 2020, refusing to send out a call for resignations until the day after the January 6th insurrection.)
Harris hasn’t been especially clear about what she’ll do, but her campaign adviser, Brian Nelson, was involved in a Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) proposal that raised crypto industry hackles.
The candidates’ track records
Though Trump is now courting crypto enthusiasts, he oversaw policies during his term in office that were often hostile to the emerging tech. “I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air. Unregulated Crypto Assets can facilitate unlawful behavior, including drug trade and other illegal activity,” Trump tweeted in 2019, in what the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance called a “thunderous” denunciation.
His SEC didn’t publish much guidance, although he did nominate commissioner Hester Peirce, known to some as “crypto mom.” What the Trump-era SEC did do, though, was say that US securities laws might apply to token sales and then create a new cyber unit for monitoring initial coin offerings, among other things. It also went after celebrities who’d endorsed ICOs, including DJ Khaled and Floyd Mayweather. It rejected outright an attempted Bitcoin exchange-traded fund, or ETF, and requested that some companies withdraw their applications. (A Bitcoin ETF was finally approved under Gary Gensler’s SEC earlier this year.) It sued Kik and Telegram over token sales. Oh, and the SEC also initiated the Ripple Labs case.
Meanwhile, FinCEN proposed new rules for crypto and gave a shortened time period for response — which was extended after industry outcry. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency published guidance for stablecoins. And most controversially, SEC official William Hinman said that, in his opinion, Ethereum isn’t a security.
Harris’ record on crypto is thinner. Though she’s served as the VP of an administration the crypto community has largely perceived as hostile, she’s signaled that she’s willing to reset policy. Harris recently said she would support a “regulatory framework” for cryptocurrencies and other digital assets to protect buyers.
Abortion
Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos via Getty Images
Harris: “And when Congress passes a bill to restore reproductive freedom, as president of the United States, I will proudly sign it into law.” – remarks at the Democratic National Convention, August 22nd, 2024
Trump: “When I’m reelected, I will continue to fight against the demented late-term abortionists in the Democrat Party who believe in unlimited abortion on demand and even executing babies after birth.” – speech at the Faith & Freedom Coalition conference, June 22nd, 2024
The president’s powers
The most impactful thing either candidate can do is sign whatever legislation comes out of Congress — either codifying access to abortion as laid out in Roe v. Wade or mandating a federal abortion ban. Harris has said she supports eliminating the filibuster to codify Roe. Trump has suggested he’d sign a bill banning abortion after 15 weeks, though he’s also said he wouldn’t sign a national abortion ban and believes that the issue should be left up to the states.
Even if Congress doesn’t pass legislation on abortion, the president still has discretion over the Food and Drug Administration, which can work to make birth control pills, other contraceptives, and abortion medication more or less available. Under Trump, the FDA could reverse regulations allowing pharmacies to dispense mifepristone, one of the pills used for medication abortions. Trump’s allies — including the Heritage Foundation, the primary architect of Project 2025 — have floated the idea of using the Comstock Act to ban the shipping of mifepristone and misoprostol, which would effectively ban medication abortion everywhere in the country. Trump has not publicly commented on whether he’d do this.
The candidates’ track records
The Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade during Biden’s term, but it wouldn’t have been possible without Trump’s nomination of three justices during his last term.
During his term, Trump reinstated and expanded a global gag rule on abortion that prevented international organizations from getting US funding if they provide abortion services or refer patients for abortions — even if those services are provided with the organizations’ own funds. Trump also implemented a domestic gag rule prohibiting taxpayer-funded clinics from making abortion referrals. The rule also forbade clinics that get federal money from sharing space with abortion providers.
Under Biden’s administration, the FDA has allowed pharmacies to dispense mifepristone, one of the pills used for medication abortions. The Biden administration also required federal agencies to issue guidance to ensure that FDA-approved contraceptive medications are available for free under the Affordable Care Act.
After Roe was overturned, the Biden administration directed the Pentagon to pay for service members’ travel for abortion care. Biden also issued regulations strengthening privacy protections for people who seek abortions, specifically designed to protect women living in states where abortion is illegal who travel elsewhere for the procedure.
As California attorney general, Harris signed onto a brief urging the Supreme Court to uphold reproductive rights. She also co-sponsored a law that required “crisis pregnancy centers,” which try to steer women away from abortion information, to clarify that they are not licensed medical facilities. The Supreme Court later granted an injunction blocking the law, ruling it was likely unconstitutional.
AI
Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos from Getty Images
Harris: “Federal agencies have a distinct responsibility to identify and manage AI risks because of the role they play in our society, and the public must have confidence that the agencies will protect their rights and safety.” – VP Fact Sheet, March 28th, 2024
Trump: “We will repeal Joe Biden’s dangerous Executive Order that hinders AI Innovation, and imposes Radical Leftwing ideas on the development of this technology. In its place, Republicans support AI Development rooted in Free Speech and Human Flourishing.” – 2024 Republican Party platform
The president’s powers
The president can write executive orders laying out guidance for the government’s use of AI, requiring federal agencies to set standards for artificially generated content, among other things.
If Harris is elected, it’s likely that the White House’s AI policy will remain consistent with that of Biden’s, who has worked with major companies to limit bad behavior without actually putting hard policies in place. Harris’ allies have told TheNew York Times that her stance toward tech regulation will likely be similar to what we’ve seen over the past four years. Trump, on the other hand, plans to revoke Biden’s executive order on artificial intelligence, which lays out regulations around generative AI. He may issue AI-related orders of his own, some of which have already been drafted by his allies.
As the commander in chief, the president also directs the military, which is increasingly reliant on AI-powered defense tech. The America First Policy Institute, led by several Trump-era administration officials, reportedly wrote an executive order to launch a series of “Manhattan Projects” for new military technologies and create “industry-led” agencies to evaluate AI models. One section of the framework is titled “Make America First in AI.” According to TheWashington Post, which reviewed the documents, these policies will likely benefit tech companies that already have contracts with the Pentagon, including Anduril, Scale, and the data-mining firm Palantir.
The candidates’ track records
In 2019, Trump signed the “Maintaining American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence” executive order. The order called for a “concerted effort” to promote AI and a “sustained investment” in AI research and development initiatives, but critics noted that it didn’t allocate any federal funding toward these initiatives. A separate executive order issued in 2020 established guidance for federal agency adoption of AI.
Trump’s budget plan for fiscal 2021 boosted funding for nondefense AI research and development. Shortly before Trump’s term ended in January 2021, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy established a National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Office.
The Biden-Harris administration has balanced AI adoption with regulation. The administration has required federal agencies to hire chief AI officers, and in 2023, the National Science Foundation and 10 other federal agencies partnered with AI developers focused on democratizing access to research. Earlier this year, Biden and Harris met with CEOs of several companies — including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google — to discuss AI. The conversation reportedly focused on energy usage, the capacities of grids and data centers, and semiconductor manufacturing.
The TikTok ban
Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photo from Getty Images
Harris: “We need to deal with the owner, and we have national security concerns about the owner of TikTok, but we have no intention to ban TikTok.” – interview on This Week on ABC, March 24th, 2024
Trump: “For all of those that want to save TikTok in America, vote for Trump! The other side’s closing it up. But I’m now a big star on TikTok. We even have TikTok check, and we’re setting records. We’re not doing anything with TikTok, but the other side’s gonna close it up, so if you like TikTok, go out and vote for Trump.” – video on Truth Social, September 4th, 2024
The president’s powers
It’s not actually clear what anyone can do here, because we’re still waiting for a key court decision. Thanks to a law signed by Biden earlier this year, TikTok could be just months away from a ban if its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, doesn’t sell it. But an appeals court is currently deliberating on whether this violates the First Amendment rights of ByteDance and TikTok users. If it does, the odds of anyone meaningfully banning TikTok — or issuing other hugely punitive measures to encourage a ByteDance spinoff — are low.
If US courts uphold the law, ByteDance will be on the hook for either a sale or a ban, but the incoming administration will have options to shape that process. The president is responsible for determining what counts as a successful divestiture, and the attorney general can enforce civil penalties against American platforms that allow TikTok to operate if it’s banned. The bill also allows for pursuing action against other large social networks owned by foreign adversaries — although the category is clearly designed to mainly include TikTok.
The candidates’ track records
The TikTok ban is actually Trump’s idea, from back in 2020. As president, he attempted to block TikTok from the US via a series of executive orders, targeting not only TikTok but also WeChat and other Chinese apps. His efforts were largely stymied by courts, however, and the orders were immediately reversed by Biden. He’s warmed to TikTok since then (possibly because he’s learned he’s popular on it), but given his overall focus on limiting China’s power, it’s not clear whether that’s a lasting change.
The Biden administration, conversely, ended Trump’s ban effort but later supported a divest-or-ban law. For now, Harris herself is among the various politicians who have used TikTok for campaigning while expressing national security concerns about it. She joined TikTok in July.
Online speech
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge; Getty Images
Harris: “I applaud the Senate for passing the Kids Online Safety and Privacy Act today. This bipartisan legislation will help protect children’s mental health, safety, and privacy online.” – tweet, July 30th, 2024
Trump: “If Big Tech persists, in coordination with the mainstream media, we must immediately strip them of their Section 230 protections. When government granted these protections, they created a monster!” – speech at a rally in Greenville, North Carolina, October 15th, 2020
The president’s powers
Regulating how kids can use social media and changing Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — two of the biggest recent speech issues on the table — depend on Congress passing legislation. The Kids Online Safety and Privacy Act’s (KOSPA) tortured legislative history is evidence that that’s not easy. On top of that, courts are dealing with a slew of lawsuits that could render parts of KOSPA unconstitutional, and the First Amendment is set up to make speech regulation very difficult to implement.
The White House and federal agencies can apply more subtle pressures, however. An administration can contact social network operators privately or publicly to suggest certain moderation decisions, and the president can direct agencies (primarily the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission) to investigate companies’ behavior — although they’re barred from outright punishing companies for speech they dislike, which would constitute jawboning. Presidents also appoint the judges who decide complicated speech lawsuits.
The candidates’ track records
Trump signed FOSTA-SESTA, the first Section 230 carveout in decades, aimed at restricting sex work content. (On top of direct negative effects for sex workers, you can thank it for the demise of Craigslist personals.) He made an abortive attempt to hollow out Section 230 further via executive order, but it was quickly revoked by Biden. He frequently accused tech companies of anti-conservative bias in areas like content moderation, implicitly threatening antitrust investigations as payback for perceived slights. When it comes to broader free speech issues, he’s called to strip broadcast licenses from TV stations over stories he disliked, and he’s attempted to do drastic things like deploy the military on protestors.
Harris has been a longtime proponent of limiting Section 230, part of a long-running focus on “online predators” like sex traffickers. She was one of FOSTA-SESTA’s numerous cosponsors while in the Senate, and she was among a group of attorneys general who asked Congress for a carveout like it back in 2013. (The amendment was supposed to facilitate taking down Backpage.com, which Harris would play an instrumental role in shuttering.) Harris later said she supported decriminalizing sex work — a position she may or may not still hold. But she’s gone on to support bills like the EARN IT Act, so her support for Section 230 limits may not have waned.
Beyond 230, the Biden administration was accused of social media jawboning in the case Murthy v. Missouri, which went all the way to the Supreme Court before Biden scored a victory. Harris, however, wasn’t a central player in this saga.
All the news from Apple’s ‘week’ of Mac announcements
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge
Apple’s unusual approach to an October event is skipping the event and just announcing some forthcoming announcements.
New Macs are coming. Apple has teased a “week” of announcements around the Mac starting on Monday, October 28th. And after months of leaks, we have a pretty good idea of what’s in the cards.
Apple is likely to overhaul much of its Mac line with M4 chips, after launching the M4 series in the iPad Pro back in May. The MacBook Pro and iMac are expected to get spec bumps featuring the chip, while the Mac Mini is reported to be in line for a full redesign — its first in over a decade. Alongside the new Macs, a refreshed Magic Keyboard, Magic Mouse, and Magic Trackpad with USB-C ports are likely to arrive, too.
The public release of Apple Intelligence is also expected this week. That would bring AI features to the Mac as well as the iPhone and iPad.
There’s no formal product event this time around. Instead, it’s likely Apple will share the news through press releases each morning. The only question now is whether they’ll come all at once on Monday or be spaced out throughout the full week.
Hospitals use a transcription tool powered by a hallucination-prone OpenAI model
Image: The Verge
A few months ago, my doctor showed off an AI transcription tool he used to record and summarize his patient meetings. In my case, the summary was fine, but researchers cited by ABC News have found that’s not always the case with OpenAI’s Whisper, which powers a tool many hospitals use — sometimes it just makes things up entirely.
Whisper is used by a company called Nabla for a medical transcription tool that it estimates has transcribed 7 million medical conversations, according to ABC News. More than 30,000 clinicians and 40 health systems use it, the outlet writes. Nabla is reportedly aware that Whisper can hallucinate, and is “addressing the problem.”
A group of researchers from Cornell University, the University of Washington, and others found in a study that Whisper hallucinated in about 1 percent of transcriptions, making up entire sentences with sometimes violent sentiments or nonsensical phrases during silences in recordings. The researchers, who gathered audio samples from TalkBank’s AphasiaBank as part of the study, note silence is particularly common when someone with a language disorder called aphasia is speaking.
One of the researchers, Allison Koenecke of Cornel University, posted examples like the one below in a thread about the study.
Harms perpetuating violence involve misrepresentation of a speaker’s words that could become part of a formal record (e.g. in a courtroom trial); we present 3 subcategories of examples: physical violence, sexual innuendo, and demographic stereotyping (4/14) pic.twitter.com/zhsKxI2qNs
The researchers found that hallucinations also included invented medical conditions or phrases you might expect from a YouTube video, such as “Thank you for watching!” (OpenAI reportedly used to transcribe over a million hours of YouTube videos to train GPT-4.)
The study was presented in June at the Association for Computing Machinery FAccT conference in Brazil. It’s not clear if it has been peer-reviewed.
OpenAI spokesperson Taya Christianson emailed a statement to The Verge:
We take this issue seriously and are continually working to improve, including reducing hallucinations. For Whisper use on our API platform, our usage policies prohibit use in certain high-stakes decision-making contexts, and our model card for open-source use includes recommendations against use in high-risk domains. We thank researchers for sharing their findings.
How to use the new Private Space feature in Android 15
Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge
While there aren’t a lot of new features in Android 15, it does offer some useful additions for your phone — and one of the most interesting is called “Private Space.” Think of it as a separate app vault that locks away specified apps on your Android device.
Of course, the main lockscreen already stops other people from accessing your phone, but Private Space puts an extra barrier in place. The idea is that if you lend someone your device to make a call or look at a photo, they won’t accidentally (or deliberately) stumble into something they shouldn’t. It’s also an extra safety net if your phone is lost or stolen while it’s unlocked.
I tried the feature on a Pixel 8 phone running Android 15. Here’s how it works.
Setting up Private Space
Screenshot: Google
There is a lot of screen guidance when you set up your first private space.
Screenshot: Google
You get the option to use a lock that’s different from that of your main screen.
Begin by going to Settings and selecting Security and privacy >Private space.
You then get a comprehensive overview of how it works and your options. Tap Set up.
On the next screen, you get the option (if you want) to use a different existing Google account for your private space or create a new one. You don’t have to do this, but it means you don’t run the risk of data from your private space being synced to your normal, more public areas on other devices: think photos, browsing history, and emails, for example. It also prevents your private data from being used in your browsing history or to prompt suggested content. Choose Got it to select another account or Do it later to skip this step.
Once you’ve chosen your account (or created a new one), you’ve got another choice: tap Choose new lock to set a new authentication method (like a PIN) for this private space or Use screen lock to use the security method already configured for your phone’s lockscreen.
After a few moments, your private space will have been created. Click Done.
You’ll find that a selection of Google apps, including Google Chrome and Google Photos, is already included.
Now, whenever you want to go to your private space, just scroll to the bottom of the app drawer, tap on the padlock icon, and authenticate (using either a biometric method like fingerprint recognition, or a PIN).
Configuring Private Space
Screenshot: Google
Your private space lives at the bottom of the app drawer.
Screenshot: Google
There are options to fully hide the private space and lock it automatically.
You can’t drag apps in and out of your private space — you have to install them. Think of it almost like a completely different Android device. When you’re within the space, tap the Install button to add new apps, and long-press on an app icon and choose Uninstall to remove them.
You can receive notifications from apps in the private space, but only when it’s unlocked. To use the same example as I used above, it’s effectively like a separate device, and when the space is locked, it’s like you’ve turned off that device. For this reason, Google doesn’t recommend using it to store apps that might need to send you critical information.
Once you’ve unlocked your private space, it stays open on the app drawer until you lock it again via the Lock button. You can also have the space lock automatically in certain situations: this and other options can be configured by tapping on the gear icon in the private space window.
Choose Private space lock to change the lock method used to access the private space.
Select Lock private space automatically to set when the private space is locked automatically: whenever the phone is locked; five minutes after a screen timeout; or every time the device restarts.
Tap Hide private space to remove it from the app drawer so other people don’t know it’s there. When it’s hidden, you can only find it by searching for “private space” in the search bar at the top of the app drawer.
Choose Delete private space to erase the private space and everything in it (though anything synced to the cloud isn’t affected).
Note that you can’t transfer your private space to a new phone. The standard Android-to-Android setup process won’t include any private space apps. You’ll have to start the private space again from scratch, though you can sign in with the same Google account you used for the private space on the older phone, which will restore your data in apps such as Gmail and Google Keep.
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