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Amazon won’t require masks for fully vaccinated warehouse workers

Technologies

Amazon won’t require masks for fully vaccinated warehouse workers

The company is ending a mask mandate for vaccinated workers in its fulfillment centers. Amazon hasn’t required workers to get vaccines.

Amazon’s warehouse workers can soon take off their masks if they’re fully vaccinated. The company will lift its mask requirement on Tuesday, unless the warehouse is in a state or region where masks are still legally required for vaccinated workers, as reported earlier by a report from CNBC.

«We continue to evaluate all of our temporary COVID-19 safety measures,» an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement, «making adjustments in alignment with public health authority guidance and our own medical experts to prioritize the health and safety of employees.»

Unlike other tech companies like Microsoft, Facebook and Google, the retail giant has avoided requiring vaccines for its in-person employees as it races to hire enough staff to operate its growing network of e-commerce fulfillment sites. The company is also offering signing bonuses and higher starting pay for new employees.

To encourage higher vaccination rates, the company has offered the chance to win cash and cars in lotteries for vaccinated employees. The company is also paying hourly workers $40 per vaccine dose and hosting on-site vaccination clinics.

Technologies

Samsung S26 Ultra’s Privacy Display Makes Shoulder Surfing a Thing of the Past

You can scroll on the subway in peace.

Picture this: You’re wedged into the middle seat while cruising at 38,000 feet, half watching the clouds and half scrolling through messages you probably should have answered already. The cabin lights are dimmed. The stranger rubbing shoulders next to you adjusts in their seat. Out of the corner of your eye, you notice their gaze flicker toward your screen.

That is a moment when the new Samsung S26 Ultra’s Privacy Display, announced during the company’s Galaxy Unpacked 2026, can quietly step in.

Unlike old-fashioned screen protectors that darken your display permanently, the new feature is built directly into the Galaxy S26 Ultra (starting at $1,300) panel. It is not a film you stick on top; it’s a part of the hardware itself, working seamlessly with the software.

During the Unpacked event, Samsung brought out Miles Franklin from MilesAboveTech to demo the feature: to Miles, looking straight at the screen, everything remained crisp, bright and color-accurate. To anyone trying to peek from the side, like those of us watching the demo, the content fades into shadow. From this perspective, the screen might as well be off.

«It’s seriously one of the coolest features I’ve seen on a phone in years,» Franklin said while onstage at Unpacked.

How Privacy Display works

Under the hood, the technology relies on a combination of directional backlighting and an adaptive pixel layer that controls how light is emitted across angles. Traditional displays spread light broadly so multiple people can see the screen at once. The S26 Ultra does the opposite when privacy mode is active. It funnels light forward in a tighter beam, limiting lateral visibility without sacrificing clarity for the primary user.

Sensors play a role, too. Using the front-facing camera and ambient awareness algorithms, the device can recognize when additional faces appear within viewing range. If it senses someone hovering nearby or glancing from the side, it can automatically trigger enhanced privacy mode. You can also have the process automate when certain notifications pop up or when opening specific apps, like those for banking or social media.

Back on the plane, you can now continue typing. The stranger next to you adjusts again — perhaps curious, perhaps bored. It doesn’t matter. Your screen remains yours.

Technologies

This One Killer Feature Sets the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra Apart From All Other Phones

Commentary: Samsung needed to give us a reason to be excited about its latest flagship. It delivered.

There are so many reasons not to buy a new phone in 2026. For starters, our existing phones last longer than ever if we take care of them. Plus, most new phones are way too similar, not only to each other, but to last year’s batch. Finally, most of us won’t have our heads easily turned by yet another AI sales pitch.

But on Wednesday, at Samsung’s Galaxy Unpacked event in San Francisco, the company gave us a genuinely compelling reason to consider upgrading to its new top-end flagship, the Galaxy S26 Ultra. Its killer feature has nothing to do with AI (although Samsung is still beating that drum as loudly as every phone-maker out there).

In fact, it has nothing to do with software at all. Instead, it’s an innovation in hardware: Privacy Display, which offers pixel-level privacy that prevents anyone beside you from seeing what’s on your screen.

Privacy Display works in both portrait and landscape, with the pixels dispersing light in a way that will darken parts of the screen if you’re not looking at it straight on. You can choose whether to apply it to specific apps, to notifications or for when you’re inputting PINs or passwords. Access from Quick Settings makes it easy to turn on and off on the go, like when you suspect someone on the bus is reading over your shoulder, for example.

The reason the Privacy Display is such a compelling feature is that it’s simple to demonstrate, and it offers benefits that are easy to understand, said Ben Wood, CMO and chief analyst at CCS Insight. «Unlike a secondary-market privacy screen protector affixed to the phone’s display, it is not an ‘all or nothing’ solution,» he added.

On the surface, privacy doesn’t feel especially sexy as tech features go. But it is important to people. You only need to observe how central Apple has made privacy to its entire brand to see that people place significant value in technology they feel they can trust.

For Samsung, placing privacy front and center may be a winning strategy, giving its latest flagship a genuine edge over competitors that they can’t match simply by pushing out a software update. Privacy Display also elevates the Ultra even within Samsung’s own wide stable of phones, and it goes some way (although perhaps not all the way) toward justifying that $1,300 price tag.

«At face value, the Galaxy S26 Series devices differ little from [Samsung’s] predecessors launched just over a year ago,» Wood said. «Without this capability, the Galaxy S26 Ultra would have been an extremely tough sell.»

But Samsung may want to capitalize on this competitive advantage while it can. «I also expect this to become a benchmark feature over the next few years on all premium smartphones and other products, such as laptops,» Wood said.

That’s something to look forward to if you plan to upgrade in 2027 or beyond, but for now this is an Ultra exclusive, so you’ll need to be feeling flush if you plan to be a Privacy Display early adopter.