I was about five years old when teachers started pointing out that I had a good memory. It led to always being cast as the lead in school plays, because I could reliably remember all my lines within a short period of time. I thought it was because I worked hard. Turns out it might just be because I have a photographic memory.

Rather than being something you just have - or don't - a photographic memory is actually something you can develop.

There are lots of great benefits to using a smartwatch or fitness band. They can encourage activity, deliver data to you in a convenient and unobtrusive way and they can let you take your music with you without carrying a phone.

But they can also be used to keep spy on people - and that's getting German authorities riled up. An entire class of smartwatches are designed specifically for parents to keep track of their kids. Germany's Federal Network Agency says devices with GPS tracking capability and integrated cellular comms constitute unauthorised transmission systems and have banned the devices.

It seems that money talks. Loudly. Threatened with the possibility of having their products being banned from the Pentagon, the CEO of security software company Kaspersky has said he will hand his source code over to the US government to prove he’s not a Russian spy.

You know a security risk is serious when Mark Zuckerberg starts paying attention. While putting tape over your webcam is one surefire way of making sure no one's watching you on your webcam, you don't have to rely on such primitive methods. There are a couple of apps that can do the job for you.

Google provides a lot of helpful, free services, but they often come at the cost of privacy. You might love Gmail, but you have to suffer through targeted ads; you may enjoy using Google Maps, but you have to give up your location privacy. Signing up for Google's suite of apps almost always involves some degree of data collection, but you should at least try to limit the amount of spying the company performs on you. Here's how you can keep using Google's apps without constantly getting spied on.

Remember how there was a huge uproar when it was revealed that Windows 10 had telemetry services that automatically sent information back to Microsoft on how users were interacting with the operating system? It seems that graphics card maker NVIDIA has now added telemetry into its latest drivers. If you don't want to be tracked by NVIDIA, here's a way to disable it.

While it's much easier to carry around a recorder these days, in the 1950s, recording top secret conversations was far more difficult. Here's the CIA's solution.

We already knew from the Snowden leaks in 2013 that governments around the world had been spying on their citizens through the use of various technologies. We now know that at least one spy agency, GCHQ in the UK, enlisted the help of New Zealand network monitoring vendor Endace. Here’s what we know.