A whole lot of us are about to watch hours upon hours of live television. And none of us will be alone when we do it. From the Super Bowl to the Winter Olympics plus everything else we stream, audio and video, it all generates profile data which our services Read more
If you’ve read some of my past articles—like this or this—you won’t be surprised to hear I sometimes poke fun at myself by telling folks I’m wearing my tinfoil hat. Twice in the last couple weeks, people did not know what I meant by that term;“tinfoil hat.” That gave me Read more
I have little interest in drinking from the firehose of artificial intelligence news. Instead, I keep my ears peeled for signals in the noise. What information feels so counterintuitive that I have to stop and read it two or three times to attempt to understand what may be at play, Read more
New is fun. It’s exciting to install a new app, to start using a new service. But they all come with a checkbox. And all those little checkboxes come with terms, conditions, and policies which control how the app or service can use your information. When was the last time Read more
Picture this: It’s Sunday afternoon. You’re in the kitchen meal planning for the week and thinking about dinner. The phone rings. It’s your bank calling about a problem with your account. A Fraud Prevention team member asks if you authorized a transfer to a foreign account? No, of course not. Read more
Don’t use Comet, Perplexity’s web browser which it just released as a free install. Protecting your personal data is difficult enough. Scams are becoming more sophisticated and more prevalent. In the ever escalating battle to protect your information, your online safety, and your hard-earned money, do not willingly surrender access Read more
You get to decide what you will accept an unknowable number of times every day. Will you wait in line at the grocery store or will you use the self checkout? Will you stay in your lane or switch to the open one beside you? Should you accept seeing ads Read more
My lawn looks like it has rained every day for the last three months. I may have cut more weeds today than grass, and the fungi in the mulched flowerbeds are as abundant as the attacks in my messaging apps. In this spam season phishing surge, if you have a Read more
Because I found out a wellness app came with unacceptable data privacy gaps, I set out to make it easier for everyone to understand the risks and protect their data. In an earlier post, I described how I learned that all the information I shared with Noom – the meals Read more
Caveat tracker: user beware. Even a free wellness app can cost you a lot. “Free” doesn’t mean no strings attached. You may be paying for the app with your data because, for some services, every meal or weigh-in you track could be shared with the people who administer your health Read more