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
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
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
I met a friend for coffee a few months ago. They mentioned some of my earlier posts about online safety, then said something which has stuck with me like a poppyseed lodged in my gums: I don’t worry about my data. I just assume the bad guys have all my Read more
How Andrej Karpathy approaches his digital hygiene makes emminent sense for the “…computer scientist renowned for his work in machine learning, computer vision, and artificial intelligence.” (source) You and I, though, are not founding members of OpenAI, or founders of Eureka Labs, an AI+Education company. And while we can learn Read more
Why should you secure your Facebook account with two-factor authentication? Because you don’t want to have to post this: I’ve used Facebook since Jan. 19, 2008. More than 17 years of my memories and messages are sitting on Meta’s servers, and it could all be erased or exploited if a Read more
With a collection of skills used to send messages, make phone calls, play music, and control connected home devices, Amazon has sold 600 million Alexa-enabled devices since it launched in 2014. Alexa is a voice assistant with an “always on” microphone constantly listening for its wake word. Once heard, Alexa Read more