💲 If you put a Ring on it: Ring’s raised its Basic video doorbell subscription costs from $3.99 to $4.99 a month. Always something, huh? More than ever, getting SimpliSafe to protect your whole home is a smarter and cheaper choice.
Your data: It’s all posted online - But there's a simple way to remove it
© Sitthiphong Thadakun | Dreamstime.com
A loyal reader, Racquel, emailed me recently after dealing with a very angry customer at work. “Last week, she left me a voicemail and said that I was behind all her problems and she was ‘going to find’ where I lived.”
Scary, right? Even if you’re safe with what you do online, there’s so much public info about us floating around the web. And the worst part is that your personal info is out there for others to snap up completely free.
Racquel had heard me talk about Incogni, a service that removes your personal info from all the sites that exist solely to gather and share your info for their profit. “[Incogni] went to work right away. It’s going to be difficult for her to find my address,” she told me.
I want you to have that safety and protection, too. Let’s take a deeper look at who’s making money by giving away or selling your data online and what can happen to you when they do.
Data-hungry data brokers
Data brokers exist only to collect and sell your personal information, often without your consent. They gather data from public records, your online activities, retail sites and anything else they can find. This can expose you to:
- Profiling: These detailed profiles about you are sold to marketers, advertisers, and even employers or insurance companies.
- Identity theft: With enough information, bad actors can access your financial accounts or create new ones in your name.
- Spam and scams: Your contact info can be sold to telemarketers and scammers. That’s why you get spam calls, emails and text messages at all hours, day or night.
- Loss of privacy: All this data from various sources can paint a very detailed picture of your life. Just knowing it’s out there makes me queasy.
😡 Look, I tried to get myself out of the data brokers’ sites but gave up after three months. It was too frustrating and time-consuming. I decided to try Incogni after seeing an ad about the service, and I was very, very skeptical. I’m not sure how they do it, but Incogni got me out of these data-scraping sites.
Money-hungry people search websites
People-search websites aggregate information from public records such as court documents, voter registrations and property records, along with social media and other online sources. In the wrong hands, this can open you up to:
- Doxxing: That’s when bad guys publish your private info online (like your home address) to purposely make you vulnerable to threats across the web or in your home.
- Stalking and harassment: You don’t have to get doxxed for someone to use your personal info to track your whereabouts or target you for harassment. Stalking can start small, but it’s a nightmare that can last for years.
- Social engineering: Criminals use detailed information to target you with creepy, highly personalized scams that are harder to detect and resist. Think an old high school friend “reconnecting” out of the blue.
- Reputation damage: Outdated or incorrect information, like an arrest record, on people-search websites can drag your name through the mud and cost you opportunities.
Yup, I tried to get my name out of people-search sites. Like a bad rash, a new site pops up at every turn. I never thought it was possible, but Incogni got me out of these sites and put me on suppression lists so these garbage sites can’t put me back in.
This is so fly: Amazon Prime Air’s delivery drones have received Beyond Visual Line of Sight clearance to go nationwide in 2025. Pilots can operate them remotely, and drones can legally travel farther. Hopefully, this doesn’t turn into people skeet-shooting for “prizes.”
Amazon driver ignores a house fire
A family’s home burned for over three hours. The crazy part is, just 20 minutes in, an Amazon driver arrived to drop off a package. Watch what happens when he enters the smokey garage.
Someone leaked a shot from the new Captain America movie and Marvel is ticked — they’ve filed a subpoena to get the poster’s identity. Which platform are they going after? Is it … A.) Facebook, B.) Reddit, C.) TikTok or D.) Instagram?
60% decrease
In high-paying remote jobs in the past year. Wanna make the big bucks? You’ll probably have to do it in person; only 4% of jobs paying over $250,000 annually are fully remote. And in a survey of 1,000 companies, 90% said they expect a full five-day week back in office by the end of 2024.
Scammers pretending to be the Social Security office
Be careful what information you give over the phone, especially if you aren’t expecting a call.
'Does incognito keep me private?'
The good news is it does hide some things. The bad news … It’s not nearly as private as you’d think.
New app limits kids bathroom breaks
Are your kids ready for this to become the norm?
Don’t buy this now: Google’s just announced six new Chromebooks, including their AI-enabled Chromebook Plus line. With a Chromebook Plus laptop, you’ll get AI wallpapers, an AI text and photo editor, and Google’s Gemini AI assistant built in for as low as $429. Not bad, but I wouldn’t shell out for a first-gen AI laptop. They’ll only get better.
Allowing specific calls while on Do Not Disturb
Do Not Disturb keeps calls and texts from bugging you, but what if there’s a person or two you want to get through any time? Here’s how to flag important contacts and silence the rest.
How to set emergency contacts for iPhone
I hope you never need to use them, but everyone should set up emergency contacts. I’ll walk you through the process. It only takes a minute!
📮 Stick with me, and we’ll go places: The prices for U.S. first-class postage stamps are going up to $0.73 in July, and lots of fake postage stamp sites and social media ads are popping up. PSA: There’s no such thing as half-price stamps. It’s a scam.
Really remote: SpaceX’s Starlink system for cellphones can now handle video calls. A demo shows an employee linking their smartphone to the satellite service and connecting to another phone on a regular cellular network. The image quality is grainy and the clip brief, but it’s still pretty cool. Don’t expect it till later this year.
75% of weddings
In 2024 will be phone-free. Unplugged weddings fix that problem of everyone looking at the ceremony through their cam and ruining expensive professional pics. Smart.
Just sell it: Nike, Ralph Lauren, Levi’s and Zara are taking over resale sites like Depop and eBay. Easiest to sell? Brown, beige and multicolored outfits and Nike shoes, which are the No. 1 sellers. Check your closets and make some summer travel money now!
It went data way: Soon, you can send files directly from Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive to ChatGPT rather than saving them to your desktop and uploading them to the AI assistant. There’s a new ChatGPT feature to make sweet interactive charts and tables from your spreadsheets. And there goes another job because of AI.
But wait! There’s more: Microsoft Edge will soon use AI to offer real-time video translation on sites like YouTube and CNBC — dubbing and subtitles included. And you can create fancy AI apps that respond to images, voice and text prompts with GPT‑4o in Azure AI Studio. Fancy, fancy.
🤦 Baby, don’t Hertz me: Get a load of this — rental car giant Hertz got caught charging Tesla renters hundreds for gas. They blame a system glitch that added a “Skip the Pump” fee to EV invoices. Refunds are rolling out. Are they sorry? Yup — you get one free EV rental day. I’ll pass.
Another health care data breach: WebTPA provides admin services to health benefit plans and insurance companies. Hackers stole the names, contact details, birth and death dates, Social Security numbers and insurance info of 2.4 million people in April 2023. Yes, it happened over a year ago and we’re just hearing about it now. The company’s CEO basically said, “It’s no big deal.” Yeah, not for you.