👀 This is auto-installed on most Androids: Go to Settings > Apps > See all apps and search for SafetyCore. It’s the app that checks for NSFW content in photos. Delete it if you don’t want it.
The truth about Zillow’s Zestimate
🙋♀️Raising my hand … Hello, everyone. My name is Kim, and I am a Zillow junkie.
I have saved every home I owned, own now and would like to own. It’s fun to track what Zillow thinks the places are worth in what they call a “Zestimate.”
But can you trust it? And if you’re selling, how can you make sure it actually reflects your home’s true value?
How the Zestimate works
Zillow pulls data from public records, recent home sales and market trends. Sounds smart, but it doesn’t account for upgrades, renovations or your home’s condition. (How to fix this is below.)
🔹 The good: If you’re selling a home in a hot market, the Zestimate average error rate is 2.4%. Not bad.
🔹 The bad: If your home isn’t for sale, the error rate jumps to 7.49%.
Here’s a link that shows you the margins of error in cities and states across the country.
Zillow trusted its own algorithm so much that it started buying homes with it. That didn’t end well.
How Zillow’s Zestimate lost them $1B
In 2018, Zillow launched Zillow Offers. The idea? Use the Zestimate to buy homes, fix them up and flip them for a profit. What could go wrong? Well, everything.
The algorithm miscalculated home prices, often overpaying. When the market cooled down in 2021, Zillow suddenly owned thousands of homes it couldn’t sell at a profit. They lost a cool billion dollars.
How to get a job as a mystery diner
Any restaurant worth its salt wants to know what it’s doing right and what it’s screwing up. And they’re willing to pay you for that info. But they can’t just judge servers and kitchen staff when they’re on their best behavior. They need someone undercover.
Hidden cams at a sleepover - March 15th, Hour 3
An 11-year-old girl makes a creepy discovery at her friend’s house. Plus, VR in prison, bad photos on Wikipedia, and how to stream Metallica’s latest concert.
👽 Just for the record, sleeve them alone: This is wild. NASA launched the Voyager 1 and 2, each carrying a Golden Record filled with photos and audio representing life on Earth almost 50 years ago. Think a nursing mother, nature pics and human speech. The kicker? Both spacecraft are experiencing major power problems. Aliens are more into comet books anyway.
410 megapixels
What Canon managed to cram into a 35mm full-frame sensor. For perspective, it has a 24K resolution, 198 times sharper than HD. And no, it’s not coming to the consumer market anytime soon. It’s going to be used for surveillance so photos can be enlarged without losing their detail.
🖼️ A picture is worth a thousand words: But if your iPhone’s Live Photos aren’t worth all the storage space they take up, it’s easy to turn ’em off. Go to Settings > Camera > Preserve Settings. Scroll down to Live Photo and toggle it off.
Mac and Windows how-to: Add widgets to your desktop
Right on my Mac desktop, I can check my mouse battery (38% and dropping), see where my son Ian is (at work), get the latest weather update (hello, sunny Phoenix!), and even keep track of time with a world clock.
Widgets are like mini windows into your favorite apps, giving you instant info without the hassle of opening them up. Want to set yours up? I’ve got you covered!
Get everything Amazon collects and tracks about you
I was doing some research about Amazon and ran across a golden nugget I couldn’t wait to share with you. We all know Amazon tracks everything including what you browse, buy, watch and even ask Alexa.
But here’s the surprise: You can download all of it. I’ll show you how.
I told you about this weeks ago: Now it’s hitting mainstream news sites. Google secretly installed an app on Android phones called SafetyCore. It scans all your photos, theoretically to provide Sensitive Content warnings. Hit this link on your Android and hit uninstall if you don’t want it eating up 2GB of space.
Picture in picture: You’re at your sister’s house and she’s bringing out the old family photos. There’s a better solution than scanning them or taking a crappy photo of them. PhotoScan by Google Photos is free and gives you a high-res digital copy without that weird glare.
Low on iPhone storage? Turn this on now
Your photos are eating up space, but a simple setting can free up tons of storage without losing your high-resolution images.
Kindness + Tech = Heroes: After Hurricane Helene and the Eaton Fire, Taylor Schenker and Claire Schwartz are reuniting lost photos with their owners. They find damaged pictures, clean them, and post them on Facebook and Instagram to match them with the right families. Here are photos found from the Eaton Fire. So nice.
Sorry, clothed for the winter: An Oregon woman’s naked photos became town gossip after a prosecutor looked through her phone and shared them with the county sheriff. There was no warrant, no consent and no suspicion of a crime. She sued, but he’s got “qualified immunity,” a loophole that protects government officials unless a court has already ruled the exact same misconduct illegal. PSA: This is just one of many reasons not to store naked pics on your phone.
🧑🎨 Neat trick for iPhone photos: If it’s a Live Photo, you can turn it into a cool long-exposure shot, like an artsy view of a river flowing by or a busy city street that seems to be moving. Open your Photos app and look for a picture with a Live label in the top left corner. Tap on it and choose Long Exposure from the menu. Let your iPhone work its magic.
Assume any photo you post can be traced: This tech is something else. GeoSpy analyzes every single pixel, background object, shadow and landmark in your photos to identify the exact spot it was taken. Within seconds, they can pass that along to the government, police or anyone else willing to pay. The old way of tracking using the photo’s metadata is over.
👋 Bye-bye: Remove the background from a photo in your iPhone’s Files app. Go to Photos and tap Select on the right. Choose the photo you want to move and press Share > Save to Files to import. Then, open Files > Quick Actions > Remove Background to make a new copy of your pic.
This makes cents: If you’re looking to make some extra cash, this might be for you. Instacart is rolling out a new side gig where you can make money by just taking photos of products on store shelves. This way, brands see what’s selling and how their products look to customers. The pay? Around $12 for 10 minutes of work (paywall link). I made $15 taking pics of store shelves at Costco while writing about the TaskRabbit app years ago. Too bad I walked out with 50 boxes of animal crackers and a kayak.
Have an iPhone? Store for-your-eyes-only pics in the Notes app. Open the pic in the Photos app, tap the share icon and select Notes. Open the note you want to protect, tap the three-dot icon in the upper right, then choose Lock.
👁️📢 No snooping: If you have sensitive pics like your driver’s license on your phone, set up a locked folder in Google Photos. Open the Google Photos app > Utilities > Set up Locked Folder. Follow the on-screen directions to finish up.