The Hook Is Already in the Water. Have You Seen It? Right now, as you read this, approximately 3.4 billion phishing emails are being sent. Every day. That is not a typo. Every 39 seconds, another wave of fraudulent messages goes out — to inboxes, to phones, to social media accounts — each one designed [...]
You Have Never Heard of the Companies That Know Everything About You. Most conversations about online privacy focus on the companies you know — Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple. These are the visible players. Their names are on the products you use. You have some awareness, however vague, that they collect your data. The companies that [...]
That Photo You Posted Is Working Against You. You took a photo. You posted it. Your friends liked it. End of story. Except it is not the end of the story. It is the beginning of one you were never meant to know about. Every image you put online begins a journey the moment it [...]
Have We Become So Lazy That We Need a Fridge Telling Us What To Buy? Walk through any appliance showroom and you will find refrigerators with touchscreens and cameras inside. Washing machines that order their own detergent. Ovens you can preheat from your phone. Air fryers with companion apps. Coffee makers that connect to Wi-Fi. [...]
The Cookie You Accepted Without Reading. Here Is What It Does. You have seen the banner thousands of times. A pop-up appears at the bottom or top of a website the moment you arrive. It says something about cookies and privacy. It offers a button that says Accept All and a smaller, harder-to-find link that [...]
Before You Click That Link — Read This. Every day, on every device, you are presented with links. In emails, in text messages, in social media posts, in search results, in documents, in chat applications. Clicking links is so fundamental to how the internet works that most people do it reflexively — without hesitation, without [...]
Every App That Knows Where You Are Is One You Did Not Think About. Open your phone's settings right now and look at which apps have been granted access to your location. Most people who do this for the first time are surprised. Not by one or two apps — by the number. A flashlight [...]
There Is a Microphone in Your Living Room and It Never Sleeps. Somewhere in your home — possibly in multiple rooms — there is a device with a microphone that is always on. It is listening right now. It has been listening since the day you plugged it in. And the audio it captures does [...]
Your Passwords Are Only As Safe As the Company Holding Them. Cloud storage is convenient. Cloud password managers are convenient. Automatic backups to the cloud are convenient. Convenience, however, is not the same as secure — and the gap between those two things has cost millions of people dearly. When you store your passwords, your [...]
You Still Own Your Photos. You Just Can't Control Them Anymore. Here is something that circulates on social media every few years, usually phrased as an urgent warning: post this message to stop Facebook from using your photos. A lawyer advised it. It was on the news. Do it before midnight. It is always false. [...]
