Time to break out the old nationwide atlas road map — it’s going to be a great summer for road trips, thanks to low gas prices. You might want to splurge on an app or GPS with up-to-date traffic information, too, because lots of other families will have the same [Keep reading]
While Washington continues its dog-and-pony show about a clumsy telephone network dragnet designed to find needles in haystacks, people really concerned about the future of the republic should simply look up — at all these low-flying planes making deliberate left-handed circles around D.C. and dozens of other cities. The FBI has [Keep reading]
Plenty of folks think they could never be outsmarted by a hacker; plenty of them are wrong. In fact, perhaps 97% are wrong. Two new studies make this point, and show the devastating consequences of being wrong. (This story originally appeared on Credit.com. Read it there.) Security firm McAfee has [Keep reading]
While many Americans are ill-prepared for a financial disaster, women are far worse off than men, according to a new study by BMO Harris Premier Services. The financial services firm says that men with any emergency savings have an average of $58,061 put away to deal with the sitution, compared to only $33,558 [Keep reading]
It’s the most vexing digital-age question: Should I share this? After the AdultFriendFinder.com hack and the IRS “Get Transcript” debacle, CNBC asked me to look into the topic of online oversharing. You can read the story I wrote here. But here’s one thing to think about: Oversharing rarely *feels* like oversharing. That [Keep reading]
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Parents today are dooming their children to an over-exposed digital life by posting nearly 1,000 photos of kids before age 5, a new British study suggests. An advocacy group named The Parent Zone polled 2,000 U.K. and found they post 973 photos before their child’s fifth birthday. Even worse: many parents admit [Keep reading]
Whenever you hear about one of those big-deal, multi-million-dollar settlements involving a federal agency and a misbehaving company, the news probably makes your eyes glaze over. In most cases, nothing really bad happens to the company — they just have to give back their ill-gotten gains, and maybe pay a [Keep reading]
Identity thieves used the IRS’ own systems to steal personal information from about 100,000 taxpayers, the agency said on Tuesday, according to the Associated Press. Criminals already armed with some data on the taxpayers used the IRS “Get Transcript” website to obtain even more data on their victims, the IRS [Keep reading]
Debt collectors reportedly have a new strategy to get consumers’ attention: text messages. “YOUR PAYMENT DECLINED WITH CARD ****-****-****-5463 . . . CALL 866.256.2117 IMMEDIATELY,” reads one such text, according to the Federal Trade Commission. (This story was first published on Credit.com. Read it there.) The agency has temporarily halted three [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan