After we all did Big Brother stories last week about Samsung’s ominous Smart TV privacy policy, more alarming information was found. The biggest “Doh!” — Samsung not only collects what you say in your living room, it uploads the content in the clear, without encrypting it. That means anyone who [Keep reading]
Elder financial abuse is a big problem that’s getting bigger. Back in 2010, MetLife released a report estimating that $2.9 billion is lost by America’s elderly each year, based on published accounts of fraud, but most observers believed that figure was low. A new survey released last week might be [Keep reading]
“I’m kind of average-looking, but I have a great credit score!” Looking for love post Valentine’s Day? Maybe you should adjust your online personals ad. According to a new study of adults in relationships, having a partner who is good with money is more important than a lover who’s sexy. [Keep reading]
Looking for love this Valentine’s Day? Remember: safe online dating requires good hygiene. Digital hygiene. A new study released this week by IBM found over 60 percent of leading dating Android mobile apps they studied are potentially vulnerable to a variety of cyber-attacks that put personal user information and corporate [Keep reading]
Facebook has added a thoughtful feature today that will make things easier for folks using social media to grieve the loss of a loved one. It’s called “Adding a Legacy Contact,” and it allows users to name a person who has can make limited adjustments to the deceased’s Facebook account [Keep reading]
The U.S. economy has, like so many of life’s big issues, a blind man and the elephant problem. If you have a good job or you just got a raise, you think America has rebounded nicely. If you are still struggling to replace income you lost during the Great Recession, [Keep reading]
Just how bad is the tax ID theft problem? About half of all filers seeking refunds in the state of Ohio now must answer a series of challenge questions just to prove they are who they say they are. Ohio has already intercepted nearly 60,000 returns seeking an astonishing $250 [Keep reading]
It’s that time of year again, when radio airwaves are full of ads telling men they can charm their significant others with Valentine’s Day flowers for just $30 on websites like ProFlowers.com. I’m an investigative journalist, and I have 20 years’ experience hunting and pecking my way through the web, [Keep reading]
As a leader of the oft-paranoid-sounding-privacy-sensitive crowd, let me be the first to congratulate Samsung for its honesty. Plenty of my friends in paranoia have pointed out the language included in Samsung’s new SmartTV privacy policy. Because the gizmo uses voice recognition to let owners change the channel and do [Keep reading]
Tax ID theft is reaching epidemic proportions. Well, it did last year when the IRS issued seemingly endless warnings about it. That wasn’t enough to get state taxation agencies to fix their systems, apparently, as TurboTax announced it has taken the extraordinary step of “pausing” state tax return filings for [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan