Across America, workers are sharing the most intimate details of their lives with employers through gadgets like Fitbits — all to save a little money on life or health insurance. It’s junk science meets Orwell meets Lenin. And we are going down a crazy, creepy path. “Take 10,000 steps and [Keep reading]
How persistent and brazen are phantom debt collectors? Last month, when I emailed a firm named Advance Cash Services asking for comment on collection harassment allegations, the firm replied by saying I owed them $935.76 for an unpaid payday loan. A few days later, I wrote about Susan Marquardt of Chicago, who [Keep reading]
Another day, another reminder that companies don’t really have to abide by promises to NOT share your personal information. They have a big “but” in their contracts. Last week, it was WhatsApp and Facebook. We’ll get to that in a moment. This week, millions of Sports Authority customers began receiving notices [Keep reading]
The FBI has issued a warning that state board of election websites are being targeted by hackers, and in at least one case, voter data has been stolen. Yahoo News Michael Isikoff first reported the attack and posted the FBI warning online (against the FBI’s wishes). It’s very serious. Clearly the FBI [Keep reading]
This might be the most sophisticated job scam I’ve ever seen. Thanks to a near-victim, you’ll get a rare chance to see a real pro almost pull off a nearly perfect digital caper. You do things when you are job hunting that you wouldn’t normally do. You meet strangers. You [Keep reading]
The Affordable Care Act is having (another) existential moment. This one will be supercharged by a presidential election, which is a shame, because improving America’s health care insurance system is a really complicated project — sloganeering has no place. But the atmosphere around the topic so poisoned that it’s hard to [Keep reading]
What do you do when you are a Midwestern town of about 12,000 people and your main employer pulls out, taking 10,000 jobs with it? You circle the wagons, call home the kids, embrace change, and trade in 20th Century industries for 21st Century industries. And hope for good luck. [Keep reading]
Get used to another term in world of computer hacking: “economic warfare.” A French firm building multi-billion-dollar submarines for Australia and several other nations says it was the victim of economic warfare after some of its schematics for similar subs being built for India were released online, allegedly by hackers. The [Keep reading]
If young families in New England can’t find a starter home to buy, she might be partly to blame. As a small-time real estate investor, she swoops in and buys would-be starter homes before families can and turns them into rentals. She says she feels badly about it … but [Keep reading]
If you’re like me, you’re afraid to answer your cell phone. And that’s a bad thing for a reporter. It wasn’t always this way. For years, my cell phone number seemed to be out of the public domain, and even businesses that had it were pretty respectful of my need [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan