Is my smartphone listening to me? How to end targeted ads and hackers
Sometimes I feel like I spend my entire day dodging attacks on my digital identity. I wake up to scammy text messages begging me to click sketchy links. I delete them. Brush my teeth.
Open my email and voila! Fake sweepstakes emails — from my own email address, no less — telling me I won everything from a power drill to a Yeti cooler. I delete those, too. By noon I’ve silenced at least a half dozen robocalls, and at least once a day I see a Facebook ad for something I recently talked to my husband about — is Siri eavesdropping on me, too?
Obviously, I’m not alone. With so many scams floating around we’re all starting to see privacy dangers around every mouse click, even where they might not exist, like in a Snapchat filter.
The recent midterm elections and upcoming Black Friday/Cyber Monday online shopping extravaganza have only made these concerns more intense. If you haven’t gotten at least a hundred unsolicited text messages — again, with sketchy-looking links — consider yourself lucky.
Where is all of this headed? Are we forever doomed to a future of digital paranoia, and the threat of cybercrime, stolen money, identities or worse? Is there a way to break free from all these shady spammers, scammers and thieves?
The good news is: It all gets a lot less scary once you realize what is going on.
Now you know:7 default settings tech companies don’t ever want you to change
An email from myself?
I get emails from myself all the time … only I never sent them. They’re often low-effort scam-bait messages claiming that I won something or I have unclaimed funds somewhere. Or even more annoying, that I’ve been hacked “watching porn” on my laptop and better pay up — or else.
Spoiler alert, there’s no watching porn or getting hacked actually going on, these are among the most common of threats.
You likely get these, too. No doubt, looking at your own email address in the “From” line is unsettling, but how does that even happen?
Sadly, it’s easy. The email addresses that populate when you open an email are rarely verified, especially if you use a free email service. Using a less-secure Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) server, a scammer can just type in what…
