My Smart Glasses Record for Meta by Default. I Found the Switches That Make Them Stop.
I almost stopped wearing my Ray-Ban Meta glasses — all I'd heard was that footage gets reviewed by some company to train an AI, with no real oversight. The fear isn't a myth: in April 2025 Meta turned the AI on by default, made your photos and voice usable for training, and removed the opt-out for storing your voice. But you can't fix it by installing anything — the glasses are locked. You fix it in three settings, one network block, and how you wear them. Here's exactly where the switches are.
Your TV Is Watching You Watch It. Here's the Setting That Makes It Stop.
Almost every smart TV ships with a feature called ACR — automatic content recognition — switched on by default. It snapshots whatever's on your screen (even from your console or laptop), fingerprints it, and sends it back to be matched and sold. In 2017 the FTC caught Vizio doing it on 11 million TVs — over 100 billion data points a day, tied to your age and income. It's still standard. Here's the buried toggle on every major brand, and why you should block the TV at your network too.
Your Car Is a Data Broker With Wheels. Here's How to Make It Stop Selling You.
Your car may be one of the worst privacy threats you own. Mozilla reviewed 25 brands in 2023 and every one failed — 19 of 25 said they can sell your data. And it's not hypothetical: from 2020 to 2024, GM sold driving data — your speed, hard braking, late-night trips — to brokers like LexisNexis, who fed it to insurers and quietly raised people's premiums. The FTC banned GM from doing it and California reached a $12.75 million settlement with them. Here's how to find what your car shares, and shut it off.
Your Phone Never Stops Talking. I Put a $20 Filter on Mine to Hear What It Was Saying.
In under a week, my phone made 91,118 requests to the internet — about one every six seconds, awake or asleep. A $20-a-year filter called NextDNS flagged 5,937 of them (7%) as ads, trackers, and junk I never agreed to, and blocked them before they connected. I didn't feel one. Here's why you'd want it, what it actually does for you, and where it falls short.