Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
As you probably know, Facebook scams and hoaxes take many forms.
Whether they show up in your newsfeed or arrive in your Messenger inbox, the results are always the same…
Lots of folks either get scammed or they become very irritated due to the deluge of fraudulent messages they receive.
The latest hoax to come to my attention is being spread primarily via Facebook Messenger.
According to this recent report from the folks at Motherboard, several popular email apps are scanning user emails and then selling the data scraped from those messages to third party companies.
That sold data is then used by the purchasers to bombard the unsuspecting users with SPAM emails and even send physical junk mail to their homes or office mail boxes.
Question from Judy: It seems like just about everything that people share in large numbers on Facebook is either a scam or it’s dangerous in some way.
I keep seeing people share the “How Hard Did Aging Hit You” challenge thing and I was wondering if it’s a scam?
I don’t mind seeing them (I think they’re cute) but I don’t want them on my Facebook if they’re dangerous.
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
A recent discovery by the security firm Sophos is a great reminder that it’s wise to keep a close eye on the games and apps you install on your mobile devices.
Sophos’ researchers have discovered that an Android game called “Scary Granny ZOMBYE Mod: The Horror Game 2019” displays a fake Google logon screen that steals your Google login information.
Apple’s iPhones and their other iOS-based devices have long had a stellar reputation for carefully guarding the user data contained on those devices.
However, the results of a new study could easily rip that stellar reputation to threads.
According to this recent article by Washington Post Technology Columnist Geoffrey Fowler, the study found that iPhones leak personal information like a sieve via their installed apps, sometimes in direct contradiction of the apps’ own stated privacy policies.