Are My Amazon Echo and Google Home Spying on Everything I Say?

Did You Know? Three countries share the distinction of having the lowest minimum elevation on Earth—Israel, Jordan, and Palestine—due to all three bordering the Dead Sea, which has an elevation of -1,404 feet below sea level. Geek Trivia In The American South, Millions Of People In The Early 1900s Suffered From A Crippling Dietary Deficiency Of? Vitamin D → Iodine → Iron → Niacin → Advertisement Unblock Content the Easy Way with StrongVPN You're just trying to check out a website and they've locked you out because it's blocked in your country. It's ridiculous, but luckily you can get around the restrictions with StrongVPN.— and unlock any website you want. Of course, they also have a money-back guarantee if it doesn't work for you. Download StrongVPN to Unlock Content Today Want to Change Your Email Preferences? At some point in the past you subscribed to the How-To Geek newsletter, but if you'd like to change the frequency or unsubscribe, you can do so by clicking the button. Change my Subscription (or unsubscribe) Today's How-To Geek Articles By popular request, we're including a quick list of the daily articles at the top of the daily email as well as the regular format near the bottom. How to Revoke Third-Party App Access From Soundcloud How to Customize Your iPhone or iPad’s Control Center How to Delete Your Instagram Search History Are My Amazon Echo and Google Home Spying on Everything I Say? How to Leave the iOS Beta Now that iOS 11 Is Out What’s New in iOS 11 for iPhone and iPad, Available Now 16 Finder Shortcuts Every Mac User Should Know Is MoviePass, the $9.95 Movie Theater Subscription, Worth It? What Is “Application Frame Host” and Why Is It Running on My PC? Hosted Telephony: What Are the Benefits? [Sponsored] How to Auto-Run Windows Programs When You Plug In a USB Drive How to Snooze Notifications in Android Oreo What Are Creative Commons Licenses? What Does CCleaner Do, and Should You Use It? Geek Comic Today's Tech Term Interrupt Vector Table An Interrupt Vector Table (a.k.a. Dispatch Table) is a table of 256 4-byte pointers (interrupt vectors) that resides in the first 1KB of memory. The interrupt vectors point to specific routines in memory or the BIOS, which then handles the interrupts. What We're Reading This section contains what we're reading from around the web, along with commentary from our editors. Think of it like your daily digest of the most interesting things online. How the 'Star Trek' Punch Became the Worst Fight Move on TV - Motherboard It's a bizarre but enduring bit of TV lore. [Motherboard] AI Research Is in Desperate Need of an Ethical Watchdog More social scientists are using AI intending to solve society's ills, but they don't have clear ethical guidelines to prevent them from accidentally harming people. [Wired] Google's AI head says super-intelligent AI scare stories are stupid 'I'm definitely not worried about the AI apocalypse,' says Google's John Giannandrea [The Verge] How to Revoke Third-Party App Access From Soundcloud SoundCloud, an alternative platform for posting and selling music and other audio-only content, offers an API that lets other websites and applications access its data for cool connections. But it’s always possible to be too connected, and if you’d rather be a little more secure with your SoundCloud account, you’ll want to restrict and cancel some of those connections. Here’s how. Read This Article → How to Customize Your iPhone or iPad’s Control Center Starting with iOS 11, you can now customize the Control Center you see when you swipe up from the bottom of your iPhone or iPad’s screen. You can remove shortcuts you never use, add new shortcuts, and rearrange the shortcuts to make the Control Center your own. Read This Article → How to Delete Your Instagram Search History Search histories can be somewhat incriminating, and there's often very little reason to keep them around. Your Instagram search history is no exception. Here's how to clear it. Read This Article → Are My Amazon Echo and Google Home Spying on Everything I Say? In-home voice assistants like the Amazon Echo and Google Home are convenient, but are they also a secret back door for the government and corporations to spy on everything you say? No. Of course not. Reports of the Echo and Google Home’s ability to spy on you have been greatly exaggerated. Read This Article → How to Leave the iOS Beta Now that iOS 11 Is Out Once a major release of iOS comes out, the benefits of being the on the beta release channel diminish significantly–here’s how to get off the beta tester train and get back to regular old public releases. Read This Article → What’s New in iOS 11 for iPhone and iPad, Available Now iOS 11 is on its way, and Apple announced a number of new features and changes at WWDC 2017 this year. From improvements to Messages and Apple Pay to powerful multitasking and file management on the iPad, here are the best new features. iOS 11 will be released on September 19, 2017, but you can play with it yourself today if you install the iOS 11 public beta. Read This Article → 16 Finder Shortcuts Every Mac User Should Know The Finder seems pretty basic, but there are all kinds of things hidden just below the surface. Whether you want to cut and paste files or jump to a particular folder, it’s all about knowing the right keyboard shortcuts. Read This Article → Is MoviePass, the $9.95 Movie Theater Subscription, Worth It? MoviePass offers an unprecedented deal for moviegoers: $9.99 a month lets you see a movie in theaters every single day. Yes, you read that right. You can watch around thirty movies in theaters every month for ten bucks. Since that’s cheaper than a single ticket in most places, people flocked to it. But before you sign up, there are still a few things to consider. Read This Article → What Is “Application Frame Host” and Why Is It Running on My PC? Open the Task Manager on Windows 10 and you’ll see an “Application Frame Host” background process running. This process has the file name “ApplicationFrameHost.exe” and is part of the Windows 10 operating system. Read This Article → Hosted Telephony: What Are the Benefits? [Sponsored] Hosted Telephony: What Are the Benefits? Read This Article → How to Auto-Run Windows Programs When You Plug In a USB Drive Portable apps—self-contained executables that can be moved onto flash drives and run without installation—are popular tools for anyone who has to work on multiple Windows machines. If you want to make your workflow even faster, you can add an “auto-run” file that automatically opens the program as soon as you plug in the drive. Read This Article → How to Snooze Notifications in Android Oreo We get it; you’re busy. You can’t always respond to notifications right when they hit your phone, but you also don’t want to forget about them. Fortunately, in Android Oreo, you can snooze these notifications so they’ll pop up again later. Read This Article → What Are Creative Commons Licenses? Any creative work you do is covered by copyright. This means that if you write something, take a photo, record a song, paint a picture, or do anything that creates intellectual property, you get certain legal protections. The biggest protection is that other people aren't able just to take your work and use it how they please. This is why services like Facebook have such complicated (and scary) Terms of Service. Read This Article → What Does CCleaner Do, and Should You Use It? These days, it seems like every Windows user has heard about CCleaner. It’s widely recommended, online and offline—but this week, it acted as a piggyback for malware. The real question we should be asking is: do you really need CCleaner in the first place? Read This Article → Advertisement Unblock Content the Easy Way with StrongVPN You're just trying to check out a website and they've locked you out because it's blocked in your country. It's ridiculous, but luckily you can get around the restrictions with StrongVPN.— and unlock any website you want. Of course, they also have a money-back guarantee if it doesn't work for you. Download StrongVPN to Unlock Content Today