Privacy
What happens to what you type
What these tools do with what you type, the security problem nobody has solved, and the short list of habits that covers most realistic risk — including the ones that changed because fraud got fluent.
What AI Tools Do With Your Text
Four things can happen to a prompt, and which ones apply depends on settings most people never open. The specific questions to ask of any tool.
Reference
Prompt Injection Matters to You
A model cannot reliably tell your instructions from instructions hidden in a document it reads. Once tools can act, that becomes your problem.
Explainer
A VPN sees everything you do, and running one costs money. The arithmetic of a free VPN only works one way, and researchers have shown how.
Analysis
Antivirus Now: What Still Matters
The built-in protection on modern systems is genuinely good. What third-party products add, what they cost you, and where the actual risk moved.
Analysis
What a Network Security Key Is
The phrase appears at the worst moment and means one of three different things. How to tell which, and the settings worth changing while you are in there.
Explainer
Deleting Search History Properly
Clearing the browser does almost nothing. The record lives in your account, and the setting that stops it accumulating is a separate one.
Procedure
It shows an approximate location and your provider. It is not your home address, and the sites claiming to find people by it are selling something.
Explainer
The tells everyone was taught — bad grammar, obvious fakes — are gone. The defences that survive are about process rather than perception.
Analysis
Browser Extensions and Permissions
An extension can read and change everything you do in the browser. The risk is not that they start malicious — it is that they change hands.
Analysis
A real transition is underway for real reasons, on a timescale that matters now for some data and not at all for most people's daily use.
Explainer
Planting credentials and files nobody legitimate should touch. Very high precision, narrow coverage, cheap enough that most should use some.
Explainer
Online Safety Advice That Holds
Much of the standard advice is obsolete. What is left is short, unglamorous, and covers the large majority of realistic risk.
Checklist
12 notes in this section