🚨 6M cruisers data breach

📬 Did someone forward this to you? Sign up here. Tomorrow: If you’re traveling this summer, I put together the ultimate list to find hidden cameras, pack light and more. Don’t miss it.

Happy Saturday, {{first_name | friend}}. You’ve used DoorDash for pizza, burritos, maybe ice cream that felt medically necessary at 11:47 p.m. Convenient? Absolutely. But apparently, the app may be keeping tabs on more than your extra guac loyalty. 

One woman swears the app decided it had seen enough after she ordered booze through DoorDash a few too many times. No human bouncer at the door. No bartender sliding the keys away. Simply a delivery service pulling her drinking privileges and letting her know in its own special way.

🍷 How does DoorDash tell a customer they’re banned from ordering alcohol? A) A text from your Dasher: “We need to talk,” B) A push notification with a support number to call, C) A plain email, no phone call, no heads-up, D) A certified letter from DoorDash’s legal department. Keep reading, the answer will be delivered at the end.

📻 Listen up! My national radio show is airing all weekend across the USA. With over 510 stations strong, find your closest one by using our super-duper station locator map, or listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or watch the entire show on YouTube. I’m wherever you are. — Kim

⚡ TL;DR

📖 Read time: 2 minutes

Three readers wrote me this week. Different cities, different services, same gut-drop moment.

Dave from Indianapolis lost five years of family photos. He thought Google Photos had his back. Anita from San Diego cleaned up her desktop and watched files disappear from three devices at once. She thought OneDrive was her safety net. Chris from Austin has 500 files sitting on a USB drive the computer won’t read. A local shop quoted him $2,100 just to try to recover them.

All three made the same mistake. None of them had a real backup.

Sync does exactly what it sounds like. It keeps your files identical across every device. Delete something on your laptop? Gone on your phone. Gone on your tablet. Instantly. No warning, no “are you sure?”

That’s not a bug. That’s the feature working perfectly.

Google Photos, iCloud, OneDrive and Dropbox are sync tools. Powerful. Convenient. Not backups. Calling them backups is like calling a photocopier a file cabinet. Related. Not the same.

A real backup saves snapshots of your files. Delete something today? Your backup has yesterday’s version. Last week’s. Last month’s. It doesn’t care what you did this morning.

Dave got lucky. Google Photos keeps deleted items in a Trash folder for 60 days. He found his photos, and his wife never had to know. (Dave, you owe me one.)

Anita wasn’t lucky. Her files were gone for good. All of them.

Chris is still waiting to find out if $2,100 buys him anything at all. Good luck with that.

You need a backup stored off-site, completely separate from your home network. That copy saves you when everything else fails. A flood. A fire. Ransomware. A USB drive that decides today is the day.

Most people set up sync, pat themselves on the back and assume they’re covered. They’re not. When USB or hard drives die, they take all your data with them. Poof. Gone. That’s usually when people get the backup religion.

This is why I use and recommend Carbonite, a sponsor of my show. It’s awesome. Let’s start with it backing up your PC or Mac automatically in the background, without you lifting a finger. Quietly. Continuously. Off-site where nothing can touch it.

When something does happen, you restore your files in a flash. If Dave, Anita and Chris had been using Carbonite, none of them would have spent a single panicked minute and lost files.

✅ Use this special link to get 50% off right now. Set it up once. Let it run. Stop betting years of memories will be OK. Carbonite is like insurance. You’ll be so glad you have it when you need it.*

📩 Send this to someone who has years of photos living only in their phone’s cloud sync. Use those handy links below.

(Starts at 47:14) Plane Wi-Fi is infamously terrible. But it doesn’t have to be. Ookla ranked the world’s fastest in-flight Wi-Fi, and this airline took the top spot.

Hit play below to find out which. 👇

▶️ Fastest in-flight Wi-Fi →

Or for audio only, click your favorite podcast player below:

🚢 Breach on the high seas: Booked a Carnival cruise anytime? Your info might be overboard. Carnival told nearly 6 million people that crooks sweet-talked an employee and sailed off with names, birthdays and more. That’s your identity bobbing in open water. Here’s what to do: Carnival’s handing affected folks two free years of TransUnion credit monitoring, but you’ve got to activate it by Aug. 31. Freeze your credit, too, and don’t wait for the letter to find you. Looks like their security missed the boat.

RSVP to robbery: Imagine opening a baby shower invite and getting your info stolen by a login screen. Surprise, you’re the baby, and the shower is money leaving your bank account. The FTC issued a warning that scammers are sending fake digital party invitations that ask for your email address and password to RSVP. The moment you type your credentials, they’re stolen. Real invitations, on Evite, Google or anywhere else, never ask for your password. 

🔐 A thief wants more than your money. He wants to be you. Think about everything riding on your name. The mortgage. The accounts your family lives on. Now suppose a stranger is opening cards, draining accounts, filing a tax return to grab your refund, while you don’t hear a peep until you’re at a loan officer’s desk getting told “no.” That’s identity theft in 2026. Silent until the worst moment. I ditched LifeLock for Coveron (formerly NordProtect), real-time dark web monitoring, instant alerts, half the price. Save 66% at Coveron.com/Kim. Be the guy nobody can fake.* 

The brick is back: The new status symbol is a phone that cannot ruin breakfast. People are buying basic call-and-text phones again because smartphones got too good at eating the day. Sales have risen quietly for three years, as folks worried about screen time and constant pings tap out. The first week feels awful, then many say they feel like themselves again. Even a small detox gets you thinking about how much of your day your phone is spending for you. 

🔬 Retinas get reheated: Picture your eyeball getting gently reheated like leftovers, except the leftovers are your central vision. Scientists recently built a laser heat treatment for dry AMD, a leading cause of blindness in older adults with basically no decent process for care. The idea is to warm damaged tissue in the back of the eye and wake up natural repair before vision loss turns permanent. It’s not a cure, but early results are encouraging. Human trials are coming.

🏀 Robot ref inbound: I’ve yelled at enough out-of-bounds replays to deserve a pension. NBA Commissioner Adam Silver says the league is moving toward AI for out-of-bounds and possession disputes, using cameras and sensors that track the ball within millimeters. Human refs keep fouls and judgment calls. Why? Faster games, fewer replay naps, fewer courtside lawyers in sneakers turning the last two minutes into an hour. The first coach to challenge the algorithm is getting locked in a Waymo and sent to the North Pole. 

(Starts at 01:12) Imagine getting thrown in the slammer for a crime you didn’t commit. How? AI. It happens more than you think. AI is increasingly making terrifying mistakes in law enforcement, and innocent people are paying the price. University of Virginia researcher Maria Lungu breaks it down.

Listen on Komando.com →

🎧 Or search “Komando” wherever you get your podcasts. I’m everywhere.

⚡️ 3-second tech genius: The most obvious phone cheat code you’re not using? Search. On iPhone, swipe down from the middle of the Home Screen and type what you need. Apps, settings, web results, all right there. Newer Androids do it, too. Tap the search bar on the Home Screen. Imagine all the menu-digging you could’ve skipped. 😅

💪 Here’s a number that stings: After 50, your collagen can drop by half. That’s the thinning hair, the brittle nails, the skin that forgot how to bounce back. I didn’t want to age into that, so I started scooping NativePath Grass-Fed Collagen into my morning tea. Tasteless, dissolves in one stir, done. Single clean ingredient, made in the USA, backed by a 365-day money-back guarantee. Right now, Komando readers get up to 45% off, free shipping, plus a free frother. Don’t miss out on this great deal!**

Give Windows a panic button: Turn this on before your PC decides not to start. Go to Settings > System > Recovery and toggle on Quick machine recovery. If Windows can’t boot later, your PC can connect to the internet, check with Microsoft for a fix and try to repair itself. Might save you a few bucks at the tech counter.

⌨️ Mac can type the boring stuff: Your address, email, phone number, anything you repeat can become a shortcut. Open System Settings > Keyboard > Text Replacements, click +, then add a trigger like “addy” and your full address. Type it and Mac fills the rest. ICYMI, works on iPhone, too, Settings > General > Keyboard > Text Replacement.

Looking for your next free read? Amazon’s discounted books page has daily deals under $1. Prime member? Amazon First Reads gives you one or two free picks each month. And don’t sleep on the Libby app. Call it book hoarding, minus the guilt.

📶 Myth buster about secure Wi-Fi: Spoiler: The lock icon is lying. “Secured” networks at coffee shops, hotels and airports mean you need a password to connect. Anyone else on that network can still see your traffic. Creepy. I use ExpressVPN to encrypt everything, so no one can spy on you. It’s the only VPN I trust to keep me safe. Works on up to 14 devices. Take back your privacy and get four extra months.*

📺 Nothing good to watch tonight? Try out Tubi. It’s a free streaming service with thousands of movies and shows, from ’90s comfort watches to “who greenlit this?” monster-movie cinema. You’ll sit through ads, but free is free. Also check The Roku Channel for more movies, shows and live TV.

People are asking AI to create a character mood board based on everything it’s learned about them through past conversations. 

The AI combs through your chats and spits out a sketchbook-style profile packed with visual themes, personality notes, recurring interests and surprisingly accurate observations. Think of it as getting a personalized Pixar pitch deck generated from your digital footprint. 

Here’s the prompt to try it out: 

The scary part isn’t that AI knows so much about you. It’s that people keep posting the results and saying, “Wow, this is exactly me.” I did.

Share this now:

🔜 Tomorrow: Travel in 2026 is going to require more than a passport and blind optimism. I’ll show you the smart gear worth packing, so delays, dead batteries and airline nonsense don’t ruin your trip.

Tomorrow’s trivia goes back to the moment America sent its first long-distance “text,” and the message was way more dramatic than “hello.”

The answer: C) A cold email. Yep, no call, warning or even context. That’s how DoorDash reportedly lets some customers know they’ve been cut off from ordering alcohol through the app. No dramatic knock at the door. No concerned check-in. Just an inbox surprise that says, “We’ve reviewed your vibe, and the vibe is now water.”

The kicker? The platform is legally in the right. Alcohol delivery comes with real liability. If alcohol is a struggle for you or someone you love, that’s a heavier topic than this story lets on, and there’s help out there when you want it.

Kim Komando • Komando.com • 510+ radio stations • Trusted by millions daily

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Photo credit(s): ChatGPT/Kim Komando, ThermoMaven

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