👀 Amazon's spy net

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📬 Did someone forward this to you? Sign up here. Tomorrow: AI can clone your voice from 3 seconds of audio. 70% of people can’t tell the difference. The fix?

Let’s get this Monday started with your free daily dose of tech smarts, {{first_name | friend}}. If your thumb clocked in before the rest of you did, same. Turns out doomscrolling isn't some modern character flaw. It's your ancient brain pulling its favorite party trick. The way you swipe, scroll and tap? It's a brain feature app designers figured out and weaponized. (You're not weak. You're hijacked.)

📜 So here's today's question. Why does scrolling feel effortless, but stopping feels impossible? A) Phone screens are engineered to reduce physical resistance B) Touch is processed by reflex pathways, not language centers C) Blue light suppresses your brain's natural stop signals D) It doesn't. You have zero willpower. (Kidding. Mostly.) Scroll to the end for the answer. But pace yourself. Wouldn't want to prove the point.

🧽 That random scam call that knew your name? The "package delivery" text with your actual address? They didn't guess. They bought you. Data brokers package up your cell, your address, your relatives, your medical issues and sell it to anyone with a credit card. Incogni puts real humans on it and scrubs you off those lists. I use it. I trust it. Get 60% off right now.* — Kim

⚡ TL;DR

📖 Read time: 3 minutes

Look, I've talked about Ring before. This is different.

Amazon isn't selling you a doorbell. They're enrolling you in something. I'm calling it what it is: the largest private surveillance network ever built in America.

I think I’m the only one.

Look at what Amazon has done. Countess millions of Ring cameras at front doors. The new Echo Show 8 and Echo Show 11 with 13MP cameras pointed at your living room. (The 2025 model quietly dropped the physical privacy shutter. They didn't put that in the ad.)

Visual recognition uses that camera plus AI to identify whoever's standing in front of it. A wireless mesh network called Sidewalk that already covers 95% of the country.

AI that scans every Ring camera in a five-mile radius for visual matches in seconds. And a fresh pipeline straight to police via partner Axon, the company behind Tasers.

Last September, Amazon launched Search Party. Lose your dog?

Every outdoor Ring camera nearby auto-scans recent footage looking for a match. AI spots size, shape, color. Pup goes home. Cue tearjerker Super Bowl ad. (Search Party is on by default. Most people have no idea.)

Here's what TechCrunch caught. Amazon told reporters its tech can't track where a specific person has been spotted across the network, even if police ask. But Search Party does exactly that. For dogs. Swap "dog" for "person"? Zero engineering work. A single policy change. Yikes.

In December, Ring rolled out Familiar Faces. Your camera scans the face geometry of everyone who walks up. Mom. The mailman. A passerby on the sidewalk. You can label up to 50 people. The rest get stored on Amazon's servers for 180 days.

Amazon refuses to launch this feature in Illinois, Texas, and Portland, Oregon. Why? Those three places have biometric privacy laws strict enough to sue over. Google paid Texas $1.375 billion in 2024 for doing this with Nest. Amazon clearly remembers that.

Five minutes. I tested all of these myself. These are the ones I'm flipping.

1. Open the Ring app. Control Center > Search for Lost Pets. Off.

2. Same Control Center. AI Features > Familiar Faces. Off.

3. Open Alexa app. More > Settings > Account Settings > Amazon Sidewalk. Off. (You'll lose nothing.)

Oh, and slap a piece of tape over your Echo Show camera. The shutter's gone, but tape still works. Your front door used to greet visitors. Now it's filing reports.

🗣 TEXT/POST THIS STAT: Amazon Sidewalk now covers 95% of the U.S. via Ring cameras and Echo speakers. The largest private surveillance network in America was built one doorbell at a time. GetKim.com

📩 Send this to someone who has a Ring doorbell or Echo Show. They thought they bought security. They actually joined a network.

I built a full nine-image social media campaign without opening Photoshop. ChatGPT Images 2.0 lets you edit photos in no time with AI. It’s honestly good. Remove that stranger, change the background, add text that actually spells correctly. It’s a game changer for small-biz owners.

Hit Play below now.

▶️ 9 social media posts in 60 seconds →

🏪 Gas station finance: Tennessee is banning crypto ATMs entirely. It’s the second state to do so, after Indiana in March. Why? Scammers love them. Americans over 60 lost $257 million to Bitcoin ATM scams last year, up 58%. The pattern is brutal. A scammer poses as the IRS or your bank, panics you, sends you to a kiosk at the gas station, and your cash converts to Bitcoin and vanishes overseas in seconds. Twenty states have similar laws pending.

Bot mitzvah: A new bipartisan Senate bill, the GUARD Act, would force every AI chatbot in the US to verify users' ages and ban minors from AI companion bots entirely. Bots would have to remind users at the start of every chat that they aren't human, and couldn't pretend to be a therapist, doctor, or lawyer. The bill follows lawsuits from families whose teens died after forming attachments to chatbots. Age-gating chatbots is the new age-gating bars. The fight over who checks the ID is getting started.

🥽 Eyes on Apple: Remember that $3,500 Apple headset nobody wanted at home? It’s great for eye surgery. A doctor in New York became the first to perform cataract surgery wearing an Apple Vision Pro. He uses an app called ScopeXR to stream a 3D microscope feed straight into the headset, while other surgeons can join live from anywhere. He’s done hundreds of cases. Weirdly enough, the consumer flop may have found a very adult job.

QR you serious?The FTC dropped a warning. Text scams posing as traffic-violation notices are surging more than 700% this month. The pitch: a fake court summons with a QR code. See one of these texts? Don't reply. Don't scan. Delete. Pay no mind. Pay no fine.

✈️ A flight risk with no charge: A Southwest flight from Oakland to San Diego sat on the tarmac for over an hour because of one unusual passenger: a 70-pound humanoid robot named Bebop. His handlers bought him his own seat (the case was too heavy to check). Bebop danced for the cabin, then sat strapped in by the window until crew spotted his oversized lithium battery and yanked it. He flew the rest of the way powered down. Pics here.

Disneyland is using facial recognition to verify guests at the gate. I’m breaking down what the park does with your data and why fans are outraged.

Listen on Komando.com →

Click your favorite podcast player below to listen now or later:

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

⚡️ 3-second tech genius: Next time you need to capture part of your screen, don’t show the whole desktop, questionable tabs and all. On Windows, press Win + Shift + S. On Mac, press Cmd + Shift + 4. Then click, drag and crop exactly what you want. Privacy with keyboard shortcuts.

Ditch apps you don’t use: They’re hogging more space than you think. On iPhone, go to Settings > Apps > App Store, and turn on Offload Unused Apps. It removes apps you haven’t used but keeps the data if you want them back. On Android, open Settings > Storage > Unused apps, and Uninstall anything you haven’t touched in weeks.

🎧 The only earbuds in my bag: I've tested dozens. These are the only ones that stay locked in on my runs, sound rich (not tinny), and have noise cancellation that actually works on a plane. Bonus: a fraction of what AirPods cost. I'd tell a friend. I am telling you. Grab 15% off my top pick.*

Windows broke Remote Desktop: It’s not you. If you’re opening a .RDP file on a multi-monitor setup and the warning box looks off, blame April’s Windows 11 update. You might see overlapping text or hidden buttons. There’s no patch yet, so for now, use Tab and the space bar to move through the warning box. May’s update is coming.

📄 Your phone is a scanner: Stop paying for scanner apps. On iPhone, open Notes, tap the camera icon, then Scan Documents. It auto-detects edges, flattens the page, saves as a PDF. On Android, open Google Drive, tap the +, then Scan. Same magic. I scanned an entire stack of receipts in three minutes during tax season. Multi-page docs? It keeps going. You've had this superpower the whole time.

🌍 Travel the world for free: Spin a 3D globe covered in green dots. Every dot is a live radio station broadcasting now. Tap Tokyo and you're getting Japanese morning DJs. Tap Reykjavik and it's Icelandic talk radio. Tap Havana and it's salsa. Over 40,000 stations, all free. Hit radio.garden in any browser, or grab the Radio Garden app on iPhone or Android. I leave it on while I'm cooking. Cheaper than a plane ticket. Same vibe.

Miami International Airport is rolling out AI-powered hologram chatbots for travelers who want directions from something that looks like it escaped an American Airlines training video from 2037.

This Siri in a shower tube gives real-time, location-based help through natural conversation, so instead of wandering past three Hudson News stores and crying near a charging station, you can ask the glowing airport genie where your gate is. 

Apparently, they’ve got four, which can speak 40 languages and cost about $50,000 each.

⭐ Quick favor, please. I need your help. Here's something most people don't know: AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity decide who to recommend based partly on reviews. The more reviews I have, the more AI sends new listeners, viewers and readers my way. Would you take 30 seconds to leave a nice 5 star review for me? Mention my show, YouTube channel and my free newsletters. Go to Trustpilot and at Google. You're literally training the robots to send me friends. Thank you so much!

🔜 Tomorrow: A daughter calls her parents from Mexico. Her husband died. They wired $18,000 in minutes. None of it was real. There's one word that stops it. That’s in your inbox tomorrow. Don’t miss this one. This scam is spreading.

The answer: B) Touch is processed by reflex pathways, not language centers. Yep, swiping triggers the same neural system as pulling your hand from a hot stove. That fast and automatic. App designers call this zero UI friction. Loren Brichter, who invented pull-to-refresh for Twitter in 2009, publicly said he regrets it because it trained people to check their phones compulsively, exactly like pulling a slot machine lever. And the trivia tomorrow, your music app knows how you are feeling. Really. It’s not how you think.

One for the road: What do you win at a Mongolian slot machine? Yakpot.

🕵️‍♀️ They can't scam you if they can't find you: Every robocall, spam text, and "hi grandma" scam starts the same way: a data broker sold your info. Your name, address, phone, email, even your relatives. Incogni scrubs you off hundreds of these sites and keeps scrubbing every single week. I set mine up once. Haven't thought about it since. The spam dropped. The texts stopped. The scammers moved on to easier targets. Get 60% off right now.*

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

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🎉 Keep it going! You got this! — Kim

Photo credit(s): ChatGPT, Fullstar, @AndySlater via X

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