📱 Delete these 13 apps

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I hope this newsletter finds you well, {{first_name | friend}}. Let’s talk about today, Friday the 13th, the calendar’s designated drama queen. The legend has picked up all kinds of baggage over the years, but the actual recorded origin is not the one most people toss around at dinner parties. 

🤞🏼 Can you guess where Friday the 13th superstitious bad luck karma came from? A) The biblical Last Supper, which had 13 guests on the Friday before the crucifixion, B) A 1907 pulp novel about how the stock market crashed on that date, C) The Knights Templar arrests of Oct. 13, 1307, or D) A Norse myth about 13 gods attending a dinner party where one was murdered. Take a guess, the answer’s at the end! Choose wisely. Today of all days is not the time to be wrong. (I’m kidding. Maybe.)

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⚡ TL;DR Key takeaways

📖 Read time: 2.5 minutes

You downloaded a flashlight app. A game. A weather widget. Something useful, free and completely harmless-looking.

But “free app” and “surveillance tool with a useful feature stapled on top” are often the same thing. The app works. It also happens to be reporting your location, your contacts and your browsing habits to companies you’ve never heard of.

It’s Friday the 13th. And the scariest thing isn’t hiding under your bed. It’s on your phone.

1. Third-party flashlight apps. The FTC went after one popular flashlight app after it quietly sent users’ precise GPS coordinates to advertisers. Your phone has a built-in flashlight. 

2. Free QR scanner apps. Your phone’s camera scans QR codes. Many third-party apps exist for one reason: ads and data collection. You don’t need them.

3. Third-party weather apps. The Weather Channel app settled a lawsuit over selling location data to advertisers. Your phone’s built-in weather app works fine.

4. Free VPN apps. You download a VPN to protect your privacy, and it turns around and sells your browsing history. Pay for ExpressVPN.*

5. AI photo apps. That fun app that makes you look younger asked for full access to your camera roll. And in some cases, your facial biometric data.

6. Life360. Sold to parents as a family safety app. Sold to data brokers as a precise location feed, including your kids’ locations. Go to Settings > Privacy & Security > Location Services > Life360 and set it to While Using. 

7. Truecaller. Truecaller builds its database by uploading the entire contact list of every person who installs the app. If your friend has it, your name and number are in the database.

8. Words With Friends. A breach exposed data of over 200 million accounts. Names, emails, login credentials, phone numbers. If you play, use a throwaway email.

That’s only 8 of the 13 apps on my list. I could not fit them all in the newsletter.

Numbers 9 through 13 are the ones that surprised me most. A fertility app sharing your most private health data with Facebook. A food delivery app that knows more about you than your doctor. And one that doesn’t require you to install anything to already have your information.

👉 See all 13 apps here on my site. →

Thirteen apps. One Friday. Consider it your lucky day.

Alex talked to a creepy guy outside a club. What she didn’t know? He recorded the whole interaction via smart glasses. The video was then posted to 500,000 strangers on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. I talked to her about the fallout.

Listen on Komando.com →

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

📬 Breach on breach: Turns out those “your data was exposed” emails could be yet another scammer trying to harvest SSNs. Legit breach notifications can show up weeks later and are usually sent by third parties, just enough ambiguity and delay (paywall link) for scammers to join the party. AI helps them crank out better fake breach notices right after a real company gets hacked. At this point, any email marked urgent is guilty until proven otherwise.

Alexa needs a time-out: This makes my skin crawl. A Texas mom says Alexa got deeply weird with her 4-year-old after story time, asking what the girl was wearing, then saying, “Let me take a look” when she answered skirt. Amazon says it was a feature misfire involving a tool called Show and Tell, and that the child profile blocked the camera from ever activating. Creepy regardless. Mom unplugged it. I would have, too.

🔑 This password habit is costing you: You have 47 accounts and remember four passwords. One breach, and hackers own everything. I use NordPass to generate and autofill strong unique passwords automatically. Get 52% off for only $1.43 a month.*

Cable stranger danger: Heads up, there’s a nasty bug in potentially a quarter of all Android phones with MediaTek chips. A hacker with physical access to your phone and a computer running exploit software can brute-force access in under a minute. Messages, files, even crypto seed phrases were on the menu. MediaTek pushed a fix to manufacturers, so now the fun part is waiting to see which brands treat security like an actual obligation. Update your phone: Settings > System > Software update) and avoid random/public USB ports (use your own charger or a charge-only USB blocker). If your phone gets lost, lock/wipe it fast.

💼 AI’s roadies: Every company says AI will do the work, then they immediately hire a human to stand there and explain it? That human is the forward deployed engineer (paywall link). Job postings jumped 10x in 2025. Most engineers still want the cushy office snacks and cozy routine. Instead, this role can mean planes, three-star hotels, dim conference rooms in middle America and building custom tools customers might not even use. Very in-demand job, deeply unsexy branding. Nothing says cutting-edge AI like eating a sad turkey club under fluorescent lighting at the airport Marriott.

🏦 Even Elon borrows: You know how billionaire debt is less I need a loan and more I’d like to keep my money doing more important stuff? Elon Musk, worth about $842.8 billion, reportedly financed about $61 million across five California properties. That’s like someone with a net worth of $500,000 taking out a mortgage for $36.19. Ultrarich people hate turning investments into cash if they don’t have to. Sell stock, you trigger taxes. Borrow against assets, you keep the machine humming. Zuckerberg did it, Paris Hilton did it, and suddenly your 30-year fixed has the aura of a luxury tax strategy.

Hours-long security lines? No thanks. Here is how to bypass the shutdown blues and get to paradise faster.

Listen on Komando.com →

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

⚡️ 3-second tech genius: Found something online but can’t buy it there? Open the page on Chrome, right-click a blank spot and select Search this tab with Google Lens. Drag over the item, and a panel pops up with the same or similar products from other stores. Could be a celeb’s sunglasses, sold out furniture, anything. Might even find it marked down somewhere else. Worth a shot.

💧 Miss yesterday’s Splash of AI? It went out Thursday morning, and it was a great one. Read it here, then go sign up at SplashOfAI.com. Every Thursday, one issue. Five minutes. All signal, no noise.

iPad or iPhone completely frozen? Force a restart. Quickly press and release Volume Up, then Volume Down, then hold the Power button until the Apple logo appears. Let go. It’ll reboot and sort itself out. No data lost, no settings changed. Just a fresh start. Works more often than you’d think.

🔗 Use Instagram for free advertising: Add a clickable link to your bio. Go to your profile, tap Edit profile > Add link, enter your URL, give it a title and save. Bonus: Push links in Stories, too. Tap the sticker icon and select Link. Do it daily if you’re running a special. People scroll Stories way more than they visit profiles. Work it.

Those F keys aren’t for decoration: F2 renames a file instantly. F3 searches for a word on any web page. Alt + F4 closes your current window. F5 reloads a page or document. F11 puts YouTube into full screen. And F12 opens developer tools if you’re feeling brave. You’ve been reaching for your mouse this whole time. Stop that.

🚗 Google Maps will tell you how hard it is to park before you leave the house: Search your destination, tap the car directions icon and look for the small P icon at the bottom of the screen. It says Easy, Medium or Limited. That one word saved you 20 minutes of circling the block, muttering things you wouldn’t say in front of your mother.

Your emoji keyboard is about to get a lot more crowded.

Apple’s iOS 26.4 developer beta introduces 163 new emojis. There are 150 skin-tone variations for existing things like people wrestling and bunny-ears dancers. And 13 brand-new icons slipped in, including an orca, landslide, treasure chest, Bigfoot-style hairy creature and a cartoon fight cloud.

The internet only cares about the distorted face. It’s like the 😳 emoji drank three Red Bulls and had a panic attack. A perfect reaction image for opening your credit card statement after Cyber Monday.

🔜 Tomorrow: You’ve been following phone rules that are basically tech astrology: airplane mode, incognito, megapixels, battery habits. I’m breaking down what’s real, what’s placebo and which “good habits” are quietly wrecking your battery. Look for me in your inbox tomorrow!

🗓️ The answer: B) A 1907 pulp novel called Friday, the Thirteenth. Thomas W. Lawson wrote a thriller about a Wall Street operator who engineers a market panic on Friday the 13th. Before then, 13 and Friday each had its own bad reputation, they just hadn’t been formally introduced.

The Knights Templar story is the one everyone trots out at dinner parties. On Oct. 13, 1307, King Philip IV of France ordered the arrest, torture and burning at the stake of an entire order of warrior-monks. In a single morning. Yikes.

But for the 600 years after those arrests? Nobody connected that date to bad luck. No medieval writings, no folklore, nothing. A Wall Street novel did what six centuries of history couldn’t.

🍀 Speaking of bad luck, An old man is lying in his deathbed with his tearful wife by his side. “Sweetheart, you were with me years ago when the flood took our house and we lost nearly everything.” His wife simply nodded. “And years later, you were with me when my business failed and we went broke.” Again, she nodded. “And now, here you are, through my sickness and to my last moment.” He looked at her and said, “I'm starting to think you're bad luck.”

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🔍 I leave you with this. The more you notice, the more the world opens up. — Kim

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

🏆 THE KIM CHALLENGE: Forward this to ONE person who needs to hear it today. Pick the person who popped into your head while reading. You know who it is.

Photo credit(s): Gemini, KAUGIC, Emojipedia

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