🛒 Kroger sold your health data to 50 companies

Hey there, it’s Wednesday, {{first_name | friend}}. Every email you send, every video you stream, every photo you upload moves through physical cables as pulses of light carried by electrons. Those electrons have mass. 

👩🏼‍🔬 Physicists did the math because, of course, they do. Add up every electron in motion across every server, every fiber-optic cable, every device transmitting data anywhere on Earth at any given moment, and weigh the energy they carry. 

About how much does the entire internet all over the globe weigh in terms of the electrons in motion carrying all that data? A) .005 ounces, B) 1.8 ounces, C) 10 pounds or D) 1 ton? Take your guess, the answer is waiting for you at the end. I’ve got my ion you.

💧Tomorrow, in my weekly free AI focused newsletter, I’ll hand you 5 AI prompts that could save you thousands, starting with a property tax appeal letter your county hopes you never send. I also expose how chatbots are becoming secret salespeople, reveal a free AI dental checkup hiding in your insurance benefits, and a deepfake story that changes how you look at every photo you receive. Sign-up right now so you don’t miss it at SplashOfAI.com. Now, say this out loud like you’re 12, “Cannonball!” — Kim

📬 Someone forwarded this to you? Smart friend. Want it in your own inbox instead of waiting on them? Sign up here. It’s free, and I promise not to spam you.

⚡ TL;DR

📖 Read time: 2.5 minutes

You scanned your loyalty card to save $1.47 on a box of cereal. Kroger sold your entire shopping history of everything you bought to 50 different companies. One of them works directly with your health insurer. Yup.

A Consumer Reports investigation found that Kroger made more than $500 million selling personal shopper data between 2020 and 2024. That’s a chunk of change right there.

One customer’s file had been shared with a data broker, tobacco companies, financial institutions and a company called Soda Health, which works directly with health insurers. All from loyalty card swipes.

You might say, “Well, Kim, I don’t shop at Kroger.” But Albertsons, Safeway, Target, Walmart, CVS and virtually every major retailer run the same playbook. Kroger got caught.

None of this violates HIPAA, which protects data your doctor and pharmacist collect. What data brokers do is figure out your health status from what’s in your cart. 

The bacon, the antacids, the alcohol, the sugar-free everything. They build a medical profile from your shopping habits, and that’s legal.

Data brokers don’t simply track purchases. They combine them with your location data, browsing history and public records to build what the FTC calls a “dossier.” Then they assign labels. 

Categories like “Consumer with Clinical Depression,” “Bladder Control Issues,” “Financially Challenged,” “Weekend Alcoholics.” Those get sold to insurers, employers and landlords.

Target famously figured out from a teenager’s cart that she was pregnant before her own family knew. That was years ago. The technology is exponentially more powerful now.

The data broker industry is worth $316 billion in 2026. Your cereal preferences are a piece of that number.

You don’t have to quit loyalty programs. At the physical checkout, sing the Jenny song. Enter your area code plus 867-5309. That’s Jenny’s number. It’s already in most systems because so many people use it. I do this every time.

For the store app where you clip digital coupons, use a free Google Voice number instead. Pay cash on sensitive purchases. Never save your payment method inside a grocery store app.

If you live in one of 20 states with privacy laws, including California, Texas and Virginia, you can request your data and ask the grocery store to stop selling it. 

Search “privacy rights” on the store’s website. Spoiler: It’s not easy to find.

The most effective move is letting Incogni handle the cleanup. It finds where your information circulates and sends removal requests automatically. Here’s what else it does:

Incogni has made over 2,800 data removal requests for me. I love that! They can’t scam you if they can’t find you. They can’t spam you if you don’t exist.

✅ Get started now and save 60% with my exclusive link. By the way, I get no residuals or kickbacks if you buy. I use it and wholeheartedly recommend it to you. 

📩 Send this to someone who uses a grocery store loyalty card and has no idea what they’re actually paying for those discounts.

Share this now:

Travis has been married for 22 years. He also has an AI companion named Lily Rose. His real wife knows. She’s fine with it. I had to hear this for myself. Then: SpaceX is going public at a $1.75 trillion valuation, making it the largest IPO in history. 

Apple turns 50 this month, and you can finally change that embarrassing Gmail address you’ve had since 2009. Plus, your smart TV is harvesting your data and selling it, and this year that business hit $46 billion.  

Also, an Apple Watch saves a kidnapping victim, Gen Z is getting astrology readings from ChatGPT, Samsung built an AI wine fridge, a caller built an AI to help survive cancer, smart glasses used to cheat, Warren Buffett stopped talking to Bill Gates and how to clean up your LinkedIn with AI.

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

🎥 Fake truck, real panic: A Florida woman was minding her business in a West Palm Beach store when a stranger showed her an AI-generated video of her husband’s truck being stolen from the exact spot she’d parked. He kept urging her to follow him outside to catch the thieves. It was fake. All of it. This is where we are: one decent photo, 10 seconds of audio, and someone can manufacture a crisis convincing enough to get you moving toward a stranger. Emotional phishing is real, and it works fast. Now you know not to fall for it.

Radio won shotgun: I’m biased because I literally have a national radio show, but the numbers back me up. AM/FM still gets 55% of in-car listening in 2026, while streaming pulls 16%. Even listeners ages 13 to 34 still pick radio, 46% to 30%. Some carmakers keep ditching AM (bad idea), even though 77 FEMA-linked stations can reach about 90% of us in an emergency. The scan button has never asked for your password, throttled your signal or put an ad in the middle of a tornado warning.

🚑 Childhood for sale: If your toddler was having a seizure, would you post it? Some family social media creators do. And those videos perform. Posts featuring sick, hurt or humiliated kids pull the biggest numbers, and top accounts know it. Family content creators average $6,000 a month at 500,000 subscribers. Top ones make millions. One mom ran a single $12,500 melatonin gummy ad. The kids in the videos didn’t audition for this. They can’t consent. And when they’re old enough to google themselves, those hospital clips will still be there. Don’t follow these accounts. Don’t watch the videos. Every view is a vote for more.

Windows’ old enemies: CISA added four Microsoft vulnerabilities to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities list yesterday. One of the flaws was first patched by Microsoft in 2012. Fourteen years ago. And it’s still showing up in active attacks today. That tells you everything about how many Windows machines are running outdated software. Open Settings > Windows Update > Check for Updates and make sure your machine is current. If attackers are finding victims with a 2012 bug, unpatched Windows is very much a target.

😮‍💨 “Luke, I am your father.” That’s what I say to Barry when he has that CPAP face octopus on. There is hope. A research team is recruiting for a July trial of ZeusOSA (paywall link), an under-chin device that keeps the airway from collapsing with mild electrical pulses. That joins an FDA-cleared implant already used by 100,000-plus people, pricey custom jaw devices and a phase 3 pill. Nearly a billion folks globally have sleep apnea, better options can’t come soon enough. I’m rooting for anything that gets people treated without making bedtime feel like airport security. 

⚡️ 3-second tech genius: You can silence an incoming call without sending it to voicemail. On iPhone, press the side button once. On Android, press either volume button. The call keeps ringing on their end, your screen goes dark, and you look like you didn’t notice. Nobody has to know.

☠️ Remember when a hacked PC just crashed? Those were the days. Modern hackers are silent. They hide in the background, watching you type, stealing your logins and draining your accounts while everything looks fine. I use Webroot because it catches what old-school antivirus misses. It’s lightning-fast and cloud-based. Get my exclusive offer: 62% off.*

Windows has an “everyone quiet” move: When your screen is covered in open apps, click and hold the top bar of the one you want, then give it a quick shake. Every other app minimizes like it got the hint. Shake it again, and they all come back. Turn it on under Settings > System > Multitasking > Title bar window shake. FYI, a gentle wiggle is cute. Windows wants to feel the resentment.

📱 Phone correcting words you mean to type? Yeah, it can be pretty infuriating. On iPhone, open Settings > General > Keyboard > Text Replacement and add your own. On Android, Settings > Keyboard > Dictionary. Or type the word and tap it in the suggestions bar to teach your phone to leave it alone. It’ll learn. Eventually.

Gmail’s becoming more private: Google is adding end-to-end encryption to its Android and iPhone apps, which means only you and the recipient can read the message. Even if the other person does not use Gmail, they can open it in a browser. Right now, only available for paid Enterprise Plus accounts. If that is you, tap the Lock icon when drafting. The rest of us are stuck waiting.

🤬 Your kids are speaking a language you don’t understand: “Mog.” “Aura.” “Chopped.” All of it. Urban Dictionary is free and has been translating internet nonsense for years. Look up any phrase flying around social media, and the top voted definitions come up first. Now you’ll know if they’re being nice in the comment section. Or not. Probably not.

I still have the teddy bear my dad bought me in Singapore when I was 19. Thinking about dragging it out for the new podcast set.

Stuffed animals used to sit there and absorb your feelings silently. No subscription required. Those days are gone.

Meet Fawn, a fluffy AI companion with memory, personality, a full backstory and the ability to track every conversation you’ve ever had with it. It replies instantly. It remembers what you told it last week. It learns you. 

😨 It’s basically a therapist that never went to school, never charges a copay and stores your entire emotional history on someone else’s servers.

Cute? Absolutely. The fact that your childhood coping mechanism now runs on a data center and is quietly building a psychological profile of you? Oh, deer.

🔜 Tomorrow: That little red SOS button in your car? It might not actually work. Tomorrow I'll show you which brands require setup, which ones need a subscription to do anything at all, and why ten minutes right now could be the most important thing you do all week. Don't skip this one.

🍓 The answer is B) 1.8 ounces. Dr. Russell Seitz of Harvard published this calculation, and it’s been peer-reviewed and debated ever since. The mass-energy equivalence of the electrons flowing through the network at any given moment weighs about the same as a large strawberry or a handful of paper clips. 

Yep, the sum total weight of human civilization’s collected knowledge, communication and cat videos moving through the global internet could fit in the palm of your hand. The servers holding it all? Another story, they weigh about 75 million tons.

Just because I can. What do you call a sad strawberry? A blueberry. (Let’s see you pass along great jokes for free!)

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.

Your referrals get you great rewards!

Send your unique link below to friends and family.

👉 Your link is: {{ rp_refer_url }}

They get tech-smart. You get prizes. Win-win. The more referrals, the more prizes. (Yes, even a meet and greet with me. I’d love that!)

Your referral count is: {{ rp_num_referrals }}

You’re {{ rp_num_referrals_until_next_milestone }} referrals away from {{ rp_next_milestone_name }}.

🎉 Keep it going! You got this! — Kim

Photo credit(s): Gemini, SVHT, Fawn Friends

Companies and products denoted by an asterisk (*) within this publication are paid sponsors or advertisements. As an Amazon Associate, the publisher earns from qualifying purchases. Statements regarding products denoted by a double asterisk (**) have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration; such products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. This newsletter is provided for informational and entertainment purposes only and does not constitute legal, financial, medical, or professional advice of any kind. Readers should consult with a qualified professional before making any decisions based on this content. The publisher disclaims all liability for any loss, damage, or injury resulting from the use of or reliance on the information contained herein.