🚕 Robotaxi ratted

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📬 Did someone forward this to you? Sign up here. Tomorrow: Your bank has been quietly watching how you hold your phone. The why part will shock you.

Hello there, it’s Wednesday {{first_name | friend}}. Your phone may look calm and innocent sitting there, but inside it’s a tiny tech lasagna. Layers of cameras, chips, sensors, glass, battery bits and teeny tiny screws. Those parts travel farther than most of us do on vacation, bouncing between countries like they’re in a very expensive relay race. So once everything finally arrives at the factory, you’d think assembly would take forever, right?

📲 How long does it take a modern factory to assemble a single smartphone? A) About 30 seconds, B) Around 20 minutes, C) A little over an hour or D) A full eight-hour shift, with snack breaks for the robots? Keep reading, the answer is waiting at the end like a tiny screw under the couch.

💧 I write this for you: Get my Splash of AI free newsletter every Thursday. I’ll show you when paid AI is worth it, how to turn one input into 10 useful outputs, protect your roof from AI insurance snooping, screen spam calls and spot the tech reshaping concerts, chores and Google itself. Yours free. Sign up now at SplashOfAI.com, so it hits your inbox tomorrow morning. — Kim

⚡ TL;DR

📖 Read time: 2.5 minutes

Kerry, that is not a dumb question. It is THE question. Most people have no clue these companies exist, and that is exactly how the brokers like it.

A data broker is a company you never signed up with, quietly building a massive file on you. Your name, home address, phone, income, the meds you googled at 2 a.m., where your phone sleeps every night. The big brokers keep more than 3,000 facts on a single person. Think about that for a sec.

You hand that info over every day and every single time you pick up your phone. They scrape it from public records, apps, loyalty cards, travels, car rides, web trails and more. Then they sell this file on you to anyone who wants it.

You go cheap. Brokers buy one record for about a twentieth of a cent and resell it for 50 cents or more. That is a 1,000 times markup on your life. Roughly 5,000 of these firms operate worldwide, feeding advertisers, insurers, background-check sites, landlords, even scammers and spammers who use your real details to make their fake calls sound legit. 

Last year, breaches tied to brokers cost Americans an estimated $21 billion. 

Why care if it is just your name and address?

Because your address in the wrong hands is how stalkers find people. It is how a “Grandma, I am in jail” call gets your grandkid’s name right. It is how your home and car insurance quietly creeps up. 

Your name is not the boring part. It’s the key that unlocks everything else.

You can opt out yourself. It is free. It is also brutal. Only 3% of people who try ever fully succeed, because brokers bury the forms in legal spaghetti, and your file crawls right back within months as they re-scrape public records.

So here is what I do. I use Incogni. It contacts data brokers for you, uses privacy laws to legally demand deletion, then keeps resending the requests every 60 days so you stay gone. It is the only service Deloitte has independently checked.* 

Plans start around $7 a month, and using this link saves you 60%. BTW, I get no kickbacks or residuals if you sign up.

Kerry, sign one form, and take yourself off the market now. You are a person, not a product.

📩 Send this to someone who still says, “I’ve got nothing to hide” (they’ve got plenty to lose).

Share this now:

While everyone is obsessing over smart glasses, AR contact lenses are seeing into the future. A whole computer. In your eyes. There’s a reason you aren’t wearing them yet. That’s 20/20 vision.

Hit the link below, so you’re in the know. 👇

▶️ Eyeball computer lives →

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

🚕 Robotaxi ratted: I suddenly miss the cabbie who pretended not to see anything. A Waymo robotaxi loaded with teenagers allegedly drinking and someone waving a toy gun in the back seat did its own call. The driverless car contacted police, with 0 human operator involved. The crazy part? Most people think a robotaxi is a car with better manners. Nope. It’s also a rolling witness stand with cupholders. Say cheese, the car’s already talking.

Loose thread alert: Bad news if you’ve been treating Apple’s Hide My Email like an invisibility cloak. It’s more like a bouncer checking IDs with his eyes closed. Researchers say the Apple iCloud+ feature that makes random forwarding addresses for sketchy sign-ups has a flaw that could expose the real email (paywall link) underneath. Apple pushed fixes, so update your iPhone, iPad and Mac now. So much for hide and seek. It’s mostly seek.

🚶 Don’t wait until it becomes a bigger problem: If your joints occasionally remind you they’re there when you climb stairs, go for a walk or spend a long day on your feet, it may be time to give them a little extra support. That’s exactly why Ian and I created ImproveLife Joint Support. Get up to 33% off plus free shipping.**

Till deepfake do us part: Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce got married at Madison Square Garden Friday, and the internet showed up uninvited. Within hours, AI slop flooded feeds. Fake ceremony shots, fake dresses, fake vows. A guest who was actually there had to publicly flag the AI-made photos as bogus. Let that land. We’ve hit the point where a real person at a real wedding has to prove the pictures aren’t fake. Your cousin’s backyard I-dos are one bored bot away from national news. Objection. That photo’s a forgery.

🕶️ Face-saving tech: Imagine you’re on your sixth messy barbecue wing at a sports bar when teenagers in $299 Ray-Ban Meta glasses walk in. Cameras, mics, speakers, AI and one tiny recording light nobody fully trusts. That’s why privacy kits are popping up: physical covers and blockers for camera-equipped frames in restaurants, offices and coffee shops. It’s getting harder to do that universal human ritual of proving you’re not being a creep just because you bought new face tech. Manners with an SKU.

There are two magic words that completely change your AI answers. Plus, Francesca teaches her 102-year-old grandpa and 89-year-old grandma how to use UberEats. The video is viral and wonderful.

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: Androids have AI that can help with whatever’s on your screen. Say, “Hey, Google,” then tap Share screen with Live, so Gemini can see what you’re looking at. Ask “How do I see saved reels?” or tell it “Change my refresh rate.” It can explain the steps or open the right menu. More tips like this in my free Splash of AI newsletter every Thursday.

Turn photos into stickers: Your iPhone can turn family, friends and pets into stickers you can drop into chats. Open Photos, find a picture, then press and hold on the subject until it glows. Tap Add Sticker from the pop-up menu. In Messages, open a chat, hit +, then Stickers. Live Photos can become little animated ones, too.

🏞️ Visuals stop the scroll: Every blog post, newsletter and social media update needs a visual. And no, Google Images is not a free photo library. Dreamstime has millions of fully licensed photos, illustrations and videos at prices that work whether you run a Fortune 500 or a food blog. No photographer required. Try it for free for a full week.*

Chrome can dub anything: Watching a video with no subtitles? Chrome can generate its own. On desktop, go to Settings > Accessibility and turn on Live Caption. Next time someone speaks, a dark caption box appears over any video or audio in your browser. Once it’s on, toggle it from the music note icon at the top right.

🚗 Better car maps: Don’t settle for the plain default view in Google Maps on Android Auto. On your car’s screen, open Google Maps > Settings and toggle on Satellite. Now you can see parking lots, buildings and what’s around you. Turn on Traffic. Green is clear, yellow is slow, red is steering-wheel-chewing time.

📚 iTunes but for books: Calibre is a free computer app that keeps your ebooks organized in one place. The cool part? It can convert books for your e-reader. Say you have a file that won’t open on your Kindle. Plug it into your computer, pick the book, hit Send to device, and Calibre sorts out the format issue.

Be on the show! Got a question only I can answer? Spill it here. You might end up on the air with me. 

Scientists have built tiny scuba suits for cyborg cockroaches. Disaster response needed abandoned motel bathroom energy.

Researchers 3D-printed flexible diving gear for remote-controlled Madagascar hissing cockroaches (what a terrifying name). Without the suit, a submerged roach taps out in about two minutes. 

With it, the bug can walk underwater for up to three hours, thanks to oxygen generated by a hydrogen peroxide and manganese dioxide reaction and piped to its breathing holes.

The goal is flooded rubble, drains and disaster zones where humans cannot fit. Finally, a rescue worker you want to survive but don’t want to shake hands with.

Check them out in action here.

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🎓 What you learned today: Data brokers are selling your whole life for less than a buck, Apple’s Hide My Email might be hiding nothing until you hit update, robotaxis have gone full hall monitor and will call the cops on you, AI wedding fakes have celebrity guests moonlighting as photo detectives, and scientists strapped scuba gear onto cockroaches because rescue work apparently needed more nightmare fuel. Not bad for one email. Tomorrow, your bank may know it’s you before you even hit login. I’ll explain what your thumbs are giving away.

⏱️ The answer: A) About 30 seconds. Well, sort of! A single phone spends 15 to 20 minutes traveling down the line to be stitched together across hundreds of steps. But because mega-factories use a highly synchronized dance of automated robots and thousands of workers, the output speed is staggering: a brand-new, completely finished smartphone rolls off the end of a single conveyor belt every 30 seconds.

Think about that: a half-minute miracle dropping a finished piece of peak global tech, faster than it takes to make a piece of toast. The months you spend waiting for a new model aren’t about assembly at all. Those factory robots build a whole new one before you’d even find yours in the couch cushions.

A boy lost his phone and asked his dad to help find it. “Why don’t you just call it?” Dad said. “It’s on silent.” Dad shrugged. “Well, if you liked it, you should’ve put a ring on it.” 

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

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Photo credit(s): ChatGPT/Kim Komando, Amazon, Nanyang Technological University

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