🚘 Your car is a snitch

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Welcome to your Tuesday, {{first_name | friend}}. You lock your phone. You cover your laptop camera. You side-eye your smart speaker every time it blinks. Good instincts. But the biggest spy in your life? It’s sitting in your driveway with heated seats. 

🚘 Your car watches, listens and records more than your phone, laptop and smart speaker combined. We’re talking GPS location down to the parking spot, speed, braking patterns, seat belt use, voice commands, synced contacts, call logs, even weight distribution in the seats. Some models know how many passengers you have and whether the driver’s eyes are on the road. And every bit of that data gets sent somewhere.

So how many data points does your car vacuum up in a single hour of driving? A) 500, B) 2,500, C) 10,000 or D) 25,000+? Take your pick, the answer is trying to parallel park at the end. 

🏷️ Your tax refund is a target. Scammers don’t need to guess your info. They buy your personal details directly from data brokers to file fake tax returns in your name. I use Incogni to wipe my profile from brokers’ databases automatically. It stops the threat at the source. Get 60% off with code KIM60. More below.* — Kim

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⚡ TL;DR (Key Takeaways)

📖 Read time: 2 minutes

I used to tell people a factory reset was enough. Handing your old phone to your kid or passing a router to your sister? A reset is fine. You trust those people, and the risk is basically zero.

But selling it online? Donating it to a stranger? Trading it in at a carrier store? That’s a different story. 

Today’s data recovery tools make a basic factory reset about as protective as a screen door on a submarine.

A factory reset doesn’t delete your data. It deletes the table of contents. Everything is still there. Your Wi-Fi passwords. Your saved logins. Your photos. All of it, invisible to you but completely readable with a $20 tool and a YouTube tutorial.

A security company bought 18 used routers off the secondhand market. Over 56% still had Wi-Fi credentials, VPN logins and encryption keys sitting there. A study of secondhand phones? 35% had recoverable texts, emails and passwords after a factory reset. At DEF CON (the world’s biggest hacking conference), a researcher found that 50% of smart home devices bought secondhand hadn’t even been reset. People unplugged them and dropped them at Goodwill. 

The average American home has 21 connected devices. That’s 21 little filing cabinets full of your life heading to a shelf somewhere.

Here’s the real checklist.

1. Encrypt first, then reset. This is the move that makes everything else pointless to recover.

2. The double wipe. Reset it using the steps above. Then set it up again with a fake name, junk email and a guest Wi-Fi network. Fill it with garbage. Then reset it again using the same steps. This forces the chip to overwrite your real data. Free. Easy. Wildly effective.

3. Cut the cloud connection. Go into your Apple, Google, Amazon or any other account’s security settings, find the list of connected devices and remove the one you’re getting rid of. Do this for every account tied to that device. If you skip this step, your old gadget still has a backstage pass to your stuff.

4. For routers and cameras you can’t properly wipe? Don’t donate them. A drill bit through the circuit board takes three seconds and is the only reset that’s 100% guaranteed. Then recycle the remains. 

📊 Post this stat: 56% of used routers sold online contain the Wi-Fi passwords, VPN logins and encryption keys of their previous owners. A “factory reset” doesn’t erase your data. It erases the map to your data. Everything else is still on the chip. GetKim.com

In 1982, Sarah Geer’s murder went cold. Decades later, tech stepped in. I’ll tell you how the FBI used DNA from a discarded cigarette to finally put her killer behind bars. Hear the full story now.

Listen on Komando.com →

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

🕷️ Iran’s digital clap-back: Who knew your office network could be collateral damage from international conflict? Iran promised retaliation after U.S. and Israeli combat ops, and it’s getting dicey on the cyber side. A group called Handala says it popped Israel’s biggest health network, Clalit, leaking data on 10,000+ patients and threatening massive cyberattacks next. Ordinary businesses are easy targets. This is your sign to back things up and patch your stuff. 

Shiny new Apples: Got an iPhone or iPad on the verge of retirement? Apple announced the iPhone 17e and the M4 iPad Air, preorders March 4, in stores March 11. The iPhone 17e starts at $599 and 256 GB, with an A19 chip, a 48 MP camera with 2x zoom, plus MagSafe, USB‑C and satellite messaging for when you’re stuck in no-man’s-land. The M4 iPad Air also starts at $599, is faster and has a bigger screen option for real laptop-ish workspace. Two new Apples at $599 each. That’s one expensive fruit salad.

Waymo blocked an ambulance during a mass shooting: A driverless Waymo robotaxi got stuck in the middle of an Austin street Sunday while paramedics raced to a mass shooting that killed two and injured 14. Video shows the car sitting there, lights flashing behind it, while an ambulance waited. A cop had to walk up and talk to Waymo operators through the car’s speaker system to get it to move. The ambulance eventually gave up and found another route. This isn’t Waymo’s first rodeo in Austin. They were already in hot water for illegally passing school buses. Self-driving cars are cool until they can’t read the room.

🧾 AI’s electric tab: My air fryer shouldn’t be in a knife fight with a warehouse full of computer chips, but here we are. The White House is making AI companies promise not to jack up your electric bill. A meeting with major data center and AI businesses is set for March 4 to collect pledges to protect ratepayers. The idea is that tech companies building massive AI data centers should pay the extra power costs, not you or me. Makes sense, electricity bills have been quietly climbing. This is why.

Texted into trouble: People have been getting blasted with official-looking Gmail texts with a Recover Account link. Reddit’s been packed with reports over the past week. Click it, type your password, congrats, you handed your inbox to a stranger. Then they try a SIM swap, so your SMS two-factor codes go to them. Use an authenticator app. Set a carrier PIN. Be careful.

🍔 Drive-thru report card: Get this. Burger King is putting AI in employees’ headsets to track whether they say “please” and “thank you.” An OpenAI-powered chatbot named “Patty” listens to every drive-thru conversation and gives a friendliness score (paywall link). It’s live in 500 locations now and rolling out to all 7,000 U.S. stores by year’s end. Talk about lord of the fries.

Stop showing up unprepared. Use AI to analyze your symptoms, find hidden patterns and create a game plan for your next appointment.

Listen on Komando.com →

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

⚡️ 3-second tech genius: See a word you don’t know on your Kindle? Press and hold for the definition and pronunciation instantly. Works for foreign words, too. Spanish, French, whatever. No googling, no losing your place. Bonus: Every word you look up using this trick gets saved. Tap the three-dot menu and open Vocabulary Builder. They’ll be organized by book, with flash cards ready to quiz you. So smart.

Your iPhone can magnify any part of a photo: And you don’t need a third-party app to do it. Open the image in Photos, tap Edit, then the pen icon to open Markup. Hit the + button and select Add Loupe. Drag the circle where you want to zoom in, resize it to fit and use the green handle to adjust magnification. Handy for receipts, menus, anything small. Neat.

🔔 Android keeps a log of everything you’ve dismissed: We’ve all cleared a notification too fast and immediately regretted it. Go to Settings > Notifications > Advanced settings and turn on Notification history. Every alert, reminder and update you accidentally swiped away, right there. You might even catch a DM that was deleted. No promises but worth a look.

Mac trackpads are great at everything except dragging: There’s a fix. Go to System Settings > Accessibility > Pointer Control > Trackpad Options. Turn on “Use trackpad for dragging” and set the style to three-finger drag. Now place three fingers down and move. No more awkward thumb and finger shuffle. Should’ve been the default honestly.

🔈 Windows has a volume mixer you’re not using: Getting blasted by a notification mid-Spotify session is not it. Right-click the volume icon in your taskbar and hit Open volume mixer. Every open app gets its own slider. Turn system alerts down. Crank the browser up for music. Your ears will thank you in a few years. 

💼 Stop falling for keyword-stuffed résumés: Regular job boards bury you in spam from unqualified applicants. I rely on LinkedIn because it actively targets verified professionals with the exact skills you need. Skip the noise, and interview only serious talent. Get $100 off your first job post with LinkedIn Hiring Pro.* 

Imagine losing product for 12 years and not knowing until you open the box. 

That’s the whisky aging business. Inside Dewar’s warehouses in Scotland (100+ buildings, 25,000 barrels each), parent company Bacardi unleashed a modified Boston Dynamics robot dog that literally sniffs for booze. It detects ethanol vapor to catch “leakers,” barrels silently losing whisky to evaporation that no human nose can catch. 

Early tests flagged 10% of barrels needing attention. 

Reminds me of my grandpa who told me, “Kim, I spent a lot of money on women, cars and whiskey. The rest I wasted.”

🔜 Tomorrow: You and a stranger can book the exact same hotel room and get two totally different prices. I’ll show you the 60‑second move that makes booking sites stop recognizing you and start showing the cheaper rate. You don’t want to miss that in tomorrow’s newsletter.

The answer: D) 25,000+ data points per hour. That’s roughly seven data points every single second you’re behind the wheel. Over a year, your car generates about 25 gigabytes of data, about the same as streaming 50 hours of Netflix, from driving to work and back.

📈 General Motors got caught selling driver location and behavior data to insurance companies through data brokers like LexisNexis and Verisk. Drivers watched their premiums climb and had zero idea their own car ratted them out. Toyota, Honda and Hyundai have been flagged for similar practices.

Buried in that 40-page agreement you tapped “Accept” on? Permission to share it with insurance companies, data brokers, advertisers and sometimes law enforcement. No warrant needed.

Your move: Dig into your infotainment system. Look for Settings > Privacy or Connected Services and toggle off everything you don’t actively need. That won’t stop all of it. But it’s a start.

🛑 Take back your privacy. You could spend hundreds of hours trying to opt out of these creepy lists yourself, but data brokers make it nearly impossible. Incogni handles the entire legal battle for you. They’ve already completed over 2,700 removal requests just for me. Use code KIM60 to save 60% right now.*

🧭 You’re like my GPS. I’d be lost without you. — 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, Bacardi

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