💀 Your home's exposed

It’s Tuesday, {{first_name | friend}}. Picture this: You just nailed the landing at the 2026 Winter Olympics. The anthem plays. Your mascara goes full waterfall on live TV. Iconic. You trained your entire life for this moment. Surely there's a massive payday waiting, right?

🤑 How much cold, hard cash does a U.S. gold medalist actually take home? A) $250,000, B) $100,000, C) $37,500 or D) $0. The answer is doing a triple axel at the end.

🕵️ Google yourself right now. It is scary what pops up. Your home address, relatives and phone number are all public. Stalkers and scammers use this info to target you. I use Incogni to wipe my footprint. It forces data brokers to delete your profile, so you stay hidden. Get 60% off with code KIM60. More below.*

Don't scroll past this. I'm giving away $250 cash to one subscriber every day in February. If you see a big red button at the top of this email that says "Claim your prize," that's you. Click it. If it's not there, don't sweat it. Tomorrow's a fresh shot. Now let's get into the good stuff. — Kim

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⚡ TL;DR (THE SHORT VERSION)

📖 Read time: 3 minutes

The whole country is watching the Nancy Guthrie case. She was taken from her Tucson home on Feb. 1 and hasn’t been seen since. When the kidnapping happened, I was curious. How long would it take me to find her home address and cell phone number on a people search site? About 30 seconds. 

I then pasted her address into Zillow and saw photos and matched the video from a home tour done on Today. I could see the layout. The entry points. The windows. Where her furniture sat. Imagine if I was a criminal armed with that info.

Here's the thing. I used free websites anyone can access from their couch.

In Scottsdale, Arizona, two teens dressed as delivery drivers forced their way into a couple’s home. They duct-taped and assaulted the homeowners, looking for $66 million in cryptocurrency. They got the victims’ home address from strangers on an encrypted app.

In Delray Beach, Florida, a retired couple had their sliding glass door shattered by thieves. The attackers had their home address from leaked personal data. That crew went on to hit victims in multiple states.

Riverside, California, police confirmed detectives routinely find Zillow and Redfin searches on phones seized from arrested burglary suspects.

Anyone can type your name into a free people search site and get your home address in seconds. Then they plug it into Zillow and see your floor plan, entry points, window types and where the security cameras sit. 

Unless you’re selling your home, take down your photos. Now.

These steps can look a little different depending on your device, app version or browser. If it’s not exact, poke around. The option is there.

Pro tip: Ask your old listing agent to pull photos from the MLS. Once they’re gone from MLS, the feeder sites eventually follow.

If you’re not selling, there’s zero reason for the internet to have a virtual tour of your home. Take it down today.

I guess you could say Zillow gives everyone an open house. Problem is, you never sent the invitations.

🗣️ STEAL THIS STAT: Police throughout the country say they routinely find Zillow and Redfin searches on phones seized from arrested burglary suspects.

📩 Know someone who bought a home in the last few years? Their old listing photos are probably still online, showing strangers the floor plan, the bedrooms and every entry point. Send them this, so they can take it all down in 10 minutes.

Investigators originally said there was no footage. Nancy Guthrie’s Nest doorbell was disconnected, and she didn’t have a paid subscription. Then the FBI stepped in. I break down how they recovered the video from Google’s backend and what that means for your privacy.

Listen on Komando.com →

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

🗺️ Police can find you from a photo. Not from your face. From the trees, dirt and buildings behind you. 404 Media obtained internal emails showing departments like Miami-Dade and the LAPD bought access to GeoSpy, an AI tool that pinpoints a photo's exact location in seconds by reading the background. That vacation selfie on your public Instagram? It's basically a GPS pin. If your social media is public, you're handing strangers a map to everywhere you go.

🍎 Apple's being weird again. They invited press to a mystery event on March 4 in London, New York and Shanghai. Not Apple Park. Not on Apple's events page. Possibly no livestream. When Apple acts this secretive, they're either dropping something big or hiding something embarrassing. Rumor says it's the iPhone 17e, starting at $599 with an A19 chip and MagSafe. If you're shopping for a new iPhone right now, wait three weeks. You'll thank me.

💾 Hard drives are sold out for 2026. It's February. Western Digital, one of the biggest hard drive makers on Earth, says its storage capacity is already reserved by its top seven customers. All AI companies. Everyday consumers? Five percent of revenue. That's you and me. The CEO basically said, "We'll get to you when we get to you." If you need an external drive, a NAS or backup storage, buy it now before prices go full doomsday prepper. I have this one.

🪞 Blind users are asking AI if they look good. People are using apps like Be My Eyes, Envision and ChatGPT to describe their face, help pick outfits and choose dating photos, some for the first time ever. The catch? AI can be flat-out wrong. It invents details, misreads colors and has no idea what "cute but not trying too hard" means. Still, for millions of people who've never had an honest mirror, it's a game changer. Beauty is in the eye of the algorithm.

🎬 Hollywood’s AI nightmare: A 15-second AI video of Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt fighting looks so real it has Deadpool screenwriter Rhett Reese saying “it’s over for us.” The clip was made with only a two-line prompt in ByteDance’s AI tool. Reese warns that soon anyone with talent will create Hollywood-quality movies from their bedroom. He’s right.

🧾 Price tag paranoia: Ever notice how flights are cheap one day, then the next day, they’re priced like you’re trying to buy the plane? Same concept, but for groceries, clothes and everything else. Talker Research’s survey found 62% of Americans are worried stores will use AI to personalize prices based on an individual’s data. The algorithm saw me buy Tums at 11 p.m. and whispered, “Raise the price, she’s cornered.”

⚡️ 3-second tech genius: Want to remove the background from any photo on your iPhone? Open the photo, long-press on the subject and watch it lift right off the background. Tap Copy and paste it into a text, email or note. You just did in two seconds what used to require Photoshop. Android users, open the photo in Google Photos, tap the subject and hit Copy Image. True genius right there.

Take back your RAM: In Windows, a secret performance killer can be apps you’ve never opened running in the background. Go to Settings > Apps > Installed apps and find the ones you don’t use. Select Advanced options and choose Never under background permissions. Bonus: Turn off any Startup apps you don’t need.

🎧 I tested them side by side: People ask if the expensive earbuds are worth the hype. My answer is no. Raycon Everyday Earbuds deliver the same premium sound and noise cancellation for half the price. They actually stay in my ears, and the battery lasts all day. Don’t pay extra for a brand name. Get 15% off right now.*

Safari tricks: Too many browser windows open? From the Mac menu bar, tap Window > Merge All Windows to pull them into one neat set of tabs. You can also turn your favorite sites into app-style shortcuts in your Dock for faster access. Open the website, click the Share icon (top right) and hit Add to Dock.

🔔 Your doorbell can talk to strangers: Ring doorbells can warn people when they get too close by saying, “Hi, you are currently being recorded,” through the built-in speaker. To turn it on, open the Ring app, tap More on the camera > Settings > Smart Responses > Motion Warning. It might scare off porch pirates before they get ideas.

Remember Atlas, the humanoid lab experiment by Boston Dynamics in headlines a few years ago? It’s gone from lab rat to gym rat.

For its final research run before the enterprise version takes over, Atlas drops a full robot Cirque du Soleil routine: crisp backflips, fluid transitions, hard sprint stops and a smug little balance pose like it’s waiting for judges’ scores. I give it a 9.6. 

Engineers also released a blooper reel full of trips, crashes and learning the hard way. Watch it here.

🔜 Tomorrow: An $8 ride with no driver. No tip. No awkward small talk. Robotaxis are already on the streets in six U.S. cities, and the price war is getting wild. I break down who's winning, how the tech actually works and when one is coming to YOUR city. If someone forwarded this to you, sign up at GetKim.com so you don't miss it.

The answer: C) $37,500. Yep. Win Olympic gold, become a legend, cry on global television, and Team USA hands you $37,500 in cash. You’d get $22,500 for silver, and $15,000 for bronze.  

Some countries treat a gold medal like a winning lottery ticket, others treat it like a firm handshake and well done, champ. Norway and the UK have historically offered no direct cash bonuses, while places like Singapore and Hong Kong offer North of $760,000. 

🇵🇱 Poland? About $211,000, plus a Toyota Corolla, a two-room apartment, jewelry, a painting and a vacation voucher for some reason. Not even joking. 

I’m a little worried about the future of Olympic skiing. It’s going downhill fast. (lol)

🛑 Get off the creepy lists. You are on hundreds of databases right now. People-search sites sell your info to anyone with a credit card. Incogni fights back for you. They send the legal removal requests automatically, so you don’t have to do a thing. Use code KIM60 to take back your privacy.*

🛣️ Failure isn’t the opposite of success. It’s the road to it. Every single time. — 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, Feppo, Boston Dynamics and RAI Institute

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