A new tool to protect your email privacy

reporter at KTLA Channel five in Los Angeles. Well, I think the last time I talked to you, I was back at work. I'm actually doing the podcast for the first time in over a year and a half back at the KTLA studio, so that is a major, major difference. Ah feels good. The main reason it feels so good is because my studio here is much more climate controlled than my foul what's the word foucs faux faux fox studio,

my faux studio at home. So it's nice to be home, but it's kind of nice to be here, although the time I'm doing this much earlier. If you're listening on on the Facebook Audio rooms, which welcome to everyone listening on the Facebook Audio rooms, you you are awesome for tuning in. It's such a cool thing. I'm I'm not kidding. I am so enamored with this Facebook audio rooms. And the reason why is because I've got my following on Facebook, which I think last count there's like eight hundred and

twenty six thousand of you. So awesome for that, and so i can put a Facebook room on there and you can listen in while I'm doing this live, and then of course it goes out as a podcast. Now, the big goal eventually, and I'm still you know, trying to work this out with but the big goal is to do a TV show. And that's kind of like what would be the ideal situation with live callers and everything would be produced and it would just be so much better. So that's eventually what the goal is. I'm

still working on it. I mean, look, baby steps. We just got back into the studio, so and you know in Los Angeles things are still pretty tight here, you know, with the masks and the you know, all the different rules and stuff. So I'm just working my way through all this. But the big thing this week, of course, Jeff Bezos went into space. It was such a sight to see and it's just when I watched something like that.

You know, I grew up with the whole space race and well, maybe not grew up with it, but you know, space is a big part of my life. You know, space is such a fascinating topic for someone like myself that covers technology because when you really think about it, when you think about the fact that we've gone to outer space over the years, back in the day, like I'm talking the sixties, like, how in the world did these people figure this stuff out? I mean, we're very

cutting edge at this point. We have high tech computers and all kinds of rockets and ships and whatever. But back in the sixties, to go to space was a whole different world. I mean, the technology that they had was very different. And so anyway, watching Jeff Bezos go into space with three other folks, you had the richest man in the world, the oldest person in the world who also happened to be a woman, and then the youngest person in the world, and then of course Jeff

Bezos's brother. I mean, what an interesting crew right to go up there and experience that. I read something where the woman that went up was kind of like not that impressed with the view because she was like, well, it was cool, but it wasn't like the whole earth, which I mean, what are you gonna do? You know, maybe there's another ride. But the fact that we now have people going up every people I'm and these are not typical people, but I mean I guess they are.

In the case of the young guy, he was like eighteen or nineteen. I mean, these are pretty much every day people. They didn't train like astronauts. In fact, there's some debate over whether we should even call them astronauts. But no matter what, they have forged a path that is just you can't you can't close it up. That's it. It's like it has been unlocked. We saw Sir Richard Branson go into outer space, and now I have the

I was telling my kids this. I have now spoken in person to two people that have gone into outer space. Buzz Aldrin I met him at an event in the New Mexico Desert a couple of years ago, and not Jeff Bezos, but Sir Richard Branson. I interviewed him a couple of years ago. So I've now talked to two people that have gone to outer space. Just so wild. Anyway, my job has taken me to very very interesting places

in my life. I often post about it on my Instagram just how grateful I am for the experiences that this job covering technology has given me. And it's never lost on me. Believe me, I work hard, I do my stuff. I'm always doing something, but it's never lost on me just how cool some of these opportunities have been. Let's get to the first topic of the show. Samsung, something we talk about often in the tech world. It's

typically a battle between Samsung and Apple. But I don't really see it that way as much as maybe some other people do, or maybe it just makes a good headline, but they are two very different companies. But Samsung set a date for their next event. It's August eleventh. It's going to be called Galaxy Unpacked. And the tagline of the invitation says, get ready to unfold And what do we think that means? Of course we know what it means. They're going to show off the latest Samsung Galaxy Z

flip and the Galaxy Z Fold. These are two phones that fold up. There might also be some other surprise in there, maybe a new smart watch something like that. But I've had I had a chance to play with both of these phones review them. In fact, the first model in the second model, so I believe this is the third generation, which is just again, it's just wild that we're on our third generation of foldables. Apple has not gotten to their first generation of foldables. But we

all see where this is headed. Foldables are going to be a force in the mobile computing industry no matter what. It's just inevitable, and from everything I've seen the not so much the first generation, but definitely the second generation of these devices. They're really really cool, and I'm considering one for sure. I don't think the camera's there just yet on these devices for me to switch over, but I do. And I think the form factor on the Galaxy fold was a little bulky for me, but still

pretty cool. The z Flip is a great form factor, but again it's just not as high powered speck wise as a phone that I want. I mean, I've talked about the iPhone twelve Pro that I've carried for the past year, and it just really is the one to be.

It's so phenomenal it impresses me every day. In fact, something as simple as this live stream I would not be able to do on an Android like the As far as I can tell, the Facebook Audio Rooms feature is only available on the iOS version of the Facebook app. I'm not even sure who can listen to it, because sometimes I see it as being available, other times I don't.

But it's just one of these things where iOS definitely gets some of these software features earlier and more polished, whereas Android gets the hardware features a little bit earlier. So either way, no matter how you look at it, we are living in a really, really good time for smartphones. Some might even say it's boring because you know, I'm at this point, I'm not reviewing as many phones as

before because they don't do as well on TV. Quite frankly, it's just people have you know, they keep their phones for three years. They're not really looking to switch, and when they do, they're just doing some research online to kind of see, like, okay, well which one shall I upgrade to? And that makes a lot of sense. It used to be oh wow, this is a new feature on the iPhone. We have touch ID, we have face ID, we have a third camera, we have a telephoto camera,

we have a foldable screen. But now a lot of those things are just kind of if you're playing poker. What do they call it house stakes? I don't know if that is that the term, I don't know, but it's one of these things where you just kind of expect that your phone is going to have these things, even on the low end. So I'll still continue to especially with the Samsung, the big flagship devices. I'll definitely take a look at them for hands on experience. I'll

definitely review them for TV when appropriate. But it's just not like it used to be, where any manufacturer used to send me a phone and I would review it because it's like, well, what does this offer that's different, unique and better than the competition. All right, let's get to the first question of the show. Hey Rich, based on your presentation on WPIX Channel eleven in New York, I ordered the Villo Mesh system. The only issue is I cannot get the app set up for Android phones.

I tried contacting them using WhatsApp. I get no response. Do you have any contact information? The woman on your piece or he said AD actually seemed helpful. It's on an AD, but I feel stuck. Thank you and appreciate any help. Tom So. I got a couple of these messages after I featured this Villo system. And just to be clear here, I do not get paid by a company to feature anything on TV. That's just not the way it works. I get paid by KTLA Television to do a technology report, and I go out and I

just cover stuff. And so it might seem tricky because there are a lot of people out there that do sponsored things and this and that. That's not me. I don't do that. So I just I get paid by KTLA and that's it. I go to cool places, I get to go and see cool people, and my paycheck comes from KTLA. So it's not an ad. Although you know, sometimes when you're featuring a product, people just don't see the delineation. It's like, oh, well he's shown it on TV.

They must have paid them. That's just not what happens with me. But anyway, I did have to look into this because I got a couple emails from folks somewhere angry saying, Rich, I bought this based on your recommendation and I can't set it up using my Android phone. I said, well, that can't be right because I tested it with Android and iOS and there was definitely an Android app when I tested it, and sure enough. The response I got from the company was this. It caught

us by complete surprise. On Tuesday, we got a notification from Google that our app was pulled from the store. They gave us the reason that we did not call out in our privacy policy that users have the option to upload an image as their profile picture. It's pretty common, but so apparently our word in the terms of service was not sufficient for Google. We immediately took steps to amend the policy and resubmitted the app the same day.

We're waiting for Google to improve and approve and reinstate the app, but we've made the APK available for download, and they gave a link. And that is one of the beauty the beauties of Android is that if you know, if something happens with Android and an app, you could what's called sideload an app. So you can still get the Villo app. What's called an APK, you download that

you installed on your phone and it still works. Of course, it's easier and simpler to go through the official Google Play Store, but you do have this option, so I expect the app to be available again. There's no problem with Villo. There's you know, this is a technicality and privacy is so big these days that all these companies are taking it very seriously. So you can go to the website, download the APK. I'll put the link in

my notes. Otherwise you can wait for it to be available, but the APK will do it pretty much the same way, all right. Next story of the week is Facebook and specifically Instagram. They have some new content restricter sliders. I don't know what you want to call it, but they call it sensitive content control on Instagram. So this allows you to decide how much sensitive content shows up in Explore and if you've ever gone to the Explore page, depending on what you've looked at in the past, it

kind of takes on a life of its own. And I'll be honest, at some point with my Explore page, it was a lot of there's a lot of bikini clad women. I don't know what that tells you about some of the posts on my Instagram. I don't know, but you know, you click things, you look at stuff, and next thing you know, your Explore page could be filled with stuff that may be sexually suggestive or even violent, and Facebook and Instagram know that, and it just kind

of happens because what do they want to do. They want to get you to click, So they're going to show you the stuff that's going to make you click, and so I ended up on my Explore page, I ended up. And you can try this as well, because it's kind of sick of seeing this stuff. And if you press and hold a picture on your Explore page, it will bring up something that says not interested, and so you can do that to kind of train the

algorithm to stop showing you some of this trash. But what they're going to do is introduce this new sensitive content control in the app, so you can decide do you want to see more of this kind of stuff? Do you want to see less of this kind of stuff or even more of this kind of stuff? And one exception to this, the allow option is not available to people under eighteen, which is a relief to myself a parent who doesn't necessarily want their kids seeing some

of this stuff. And TikTok is another one. You know, you scroll through TikTok and you can see a lot of things that you might not be expected. And my kids will often take my phone and ask to, you know, take a look at it, and it concerns me because what are they exposed to by looking at this stuff? So of course it's my account, so I can't really there's only so much I can do, even on Instagram.

But if you want to try this and see these these content sliders for yourself, you can go into settings and then account and then look for sensitive Content Control. Again it's allow you and this this feature will say you may see photos and videos that could be upsetting or offensive. Limit is the default. You may see some photos and videos that could be upsetting or offensive, and limit even more you'll see fewer photos and videos that could be upsetting or offensive. And I think that Instagram

is kind of hedging its bets here. They can't cut out everything because people always find ways around this stuff. But that's you know, that's an option for you to go in and change it. And maybe you don't care, maybe you like seeing whatever you're seeing. That's fine. But to me, the important thing is to know that you can press and hold a picture on your explore page and you can hide it, and then the algorithm will learn from that and say, okay, let's not show as

many of these types of things. And for me, it's actually opened up a newer world on my Instagram Explore page one. That's actually slightly more useful because now I'm seeing more tech stuff, more of the stuff that I actually would like to interact with. All right, next question. Bolts Pro is the headline, Hey, Rich, have you heard of this charger? What do you think of it? Thanks Valerie w Well. I get a lot of emails from people about this boltz pro and I have to look

it up. I assume it's some sort of item that's being heavily advertised on social media, and sure enough, when I look it up, of course, you just see a whole bunch of websites about this. But here's the thing. When you go to the main page of bolts Pro, it's just one of those websites that's pretty much a I don't want to call it a scam, but it's definitely not what it seems to be. It tries to make it look like it's on a blog and it's

a review, and guess what it's not. It's what's called an advertorial, which means it's a charger that's you know, it's just a charger, that's all it is, that has four USB ports and it's you know, supposedly so fast, and it's not. But I would just recommend getting a charger on Amazon from Anchor and just search for a USB C charger or whatever you need. But this is totally an advertisement that's made to look like a blog post, and if you try to look for legitimate reviews, there

just aren't any, which is also bad. And you can't buy it on Amazon, which is also bad. So don't worry about this Bolts pro. I would not purchase it. I would just look for an Anchor charger on Amazon. You want a twenty watch charger, if you want something that's going to be fast, you want to look for a Qualcom Quick Charge if you want something that's going to charge your phone faster. But that's what I would

look at. You don't need this Bolts thing anything that's advertised on social media and then all of a sudden you look for it on Amazon. If you can't find on Amazon, that's a red flag as well. It's just one of these things where they just heavily concentrate the advertising big time and they will get sales off of it. But the reality is there are much better deals out there. And if you see these websites that give you like high pressure sales tactics, they're also bogus. So that's what

I think about that. All right, just saying hi to the folks on Facebook. Let me give a shout out to the folks in the front row. These are people who have sent stars to me. Roshan, Shafie, Stanley, JC, Soak, Jinhang, Pamela and Yogish. Thanks for being in the front row. Thanks for sending those stars my way. I do appreciate it. And this is so much fun to be able to do this with you, It really is. All right, let's talk about email protection. Take a sip of my tea here.

This is from duck duck Go, and this is a new way to protect your email. They call it very very standard name here email protection. That's what they call it now, duck duck Go. I'll be honest, I do not use duck duck Go. I get a lot of emails about people saying they want more secure and more privacy centric search engines. I just don't think duck duck go. I'm gonna just check this real quick. Let's do a quick search. I just don't think duck duck go gives

me the search results that I want. They're just not as oh gosh, how do I say this up to day as current, as thorough as something that Google's going to give you. And if you want a search engine that's maybe a little bit of an alternative to Google, I would check out Niva and ee v A, and I do think that that one is more along the lines of the quality of Google. And so although I don't use them either, I still just use Google. I really love Google, and it's just that's what I like.

But if you use Duck, Duck Go or Brave or any of these other things and it works for you, then fine, that's that's great. It just for me personally, as a reporter, I'm doing so much research on stuff that's brand new and I need like very new results. It's tough to get that from these other search engines. With all that said, I do think that what Duck dot go is cool is doing is cool. I do

think this email protection is great. And basically what you do is you sign up for a duck at a you know, an email address that's at duck dot com, and you send emails there. And what they do is they realize that a lot of people don't want to switch email providers. So what they do is they just forward the email to your regular inbox, so whether that's Gmail or Yahoo or whatever, but they remove the email

trackers and so that is a really cool service. They don't look at your emails, they don't track your emails themselves, but you might be surprised. According to their blog post, and I knew this to know that seventy percent of emails contain some sort of trackers that detect when you've opened the message, where you've opened the message, and what device you're using to open that message. And for this reason, I go into my Gmail and I turn off external images.

So when all these people send me messages with a tiny tracking pixel embedded in that image, guess what, it doesn't load. And they're really sad. Now there may be other ways, other clues that they're using to see if I've opened their email. When you click on links, a lot of times those links are tracked. I mean, there's so many ways for these companies and people to do this and spammers, and it all goes into these big databases that you know, kind of figure out who you are.

So anyway, that's one thing you can do. You can sign up for this duck email address. You can also create a unique private email addresses that you can just dispose of when you're done. So let's say you sign up for a free trial on a website and you know, maybe don't need a credit card or whatever, but you don't want to be bombarded with all those emails afterwards to say please sign up, here's a better deal, here's a better deal. You can just deactivate that email address

and you won't get a new email from them. So Duck dot go Email protection is free. You sign up for it through the app, and unfortunately it is a it is a invite only at this point, so you have to download the Duck dot Go for iOS or Android, open up the settings Beta Protection email Protection, and then join the private waitlist. And Duck dot Go is really serious about this. They think that this is about as important as using a unique password on every website that

you go to. So I don't know. I mean, I've got a lot of email addresses, so I'm probably not going to sign up for this allthough. So I kind of like the idea of getting a rich on tech at duck dot com. And now that I just said that I should probably get it because someone else is gonna jump on it. Don't jump on that, please, all right. Next next question comes from Pat. It says, buy styles scene on TV Rich. Is there an app for identifying

clothing or home items in TV shows? I love some clothes on Netflix, on furniture on d Y. I DIY shows, but I can't find it online. I enjoy your show at five thirty. I enjoy your shoe each five thirty eight am on KTLI. Now is that a Freudian slip your shoe because you're talking about buying the stuff that you see on TV? I don't think so. But if you're gonna buy my shoes, they'd probably be all birds because that's what I typically wear on TV, and I love them. By the way, I've got both the running

and the regular. It's funny you say this, Pat, because this has been regarded over the years as the holy grail of TV. Interactive TV. They talked about this for years, how the Internet was going to change TV forever and let folks buy stuff that they see in one click on their TV screens, and guess what, it never happened. Now, if you ask me, Netflix should do this because They've got everything in place to be able to do this.

They know what you're watching, they know when you're watching, they can sync it up with their app, they can put it in the app, they can I mean, they just have the ability to do this. So do the other online streaming services too, but Netflix especially, nobody's done it really as far as I know. I'm sure there's some apps that can help, but I think the closest thing that you might be able to use is Google

Lens and or Amazon. They can let you take a snapshot and scan the picture for what people are wearing that picture. Now, maybe not the exact brand, but you know, maybe similar to what they're wearing. So that's what I would write. Commend downloading and see if you can if you can identify some of that stuff. So yeah, really really cool. It would be cool. But to me, a lot of this stuff is, you know, if they don't have a deal with it, they don't want to sell it.

There's a lot of reasons why this hasn't happened, not just the fact that it's not. It's definitely doable, that's for sure, all right. There's been a lot of talk this week about Apple's new mag Safe battery pack. A lot of people have been emailing me about this. I just discounted it immediately, like I do with a lot of stuff. I don't know why, and then you know, as more you know reviews or people chatter about it or people email me about it, then I give things

a second look. But sometimes I'm just like, ah, do you really need a mag Safe battery pack? Like mag Safe has been I would say underwhelming at most. I think it has a lot of potential, but I don't think we're fully seeing that potential realized. And I use myself as an example. I mean, I've had mag Safe for a year now, or almost a year, and I don't have any mag Safe accessories. I wanted to buy some, but I just, you know, it's like every time I want to get them, I'm like, Eh, do I really

need that? And so I have been hesitant. I tried one in my car. I talked about it last week. I got it. It didn't really work. It was like a holder for my phone. A battery pack is, I guess good for travel, but I haven't been traveling very much, so I've not really seen myself in a place where I need the extended battery pack maybe at CES this year.

If it actually happens in person, I'll need this. But nonetheless, I think I will do a segment on these things because I got so many emails about them, so I guess people do have a use for them, and I have to remember sometimes it's not always all about me. Sometimes it's about other folks. But anyway, i'more has a great review on this thing, and so this is Christine Chan who wrote the review. And they looked at it and said that, you know, it took ten months for

Apple to make one of these things. It's ninety nine dollars. It comes to in one color white. It is not made of silicone like you thought the old smart battery cases before it. It's actually a hard plastic more like the MacBook from two thousand and six, so that's interesting. There is a single lightning port at the bottom, as well as an LED status indicator. And of course, if you just like to stay in the Apple ecosystem, this is the one you want to get, no matter what. Now.

The reviewer said they were surprised at how strong the magnetic attachment is, although it's not as strong as the pop sockets pop grip which is funny because I've also wanted to get a pop sockets pop grip for mag Safe, which I've been dragging my feet on as well. Maybe I should just order all this mag stuff stuff. But the ones people are comparing it against are the Anchor and the Mofi, so maybe those are the two I'll get.

I'll compare these. But from other places I've read, apparently this doesn't charge your phone with a full charge if you have an iPhone twelve Pro. I don't know, but if you have an iPhone twelve, it's the only reason you really get this because the otherwise, you know, I'm talking all the pro all the iPhone twelves, like whether it's the twelve, the twelve Pro, twelve Pro Max, because those are the only iPhones so far the have mag Safe. It fits on the iPhone twelve Mini as well. Now

here's the thing that I immediately discounted. The charging rate is only five watts, and you can go up to fifteen watts with wireless on an iPhone with a different charger, and so it's like, ah, this is a real trickle charge for this thing. But one thing that this review says, if you plug the mag Safe battery pack in with a lightning cable. Then it acts like a regular mag safe charger with a full fifteen watts of charging output.

So here's the scenario. I see. You bring your lightning cable, you bring this charger, and this is now the bedside charger for when you travel, but you get the added benefit of having a full battery pack for you know, taken on the go. So let me give you the full scenario. You get to the hotel room, you plug this battery pack in, you lay your phone on top. It charges your phone and it also charges that battery.

Then when you leave the hotel room, you take your phone and this mag say fully charged battery pack, and that should definitely get you throughout the day to be charged up and ready to go until you make it back to the hotel room later on in the day. So that would be the scenario that I would see working pretty well. But the conclusion is, let's see, what's

the conclusion of this review. The conclusion is that, let's see, it's expensive, it doesn't have the greatest capacity, the battery can wiggle when it's attached, it can feel bulky, and it's only available in that one color. But again, if you need it, and you want it, and you like the Apple stuff and you want to stay in the ecosystem, then I think it looks pretty cool. I was originally going to get it, and then I was kind of like eh. When I saw the five Watch charging, I

was like, Eh, that's kind of a non starter. But I do like the idea of having an extra battery pack with me when I travel. So if it's one that magnetically attaches to the back of my phone for ease, then that does make life easier. Plus I can use it as a charger. But I'm going to compare it against these other two battery packs and see which one I think works for me. All right, let's get to the next question. Bruce says, good morning, Rich, I have

a question on the iPhone eleven. How come when you receive text messages you don't know the time they were sent or received. I always see the time I send them, but not the other way around. Thank you for your time, Bruce and Michigan Bruce Bruce, Bruce, Bruce, you didn't read my book. I know, I know this was This was one of the biggest tips in my original book one hundred and one well, the original book, let's see iPhone book. I got to look up my own book because it's

been so long, I can't remember that it was. The original book was one hundred and one Handy Tech Tips for the iPhone, and then it was one hundred and one iPhone Tips and Tricks. But this original book was you know, I had my original one hundred and one tips. I just thought everyone should know. And by the way, this was a best seller on Amazon. It did really really well. I did a second version of it and it still has four and a half stars, which is amazing.

The second book has also four and a half stars, which is really really our four point six stars on Amazon. I mean, that's really really tough to get. So people

love these books I wrote. I stopped at iOS thirteen, and to be completely honest, we had a new company come in and I was unsure about whether I was allowed to sell my book with my contract, you know, here at the station, and I guess I'm getting into a little bit of inside baseball maybe confidential stuff, but I was just unsure, and so I was treading lightly. I took you know, I didn't take it down for sale,

but I just didn't really advertise it anymore. And so I feel like at this point, I don't think my company would be not allowing me to do this to sell this book. So I'm seriously looking into a way of bringing this back and updating it for the new iOS because iOS fifteen actually has a lot of new features and so and honestly, a lot of these things are just tried and true tricks on the iPhone that people just don't know. And so you just keep this book on your coffee table and you kind of just

look at it and refer to it. And so anyway, long story short, you can still buy the books on Amazon, and yes, they will still help you. You just might run into a scenario where it's not completely up to date for the latest operating system and that you know that's not gonna happen with all the tips, but it can happen with some of the tips. But anyway, to answer your question, Bruce, the solution is to just look in the message list. And I'm not talking the main

message list. I'm saying, like, go into a conversation of messages and just put your finger on the right side of the screen and swipe to the left, and that will reveal the time stamps for all of the messages, and that is the easiest way to see when messages were sent and received. Yes, your iPhone kind of time stamps things like in the center of the screen at random times. I don't know how they decide, maybe it's

every day whatever. But if you want to see all the exact time stamps, yeah, just swipe from the right to the left and that's it. That will bring you to it. Let's talk about Venmo, my favorite app that I used to hate. Now I kind of like it. I told you I played poker at my friend's house last Friday night and we did something different. We all used Venmo to pay for the the buy in and then we got cashed out with Venmo. And by the way, my friend Bald Brian Brian Bishop, he's on the Krolla show.

He told me that everyone's self reported winnings, like their final count of their chips was actually exactly right, which thumbs up for honesty with my friends, So that was pretty cool. I actually won, so that was kind of fun. Not a lot of money, but I did win and I got my payout via Venmo, which was cool. So anyway, I like Venmo as long as you don't. You know, I feel like it's good for simple things, but not a lot of stuff. But anyway, I'll talk about that too.

But they revealed an updated look to the Venmo app. So at some point you will open your Venmo app and it's going to look completely different and you'll smile to yourself and say, oh, yeah, Rich, talk about this. It hasn't happened on my app just yet. These companies typically roll these things out. They take time, but a couple of things are changing. Number one gone is the

Global Feed. The Global feed has been a source of contention and entertainment for folks and also people that don't realize that if you don't change the privacy settings, it shows whatever you do on Venmo to everyone in the world. I hated that about Venmo. I just thought that that was so dumb, and I always changed my privacy settings immediately so that it was just private among me and my not even me and my friends, just private among

me and the person I'm transacting with. A lot of people like the feed among their friends because they can it's just fun, you see. You know, oh, Rich played poker with these folks, and you know, you see that on there, and it's fun and there's a little fomo involved and whatever. But I don't even do that. But I'm fine if you leave that aspect open, as long as you know that it's open. But anyway, Venmo's getting

rid of the global feed. They said that it no longer serves their seventy million users because it's not meaningful anymore to them, which I get that's totally true. But they did it because there's just, you know, this emphasis on privacy. There's gonna be a much bigger focus on the Venmo credit card, the debit card, the crypto. All that is more front and center. Now. The privacy controls

they already introduced, we talked about them. This allows you to control your friend list so that people can't creep on your friend list. You can lock that down in the settings as well, so you can select public, friends only or private for your friend's list. And you can also choose how you want your profile to appear if

you appear on other people's friends lists. So that could get interesting, you know, like you could someone could potentially be looking through someone's friend list and see you, and they're like, oh, that's interesting. Rich interacts with this person. Hmm, okay, I'll just keep that in the back of my head.

The other big thing that they kind of hit, of course, in their blog post, but this week they are rolling out a new toggle switch when you make a transaction that says, hey, by the way, did you pay for goods or services with this with this transaction? And if you toggle that on, the seller is going to pay a fee and you're going to be covered by a

purchase protection. Now, as a user, and I talked about this in my last podcast, I like this because if I'm paying someone for something as a business transaction, I want to be protected in case something goes wrong, and whether that's I don't get my goods, the service is bad, whatever, I want to be able to have that little bit of protection between me and my money. And if you do this as a personal transaction, and yeah, there's some protections built in, but not really and you're kind of

out of luck. So if you toggle this switch, which Venmo thinks people will do, the seller's gonna have to pay some money. Already. Sellers are complaining about this, which I understand. Who wants to pay more than you have to? But I see it as kind of a cost of doing business. And I get it. Business is expensive. It's not cheap. When I sold my book, I talked about this,

it was very expensive. I had to give you know, ten percent here, thirty percent here, you know, up to fifty percent to other places to you know, sell what I wrote, which is mine. But I couldn't have done it without these services, these platforms, and so for that reason, I was very happy to hand over my money and take the portion that I was welcome to. So you're

not going to see it immediately. But again, let's say you go get a haircut with someone, and you know, you put it in there as a private, you know, person a person transaction. Now you might toggle it as a service or a good and you might not think twice about doing it, and next thing you know, they're gonna pay a little percentage on top of that. So

just something to be aware of, something to know. And I think it's good that they're doing this because Venmo has become way more than just a way to pay friends and divvy up tabs and stuff like that. It has become a force in payments and so they are recognizing that, and of course they want to cut as well.

Of more of this money. Because if you if you use vemo as a personal payment service and just wait for the money to take its its little time to get into your account, you could use venmo forever without paying a dime. And of course they don't want that. They want you to pay. They want you to pay, and so that's what these services nudge you to do. All right. Just want to say thanks to the folks

in the front row on the Facebook. It's still a lot of the same folks, Stanley, JC, sock Jinhang and yogash Thanks for being in the front row and sending those stars. And thanks to everyone else that's listening and giving me those thumbs up up to keep going thumbs up. I love it. It's such a fun thing I've done

in my time as a tech reporter. I've done so many different variations of live and I like the live on camera stuff, but the live audio is such a fun thing, especially when I could eventually bring people on board. Still figuring out the best way to do that, AJ says best video download Hey Rich, what's the best video downloader? And social media apps to manage multiple accounts? Thanks aj, aj best social media downloader I know of is called the soft O Reno YouTube Converter too. It works with

a lot of different services YouTube, Instagram, Facebook. You can download videos from that, hopefully they're your own, because I can't. I can't. I can't condone downloading videos that you don't own. But there's another one called Twitter Video Downloader dot com, which I also like for downloading your own Twitter videos off of Twitter, because you never download someone else's, right. But those are the Those are the websites that I would recommend or the services that I would recommend for

those super easy. Soft Reno is going to cost some money, maybe twenty bucks, thirty bucks, I can't remember how much it costs. I bought it so long ago or I got it so long ago, i should say. And it just works really really great. It's not there's no spyware on it. There's no there's no you know, ads and all this other stuff. So it's a it's a legitimate software that works really really well. So good question, all right,

Uh should Netflix air emergency alerts? That is the question posed by the Hollywood Reporter And they have a great guy that that covers all things like legal when it comes to I guess legal politics, whatever, when it comes to entertainment. His name's Eric Gardner, and he said that they're talking Congress is talking about the feasibility of making streaming services have to air these emergency alert system notifications.

So if you have ever watched TV and growing up as a kid, you know, eighties nineties, like you always heard these things on TV that you know that sound right, and you technically you can't even play it on TV without breaking some sort of rule, like you're not allowed to play this on the radio or TV. I'm sure I could play it in a podcast because that's not regulated by the FCC, but I don't have the audio, but you know, the sounds like it, and it's like

it plays that sound that we all know. And then it says this has been a warning test of the emergency alert system. Had this been a real test, this would be followed by instructions to you know, stop, drop and roll or whatever. In the nineteen sixties, according to this article, this was established to warren Americans to get into bomb shelters in the event of a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union. Later, all broadcast stations and cable

and satellite operators were required to install and maintain the system. Now, the trick here is that cable satellite a little bit different from broadcast, but I guess they still fell under some of those same regulations because you had to use a cable and blah whatever. But when it comes to streaming,

they are not currently regulated by anyone. And if you've watched some of these shows on Netflix, you know that they can show whatever they want and they can say whatever they want, and so the idea that they would have to show these emergency alerts makes sense because a lot of times your TV is on these streaming services and not on a standard broadcast or cable or satellite channel.

But on the flip side, the proposed the people on the other side say, you know what, We've all got cell phones, and if you've gotten one of these alerts on your cell phone, you know they've made their way there. And so why do we need this on our streaming services? And not to mention it would be it'd be kind of tricky for Netflix and all these services to in to make this work. I'm sure they could do it, but it definitely would be a little tricky. I don't

know where I stand on this. I think that it's one of these things where we have so much access to information these days and very quick access. I'm not sure we need it through Netflix, but I would almost argue it'd be better to serve it up through the TV itself, because then it could just go overlay the screen no matter what you're on, whether you're on cable TV, whatever.

And most TVs are connected to the Internet these days, so they could technically do that, but not every TV is connected to the Internet at all times, so it's definitely a tricky situation. But anyway, it's one of the things are considering. I thought it was fascinating because it just goes to show our world is evolving in such

a unique way. You know, when you're whether you're just everything when it comes to cars, when it comes to the way we do things, you know, cellular like data, like it used to be like phone calls went through a certain type of antenna, but now they're all served through through data and they're like literally not even going through a standard like I don't even know what they went through before, but it was definitely not data. It

was like a antenna. It was like an RF signal at some point, right and now it's just a digital bits of ones and zeros that it converts your voice into. So as we evolve with tech, these laws and these regulations, they all have to catch up to the way that we're doing things. And I just find that fascinating because it leaves a lot of things open for new interpretations. Now, by the way, you can comment on the Facebook audio. I just don't see those for some reason while it's live.

I don't know why, but it just they are there. Jennifer says good morning, And I always joke that people say good morning when they email me because they always see me on TV and they go, oh, let me email him. I just saw him on TV, and then they email me like right after they saw me on TV, so they always say good morning. With Uber and Lyft prices, skyrot rocketing, is there an app to use for taxis

in Ocla County? Thank you, Jennifer. Jennifer, I had to go back into the depths of my memory to remember what the app was that I used to use. It used to be called Taxi Magic. When Uber and Lyft first started, and I've told this story a million times, they invited me to a party in Santa Monica and they said, we're picking you up in an Uber and I said, what is an Uber? And they said, it's a car service that comes to you on demand through an app. And I said, what, what in the world

is that? Because I knew what a car service was, because I'd lived in New York City and I knew what a taxi was, but a car service was prohibitively expensive for the everyday person like myself. It would be, you know, a minimum of fifty dollars to go anywhere, and much much more if you're going somewhere. And so I said, wait what And I remember this, this taxi

or this car came to my house. It was like a chauffeured car back in the day that you like, you know, it's more of a black car town service, and it was like twenty three bucks to go to Santa Monica. And I just couldn't believe it. And my wife and I were early adopters of this service. We tested it out and we took it all over Los Angeles because it was so cheap and we just couldn't believe it. I was like, there's no way this is gonna last. Well, the black car, the town car service definitely,

it lasted, but it's way more expensive. And of course you've got things like Uber, x Uber Shared, You've got Lyft, You've got all these different services. And to take an actual town car service at this point, or an Uber Excel which not xcel, the Uber, they have so many names for them. They have Premiere, they have Lux, they have Suv. But to take any of those high end ones, it's definitely very cost prohibitive. But to take the cheap ones,

it's cheap. But yes, you're right, Jennifer. This is a long answer to tell you that Uber and Lyft have gotten very expensive during the pandemic, and that is due to a lot of things, a lot of law changes in California, a lot of fee, a lot of added fees, a lot of surg charges, and also, quite frankly, they just don't have the people working it like they used to. So the demand is there, but the supply is just not there. And so to answer your question, the app

is called curb c RB. I don't know how good they are. I have not used them in many many years. I'm not even sure where they stand with their app. But that is the app that used to kind of collate the taxi services into an app. It was definitely hit or miss in my tests. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. But if you want to compare the prices, you can do that. Now. The other way to compare

prices is to actually use Google Maps. So if you put in your address in Google Maps, you can go to the top and you know, navigate as you typically would, but look at the top. There's a little icon next to it's like car. It's a car, and then I think it's bike and train. And then there's a little guy with his hand up or a little person with their hand up, looks like they're hailing a taxi. I think they have a suitcase in their hand. If you tap that, it will let you see how much prices

are for different car service options. So it can look at Lyft, it can look at Uber and whatever else they may have in that service or in that service area. And now it may be a paid thing. I don't know, but at the very least it can help you realize that sometimes Uber and Lyft could be very different pricing, and so it's just good to kind of just do a quick glance. Maybe you have a preference, maybe you don't. I was using Lyft for a long time, but then

I recently switched back to Uber. So it just really depends what service you want to use, or if you're service agnostic, you might be able to save five to ten you know, even more money depending on which one of these services that you use. So good question, good question. The FTC has voted to enforce right to repair. This is a topic that comes up every so often. Now you might be thinking, well, can't you just bring your

phone in to get it repaired? You know these U break I fixed places, Yeah, you can, but a lot of times unless they're an authorized facility, they don't have access to all of the goodies that it takes to help them actually repair these things in a in an authorized way. So you bring your phone to a third party place that does not have an authorized service, and next thing you know, your warranty is is out and

anything that goes wrong with your phone you're there. You know, you go back to the company, Apple, Samsung, whoever, and they're like, ah, sorry, you got this thing repaired with some random dude, and we're not gonna be sorry. We don't know if you broke this thing when you got it repaired, and now you're you're out of luck for

the next year or two. So Wire talks about the fact that the FTC is going to clamp down a little bit on these right to repair laws and I guess have existed but have not been really enforced, but now they're going to enforce them. And this is not just for smartphones. This is for things like tractors, cars. I mean, we're getting into this place where electronics are so specialized that just to repair them. I mean, I watched the guy you break I fix like crack open

an iPhone and I couldn't believe. It's just there's too much glue in there. There's too many little parts, little screws, specialized screws that you need a special screwdriver to open them with. And I will tell you I opened up my iPod. This is going way back. I'm talking at least ten years ago, probably closer to fifteen years ago, when you can open up an iPod and you can

order a kit from Amazon with a new battery. This is when the batteries would go dead and so you could put it in a fresh battery and boom, you're on your way and the battery charge would last longer. Again. Well, the toughest part was really getting the glue off the bottom, like taking the bottom off without ruining the connection, because there's a connection that it's all just like glued together and really really complicated. So I did it. It worked.

It's tough to get the thing back to normal or back to the way it was, so a lot of times they use like a dryer, like a heat a little bit of a heat source to like to get the glue to be gummed up a little bit. Anyway, it's just one of these things where it should get a little bit easier. We'll see what happens. But I think a lot of times this has to do with

farmers too, like farm equipment. I've read a lot of articles about how like John Deere and all these big companies that make this farm equipment, like you basically have to, you know, have an authorized repair or else you're gonna get on the bad side of the farm folks. It's just the way it works. So anyway, so they argue that that independent repair shops should have the same software, diagnostic diagnostic tools and all all the things that the

parts the documentation that authorized shops have. That's the main thing here. And then the people on the other side say that it could be dangerous, Like you know, you replace your own battery and you know some guy down the street does it for you, and you don't know what the quality of their work is and there could be a major problem and your phone could explode in your pocket. So I do see that side of it, and I do worry about that stuff with an unauthorized person.

But you know there are some smart people out there. I did a story many many years ago with a guy that was called the the iPod Repair Surgeon, and he was out of his garage in I forget where he was somewhere in LA. And this guy had a line down the street for people to repair their iPods and he had a fantastic business. And I don't think he was an authorized repair and I'm pretty sure people were very very happy with the repairs that he did on their products. So Joe Kempy was his name. It's

still around. I just don't think he's doing those repairs anymore. But he had a great business, the iPods Surgeon. He told me that I put him on the map with my story I did with him at KKEL nine News. This is yeah, we're going way back. But him and I kept in touch for many years. He was such a great guy, really, just such a cool little business. He ran out of his place for that. Darryl says, Hey, Rich, I have a question. I have an iPhone ten R.

I've been on the Sprint network. They're switching to Tea Mobile. They sent me a new SIM. They told me to back up my old voicemails before I install it. I have some voicemails I'd like to keep, but too many to individually sent. My question is would my voicemails be saved on the SIM card? Can I retrieve them later? Is there an easy way to save those voicemails? I love your shows, your podcasts, and your sign copy of your book. Thanks for helping make us help make sense

of our electronics. Daryl. Thank you, Daryl. I appreciate the kind words. No, you cannot. The voicemails are not saved on the SIM. In fact, when you switch your SIM to that new Team Mobile one, you are gonna lose all of those voicemails that were saved on the Sprint network. So what you need to do is save those voicemails, do not lose them. You can go on the iPhone and you say, yeah, iPhone, ten rs. You've got an iPhone.

On the iPhone, you can save the voicemails by going into your voicemail and there's a little share button and when you go share, when you click on a voicemail, just save that voicemail. Just download it basically, and I would save it to something like Google Drive. You can save it to Dropbox, you can save it to iCloud drive, whatever you do, or files. Just save it somewhere. You can email it to yourself, email the audio. They're usually tiny files. But once you finish that, once you switch

that sim those voicemails are gone. I get so many emails from people that say, rich, I had a loved one on my voicemail that left me a voicemail and they passed away, and is there a way I could retrieve their voicemail? I deleted it. No, you cannot, and it's really really sad. So at the very least, if you cannot figure out any way. If you have an Android, you know there might be some programs that can help you save those voicemails, but they don't have the same

like save functionality as the as the iPhone. The ease of use but just play the play the voicemail out loud and ask a friend to record it on the voice recorder on their phone and email it to you. No matter what, get these things off your phone. If you have a headphone jack, you can connect that to your computer's headphone jack and use the record program to just record those. Uh. There's many ways of doing this.

Plug it into your iPhone or your iPod. Plug your your Android into a friend's sorry iPad and use the recorder app to record if the iPad has a headphone jack, which they typically do. No matter what, just use a little recorder app or save these things from your iPhone. If you have an important voicemail, save it. That is the only way you can keep it. Uh. Finally, one more tip Tony. I know Tony. He is a fan

of the podcast. He's often tweeting me, So Tony, thanks for your uh your tweets, your emails and listening to the podcast. He sent in a tech tip for blocking spam. We talked about sam spam calls last week. He says, Hey, Rich, I have a number which has an area code in another state. That way, if I ever get a call from the area code, it is almost always a spam call, and that is great advice. I never thought about doing that.

But my phone number is similar. It's an LA phone number, but it's definitely not exactly where I live, but it's it's close. So yeah, good, good, good. I don't know what I was gonna say. It's getting towards the end of the podcast, so I was gonna say, good tip. But one more thing I did want to mention. Google

is simplifying its backup system on Android. Hallelujah. This is from Will Saddleberg on Android Police, and basically they are I guess they're first reporting nine to five's report that the Google one app is finally getting a little bit more user friendly and they're gonna make it easier to see the apps, the photos, the videos, the SMS messages, your call history, and device settings that are on this app. So with Google, the backup has always been really weird.

It's gotten a lot better in recent years where you can actually restore a phone. But iPhone is kind of the king of this. But definitely I would say one plus push the envelope. Samsung with smart Switch, and now Google with Google One, they've definitely all gotten a lot better. And about switching from one Android to another about bringing pretty much almost all of your settings and apps and whatever you need your text messages from one device to another.

But anyway, they're making it a little bit clearer by putting it all in this Google one app, which I think will be a lot clearer to most people. So I'm very happy about that. Oh no, that sounds you know what it means. It means. That is the end of the show. Thanks so much for listening to this episode. Code That's gonna do it? If you'd like to submit a question for me to answer, Oh, I've got a new way for you to do it. Ooo. It's so exciting.

I actually switched over my rich on tech dot tv now redirects to a new app or a new service called bio dot Link, and I love it. It's so clean, it's so easy, it's free. It's actually saving me seven dollars a month versus my old one that I used to I used to use campsite and it was seven bucks a month. This one is totally free, and so far it has all the features I want and a clean look, and the only thing it doesn't have just yet is the ability to schedule links, which is kind

of a problem, but they say it's coming soon. But bio dot link if you want a free like you know, link bio for your Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, whatever. Now you can just go there rich on Tech dot tv and look underneath my little bio line and there is an email envelope. You can click that and send an email direct to me. That is really really cool, really handy. You can still do through the Facebook page, but this a little bit easier. Also, I would like it if

you would rate and review this podcast. Just write a quick line about what you like about the show to help other people know why they should listen. In a field of crowded tech podcasts, this is one way we can help stand out and grow the following. The Devonian Kid, I think I said that right, said useful concise reviews of daily tech, he said, or they said, rich reviews the kind of tech we need and use every day.

His descriptions of his own and his family's experiences, good and bad, provide great input for my own tech purchases. Thank you for that review, Devonian Kid. Just rate this podcast by going to rate this podcast dot com slash rich on Tech. You can find me on social media everywhere at rich on Tech and no matter where you live in the US, be sure to download the free KTLA Plus app on Apple TV, fireTV, and Roku. Then you can scroll to the tech section and watch all

of my TV segments on demand. If you haven't done that, please do it. It's really fun. My name is rich DeMuro. Thanks so much for listening. There are so many ways you can spend an hour of your time. I do appreciate you spending it with me. Stay safe, I'm gonna talk to you real soon. Bye.