Technology
Easy internet sleuth tricks you’ll wish you knew sooner
The internet is a treasure chest of information … if you know where to look. Whether you’re trying to verify a website, learn more about your neighborhood or dig up what’s floating around online about you, a little tech know-how goes a long way.
Here are some simple, powerful tricks to level up your sleuthing skills.
THE BIGGEST WI-FI MISTAKE YOU DIDN’T KNOW YOU WERE MAKING
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See the details of any website
You’ve come across a website that offers an incredible promise of a free trip to Hawaii. Aloha! All the site needs is your personal info and a credit card. Before you take the plunge, make sure you’re not getting screwed over.
A WHOIS lookup search checks a database that contains information about domain names and their registrants — so you can find out who owns the website and see if they have a real business address and contact information.
A woman is seen holding a credit card while using a laptop. (iStock)
How do you get this done?
- Head to a WHOIS lookup website. There are plenty of them on the web. I use who.is.
- Plug the site’s URL into the search bar. You’ll see who owns the site and their contact information, including address and phone number.
Next time you think a friend is getting scammed, pull out this awesome tech party trick. You could save them some cash and embarrassment!
RELATED: Your IP address: What it is and why you need to protect yours if you care about privacy
Run a free background check
SCAMMERS ARE TARGETING TEENS WITH THESE NASTY TRICKS
Your online business is everyone’s business, like it or not. How can you check what the internet’s got on you? Here’s a quick and easy way:
- Head to Google and type in your first and last name in quotes. See what pops up. People are usually interested in the organizations you’re affiliated with, your social profiles and any photos of you floating around the web.
- Next up, your credit score. You can get a free credit report from Equifax, Experian and TransUnion once a year. Go here to get yours online. Check the fourth credit bureau, Innovis, too.
- What about family tree sites? They can be fun and informative … and incredibly invasive. Look yourself up at FamilyTreeNow.com. You’ll be shocked.
Find out who your neighbor is
Go introduce yourself. If that’s not possible, you can find out online in most cases through a county’s assessor site. These government-run sites use data from assessors to estimate the value of real property within a county, city, town or village.
A close-up of the hands of a person using a laptop. (iStock)
Once you get there, you can see where your person of interest lives, get details on their home or any other properties they own, and much more. You can even view signed documents, like the deed to their home. Yes, really.
The easiest way to find your county assessor’s site is a quick Google search. Just type in the county you’re looking for, along with “assessor.” You can also go to Publicrecords.netronline.com. This directory includes official state and county websites you can search for by ZIP code.
Every county assessor’s site works a little differently, but here’s an overview of how to search on the Maricopa County site here in Arizona.
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Click on the Go to Data Online button next to the County Assessor option, then search by name or address. Click the magnifying glass icon to search and you’ll see the address, owner, parcel number and other information. Then click on the parcel number and to get even more detailed information and access any related documents.
PRIVACY 101:How to get photos of your home off Zillow, Redfin and Realtor.com
A picture is worth a thousand words
Words and profiles are one thing, but what about pictures of you? All these sites are
worth checking to see what pops up.
- Pimeyes: This site allows you to upload an image of yourself (or anyone) to find that image across the internet. This is particularly useful for tracking down where your photos appear online. Beware: You may get back blurred-out images from adult content.
- TinEye: Another excellent reverse image search tool that may turn up additional results.
Google Maps is pictured on a phone. (Nikolas Kokovlis/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
RELATED: Think of Google Lens as the smarter version of Google Images.
Go down memory lane
Not all online sleuthing is of the sneaky variety. This one is fun to try with all the places you’ve lived or a home you’re considering buying.
Pop into old Street View photos on Google Maps. You’re able to see what a place looked like going back as long as Google has captured photos there. I’ve spotted pictures going back over a decade. Talk about a hit of virtual nostalgia.
- Open Google Maps on a browser, type in an address and click the photo that pops up.
- Choose See more dates to scroll through the photos.
Now, share this article and impress your friends with your tech savvy — or save them from falling for a scam. Either way, you’ll look like the smartest person in the room.
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Technology
Amazon.com says things are fixed after some issues with logging in and checking out
If you were having issues shopping on Amazon or loading your playlists on Amazon Music on Thursday, you weren’t alone. For over three hours today, Downdetector showed a sizable spike in people reporting issues with checkout, search, and logging in. The problem seemed to be affecting both the site and the mobile apps. But an Amazon spokesperson tells The Verge that the issues are now fixed.
“We’re sorry that some customers may have temporarily experienced issues while shopping,” Amazon spokesperson Jennie Bryant says in a statement. “We have resolved the issue, which was related to a software code deployment, and website and app are now running smoothly.”
Several Verge staffers experienced issues themselves when there were problems. Clicking through to many products produced a “sorry, something went wrong” error, and even pages that did load were not showing pricing. Users reported being repeatedly logged out of their accounts when trying to check out or load their cart. Even the parts of Amazon.com that were working seem to be loading slowly.
The company has been dealing with AWS outages in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates due to drone strikes by the Iranian military, but there has not been any word of more widespread outages in the US or elsewhere.
Update March 5th: Added comment from Amazon saying that things are fixed.
Technology
$163K in fake medical bill charges; AI uncovers it for you
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Last summer, a man’s brother-in-law suffered a fatal heart attack. The hospital bill for four hours of emergency care: $195,628.
The man’s sister-in-law was ready to pay it. He asked her to wait. He requested an itemized bill with CPT codes, the universal billing codes hospitals use, and fed the whole thing into Claude, an AI chatbot.
Within minutes, Claude found duplicate charges, services billed as “inpatient” even though the patient was never admitted, supply costs inflated by 500% to 2,300% above Medicare rates and charges for procedures that never happened. He cross-checked with ChatGPT. Both AIs agreed. He wrote a six-page letter citing every violation by name.
The hospital dropped the bill to $33,000. An 83% reduction. Zero medical training. A $20 app.
A man cross-checked a hospital bill with AI and got it reduced by some 83%. (Neil Godwin/Getty Images)
Your bill is probably wrong, too
That story sounds extreme. It’s not.
The Medical Billing Advocates of America estimates 3 out of 4 medical bills contain errors. The average hospital bill over $10,000 has roughly $1,300 in mistakes. And less than 1% of denied insurance claims are ever appealed. Hospitals and insurers are banking on the fact that you won’t check.
AI flips that equation. You don’t need to understand CPT codes or have a medical billing degree. You just need to paste.
You can use AI platforms, like ChatGPT, to spot errors or suspicious charges on medical bills. (Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
The 5-minute audit
Step 1: Call your provider and request an itemized bill with CPT codes. Not the summary. The full line-by-line breakdown. You’re legally entitled to this.
Step 2: Open ChatGPT, Claude, Grok or Gemini (free versions work) and paste this:
“I’m pasting my itemized medical bill below. Please: (1) Explain every charge in plain English, (2) Flag any duplicate or suspicious charges, (3) Compare each charge to average costs, (4) Identify billing code errors or bundling violations, and (5) Draft a dispute letter I can send to the billing department. Here’s my bill:”
Step 3: Paste your bill. The AI will translate every line and tell you what looks wrong.
WOMAN SAYS CHATGPT SAVED HER LIFE BY HELPING DETECT CANCER, WHICH DOCTORS MISSED
If the AI finds errors, call the billing department and ask for a supervisor. (iStock)
Step 4: If the AI finds errors (it probably will), call the billing department and ask for a supervisor. Reference the specific codes. Hospitals resolve disputes all the time when patients show up prepared.
Pro tip: Counterforce Health (counterforcehealth.org) is a free AI tool built specifically for insurance denial appeals. Worth bookmarking.
It’s time to give your medical bills a thorough examination. The AI will see you now.
Real talk. Everybody’s talking about AI. Nobody’s showing you what to actually DO with it. My new free newsletter, Splash of AI (SplashofAI.com), gives you one trick, one tool and one “wait, I can do THAT?” moment every single week. Five minutes. Plain English. The kind of stuff that saves you time, money or both. You’ll wonder how you got by without it.
Send this to someone who is staring at a medical bill they can’t make sense of. Forward this right now. Seriously. This could save them hundreds or even thousands of dollars, and it takes less time than making coffee.
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Technology
Meta’s AI glasses reportedly send sensitive footage to human reviewers in Kenya
Meta’s AI-powered smart glasses could be sending sensitive footage to human reviewers in Nairobi, Kenya, according to an investigation by the Swedish outlets Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten. The report, which was published last week, claims Meta contractors in Kenya have seen videos captured with the smart glasses that show “bathroom visits, sex and other intimate moments.”
So far, at least one proposed class action lawsuit accusing Meta of violating false advertising and privacy laws has emerged in response to Svenska Dagbladet’s reporting, citing the company’s claim that its smart glasses are designed for privacy:
By affirmatively claiming that the Glasses were designed to protect privacy, Meta assumed a duty to disclose material facts that would inform a reasonable consumer’s decision to purchase the product. Instead, Meta hid the alarming reality: that use of the AI features results in a stranger halfway around the world watching the most private moments of a person’s life.
The Nairobi-based contractors interviewed by Svenska Dagbladet are AI annotators, meaning they label images, text, or audio, with the goal of helping AI systems make sense of the data they’re training on. “We see everything — from living rooms to naked bodies,” one worker says, according to Svenska Dagbladet. “Meta has that type of content in its databases.”
A former Meta employee reportedly tells Svenska Dagbladet that faces in annotation data are blurred automatically, though workers in Kenya say this “does not always work as intended,” and some faces are still visible. Another person reportedly tells the outlet that a wearer’s bank cards are sometimes seen in the footage they review as well.
Meta’s Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses come with a built-in AI assistant capable of answering questions about what a user can see. The glasses have soared in popularity in recent years, despite growing concerns over privacy and surveillance.
EssilorLuxottica, the eyewear giant that Meta works with to develop the camera-equipped glasses, sold over 7 million of the AI-powered glasses in 2025 — more than tripling its sales in 2023 and 2024 combined. Last year, Meta made some changes to its privacy policy that keep Meta AI with camera use enabled on your glasses “unless you turn off ‘Hey Meta.’” It also stopped allowing wearers to opt out of storing their voice recordings in the cloud.
As reported by Svenska Dagbladet, the Kenya-based AI reviewers work with transcriptions as well, ensuring Meta AI provides the correct answer to the questions users ask aloud. In a statement to The Verge, Meta spokesperson Tracy Clayton says media captured by its smart glasses “stays on the user’s device” unless they choose to share it with other people or Meta.
“When people share content with Meta AI, we sometimes use contractors to review this data for the purpose of improving people’s experience, as many other companies do,” Clayton says. “We take steps to filter this data to protect people’s privacy and to help prevent identifying information from being reviewed.”
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