8/15/2023: Hide yourself from Google Search
How to stay hidden in Google Search
Plus: Amazon’s AI reviews, preserving your phone battery, and legal pirate radio
For years, Google made it incredibly easy to look up someone’s address, phone number, age, and other personal info.
All you had to do was type in a person’s name and where they live, and you’d get all kinds of details from sites like Whitepages and Spokeo, which pull together that info from public and private sources. Creepy as this is, doing anything about it has always been a slog, and most people never bothered.
Thankfully, that’s starting to change. Google now offers a simple removal tool for hiding those people search sites from its search engine, and with a little more legwork, you can delist yourself from the sites themselves. It’s easier than you might think.
Need to know
Amazon’s AI reviews: Amazon has started using generative AI to summarize customer reviews in its mobile app, and it’s actually more useful than I expected. Each AI-written blurb sums up the product’s pros and cons, and underneath you can tap into summaries for specific attributes, such as ease of use or value. The summary for this portable power bank, for instance, shows a button for complaints about warmth; tapping it leads to an explanation of the problem, along with the reviews that brought it up.
This lines up with how I read Amazon’s customer reviews in the first place. Fake reviews are still a problem on Amazon, so instead of looking for endorsements, I mainly just scan through for common complaints. To my surprise, Amazon’s AI summaries make that process a little easier.
Encrypted Android group chats: Google is extending end-to-end encryption to group chats in its Messages app for Android. If everyone in the conversation is using Google’s app (rather than, say, an alternative pre-loaded by their phone maker) and hasn’t disabled the RCS chats feature, a padlock icon should appear inside the send button and timestamps. This means no one outside the conversation should have access to its contents, including your wireless carrier.
Apple likes to tout iMessage’s end-to-end encryption as a selling point for the iPhone—see, for instance, its “Inside Joke” ad from 2019—but refuses to support RCS, which among other benefits could make messaging more secure between iPhone and Android users. I guess privacy is only “a fundamental human right” until it disrupts platform lock-in. Oh well. At least Android users now enjoy similar protections while chatting among themselves.
Tip of the moment
Preserve your phone’s battery (or not): Thanks to a couple recent videos by Lon Seidman and Joanna Stern, I’ve learned that letting your phone get to hot can hurt long-term battery life. As Stern explains, higher temperatures speed up the chemical reactions inside the battery, thereby increasing the rate at which it degrades.
While that’s not a new problem in itself, the rise of fast-charging technology is giving our phones a regular dose of high heat, and record summer temperatures don’t help either. (Seidman also blames wireless charging, though the evidence isn’t as clear-cut.) This might explain why some iPhone 14 users are complaining about unexpected battery degradation.
All this leads to a couple of recommendations:
- Avoid using fast chargers—such as those advertising 18W charging speeds or more—at least for overnight charging. On Samsung phones, you can even disable fast charging outright.
- Stern says to consider a thermal bag, though I suspect just keeping it out of the sun should be sufficient in most cases. Her suggestion for a cooling fan might make sense for heavy mobile gamers.
You can also keep an eye on iPhone battery health under Settings > Battery > Battery Health & Charging. Android users can estimate battery health using the AccuBattery app. But try not to worry about it too much. By the time your next phone’s battery depletes, right-to-repair rules might make it easier to replace.
Now try this
Pirate radio, but legal: While I have no aspirations to become a DJ myself, I’m enjoying Amazon’s free Amp app, which launched last year for iOS and earlier this month for Android. It allows anyone to host their own radio stations with music from Amazon’s streaming catalog, including commentary between the tracks. I’d rather use this than Spotify’s new DJ feature, which outsources the job to AI instead.
Bring back email bundles: Do you miss Inbox, Google’s attempt at building a more ambitious Gmail app? Try Shortwave, which I mentioned in my roundup of alternative email apps a few months back. Like Inbox, it can bundle up emails into categories such as Newsletters and Purchases, and you can schedule them to arrive at specific times of the day. The app just arrived on Android after launching for iOS and the web last year.
Around the web
- Here’s a lovely new set of phone and desktop wallpapers.
- Slack is getting a big redesign soon.
- SanDisk’s portable SSDs have a data destruction problem.
- Turning off YouTube watch history now disables recommendations as well.
Spend wisely
Apple’s 9th-gen iPad is still the best deal in tablet computing, at least when you factor in sale prices. Amazon currently has the 64 GB model for $250 (final price appears at checkout), matching previous record lows. Best Buy, meanwhile, has the 256 GB model for $360 refurbished if you scroll down to “Buying Options” on the product page. The Apple Pencil and Logitech’s Combo Touch keyboard case are on sale as well.
Thanks for reading!
Here was a nice little surprise over the weekend: Houston Chronicle tech columnist Dwight Silverman listed Advisorator as one of his must-read tech newsletters, praising its “easily understood style that works for both the tech-savvy and tech-clueless alike.” I feel the same way about Dwight’s work, which is why I’ve featured some of it in Advisorator. Thanks Dwight!
Got tech questions for me? Just reply to this email to get in touch.
Until next week,
Jared