Firefly Web Studios Erie PA

04/22/2026

Facebook Access Scam. Just. Don't. Click.

From Kim Komando com

💀 Scammers plant Facebook grief-bait: A nasty ploy is making the rounds on Facebook. You get a message from a “friend” saying, “He died in an accident” with a link to a news article. Click it, and you land on a fake login page that steals your credentials. Your account gets hijacked, and the scam sends the same message to everyone you know. Never click grief-bait links. If a friend posts something alarming, call them. These scammers count on your panic. Don’t give it to them.

04/21/2026

Keep Meta from owning your posts, images, likenesses and posting for you after you die!

From KimKomando com

Meta was granted a U.S. patent for a system that trains AI on your posts, comments, chats and voice messages to simulate you after you die.

AI can post, respond to DMs and do audio and video calls in your name.

Don’t want that for you? I’ve got the fix.

📖 Read time: 2 minutes


Here’s something I read that you need to know about. Meta owns a patent that could turn everything you’ve ever posted into a digital ghost.

The U.S. Patent Office granted Meta U.S. Patent 12513102B2. The filing describes a system that trains an AI on your posts, comments, chats, voice messages and likes, then deploys a bot that responds to your friends’ posts, answers DMs and simulates audio and video calls.

In your voice. With your face. After you die.
🤖 What the patent says

The filing is direct about the use case. The AI simulates you “when the user is absent from the social networking system, for example, when the user takes a long break or if the user is deceased.”

Meta would probably call this a virtual assistant for people on vacation. But they specifically wrote death into the patent. That’s one very long vacation.

The patent notes the impact of account inactivity is “much more severe and permanent” if the user is deceased and can never return. Translation: Your death is a business problem.

This technology is the proposed solution. What the industry calls “grief tech” has been building toward exactly this. Startups have been doing it for years. Now one of the largest companies on Earth holds the legal right to do it at scale.
🔒 What you can do

Facebook has a legacy contact feature that most people have never touched. Meta buried it deeper in 2026. Here’s the current path.

On Facebook: Settings & Privacy > Settings > Accounts Center > Personal Details > Account ownership and control > Memorialization. (Depending on your device, OS and more, these steps might be a tad different. Poke around until you find it.)

From there, you have two choices. Assign a legacy contact, a trusted person who manages your profile after you’re gone. Or choose to have your account permanently deleted after your death. Either puts you in control. Leaving it blank gives that decision to Meta.

04/01/2026

Love ChatGPT? Given thought to the invasive nature of it saving your data? Here's how to help protect your "identity". Courtesy of KimKomando.com

ChatGPT’s memory feature is on by default for most people.
It saves your personal details across every conversation and builds a growing profile on you.

You can view, delete or disable it completely.

📖 Read time: 2 minutes

You’ve been telling ChatGPT things. Your job. Your health questions. Your money stress. Your relationship stuff. Maybe your kids’ names. Your city. Your age. And ChatGPT has been writing it all down.

OpenAI’s memory feature isn’t hidden. But most people have no idea it’s been running in the background this whole time, no idea what it’s saved and no idea how to check. That’s the problem.

😶‍🌫️ Here’s what you need to know

Memory works across all your chats automatically. Every conversation, ChatGPT can flag details it thinks are worth keeping about you: your title at work, where you live, physical conditions you’ve casually mentioned. It takes note of your communication style, family situation, political leanings and financial picture.

Over time, it builds a personal profile that travels with you from conversation to conversation. Not a short one, either. I checked mine. It knew things I’d completely forgotten I’d told it. Go look at yours.

👉 Open ChatGPT on your phone or computer. Click your profile picture in the bottom left on desktop, or the menu on mobile. Go to Settings > Personalization > Memory.

You’ll see a running list of everything it has stored. Some entries will be totally harmless. Others will make you do a double-take. Seriously.

🔍 3 moves to make right now

You’ve got options.

Delete. If individual memories feel too personal, hit the trash icon next to any entry you want gone.

Turn memory off entirely. Toggle it off under Settings > Personalization > Memory, and ChatGPT stops adding to the file. FYI, turning memory off is a two-way street. ChatGPT won’t build a profile on you anymore, but it also won’t remember a single thing about you.

Your preferences. How you like things explained. Gone. Every conversation starts cold, like you just met. For some people, that’s exactly the point. For others, it makes the tool genuinely less useful. Only you know which side of that line you’re on.

Memory lane closed. Use Temporary Chat for anything sensitive. Start a new chat and select Temporary Chat from the top. Nothing from that session gets stored. Not a word.

🔐 The step people completely skip

OpenAI trains its AI models on your conversations unless you tell it not to. Memory data included.

👉 To opt out, go to Settings > Data Controls and turn off Improve the model for everyone. One toggle. Thirty seconds. Done.

Deleting a memory from your list doesn’t scrub it from OpenAI’s servers. For a full data removal, submit a deletion request at privacy.openai.com. And if you’re on a ChatGPT Team or Enterprise plan, memory is off by default. Lucky you.

04/01/2026

Here's a good example of how your data drives the tech industry without you knowing it.

Courtesy of KimKomando.com

🚂 The money train

These Big Tech companies didn’t only survive the mockery. They turned us into both the product and free labor.

👉 Share this fun fact at a dinner party. You know those “I am not a robot” tests where you click traffic lights and crosswalks? You weren’t proving you’re human. You were training Google’s self-driving car AI. For free. Every click. Every crosswalk. Unpaid work, delivered with a smile.

Right now, people are calling AI glasses that see what you see a “creepy gimmick.” In five years, you’ll be wearing them to find your keys. And handing over a 24/7 video feed of your home to do it.

01/19/2026

Your car is smart. So is the manufacturer. Many of them track you. Here's how to correct that.

Selling a car without clearing your info is like selling an unlocked phone. Use these steps to erase your personal data, so no one drives away with it.