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Online Shopping Scams Are Rampant: How to Spot and Avoid Them If you’ve bought something online that never arrived, or paid through a peer-to-peer app for a product that turned out to be fake, you’re far from alone. A November 2025 survey by the Pew Research Center found that about a third of Americans — 33% — say they have personally experienced an online shopping scam. That’s a large enough share to make fraud prevention a basic skill for anyone who shops on the internet. ...

Is Your Therapist Recording Your Sessions with AI? What Patients Need to Know If you’re in therapy, you probably assume that what you say stays between you and your therapist. But a growing number of mental health professionals are bringing a third party into the room: artificial intelligence. According to a November 2025 Forbes report, therapists are now using generative AI tools during live sessions to transcribe conversations, generate clinical notes, and even analyze patient speech patterns. The catch? Many patients are never told it’s happening. ...

New Tool Flags When Your AI Assistant Is Working Against You If you use an AI assistant—whether it’s a chatbot, a scheduling agent, or a browser extension that automates tasks—you’re trusting it with access to your personal data, your email, or even your financial accounts. That trust is the foundation of the convenience these tools offer. But it also creates a new kind of risk: what if your AI agent starts acting in ways you didn’t intend, sharing information you didn’t authorize, or quietly serving a different master? ...

1 in 3 Americans Has Been Scammed While Shopping Online. Here’s How to Stay Safe. A new report from the Pew Research Center, published in November 2025, finds that roughly a third of U.S. adults say they have personally experienced an online shopping scam. That figure is a reminder that fraud is not a rare or distant problem — it touches a large share of consumers, and the risk is only rising during peak shopping seasons. ...

Your Phone Can Train AI Without Sharing Your Data: How Privacy-Preserving AI Works Every time you type a message, take a photo, or ask your phone for directions, a small AI model on the device might be learning from your behavior. The personalization — predictive text, photo sorting, suggested replies — is convenient. But for years that convenience came at a cost: your raw data had to leave your phone and travel to a company’s servers for training. That’s changing. ...

Nearly 1 in 3 Americans Hit by an Online Shopping Scam – Here’s How to Protect Yourself If you’ve ever bought something online that never arrived, or clicked a link in an email that turned out to be a phishing trap, you’re not alone. According to a November 2025 survey from the Pew Research Center, about one in three U.S. adults say they’ve personally experienced an online shopping scam. That number climbs even higher among younger adults and people who shop online frequently. ...

Your Phone Can Train AI Privately: What On-Device Learning Means for You Every time you use a smart keyboard, voice assistant, or photo app that learns your habits, your data typically travels to a cloud server for training. That means your input—your typed words, spoken commands, or tagged images—ends up on someone else’s machine. Data breaches and misuse are real concerns. A recent line of research aims to change this by enabling privacy-preserving AI training on everyday devices such as phones, tablets, and smart home gadgets. Instead of shipping raw data to the cloud, the AI model learns directly on your device. This article explains what happened, why it matters, and what you can do now. ...

1 in 3 Americans Has Been Scammed Online – Here’s How to Avoid It Online shopping is now a daily habit for millions of Americans. But a new survey from Pew Research Center highlights a troubling trend: about one in three U.S. adults say they have been the victim of an online shopping scam. ...

Online Shopping Scams Hit 1 in 3 Americans – Here’s How to Avoid Them If you’ve ever clicked “buy now” on a deal that seemed too good, only to receive nothing or a cheap counterfeit, you’re not alone. A new report from the Pew Research Center found that about a third of U.S. adults say they have personally experienced an online shopping scam. That’s millions of people, and the numbers are likely underreported because many victims never realize they were scammed until it’s too late. ...

How Your Devices Can Now Train AI Without Sending Your Data to the Cloud Every time you use a smart keyboard, a voice assistant, or a photo recognition app, the underlying AI model likely improves by learning from your personal data. Historically, that meant your texts, recordings, or images were uploaded to company servers for training. But a growing body of research and real-world frameworks are changing this: a technique called federated learning, and a new refinement called Federated Constrained, now makes it possible for AI to improve itself using only the processing power on your own phone or laptop, without raw data ever leaving your device. ...