Hundreds of Smartphone Apps Are Spying on Your TV Watching. Here's How to Disable Them

Did You Know? Life expectancy before the 20th century was very low (around 35 years in most regions and populations), but that doesn’t mean that the average person only lived 35 years (life expectancy is an average for the whole population). If you managed to avoid dying at birth (or, later, giving birth), from childhood diseases, or in a famine or conflict, your chances of living to old age were quite high. Geek Trivia A Pivotal Supreme Court Case That Defined Fair Use In Music Was 2 Live Crew Vs. Who? Stevie Wonder → Tom Petty → Roy Orbison → Tupac Shakur → Advertisement How-To Geek Recommends Running Malwarebytes Alongside Your Antivirus for Maximum Protection Running antivirus is still important, but these days the really active threats are from spyware, adware, crapware, and the worst of all: ransomware. That's where Malwarebytes comes in. Malwarebytes not only protects your computer from malware, but does a better job of cleaning up an infected computer than anything else on the market. And it doesn't just work on PCs — they have a Mac version too. Click here to download Want to Change Your Email Preferences? At some point in the past you subscribed to the How-To Geek newsletter, but if you'd like to change the frequency or unsubscribe, you can do so by clicking the button. Change my Subscription (or unsubscribe) Today's How-To Geek Articles How to Get the Pixel 2’s Portrait Mode on Your Nexus or Pixel Phone How to Quickly Change Audio Devices on the iPhone Hundreds of Smartphone Apps Are Spying on Your TV Watching. Here’s How to Disable Them How to Customize Nest Secure’s Alarm Levels How Will the Meltdown and Spectre Flaws Affect My PC? How to Manually Set Your Location in Google Chrome How to Play Multiplayer Party Games on Your Chromecast How to Use the Foreground and Background to Create Stronger Photos What Is Microsoft Azure, Anyway? Today's Review Geek Articles Kohler’s Smart Mirror Lets You Ask Alexa to Flush Your Toilet, If You Want That Pick the Right Fitbit for Your Fitness Goals Most Americans Are Still Afraid of Self-Driving Cars Ten Original Movies From 2017 You Might’ve Missed Geek Comic Today's Tech Term Applet An Applet is a small, limited feature application/program that is designed to perform a specific task or function from within another larger, full-featured application or program. What We're Reading This section contains what we're reading from around the web, along with commentary from our editors. Think of it like your daily digest of the most interesting things online. Charring, melting laptop batteries cause HP to issue voluntary recall Worth looking into if you bought an HP laptop in the past couple years. [Ars Technica] Why Do Cartoon Villains Speak in Foreign Accents? It's one of those things you don't notice until someone points it out, and then you can't stop noticing it. [The Atlantic] Even Realistic Videogames like Call of Duty Won't Help Us Win Wars Research shows that video games about war do practically nothing to prepare people for actual battle conditions. [Wired] App Store kicks off 2018 with record-breaking holiday season Ppp Store customers spent $300 million on New Years Day. Are wellness apps the new gym equipment, purchased on New Years Day only to sit abandoned later? [Apple] How to Get the Pixel 2’s Portrait Mode on Your Nexus or Pixel Phone Portrait mode is arguably the hottest thing smoking on modern smartphones—it’s even become the reason to buy one phone over another at this point. But if you’re overall happy with your current generation phone and just want to get your hands on some of that sweet portrait action, now you can. Read This Article → How to Quickly Change Audio Devices on the iPhone There are few things more annoying in life than making a phone call from your iPhone, and then realizing that it's actually connected to your Bluetooth speaker—which don't have a microphone. Shouting "Can you hear me now?" at the phone is never a good look. Read This Article → Hundreds of Smartphone Apps Are Spying on Your TV Watching. Here’s How to Disable Them If you’re afraid that your smartphone is spying on you…well, you’re right. But that’s kind of a non-optional part of modern living: amassing huge amounts of consumer data is how companies like Google operate. But recently some third-party apps have been found taking a few more liberties than they should, like a HAL 9000 in your pocket. Read This Article → How to Customize Nest Secure’s Alarm Levels The Nest Secure has three different alarm settings: Off, Home, and Away. Here’s how to customize some of these settings to fit your needs. Read This Article → How Will the Meltdown and Spectre Flaws Affect My PC? Computer processors have a massive design flaw, and everyone is scrambling to fix it. Only one of the two security holes can be patched, and the patches will make PCs (and Macs) with Intel chips slower. Read This Article → How to Manually Set Your Location in Google Chrome Phones get all the fun toys. Thanks to built-in GPS, network triangulation, and other goodies, it’s possible for them to use a more-or-less exact location for apps and website tools. Read This Article → How to Play Multiplayer Party Games on Your Chromecast So you have a Chromecast. Did you know that you can do more than just stream movies, music, and videos with it?  You can also play simple games that were actually designed for use on the Chromecast. We’re not talking about any AAA titles here, but there are definitely some fun little multiplayer games for when you have a group of people together. Read This Article → How to Use the Foreground and Background to Create Stronger Photos Photography can be very technical, especially in the digital age. But photography is, at it's core, art. You can take a technically perfect photo that's utterly boring and a technically imperfect photo that's a lot more interesting. Read This Article → What Is Microsoft Azure, Anyway? If you’ve followed Microsoft news, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of Microsoft Azure, formerly known as Windows Azure. This cloud computing service is a big part of Microsoft’s business, and it competes with similar services from Amazon and Google. Read This Article → Advertisement How-To Geek Recommends Running Malwarebytes Alongside Your Antivirus for Maximum Protection Running antivirus is still important, but these days the really active threats are from spyware, adware, crapware, and the worst of all: ransomware. That's where Malwarebytes comes in. Malwarebytes not only protects your computer from malware, but does a better job of cleaning up an infected computer than anything else on the market. And it doesn't just work on PCs — they have a Mac version too. Click here to download