Intego Mac Security Podcast

Trade In Your iPhone – Intego Mac Podcast Episode 360

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A European Union consumer advocate describes how Apple fails to comply with DMA. An explanation why Touch ID doesn’t always work: you may have negligible fingerprints. It’s possible to receive a damaged iPhone replacement instead of a repaired one. And trading in your Apple devices might be a good idea right now, because prices are looking good.

  • EU Consumer Group Summarizes How Apple Fails to Comply With DMA
  • Most iPhone buyers prioritize need over new features in latest upgrades
  • Struggling to Unlock Your Phone? You Might Have Lost Your Fingerprints
  • macOS Version of HZ RAT Backdoor Targets Chinese Messaging App Users
  • Cheana Stealer Strikes: Windows & macOS VPN Users Under Attack
  • Apple Repaired My iPhone Screen, but Now My Social Media Account Is Banned
  • DeviceCheck framework
  • How to trade in (or sell) your iPhone, iPad, Mac, or Apple Watch
  • How to securely dispose of your old iPhone or iPad
  • Sextortion Scams Now Include Photos of Your Home
  • Why some homeowners are blurring their house on Google Maps

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    Transcript of Intego Mac Podcast episode 360

    Voice Over 0:00
    This is the Intego Mac Podcast—the voice of Mac security—for Thursday, September 5, 2024. This week’s Intego Mac podcast security headlines include: A European Union consumer advocate describes how Apple fails to comply with DMA. An explanation why Touch ID doesn’t always work— you may have negligible fingerprints. It’s possible to receive a damaged iPhone replacement instead of a repaired one. And trading in your Apple devices might be a good idea right now, because prices are looking good. Now, here are the hosts of the Intego Mac Podcast. Veteran Mac journalist, Kirk McElhearn. And Intego’s. Chief Security Analyst, Josh Long.

    Kirk McElhearn 0:48
    Good morning. Josh, how are you today?

    Josh Long 0:50
    I’m doing well. How are you, Kirk?

    Re-start your browser to ensure it gets updated

    Kirk McElhearn 0:52
    It’s Thursday, and that means it’s restart your browser day.

    Josh Long 0:56
    This is a new thing that we decided we were going to come up with, right? Because every week, it seems like there’s some vulnerabilities that get patched in browsers, not literally every week, but it’s often enough. They’re not zero day vulnerabilities necessarily, but on a pretty regular basis, Google is coming out with new chromium versions, and so it’s probably a good idea to just make sure you’re updating your browser once a week, and the best, easiest way to make sure your chromium based browser is up to date is just quitting it and restarting it.

    Kirk McElhearn 1:30
    I had to use Microsoft Edge this morning, so I usually use Safari, which doesn’t have the same problem. Safari updates come with operating system updates, and it informed me that my browser was up to date that had just installed an update. Now, since I’m used to my browser updating with the operating system, I wouldn’t think of checking in the browser. All the other apps I know that get updates, they either use sparkle, which is a framework that developers use. This is the thing you see when you get a dialog that comes in front from an app that says an update available. Click to update. It downloads and it relaunches the app, or updates in the Mac App Store, which I really don’t check off and I’m looking now, it seems like there’s two updates available, but browsers are not something even reflexively, I wouldn’t think to check for updates in browsers, because Don’t you think the browser should be more aggressive and displaying a dialog saying, hey, you need to restart your browser to update it.

    Josh Long 2:24
    Yeah, I think so. And most of the time what you’ll see in most of the Chromium based browsers, so this is, you know, Google Chrome, obviously, and Microsoft Edge, brave and other browsers will have a little indicator icon, usually kind of near the top right corner of a window, that’ll give you some little tiny hint that there might be an update available for your browser.

    Kirk McElhearn 2:47
    Little tiny hint for something that could be a serious update. Little tiny hint doesn’t seem very strong.

    Josh Long 2:53
    Right? And that hint depends on your particular browser, but it might be like a little arrow that points up with a little green circle around it in Edge, for example. But it gets a little bit more insistent the longer you go between updates, because it’ll start to maybe it’ll be yellow next time, or red if like, there’s a really critical update that you haven’t installed yet. So anyway, it’s just a good idea if you can just quit your browser every day. The really, the only reason to not do that, maybe, is if you’re right in the middle of something, maybe you’ve got a form halfway filled out. Even in that case, chances are you might get logged out of the site anyway, if you come back to it hours later. But unless you’ve got private browsing windows open, there’s really not a whole lot of reason to keep your browser running all the time, and also Chromium is kind of notorious for being memory hog, so that’s another good reason to make sure you quit your browser when you’re not using it, to clear out all that extra memory that might still be used.

    We’re a week away from Apple’s annual September product announcements

    Kirk McElhearn 3:54
    We started this last Thursday. I don’t think I’m going to remember every Thursday, and we don’t need the full explanation every Thursday, but I will try to remember from time to time. Now, we just want to remind people that next Monday, September 9, assuming you’re listening to this before, Monday September 9, is Apple’s annual event where they are presenting new iPhones and Apple watches and maybe other hardware. We don’t know. They will be announcing the availability dates for iOS, 18, iPadOS, 18, Mac OS, Sequoia. WatchOS, 11 TV. OS, something, home. Os something, vision. Os something, did I miss? Did I leave anything out?

    Josh Long 4:29
    I think that pretty much covers it all. Yeah, of course, the event is mostly going to be focused on the new iPhones and new Apple watches. That’s what Apple always comes out with every year at this time. So obviously, that necessarily means that we’re going to be getting iOS updates along with the new phones that are coming out, because they will ship with the new iOS version. And most of the time, they ship pretty quickly. So it might be as soon as next Friday, a week from tomorrow, that we’ll be able to pre order the new iPhones and maybe get. Um, as soon as maybe a week after that, we’ll see.

    European Union catalogs Apple’s DMA violations

    Kirk McElhearn 5:02
    Okay, so this is a slow news week because of all this stuff that Apple is waiting on, and we have a a potpourri of stories this week. Would that be a good word? Let’s start with an EU consumer group that has been summarizing how Apple has failed to comply with the DMA. The DMA is a digital markets act, and this is the European Commission regulations that required Apple to allow third party app stores and some other things, like access to the NFC chip. I don’t remember who wrote about this last week, but someone pointed out this. This is going to be the first time that Apple introduces a new iPhone, that there are actually two new iPhones. Not that the iPhone hardware is different, but that what you can do on the iPhone is different depending on where you are. Now it’s always been the case that countries like China, for example, have banned certain apps and you couldn’t use those on the iPhone or an Android phone. But here we’re talking about, I want to say, core features about the way you get apps onto an iPhone. There is this list of things that Apple has done or has not done to comply with the DMA, right?

    Josh Long 6:03
    And so the brief summary is basically the most important thing is that if you are in an EU country, you have access to be able to get third party apps from outside of the App Store ecosystem. So currently, if you’re just about any place else in the world, in just about every circumstance, the only way that you can really get apps consistently and easily is to get them from the Apple App Store. That’s it. There’s no option for downloading an app from a website or from a third party app store. Not really. That’s there’s kind of a little bit of an asterisk on there, because there are some kind of ways that you can do it, but it’s very difficult, and it’s not supported, really by Apple. So really effectively, you only have the App Store as an option. Now in the EU you do have some other options, but this consumer rights group is saying that Apple’s not doing such a great job because of all the extra steps that you have to go through. So one of the things that they say is Apple creates unnecessary steps to impede or deter users from switching to alternative app stores or downloading apps from outside of the App Store. Well, this is kind of in part, because Apple’s trying to protect its customers and protect the devices, right? They don’t want to make it so easy for anybody to just, you know, distribute third party apps through a website, because, well, guess what? You can also get malware potentially that way as well. And so that’s Apple’s argument as well. We’re doing this to protect consumers and make sure they’re not going to get infected with drive by downloads or whatever like we want to keep the iPhone sacred and secure and not have to have these concerns like we do on on Mac OS, which they don’t really want to make a big deal out of.

    What motivates buyers to get a new iPhone?

    Kirk McElhearn 7:57
    Yeah, you can then stole things from almost anywhere on Mac OS. They do have to be code signed and all of that, but you can still install things if they’re not code signed. So yes, Apple has a way to go with the DMA. Now, talking about new iPhones is an interesting story that just came out on Apple insider, which I mean, this really corresponds to what I’ve been reading and to what people have been talking about this comes from a study by Consumer Intelligent Research Partners, CIRP, who researches mobile phone sales and things like that. And the article says most iPhone buyers prioritize need over new features and latest upgrades. And there’s a pie chart here. People will upgrade their phone if it’s obsolete. 44% of people will upgrade their phone if it’s obsolete. 29% of 9% of it’s lost, broken or stolen. Only 18% if there’s new features. And I think this is probably been, well, the iPhone came out in 2007 so this is 17 years. And I’d say for the past five or six years, there haven’t been that many new features that have driven people to buy phones. And it’s not just iPhone, it’s Android as well. This isn’t specific to Apple, and every time Apple introduces a new iPhone with all these cool new features, I can’t help but thinking that most people don’t care about them at all. If you go back to the iPhone 12, that was the first to support 5g it’s almost laughable, if you want to go back and look at the 20 minutes that they talked about how Fast 5g was and how it was going to change your life, and how it did absolutely nothing and fell flat. Kind of reminds me of 3d TVs. They were a big thing, and now no one cares. So this year could be different for the iPhone because of the apple intelligence features that you can only get with the iPhone 16 or with the Pro models of the iPhone 15 you can get on some iPad, but for the iPhone, you’re limited, right?

    Josh Long 9:45
    And I have seen some speculation about that, that there might be a little bit of an uptick this year compared to all the previous years, specifically for that reason. So AI is kind of something that a lot of consumers are aware of. I mean. Even talk about it on, you know, on the news and stuff. So it’s something that people are are becoming aware of, and the they probably are gonna like the idea of, Oh, I get fancy AI features, but oh man, I gotta buy a new phone for it. And, okay, well, I guess I’ll get the latest model.

    Kirk McElhearn 10:16
    It’s not just I gotta buy a new phone. It’s $1,000 new phone, right? It’s not just dropping $300 for an Android phone. It’s $1,000 for an Apple phone. Maybe, maybe it’s going to be one at 800 right? The iPhone 16, non pro small. But you know, it’s, this isn’t a small purchase a phone.

    Josh Long 10:35
    No, that’s true. In fact, a lot of people, well, as you mentioned, some people, 44% of people apparently, typically only update their phone when it’s obsolete. I was just talking to somebody yesterday who was using an iPhone 6s so they’re limited to iOS 15, and they were talking about how certain apps like when they tried to download them from the App Store, it says, Well, you can download an older version of this app that’s compatible with your phone, but they were having some functionality problems, and the app wasn’t working for them. And I’m like, Well, yeah, because the developer is not actually updating that app anymore, so you may be able to download an old version, but that doesn’t mean it’s actually still going to work.

    Touch ID not so great recognizing worn fingerprints

    Kirk McElhearn 11:14
    Okay, there was an interesting article in Wired last week. It says, struggling to unlock your phone, you might have lost your fingerprints. I’m sure we both know people who have trouble using Touch ID on an iPhone. I’ve known several people for whom it just wouldn’t work reliably, maybe once out of every 10 times. The Wired article says the absence of these identifying marks, which can be the result of excessive typing, manual work, chemotherapy or sports, is becoming more of an issue in the age of biometrics. Now the only iPhone that Apple sells with Touch ID is the third generation iPhone SE that came out in the spring of 2022 the low cost iPad uses Touch ID. It has touch ID on the power button. The iPad mini still has touch ID on the power button, but a lot of people are still using those older phones, like the person you talk to with an iPhone success that have such ID. Now this article, if it’s talking about recent phones, it’s more about Android, because I don’t think there’s any really reliable face ID on Android. In fact, when the Google Pixel 9 phone came out a week or two ago, one of the pros I saw on list of pros and cons was that the fingerprint sensor is ultrasonic instead of optical, so it’s twice as fast as before. With iPhones, we’re used to using face ID for almost every phone. With Android is different. The article begins talking about someone who lost her fingerprints when she started rock climbing. And it’s true if you’re doing a sport like that, this is going to happen. Apparently, if you have chemotherapy, this can happen as you age, your fingerprints go away. And interestingly, the person went to get fingerprinted to apply for citizenship, and the police couldn’t get a good fingerprint. Now this goes both ways. Right. On the one hand, you can’t get fingerprinted when you need to be fingerprinted for something like this, but on the other hand, if you’ve lost your fingerprints, you can’t get caught if you commit a crime, and they can find your fingerprints.

    Josh Long 12:59
    Well, in any case, it could be a problem for you if you’re trying to get into your phone. This probably isn’t super common that people lose their fingerprints. It probably for most people, if you do lose your fingerprints, it’s probably most likely to happen like over time, and maybe not while you still have the same phone that you originally enrolled your fingerprints in. But anyway, kind of an interesting article.

    Kirk McElhearn 13:22
    Yeah, something to consider. You’re planning to buy a device that uses Touch ID these days. If you have problems already with Touch ID, of course, you can just tap your passcode. So don’t make an easy passcode. Make sure it’s secure. We’re going to take a break. Then we’re going to talk about trading in your iPhone and other apple devices to get some money back to buy a new one,

    Voice Over 13:42
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    Stealer Malware of the Week, come on down!

    Kirk McElhearn 14:57
    Okay, so it’s malware time. It’s still. Time we should say, because every week we have a new steel or malware, and we have this one this week, Cheana, Cheana Stealer. Is it different from any of the other stealer malware, or does it just steal the same stuff?

    Josh Long 15:10
    It’s pretty much the same as all the others, but it but there’s a new one with a new name. So hey, we thought we’d mention it, just in case you saw the headlines. So don’t worry. If you’ve got Intego software, you will be protected.

    Kirk McElhearn 15:21
    Okay, what about HZ RAT?

    Josh Long 15:25
    This one was a little bit interesting, just because, well, it’s a remote access Trojan, so it’s a little bit different from kind of your just generic stealer malware, because rats essentially offer a back door into your system for some attacker. So it does more than just gathering stuff and exfiltrating it. It also gives attackers a way to get into your computer and send it commands and other things like that. So of course, it can do all the stealer stuff as well, but it does continue to give access to your computer so an attacker can log in remotely. There were a couple of Chinese apps. There was one called DingTalk, another one that is very popular, called WeChat, that both had Trojan versions of them out there. And if you happen to download one of these trojanized versions of the app, then you would actually get this HC rat installed. This is the first time I believe that Hz rat has been available on Mac OS. Previously, it had been known to be distributed on Windows. Now there’s also a Mac OS version. So once again, in another case where the bad guys who have been targeting Windows are now saying, Maybe we should go after Mac users too.

    Kirk McElhearn 16:37
    I like how you say that. Another popular Chinese app, WeChat. Wikipedia says that by 2018 WeChat had been used by 93.5% of Chinese internet users. It’s not popular. It is like the app that everyone uses. It’s, it’s a platform. It’s more than just an app, correct, right?

    Josh Long 16:53
    It’s more more than just chat. It’s not just an instant messaging program, right?

    What does Apple replace your damaged phone with?

    Kirk McElhearn 16:58
    Okay, so we have an article, and we’re, I want to say we’re kind of short on details, but it does make sense. Someone named Tim Voorhees wrote an article claiming that Apple repaired his iPhone screen, but now his social media account is banned. Now you may not know this if you’ve never had an iPhone replaced under Apple Care, if you have Apple Care, plus, they don’t necessarily repair the device. They generally just give you a new one. Now this could be a new retail, boxed one, or it could be a refurbished one, but they replace your device. If you do this by mail, Apple sends you what they call the Express replacement service. They send you the new one. They allow you 10 days to copy your data and send it back. If you do it in person, obviously they’re going to copy the data right away. So this person talks about he had a cracked back glass on his iPhone and a broken volume button, and he says, a brand new replacement phone. But he explains later that it was a refurbished phone because he found that when he tried to log into Snapchat, that his phone was banned from using Snapchat. Now there’s something that Apple uses called the device check, and it’s a framework that developers can use to record and write data about a device. And you could use this if someone has been using a device fraudulently. Or Apple’s developer page, which I linked to in the show notes, talks about maybe they’ve taken advantage of a free trial for something already. It’s not clear how this works, even from Apple’s information. There must be some other way of identifying the device, which would be the MAC address, which is generally the device identifier for all sorts of devices that use the network. But what probably happened is someone used the device maliciously. It got banned by Snapchat. Maybe they traded it into Apple. We’re going to talk about trade ins in a minute, and Apple refurbished it and then put it back into circulation as Apple Care replacement. It’s not entirely clear how to get around it, because Apple can’t do anything about this if it’s in Snapchat database, and Snapchat says it’s Apple’s fault. So even if you get a replacement phone, there could be some ways that it could prevent you from using certain services. Now he explains that Apple replaced it again, but when you get a replacement phone from Apple, it’s not a fully virgin iPhone, it’s most likely a refurbished phone, right?

    Josh Long 19:14
    So I think that the important takeaway here, and first of all that you know this is unconfirmed. This is one blogger who wrote about this. You can probably find similar examples out there, but, but as far as the device check framework, that is true. So it is possible. Apple does explain how it is possible for a developer to to ban hardware or to lock out a particular piece of hardware, as you said, from like free trials or something. Maybe a trial period expired, and if a developer says, I want to make sure that no matter what anybody does, they can’t get another free trial from me, then one way they could do that is device checks, so locking out that hardware from any further free trials. So the problem comes in where, if you have gotten your phone replaced. Just under, under warranty or a repair from from an Apple Authorized Service Provider, you want to make sure that you download all the apps that you’re likely to use on that phone at some point and just log into those services. And just check and make sure do that pretty quickly after you get your replacement, just in case, so that if you do run into a problem like this, that like the Snapchat band that this user describes, you can take it back to Apple and say, Hey, I ran into this, presumably, device check issue, and I would like you to replace the phone again, because now I can’t use Snapchat, and it’s nothing that I did wrong.

    What are some tips for trading in an Apple device?

    Kirk McElhearn 20:36
    Yeah. So speaking of repurposed phones, it’s time to talk about trading in your iPhone, iPad, Mac or Apple Watch, because next week, you’re going to want to buy a new iPhone. Now I have an iPhone 14 pro Max. I think you do too. Or is it yours just a pro?

    Josh Long 20:50
    Mine’s a Pro, not aMax.

    Kirk McElhearn 20:52
    Yours is just a Pro. So I looked on Apple’s website to see how much I could get for trade in. In the US, they offered me $620 and here in the UK, they offer me 520 pounds, about the same amount. I believe the phone cost 1099 pounds when I bought it, so this is nearly 50% of what I paid for this phone two years ago. That’s pretty good. That’s very tempting to get people to buy a new phone. So Apple’s trade in prices are partly to nudge you to buy new phones. But I checked on another website in the UK that buys used phones. They offered me 575 pounds. There’s a huge market for used phones, and there’s several reasons. One is there’s these third parties who buy them and then resell them, and they’ll sell them through their own websites, or they’ll sell them through Amazon or eBay, etc. The second is Apple who they get to trade in so you can get a new phone, but they also refurbish them to put them into circulation. For you know what we just saw, Apple Care replacements. And if Apple is offering this much money, why would you not trade in a phone? Right then, I spent 1100 pounds off, and that I haven’t fully paid off because I took it two years with 0% interest, and I finished paying it off in 10 days. Why would I not trade it in for nearly half that price and get the new phone for that much less

    Josh Long 22:11
    Exactly right? And so I’m looking at doing the same thing, because, well, I’m not going to need my 14 pro anymore once I have my new 16 Pro. So I’ve been looking at doing the same thing. One thing that I’ve noticed in the past is that although you can sell the device juice, and you do typically make a little bit more money if you know how to properly list it. And that’s kind of an important point, is you need to know first of all how to properly prepare the device. We do have an article about that as well, and you also need to list it in such a way that people are going to be able to find it and trust that you’re going to be a reliable seller. You need to take actually good pictures of it to prove that you actually have the device in hand. You can’t just use generic images, or people will be less likely to bid on it, or buy it now, or whatever. Depending on how you’re going about selling it, you can probably make a little bit more money that way, but it’s also going to require more effort.

    Kirk McElhearn 23:10
    But there’s the hassle factor. I’ve sold a lot of things on eBay, and it’s a hassle. Whenever it’s an iPhone, you immediately get emails from people saying, oh, I want to buy it. And how about if we just do this, you know, outside of eBay, so you’ll save money on the fees. And you know, that’s going to be a scam, because they’re going to, they’re going to pay you, and then they’re going to claim to eBay that they didn’t get the device, or that it’s broken, or whatever. You don’t want to do that even with local Facebook groups marketplace, it can be a hassle. Doing it with Apple is the easy way. You’ll save time, and you won’t have to worry about it. Doing it with some of these other third party companies that I’ve worked with. They’re fine as well. We list a couple in this article that we have about trading in devices depending on what country you’re in. There are others. I’ve used one here called Music Magpie, which buy CDs and books and DVDs and phones and things like that. The other ones that offered me 575 pounds for my iPhone compared to Apple’s 520 Now it’s interesting to look at Apple’s trade in values for different devices. I have an iPad Mini four years old, cost 499 pounds. Apple is offering me 200 pounds for it for a four year old iPad Mini, the same iPad in the US, they’re offering $250 it was $500 in the US, four years old. That’s really good. However I’m working right now. I’m looking at Josh on my m1 iMac, that’s a little more than three years old. That cost 1600 1800 pounds, something like this. And Apple only values this at a little more than 300 pounds, I could sell this for half of what I paid on eBay. And I’ve sold max on eBay in the past, and I usually get about half. So it depends on which device they want you to trade in, phones to buy new phones. They don’t seem to care much about Max. Another thing is the Apple Watch. I have a series eight stainless steel I believe. You think it’s pretty expensive, like 799 pounds. I think Apple’s offering me 189 to trade it in. I mean, that’s just ridiculous compared to what they’re offering for the iPad Mini that’s four years old. So depending on which device you have, you might want to consider trading it into Apple or selling to another company, or you might want to sell on eBay. A while ago, I sold a couple of old Apple TVs that I had on eBay. And yes, I had a box with Apple TVs, and I had never gotten around to it, and they were easy to sell. And you might want to look in that drawer where you kept a bunch of Apple devices. One thing is, you can’t wait too long. After two or three years, the value goes down. Although the iPad Mini is really interesting, they’re offering so much, which does suggest that maybe there’s going to be a new iPad Mini soon, and there’s been rumors to that. I want to give you one tip, when you trade in a device to Apple or anyone else, and this was someone at Apple who told me this a couple years ago, put your device in the packaging and take photos all sides of the device, because the apple person said to me, they’ve had problems sometimes because they have third party companies that handle these trade ins, and they said they’ve had problems sometimes with people who the company claimed the device was damaged, and the people who traded them in said the devices weren’t. So even Apple’s warning about that, and I would say any company you’re trading into, make sure you take photos, to make sure that the screen’s not damaged, that there’s no chips on the glass or on the side or anything.

    Josh Long 26:22
    I would recommend that you do this anytime that you’re selling to any party, because you never know what’s going to happen in shipment and other things like that. It’s always a good idea to make sure that you can prove that, that when it was last in your possession, that everything was in good shape.

    Blackmail and “sextortion” emails use more social engineering tricks

    Kirk McElhearn 26:37
    Okay, we have an article on the Mac Security blog, which is extremely popular. It is entitled, “Porn blackmail, Sextortion. Emails, have you been hacked? A new scam, and I went through an email that I received and explained why it wasn’t possible that what the scammer said now, Brian Krebs, in his blog, Krebs on security, has said that some people have gotten the same email, but with something additional, a Google Street View photo of their home, or in one example, they show the front yard of the person’s home. Now this means that the scammers went to the trouble of finding someone’s address, looking them up on Google Maps and taking a screenshot of the photo that is actually a little bit more disturbing than what I always thought was just a spray and pray email that gets sent to a whole bunch of people, right?

    Josh Long 27:24
    That definitely indicates that this is a much more targeted attack. Now it’s also probably more likely to be more effective, right? If, if you see a photo of your own home, then it’s going to be a lot more concerning to you than an email that just could be generic, right? Like this indicates that somebody actually took the time to target you, and therefore this might be legitimate. That’s what they want you to think.

    Kirk McElhearn 27:51
    Well, it might be legitimate, but the text of the emails, I think, exactly the same as the one that we wrote about a couple of months ago. Worth pointing out, though, and Brian Krebs mentions that this is something that should be reported to the FBI. I love that the FBI has a phone number one, 800 call FBI. Easy to remember. This also raises a question of a story we saw last week on It’s actually ABC News in California that people are blurring their homes on Google Maps to deter burglars. Here’s how So apparently, burglars look on Google Maps to see if you have a fancy car or some sort of fancy things on your porch before deciding whether to burgle you. I find that a bit of a stretch. You drive down the street, you’ll see what people have by their house, but you can have Google blur your home. You might want to do so if you’re worried about these sextortion scams, or if you do get one of these extortion scam emails with a street view photo of your home, right?

    Josh Long 28:45
    I don’t know that everybody needs to do this, but if you feel like, for your own privacy sake, that you would rather have Google blur your home, you can do that. So there is an option for that, and we’ll have a link in the show notes where you can find out more about that.

    Kirk McElhearn 29:00
    Blurring the home seems to me a tell that you’re trying to hide something which might attract more Burgos.

    Josh Long 29:06
    That’s what I worry about. Yeah. So it’s not something that I personally do. I’m not super worried about it. I mean, like, if somebody has your address, they can somehow see what your home looks like anyway, right? So, like, I don’t know that it really matters that much. They can also see what all the homes next to your home look like. And well, chances are it was probably built at the same time, and so it looks a lot like the neighbors homes too. So I don’t know that there’s that much value in it, but if you feel more comfortable, you can certainly blur your home.

    Kirk McElhearn 29:35
    Okay, that’s enough for this week. Next week, we will be able to explain what we have purchased on Monday. Get your credit card or debit card ready until next week. Josh, stay secure.

    Josh Long 29:44
    All right. Stay secure.

    Voice Over 29:47
    Thanks for listening to the Intego Mac podcast. The voice of Mac security with your host, Kirk McElhearn and Josh long to get every weekly episode. Be sure to follow us in Apple podcasts or subscribe in your favorite podcast app, and if you can leave a rating, a like or a review, links to topics and information mentioned in the podcast can be found in the show notes for the [email protected] the Intego website is also where to find details on the full line of Intego security and utility software intego.com.

    About Kirk McElhearn

    Kirk McElhearn writes about Apple products and more on his blog Kirkville. He is co-host of the Intego Mac Podcast, as well as several other podcasts, and is a regular contributor to The Mac Security Blog, TidBITS, and several other websites and publications. Kirk has written more than two dozen books, including Take Control books about Apple's media apps, Scrivener, and LaunchBar. Follow him on Twitter at @mcelhearn. View all posts by Kirk McElhearn →