The parental controls that fail, Amazon's Starlink rival, and a VPN warning

This week started with a report I wish were surprising. Researchers tested 86 of the safety features that social media apps advertise to parents, and most of them failed, were buried, or were missing outright. I wrote up which controls to trust instead.

In this issue:

• The parental controls that held up, and the ones that failed
• Amazon's answer to Starlink gets real
• You bought the movie, but do you own it?
• Windows 11's new rewind button is not a backup
• Who answers when a chatbot is blamed for a death?
• The short list of apps for a normal person's phone
• This week's tech tip: could you get back into your email?

And the Scary Headline: the free VPN app on your phone may be doing the opposite of its one job. That one is at the bottom, and it is worth the scroll.

Most teen safety features don't work. Here's what does.
Researchers checked 86 child-safety features that Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube advertise to parents. Only 35 worked as promised. The pattern that held up: the default Teen Account protections and the under-13 kid modes mostly do their job. The controls you have to hunt down to turn on are the ones that fail. The post has the per-app list of what to turn on and what to skip.
Learn

Starlink is about to get competition
Amazon says its Leo satellite internet turns on for customers later this year, and it matters most where the internet provider options are sparse. Pricing and real-world speeds aren't public yet, so nobody should cancel anything. The waitlist at leo.amazon.com is free, though. Put your name on it, then judge Leo on numbers instead of promises. The post covers how it differs from the satellite internet you may remember.
News

You bought it, but do you own it?
Sony is ending PlayStation game discs and deleted 551 movies from customers' libraries in Europe, no refunds. Clicking Buy on a movie, book, or game usually gets you a license someone else can revoke. The habit that protects you: for anything you would hate to lose, buy it from a store that hands you a file you can download and keep. The post names those stores.
Learn

Windows 11's new rewind button works, but it is not a backup
Microsoft's Point-in-Time Restore reaches most Windows 11 PCs with this week's Patch Tuesday update. It can roll your computer back to yesterday, and I'd let it turn on. Just know the snapshots live on the same drive they protect, so when the drive dies they die with it. Use it for oops moments, and keep a real backup somewhere else.
News

Can OpenAI be held responsible when ChatGPT is blamed for a death?
The first lawsuit to blame a chatbot for a death by violence is working through the courts. The whole case turns on one fork: if a chatbot is a product, the maker can be liable for a dangerous design, and if it is a service, the bar is much higher. No verdict from me, just the case, the fork, and why nothing about it is settled law yet.
Blog

The apps I'd recommend aren't the ones I use most
I looked at my own most-used apps and they are all mostly for work. So this is the other list: the handful that earn a spot on a normal person's phone, starting with what's already built in, plus the kinds you should delete. One of the deletes was the free VPN, and that call aged about two weeks. See the Scary Headline.
Blog

If you only read one: the teen safety report. If a kid or grandkid in your life has a phone, it tells you which switches to trust and which to skip.

5-Minute Tech Tip

Check the recovery info on your email account. Everything else resets through that inbox, and the recovery phone and backup email on it are how you get back in if you ever get locked out. Most of us set them years ago and haven't looked since. Five minutes signed in beats thirty days locked out: Check your email's recovery info before you get locked out.

Scary Headline of the Week

"Free VPN apps downloaded 2.4 billion times are leaking your data."

Mostly true, which is unusual for this segment. Researchers at the University of Michigan, the University of New Mexico, and IIT Delhi tested 281 free VPN apps from the Google Play store. The apps they flagged have been installed more than 2.4 billion times. Among them:

• 29 let traffic leak outside the tunnel, including the record of which websites you visit
• 61 sent data with no encryption at all
• 76 sent the phone's advertising ID to third parties, which is tracking, from an app whose one job is to prevent tracking

The catch in the headline is the word "your." The study covered free Android VPN apps, the kind that cost nothing and demand nothing, and it says nothing about paid services with audits and reputations to lose. A VPN's actual job is narrower than the ads claim anyway, and most of us at home don't need one. If a free VPN is sitting on your phone because it promised privacy, deleting it is probably the privacy upgrade.

Verdict: real, but only if a free VPN app is on your phone. Deleting it takes ten seconds.

Seen a headline this week that scared you? Reply and send it. It might get next week's verdict.

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Did your email's recovery info turn out to be current, or from three phones ago? Hit reply and let me know.

Joel