Guides

Whether you're a parent of an existing iPhone owner, or you've recently decided to give in to your kid's incessant pleading for a new iPhone, you may find yourself wondering if you can leverage your son or daughter's shiny gift to keep tabs on him/her. The answer is that, yes, but you will need to convince them to give you the password to their Apple account, or accept your location requests through Find My Friends.

Now, before we go on, let's go over what we know about kids and parents. Kids, especially teenagers, are astoundingly moronic, impulse driven idiots that are typically completely ignorant of their own mortality who spend their time traveling in packs looking for opportunities to trump each other's stupidity. Parents, especially American ones, are overwhelmingly paranoid, obsessive, overbearing blowhards that misidentify harmless coming of age behavior and experiences as threats to their child's well being while ignoring real threats to their mental and physical health such as television and run-amok consumerism.

News stories of data breaches, stolen identities, hi-jacked accounts and other cyber-crimes are at this point no more odd than those of fires or car accidents - they occur on a daily basis and don't seem to have any end-all solution in sight, at least not anytime soon. Just as one keeps a fire extinguisher and wears a safety belt for prevention and protection, so should one use every available tool to protect against cyber-crimes. One of the simplest yet most effective tools that can beef up your online security and privacy is two-factor authentication, also known as 2FA.

Perhaps you've decided to finally take control of the giant mess of passwords you've made over the past decade or two. You've downloaded a password manager and now you need to figure out what services you have passwords for, what the passwords are and what your username is for each login. Safari provides an easy way to view your passwords, but if you've mostly been using Chrome, well you're in luck, as the latest version of Chrome lets you export your passwords in CSV format for easy viewing.

Whether you have been taken off the market or you just want to get ahead of the next boycott hashtag, here's how to delete your profile from several popular dating apps. Remember, deleting an app from your iPhone or iPad does not cancel or remove your personal profile. It just removes the app from your device. Your profile will still be shown to other people if you do not take the time to properly cancel your account.

Most dating apps offer a pause option if you do not want to permanently remove your information. Selecting the pause option typically removes your profile from public view allowing you to take a break from dating. You can then easily reactivate your account when you're ready to start dating again.

Security is always (or should be) a primary concern with any information you have online, including data from your social media accounts. Somebody with access to your Facebook account could wreak havoc on it, not just by spamming your friends, but by potentially gaining access to other online accounts and payment methods. With stories like the Cambridge Analytica data breach in the news, privacy and security are once again on the public mind.