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For years, Google made it incredibly easy to look up someones address, phone number, age, and other personal info. All you had to do was type in a persons name and where they live, and youd get all kinds of details from sites like Whitepages and Spokeo, which pull together that info from public and private sources. Creepy as this is, doing anything about it has always been a slog, and most people never bothered. While some companies charge hundreds of dollars per year to remove this data on your behalf, thats not really necessary. If you have an hour or so to spare, you can hide your personal information from casual snoopers on Google, and even on the people search sites themselves. Its well worth the effort and doesnt cost you anything. This story first appeared in Advisorator, Jareds weekly tech advice newsletter. Sign up for free to get more tips every Tuesday. Googles search results removal tool Googles search results removal tool lets you hide pages that include your personal details with just a few clicks. Heres how it works: Search for your name and a bit of personal info, such as your street number, your city or town, or the last four digits of your phone number. When you find a result that includes your information, click the button next to it. In the sidebar menu that pops up, click Remove Result. When asked why youd like to remove the result, select It shows my personal info and I dont want it there. Select Contact Info, enter your name, and specify the type of info that appears on the page. (If the page shows multiple types, such as your address and phone number, you can select either one.) Type in your name and the contact info that appears on the page. Click Send to confirm the request. Google says it responds to these requests within a few days, but usually it takes less than an hour. While requests are subject to Googles removal policiesit wont for instance, pull results that are newsworthy, or that come from government sourcesit seems to be pretty lax overall. I was even able to remove a page about my wife that listed me as a relative and included a previous home address. One catch: Removal requests require a Google account, so youll need to set one up if you dont have one already. But once youve done that, youll be able to track each request through Googles Results about you dashboard . An update to this dashboard, coming soon, will also proactively surface results that include your personal info, and youll be able to get notified through Googles mobile app if new results arise. A deeper cleanse Removing a result from Google search doesnt delete the page itself. People can still look up that information through other search engines or by going directly to sites like Whitepages. If you want to delete the underlying info, start by setting up Permission Slip, a free app from Consumer Reports that I wrote about a couple years ago. The apps Auto Requests feature automates the process of getting data brokers to delete your info, some of which feeds into popular people search sites. The app is available for both iOS and Android. Beyond that, youll have to make opt out requests with each individual site. Burdensome as this may seem, usually its just a matter of finding their opt out pages, then submitting a link to the offending page along with a valid email address to verify the request. Making manual opt out requests Heres where you can find the opt out pages for major people search sites: Spokeo Whitepages BeenVerified/PeopleLooker/NeighborWho InstantCheckmate/Intellius/TruthFinder/US Search ClustrMaps Nuwber MyLife PeekYou PeopleFinders CheckPeople TruePeopleSearch USPhoneBook FastPeopleSearch SearchPeopleFree Radaris Unmask DeleteMe also offers a searchable list of guides to opting out of more sites. A couple caveats though: Strongly consider using a disposable email address for your requestsno need to give these companies more info than they already haveand do not pay for any opt out services they might try to offer. Should you pay for data removal? If all that seems like too much work, you can always pay a third-party service to handle deletion requests for you. DeleteMe, for instance, charges $129 per year for data removal service, while Optery charges $249 per year for its Ultimate package. But much like third-party antivirus software and system cleaners, these services tend to inflate the amount of work theyre actually doing. An investigation by Consumer Reports found that these services are less effective than manually making opt out requests on your own. That tracks with my own experience trying out Optery. When I signed up for its free version, it claimed that 246 sites were exposing my personal data, yet when I clicked through on many of the results, it said data was nowhere to be found. With the steps Id taken above, most sites have already removed my data or are in the process of doing so, and none of them are showing up in Google anyway. If you insist on paying for data removal service, consider using EasyOptOuts instead. It only costs $20 per year, and while I havent tried it myself, Consumer Reports found that its just as effective as Opterys most expensive planand more effective than other, pricier services. EasyOptOuts also received a positive review from Privacy Guides, another site that I trust. Security through obscurity Ultimately, the goal is not to banish every trace of personal information from the internet. Thats a Sisyphean task, especially given how often our data simply leaks into the hands of hackers. But the more friction you can introduce to the process of looking up your personal info, the more youll be able to deter casual snooping. To that end, even just a little effort goes a long way. This story first appeared in Advisorator, Jareds weekly tech advice newsletter. Sign up for free to get more tips every Tuesday.
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Every day, people are constantly learning and forming new memories. When you pick up a new hobby, try a recipe a friend recommended, or read the latest world news, your brain stores many of these memories for years or decades. But how does your brain achieve this incredible feat? In our newly published research in the journal Science, we have identified some of the rules the brain uses to learn. Learning in the brain The human brain is made up of billions of nerve cells. These neurons conduct electrical pulses that carry information, much like how computers use binary code to carry data. These electrical pulses are communicated with other neurons through connections between them called synapses. Individual neurons have branching extensions known as dendrites that can receive thousands of electrical inputs from other cells. Dendrites transmit these inputs to the main body of the neuron, where it then integrates all these signals to generate its own electrical pulses. It is the collective activity of these electrical pulses across specific groups of neurons that form the representations of different information and experiences within the brain. For decades, neuroscientists have thought that the brain learns by changing how neurons are connected to one another. As new information and experiences alter how neurons communicate with each other and change their collective activity patterns, some synaptic connections are made stronger while others are made weaker. This process of synaptic plasticity is what produces representations of new information and experiences within your brain. In order for your brain to produce the correct representations during learning, however, the right synaptic connections must undergo the right changes at the right time. The rules that your brain uses to select which synapses to change during learningwhat neuroscientists call the credit assignment problemhave remained largely unclear. Defining the rules We decided to monitor the activity of individual synaptic connections within the brain during learning to see whether we could identify activity patterns that determine which connections would get stronger or weaker. To do this, we genetically encoded biosensors in the neurons of mice that would light up in response to synaptic and neural activity. We monitored this activity in real time as the mice learned a task that involved pressing a lever to a certain position after a sound cue in order to receive water. We were surprised to find that the synapses on a neuron dont all follow the same rule. For example, scientists have often thought that neurons follow what are called Hebbian rules, where neurons that consistently fire together, wire together. Instead, we saw that synapses on different locations of dendrites of the same neuron followed different rules to determine whether connections got stronger or weaker. Some synapses adhered to the traditional Hebbian rule where neurons that consistently fire together strengthen their connections. Other synapses did something different and completely independent of the neurons activity. Our findings suggest that neurons, by simultaneously using two different sets of rules for learning across different groups of synapses, rather than a single uniform rule, can more precisely tune the different types of inputs they receive to appropriately represent new information in the brain. In other words, by following different rules in the process of learning, neurons can multitask and perform multiple functions in parallel. Future applications This discovery provides a clearer understanding of how the connections between neurons change during learning. Given that most brain disorders, including degenerative and psychiatric conditions, involve some form of malfunctioning synapses, this has potentially important implications for human health and society. For example, depression may develop from an excessive weakening of the synaptic connections within certain areas of the brain that make it harder to experience pleasure. By understanding how synaptic plasticity normally operates, scientists may be able to better understand what goes wrong in depression and then develop therapies to more effectively treat it. These findings may also have implications for artificial intelligence. The artificial neural networks underlying AI have largely been inspired by how the brain works. However, the learning rules researchers use to update the connections within the networks and train the models are usually uniform and also not biologically plausible. Our research may provide insights into how to develop more biologically realistic AI models that are more efficient, have better performance, or both. There is still a long way to go before we can use this information to develop new therapies for human brain disorders. While we found that synaptic connections on different groups of dendrites use different learning rules, we dont know exactly why or how. In addition, while the ability of neurons to simultaneously use multiple learning methods increases their capacity to encode information, what other properties this may give them isnt yet clear. Future research will hopefully answer these questions and further our understanding of how the brain learns. William Wright is a postdoctoral scholar in neurobiology at the University of California, San Diego. Takaki Komiyama is a professor of neurobiology at the University of California, San Diego. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Just a few months into Donald Trumps second term, are the manosphere influencers who championed him already starting to backpedal? In a recent episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, host Joe Rogan raised concerns about the presidents decision to send undocumented immigrants directly to El Salvadors mega-prisonswithout trial, lawyers, or, as critics argue, any semblance of due process. “What if you are an enemy of, lets not say any current president. Lets pretend we got a new president, totally new guy in 2028, and this is a common practice now of just rounding up gang members with no due process and shipping them to El Salvador, youre a gang member. No, Im not. Prove it. What? I got to go to court. No. No due process,” said Rogan. We gotta be careful we dont become monsters, while fighting monsters. For those who had been sounding the alarm during Trumps campaign, it was a painful watch. Watching Joe Rogan figure this shit out in real time is painful, one commenter wrote. That ol Even a broken clock is right twice a day idiom comes to mind, another added. As one Reddit comment pointed out, Why does he need to use a hypothetical president to make this point? This entire commentary describes the current administration. View this post on Instagram A post shared by The Tennessee Holler (@thetnholler) This election cycle, Trump owes at least part of his victory to Rogan and other manosphere influencers who endorsed him. After hosting the now-president on The Joe Rogan Experiencein what became one of the most-watched podcast episodes of all time, with 58 million views at the time of writingRogan followed up with a full-throated endorsement just one day before the 2024 election. Are we now seeing the first cracks appear? Rogan isnt the only vocal Trump supporter expressing unease in recent weeks. Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy, who publicly backed Trump during the campaign, voiced frustration after the presidents rollout of sweeping tariffs sent markets into a nosedive. Portnoy claimed he lost $7 million in the aftermath. So, Trump rolls out the tariffs, right? Portnoy said in a livestream posted April 7. This is a decision that one guy made that crashed the whole stock market. Thats why were calling it Orange Monday and not Black Monday. Just days earlier, Portnoy had reaffirmed his support for Trump. I voted for Trump, I think hes a smart guy, he said in a clip. I also think hes playing a high-stakes game here. Im gonna roll with him for a couple days, a couple weeks, see how this pans out. By Monday, he said his estimated losses had climbed to $20 million.
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