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Tech News and Commentary
Dave and the team discuss a futuristic license plate, Google Lens features now available, a German algorithm taking hundreds of jobs, apps parents should know about, and more.
Our guest this hour:
Deborah in Porterville, California listens on KTIP and asked us “Yesterday at 1:03PM, a live photo was added to my photo album. I did not take this picture. The man in the picture is unknown to me. and the picture appears to be a selfie. My phone did not leave my possession. I went to AT&T and asked them how this got on to my phone. They said it was probably an Airdrop. Do you agree with that? I’ve turned off my Airdrop – even though it was only set for contacts in my address book. Curious if you can help me solve this mystery.”
Deborah, they may very well be right about Airdrop. Back when it was a new feature, it was common for people to send pictures to random people around them just for the fun of it.
That has died down and is mostly a thing of the past, but it may have happened.
Now, since you say that yours was set to your contacts in the first place, we should mention the other possibility: iCloud.
If someone else’s phone was on your iCloud account their pictures would go to your photostream. It seems to us that it’s an unlikely cause, since you only got one, but it’s possible that they only have one on their phone.
Checking to see if this is the case is easy, just log into iCloud.com with your Apple ID and it will show you all the devices under your account on “Find my Device.”
If you’re still not convinced, just change your Apple ID password to be safe.
What they told you does make sense though, and if there’s no unknown device listed on iCloud.com, then there’s probably not cause for concern.
Bonnie in Montrose, Colorado listens on Newsradio 580AM KUBC and asked: “I have a problem with my Samsung Vive. I get all these pop ups and I can’t seem to get them off my phone. They popup constantly and it’s driving my crazy. I’ve taken it to the techs at the store and they don’t know what to do to help me. Please help me. I’m just so sick of these pop ups.”
Bonnie, we don’t really know what you mean either.
If you’re getting a lot of notifications from a specific app, you can remove its permission to notify you of anything in the phone settings.
Any other type of popups would be very strange to us, and they would likely mean that your phone is rooted. If that’s the case, getting rid of the problem without restoring may be a little harder and restoring and unrooting may be your best bet.
Without knowing more about the popups we can’t really suggest much, though. We don’t really know what you mean by that, and since that’s the problem itself, we can’t be of much help unless you reach out with more information.
If you do want to share more info like when is it that the pop-ups occur, is it during the moment you’re browsing the internet? Perhaps with those details provided we can help you.
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