Seniors

If your parents are still reusing the same password across their bank, email, and Facebook — or, worse, writing them on a sticky note stuck to the monitor — it is not a matter of if they will get phished. It is a matter of when. This guide shows you, the adult child who got voluntold to be the family IT department, how to install a password manager on their devices in roughly ten minutes of hands-on time, and how to actually get them to use it without a fight. ...

If your parents have discovered ChatGPT in the last year — and statistically, at least one of them has — they are probably using it the way most people do: asking medical questions, pasting in emails to “make this sound nicer,” asking it to summarize bank statements, and getting it to draft replies to family group chats. None of this is malicious. All of it is potentially a privacy problem. This guide explains what actually happens to a chat log after your parent hits send, which AI tools are safer than others, and the three settings you need to flip on their account the next time you visit. ...

Once you understand what AI tools actually do with your parents’ chat logs, the natural next question is: what should they use instead? The honest answer is that there is no single “best” privacy-first AI — there are three good options, each suited to a different household. The right choice depends almost entirely on what hardware your parents already own, how technical you are willing to get, and what they actually want to do with AI in the first place. ...