Do You Still Believe These 19 Ridiculous Tech Myths?

There's plenty of fake tech news floating around; each new generation of technology products and services begets even more false beliefs. A lot of those are pretty easy to discredit, but we found a few for this story that might make even our readers do a double-take!

It's possible you’re worried about something that isn't true—or maybe something that used to be true but isn't now, as new discoveries and updates cleared up the problem. Go through our list below, and then pass on the real deal to your friends, family, and social following, so they won't fall prey to tech disinformation.

Do you feel a little safer from spying when you put your web browser of choice into privacy or incognito mode? It helps, but you're still far from 100% privacy and anonymity.

The mode erases cookies and tracking data after you close a window. But it doesn't stop websites or even your ISP from knowing where you’re going. For example, your browser has a unique fingerprint that has nothing to do with files or info (such as cookies) placed by the site. The fingerprint is more like revealing the very DNA of your browser. Sites can and do use that. Even if you use a VPN in incognito mode, you can't mask all of it.

The best solution is to switch to a security-focused browser such as Brave or to use the Tor Browser, a system that bounces your connections around as you surf. (Both can notoriously slow down your internet experience, unfortunately.) Some services can even inject false info into your fingerprint to obfuscate who you are.

For more tips, read How to Completely Disappear From the Internet.

Why would anyone try to hack you if you’ve got nothing to hide? Hold on: We all have something to hide. Namely, private personal information (PPI)—the kind of data used in identity theft. Having it stolen really can ruin your life.

If you do any kind of work on government websites, your Social Security number may be used or stored there. Your credit card number is tied to every online shopping spree. It might seem safe, but that kind of private data is going public all the time due to frequent, massive data breaches. You may indeed be small potatoes, but that doesn't mean your PPI won't be found, sold, and resold to bad actors. And many of the tools doing this are automated: They’ll scrape for whatever they can use and sell it, hitting as many targets as possible.

One thing you can do to help yourself is to make sure you have a different password for each site and service you use online. Yes, it's a giant pain to remember them all (which is why we recommend you use a password manager), but if your password is found in one breach, then the bad guys could have access to every account for which you use that single password. Sign up for some ID theft protection and breach-monitoring services—they'll tell you whether your PPI is compromised.

For more, read What to Do When You've Been Hacked.

The evil people who write viruses want to infect as many people as possible. That's one reason Windows systems and Android devices are the usual targets; there are just a helluva lot more of them.

But simply because you don't hear a lot about macOS and iOS attacks, that doesn't mean they don't happen. While the walled-garden aspect of Apple's products makes it more difficult for bad actors to load your devices with malware, sometimes even Apple leaves security holes in its products’ defenses. Take, for instance, the IOMobileFrameBuffer problem of July 2021 that struck iOS, iPadOS, and even watchOS. Had it been found by the wrong people and not patched with an update, it could have been an easy exploit. Keep your devices up to date to avoid such issues.

You’re far more likely to be infected if you have a jailbroken iPhone or iPad. But if you jailbroke your device, you’re probably tech-savvy enough to know the risks that go with using apps and software that haven't been vetted. Like those of us who’ve been using Windows for decades.

AI, as we know it today, is many things: an incredible achievement even at this early stage; full of biases that are downright embarrassing and legally actionable; able to hallucinate such things as a dying man in the desert in need of water. But AI has not achieved human intelligence. It is not self-aware. It does not have feelings.

Google itself has issued a list of AI myths and it says specifically that AIs "remain narrow and brittle, and lack true agency or creativity." Google will likely stay ahead of the claims of sentient AI. The company fired an engineer in the summer of 2022 who publicly claimed that the LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) chatbot system—upon which the Bard AI is built—was alive.

What Google is saying is that AI didn't decide to write a story or compose a song—you did that. Generative AI such as Bard, ChatGPT, and even Dall-E and Midjourney for images, are fantastic mimics. The AIs simply use patterns to make new, never-before-seen patterns. They’re fed an enormous amount of data—GPT-4 supposedly has 1 trillion parameters to build on. The tool will then vomit back something that mashes all that info together. If you are talented enough to write a highly specific prompt describing what you want, that mashed new thing could deliver something beyond your expectations, making the AI look miraculous.

But the tool is by no means something that feels or thinks, even if it sometimes answers questions as though it does. Just because it uses a neural network does not mean it has neurons. Machine learning isn't about education; it's more about the "complete abandonment of caution that should be associated with the judicious use of statistical methods," according to NewsClick.

Could we someday reach the "AI Singularity," where machines reach human-level intelligence, aka "machine consciousness?" Experts say it could happen, but it will take decades and require architectures we haven't yet built. Hopefully, by then we’ll have instilled AIs with the Three Laws of Robotics, among other safeguards.

An Amazon Echo and similar devices, such as the Google Home and Apple HomePod, are indeed always passively listening—because if not, the devices wouldn't hear the "wake word," which is typically "Alexa" on an Echo device. The wake word tells the device to actively listen and help you with a query.

(You can push a button on top of any Alexa to turn off the microphone until you want it on. You could also push the microphone button on top to start your query. But that's not what smart speakers were designed to do.)

The devices record only what you say after you say the wake word. They don't record everything, unless you turn on something like Alexa Guard, a feature ostensibly for listening for suspicious noises, like breaking glass, while you’re away.

If even that much listening in is too much for you, go into the Alexa mobile app to More > Settings > Alexa Privacy > Review Voice History to delete one or all queries, even just those on certain date ranges. You can also do it from the Amazon.com website. You can also say "Alexa, delete everything I said today" (once you enable that function in the app.) Best of all, you can set Alexa never to save your recorded voice—and even tell it never to send improvement data to Amazon, ever.

For details, read How to Review and Delete Your Alexa History.

The best camera is the one you have with you, of course, and the camera we always have on hand is our phone. You can look at the amazing specifications of a modern phone camera—the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra has a 200-megapixel sensor!—and feel very good about the shots you take. Just don't kid yourself that you can't do better with a dedicated interchangeable lens camera.

The "more megapixels means a better picture" myth is one we try to dispel often (the sensor size inside the camera that matters more). Also prevalent these days is the belief that all the revolutionary tech inside a phone camera makes it just as good as a dedicated camera. That tech is called computational photography, in which imaging tech enhances or extends your digital photography capabilities. Shooting a 360-degree view of the landscape or getting the shallow depth of field bokeh effect without a big, fancy camera are good examples of what computational photography can do.

But think about it: Have you ever seen a professional photographer use a phone at a wedding, on the sidelines of the big game, or at a model's photoshoot? Not likely.

Of course, sophisticated equipment requires sophisticated skills. You have to learn about exposure, shutter speed, aperture, and ISO settings. And the lens selection on a phone is, well, limited. If you haven't mastered a high-end camera, using a phone camera might indeed mean better pictures—from you, at least.

For tips, read 10 Easy Tips and Tricks for Better Smartphone Photos.

In the olden days, when devices were powered by nickel-cadmium (NiCad) batteries, they could indeed develop a memory that never let them charge past a certain threshold. That's where the whole "I must discharge my battery all the way to zero" belief (see below) came from—doing that would act as a sort of memory reset.

This is not the case with the modern lithium-ion battery. The problem with lithium-ion batteries is capacity and degradation. In the same amount of charging time, a new phone might hit 100% when an older phone can manage only 80%. Some call it "old man syndrome." Younger batteries are hungrier for power, much like teenagers at buffets.

No matter what, the more charge cycles you put a battery through, the less capacity it retains in the long run. So-called "fast charging" on phones makes the degradation happen even faster (and even that tends to be a myth, since modern phones are very smart about charging). Stick to the usual overnight charging—just use a slow charge, whether it's plugged in or wireless.

Nope: Running a modern lithium-ion battery down to 0% all the time is harmful. It wears them out faster. What you want to do is a partial discharge.

This is another capacity issue. With the inside components of a battery (like the one in your smartphone) in a constant state of decay, the materials simply hold less power over time. It's why your old phone lasts for fewer and fewer hours, compared with the full day or more you get from a brand-new device.

Some people still believe that running a phone down to zero occasionally helps as a recalibration of sorts—say, if your phone shows it's at 30% but then promptly dies. But the problem is that modern phones seldom get to the end of battery life. They’ll do an auto-shutdown with a trickle of charge left inside. If you suspect that, let the phone sit for a few hours before you plug it in.

The best strategy: Never let the battery go below 20%, then charge it up to around 80%, which happens quickly on a fast charge. Keeping it between 30-80% all the time is a good way to increase a battery's lifespan.

Your phone is smart enough to have extra protection, so when the lithium-ion battery hits 100%, it stops charging. It will never overload. Those tales of someone's phone catching fire were generated by phones with faulty batteries.

But also, don't put the phone under your pillow—it can get hot, even burn you, and then burn itself out. A phone needs to dissipate some heat, another thing that hurts batteries. You wouldn't sleep on your laptop, so don't sleep on your smartphone.

It's possible that when an older phone is plugged in to charge all night long, it will use some juice and drop to 99% and charge up again to 100%. That's not great, but don't lose any sleep over it. If you should wake up during the night, unplug it or take it off the wireless charger. It won't lose much before morning.

For more, read Charging Your Phone Overnight: Battery Myths Debunked.

Electric vehicles (EVs) account for only 5% of cars on the road, but sales will only go up as governments push people toward buying them. In California, for example, the mandate is that "by 2035, all new cars and passenger trucks sold in California be zero-emission vehicles." Tax credits help push people to them nationally. EVs are the future.

But apparently, quite a few people think you can't recycle the batteries used in EVs. That's not true at all. They can be recycled and rehabbed. Over and over. They won't even have any performance loss. Also, the minerals inside are far too expensive and critical to just let rot in a landfill.

For more, read Chasing Black Mass: Inside the Electric Vehicle Battery Recycling Process.

Certain people have long been worried that cellular signals, Wi-Fi, and probably even radio (back in the 1930s) are making them sick. 5G is simply the newest over-the-air "villain." In our conspiracy-rife times, where outright lies can masquerade as the truth even when facts smack the liars in the face, 5G gets a lot of attention.

Our friends at Mashable have covered some of the conspiracy theories: say, 5G being "turned up" will cause people who are vaccinated for COVID-19 to spontaneously combust. (This was supposed to "happen" on Jan. 5, 2022. It did not.) Furthermore, there's no scientifically validated connection between 5G and COVID-19.

The Jan. 5 date was for the rollout by carriers Verizon and AT&T of new 5G services, which was postponed to Jan. 19. That happened because the FAA became worried about C-band service causing interference with aircraft. That might be the only way 5G could impact your health: by crashing a plane. (Before we create a new myth, please know that scenario is also highly unlikely.)

What it boils down to is that 5G is, as our former mobile-tech expert Sascha Segan has said, "based on radio frequencies that have been used for decades." It's like expecting to get a headache from UHF. The World Health Organization says the low-level electromagnetic fields from towers ("if they exist at all") are a minor threat compared with the everyday risks of riding in a car, or, say, not wearing a mask during a respiratory-illness pandemic.

For more, read Is 5G Safe?

Electromagnetic fields (EMFs) are everywhere, because just about everything with power emits such a field, from the sun and lightning down to your AirPods. We’re not talking about the equivalent of sitting next to a mound of uranium. As the World Health Organization says: "Everyone is exposed to a complex mix of weak electric and magnetic fields, both at home and at work."

The main effect of a low- to mid-frequency EMF on biological systems is to cause them to heat up, but most people never encounter levels high enough for that to happen. (High-frequency EMFs are the ionizing kind that do more damage, such as X-rays, CTs, and even UV rays from the sun and tanning beds.)

WHO has had an EMF Project in place since 1996 assessing what frequencies up to 300GHz can do. A lot more research has to be done. Some reports call non-ionizing EMFs a possible carcinogen; others don't. But even with the vast proliferation of devices over the last 20 years, cancer death rates have declined since the early 1990s.

An entire world of products to protect you from this invisible radiation exists. From beanies for your head (the modern version of a tin-foil hat), to "anti-EMF" stickers you can put on your phone, to a router cover that probably does more to prevent dust than radiation, most are utter grifts offered by schemers to take advantage of people's fears. Some so-called negative-ion jewelry claiming to "block 5G" was found to actually emit ionizing radiation that was truly dangerous. A few products might do what they claim, but when the EMF is blocked, so is the signal for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 4G, and so on. You may as well put them in a Faraday cage to make them inert. If you’re that scared about EMFs, just stop using your phone and the internet.

There's something to be said for beauty and durability in a cable. And sometimes, you get that with an expensive HDMI cable. How expensive? We found one 20-meter cable priced at $10,500! But it's hard to believe any cable that costs as much as a car is going to be worth the money.

Ultimately, a digital signal is a digital signal. And a $10 cable versus a $1,000 cable of the same length (at least below 75 feet long) and specifications isn't going to change the picture on your TV.

You should be aware of the different HDMI standards. The 1.4 specification dates back a decade and handles everything up to 4K video. Every HDMI cable supports it. If you’re one of the few with an 8K setup, get a cable supporting HDMI 2.1, which is also supported by the vast majority of TV models from the last couple of years, whether 8K or not. More important is the speed rating (Standard, High Speed, Premium High Speed, and Ultra High Speed). The latter three can handle 4K at 24 frames per second, but you need Premium or Ultra to get the max frame rate for gaming.

Cable length can be a factor when your components are far apart. Over distance, cables need to be better shielded to avoid interference. So you might indeed pay more for that—but at a certain point, you’d be better off using Ethernet.

For more on the topic, read What You Need to Know About HDMI Cables.

A lot of people have placed hope in Starlink, the satellite-based internet provider from Elon Musk-owned SpaceX. For people living in disenfranchised areas, many of them rural, who have next to no choices when it comes to broadband access, Starlink is transformative. And customers who have Starlink give it high marks.

But the likelihood that it can or should replace your cable or fiber connection, no matter how crappy the customer service or connection, is slim. There's a reason it scores particularly well in rural areas, where Starlink is certainly the best choice among the satellite-based ISPs.

One of the issues will be congestion. One report says that even with 12,000 low-earth-orbit (LEO) satellites in the sky, the Starlink service would be able to handle only about 485,000 users; The service hit 400,000 users in May 2022, but only 4,000 satellites are operational as of this writing. That number won't hit 12,000 until 2026. SpaceX wants to get to a "megaconstellation" of 42,000 LEO satellites. Eventually.

Even Musk has said the service will be best for places with low to medium population density. In cities, he say 5G will be better.

Starlink ultimately isn't meant to replace anything: It's a supplement. And not a very affordable one, at $110 per month plus the cost of equipment.

Airport security can do many things, such as pour out your drinking water, make you take off your shoes, and blast you with air in search of explosives residue. But the conveyor belt scanners the TSA uses to look at your belongings won't erase your data. The myth is a holdover from the days of film cameras: The electromagnetic radiation of an X-ray could indeed do some damage to undeveloped negatives, in particular to high-speed film that's particularly photosensitive. But the photon scanners in use today won't hurt a hard drive (though a big magnet could, so don't take your laptop into an MRI machine).

TSA scanners also won't do anything to a solid-state drive, which is the only kind of storage you have in a smartphone. Not because they couldn't, in theory, if they were powerful enough. But TSA machines just aren't that intense.

So why does the TSA make you take out your electronics and put them in a separate bin? Because they’re so dense that agents can't see through them on a screen, potentially obscuring the view of your 4 ounces of forbidden shampoo.

Keep in mind that the radiation exposure you and your electronics get from the sun and beyond at 36,000 feet on a cross-country plane ride is about the equivalent of two chest X-rays. It's not really that dangerous (unless you’re a crew member), but maybe you should consider driving instead.

This one has been debated for years. The reasons to shut down computers overnight are numerous—they’ll use less energy, moving parts such as fans and drives won't spin up, you won't receive overnight notifications and alarms, and a daily restart helps the OS. But there are also reasons to leave it on all night—remote access is possible, the PC can run background updates, you don't want to wait for a restart, and a cold reboot causes a power surge that seems unnecessary. Both factions—leave-it-on-all-nighters and shut-it-downers—claim their practice leads to a longer lifespan for a PC.

Panda Security surveyed people on this topic in 2020 and found that, for work computers at least, 37% shut down nightly, 23% never shut down, and 15% would only turn the machine off if it stops working.

According to Panda, you should shut down at night only if your PC has sensitive information on it and the network isn't secured, or when you don't need to run backups or remotely access the drive. Otherwise, leave it on, and restart it occasionally to clear the RAM and perform OS installation updates.

When a new iPhone comes out, your current, older phone somehow seems less responsive. As though, perhaps, something has happened to it that might drive you to make a new purchase.

At one point, Apple actually admitted to this. In 2017, the Batterygate fiasco revealed that Apple did throttle CPUs on older iPhones to help address the aging of iPhone batteries. People didn't like that, states sued, and Apple was fined $113 million. Apple's excuse is it did this for our own good—to prevent crashes, not to increase sales. (I’m sure the latter was just a coincidental side effect.) All the other phone makers also say they don't reduce phone performance with age. At least, not on purpose.

So is your phone really getting slower? The answer probably has more to do with the updates to your mobile OS and all the apps installed. Everything is optimized to run on the latest hardware. If you’re trying to run iOS 15 on the iPhone 8, which came with iOS 11 in 2017, even running newer updated apps with it, the chips inside aren't what that software was designed for.

This can still be true, if you’re willing to settle for using just a couple of streaming services and perhaps an HD antenna to get basic networks over the air. But all the media companies have created walled gardens of content and made much of it exclusive (especially if it's new).

If you want NBC content (say, The Office reruns), you need Peacock. If you want CBS shows (and Star Trek), you need Paramount+. Want to watch Fixer Upper? You require Discovery+ (soon to be folded into Max with HBO). ABC has stuck with Hulu because Disney owns so much of the streamer—but Disney launched Disney+ for everything else. Netflix, Prime Video, and Apple TV+ each tries to entrance you separately with zeitgeist-y original content.

The cost of having even the minor tier on all these services was around $960 per year as of summer 2022, and several top streaming services have seen price hikes since then. That may still be cheaper than pay TV or a live-TV streaming service, but you still won't have access to everything. No matter which way you go. Who has the time (or the money) for that?

But with Discovery and HBO Max merging, and the likelihood that Hulu could be shuttered or folded into Disney+, maybe some costs will go down. Or you could just use commercial-laden free streaming services such as Freevee, Tubi, and The Roku Channel, and make your streaming feel like it's from the previous century.

We didn't realize the tech term "cloud" was being taken so literally, but this myth persists, popping up in lists occasionally. Apparently, some people think references to the cloud or cloud computing indicate that data is being stored in the actual sky. And that stormy weather can interfere with it.

No. "The cloud" is a metaphor for the internet, taken from the cloud image used in flowcharts back in the day to represent the internet's amorphous nature. More specifically, cloud computing refers to massive data farms run by the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, not only for online storage and file sharing but also for access to and development of products. Gmail, Netflix, OneDrive, and Amazon AWS are all different forms of cloud computing. You can read all about it in What is Cloud Computing? Rest assured, your ability to access cloud computing data and services isn't going to go away because of clear skies or rainy days.