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Home is where the safe word is
Plain-English help for families, parents, remote workers and anyone looking out for an older relative.
Learn how AI-powered scams reach your phone and inbox, the habits that stop them, and the tools we'd use ourselves.
About two minutes. Nothing to sign up for.
Map your homeDevices and accounts, kept on your device. Nothing is sent to us.
Start here
- Set a family safe wordA word only your family knows, plus a rule for calling back before anyone sends money.
- Lock down your AI assistantsCheck what your chatbots remember, keep and learn from, and change the settings you don't like.
- Look out for an older relativeSet up their phone and a plan together, without taking over.
Threats to know now
The AI-era scams and privacy leaks most likely to reach your household, with what they look like and what stops them.
- ThreatHomeBusiness
Voice cloning and deepfake scams
Criminals can copy a voice from a short clip and fake faces on a video call, then use them to ask for money in a hurry. In 2025 the FBI logged 22,364 complaints that mentioned AI, with losses near $893 million, most of it in investment scams; voice-cloned 'distress' calls alone cost victims more than $5 million. The defense is low-tech: pause, hang up, and confirm through a number or channel you already trust.
Read - ThreatHomeBusiness
AI-powered phishing and business email compromise
Criminals now use AI to write fluent, personalized phishing emails and payment requests, in any language and at volume. Business email compromise (BEC), where a scammer poses as a boss, vendor or title company to redirect a payment, drew $3.05 billion in reported losses to the FBI in 2025. Typos are no longer the tell; a request to move money or change bank details is. Confirm every one on a second channel you already trust.
Read - ThreatHomeBusiness
AI chatbot data leaks and shadow AI
Whatever you paste into an AI assistant can be stored, read by reviewers or used to train future models, depending on the app, the plan and your settings. In a 2025 survey of workers in 47 countries, 48% of those who use AI at work said they had uploaded sensitive company or customer information into public AI tools. The fix is mostly unglamorous: business accounts for work, the right settings at home, and a clear rule about what never goes in.
Read - ThreatHome
AI-scaled romance and investment scams
Organized scam operations now use AI to translate, script and run many online 'relationships' at once, usually steering people toward fake crypto investments. Investment fraud was the costliest crime reported to the FBI in 2025 at $8.6 billion, and people 60 and older reported $3.5 billion of it. Being targeted says nothing about your intelligence; these are professional operations. The rule that holds: never send money or crypto to someone you have only met online, and talk it over with someone you trust first.
Read - ThreatHomeBusiness
Prompt injection and AI agent hijacking
When an AI assistant reads your email, files or web pages, it can mistake text written by a stranger for instructions from you. That is prompt injection, and when the assistant can also send, buy or delete things, an attacker can steer it. The UK's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) says it may never be fully fixed, so the safe move is to limit what your AI can reach and keep yourself in the approval loop.
Read
Habits that hold up
Step-by-step routines you can finish in one sitting and share with the people you live with.
- GuideHome
Digital hygiene at home: the household baseline
A safe household runs on a few habits: one password manager, passkeys or multi-factor authentication (MFA) on the accounts that matter, automatic updates, and backups you've actually tested. AI adds one more: a family safe word and a callback rule, so a panicked call that sounds like family gets checked before anyone pays. People 60 and older reported $7.7 billion in losses to the FBI in 2025, so bring older relatives into the plan.
Read - GuideHome
The family safe word and callback rule
Pick a private word your family uses only to prove who's really calling, and agree that any urgent request for money gets a hang-up and a callback to a number you already have. The FBI recommends the secret word, and the FTC and FCC recommend the callback. Setting it up takes one family conversation.
Read - GuideHomeBusiness
Lock down your AI assistants
Each major AI assistant has a training setting, a memory setting, connected apps and a way to delete history, and the defaults favor the vendor. This guide walks through ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and Meta AI one at a time, with notes for business accounts. Plan on about five minutes per assistant.
Read - GuideHome
Help an older relative stay ahead of AI phone scams
Older adults report losing money to fraud less often than younger adults, but when a scam works it tends to cost them more, especially when it starts with a phone call. People 60 and older reported $7.7 billion in losses to the FBI in 2025, including $352 million in complaints that mentioned AI. This guide helps you set up call screening, bank alerts, and a trusted contact together, as partners, and plan what to do if something gets through.
Read
Official channels, in order
If it already happened
Move quickly, and don't let embarrassment slow you down. These scams are built to fool careful people, and reporting helps you and the next family.
Call your bank's fraud line
Use the number on the back of your card or in your banking app, not one from the message. Ask them to stop or reverse the payment and secure your account.
Report it to the FBI
The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) takes reports of online scams, including voice-clone and investment scams.
ic3.gov (opens in a new tab)Report it to the FTC
The Federal Trade Commission uses reports to track scams and warn others. You'll get next steps for your situation.
ReportFraud.ftc.gov (opens in a new tab)60 or older? Call the National Elder Fraud Hotline
The Justice Department's hotline helps people 60 and older, and their families, report fraud and find support.
833-FRAUD-11 (833-372-8311)
Tools we'd use
What we'd set up for our own families. Nobody paid to be on this list, and we earn nothing when you click.
Bitwarden
Free tierPassword managers
Storing and filling a unique password and passkey for every account, and sharing the ones you need to with your family or team.
See it in the toolkitiPhone Screen Unknown Callers
FreeCall screening and scam blocking
Making unknown callers say who they are and why they're calling before your iPhone rings.
See it in the toolkitPixel Call Screen and Scam Detection
FreeCall screening and scam blocking
On Google Pixel phones, screening unknown callers automatically and warning you during a call that sounds like a scam.
See it in the toolkitCredit freeze (Equifax, Experian and TransUnion)
FreeBreach monitoring and credit freezes
Stopping anyone, including you, from opening new credit in your name until you lift the freeze.
See it in the toolkitBackblaze Computer Backup
PaidBackup
Automatic, continuous cloud backup of a whole Mac or Windows computer, including drives plugged into it.
See it in the toolkitSignal
FreeEncrypted messaging
Private texts, voice calls and video calls with family, friends and colleagues.
See it in the toolkit
Own your digital life
Who holds your data, who learns from it and how you leave. Digital sovereignty, sized for a household.
- ExplainerHomeBusiness
Digital sovereignty, in plain English
For governments, digital sovereignty means control over their own technology, data and online rules. For you, it means staying in charge of your own data, identity and choices: knowing who can read or train on your information, being able to leave a service with your data, holding the keys to your own accounts, and deciding what stays on your own devices.
Read - ExplainerHomeBusiness
Who owns your AI conversations?
In practice, the company that runs the assistant holds your conversations, and its terms decide who can read them, whether they train future models and how long they're kept. Some consumer plans, including ChatGPT's, use your chats for training unless you switch it off, while the major business plans say they don't by default. You can usually export or delete your chats, but deleting doesn't undo training that already happened, and legal holds can override deletion.
Read
New to the jargon?
Every AI and security term on this site, decoded in a sentence or two.