There are a lot of myths about technology out there. Some are relatively minor, like the widespread notion that you can save your wet phone using rice, while others verge on the paranoid, like the theory that 5G towers can make you sick.
These ideas have become widely held beliefs, tales that we’ve carried with us for years or more, spreading them far and wide, like mankind used to do around campfires. Only now we have Reddit and AI abstracts on search engines.
We’re here to tell you: There are a lot of “facts” you shouldn’t just accept about tech just because you heard it “somewhere.” Review our list below, and then spread the truth to your friends, family, and social following.
(Credit: René Ramos)
1. Privacy/Incognito Mode Is Totally Private
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 far more revealing about your system than just the cookies on your browser. Sites can and do use that. Even if you use a VPN in incognito mode, you can’t mask yourself entirely.
The best solution is to switch to a security-focused browser like Brave or use the Tor Browser, a system that bounces your connections around as you surf. (Unfortunately, both can slow down your internet experience.) Brave, Tor, and others like Dolphin on mobile devices offer an anti-fingerprint or anti-detect feature that injects false info into your fingerprint to obfuscate who you are.
For more tips, read How to Completely Disappear From the Internet.
2. You Are Small Potatoes and Not a Target for Cybercrime
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. 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 using 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 same 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.
(Credit: René Ramos)
3. Apple’s Macs and iPhones Can’t Get Malware
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 ton more of them.
But simply because you don’t hear a lot about macOS and iOS attacks 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. For example, the OMobileFrameBuffer problem of July 2021 for mobile devices and this year’s zero-day vulnerability on all Apple platforms. When not patched with an update, these things become easy to exploit. Keep your devices up to date to avoid being a target.
You’re far more likely to be infected if you have a jailbroken iPhone or iPad. But if you’ve jailbroken your device, you’re probably tech-savvy enough to know the risks that go with using apps and software that haven’t been vetted.
4. Artificial Intelligence Is Sentient
AI, as we know it today, is many things: an incredible achievement, even at this early stage; full of downright embarrassing biases; able to hallucinate all sorts of wild, factually inaccurate stuff. 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. The tech giant says that AIs “remain narrow and brittle, and lack true agency or creativity.” You may recall that in 2022, the company fired an engineer who publicly claimed that the LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) chatbot system—upon which the original Bard AI (now Gemini) was 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 ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, Grok, etc., are fantastic mimics. The AIs simply use patterns to make new patterns. They’re fed an enormous amount of data—GPT-4 supposedly had 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, the results may be beyond your expectations, making the AI look miraculous.
That said, could we someday reach the “AI Singularity,” where machines achieve super-human-level intelligence, aka “machine consciousness?” Experts say it could happen; some expect it as soon as the year 2045.
(Credit: D3Damon/Getty Images)
5. Alexa Is Recording Everything
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 can 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 ones from certain date ranges. You can also do it from the Amazon.com website or 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.
For details, read How to Review and Delete Your Alexa History. This might all change if we ever get the full launch of Alexa+ with real AI answering. We shall see.
(Credit: René Ramos)
6. Phones Take Pictures as Well as Full-Frame Cameras
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 S25 Ultra supports 200 megapixels—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 (it’s the sensor size inside the camera that matters more). Also prevalent 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.
7. Batteries Develop a ‘Memory’
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. If you charged it to 50% too many times, then it would only go that high in the future. But discharging the battery completely, down to 0%, acted as a sort of memory reset. That’s where the whole “I must discharge my battery all the way to zero” belief (see below) came from.
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, mainly because it can generate more heat (though modern phones are very smart about charging and have much better ventilation). But ultimately, you’ll be fine if you stick to the usual overnight charging. It will stop once it hits 80 or 100%, depending on your settings under Battery Health.
(Credit: René Ramos)
8. You Should Charge a Phone Only From 0%
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.
We’ve all been in the situation where your phone says it’s at 10 or 20% and you believe you have time left for a call, but then it promptly dies. Some people still believe that occasionally running a phone down to zero helps as a recalibration for that.
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 to 80% all the time is a good way to increase a battery’s lifespan.
For more info, read How to Save Battery Life on Your iPhone.
9. Charging Phones Overnight Overloads the Battery
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 stem from 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, 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.
10. You Can’t Recycle Electric Vehicle Batteries
Electric vehicles (EVs) accounted for only 7.9% of cars on the road in early 2025, according to Edmunds. 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.”
Federal tax credits were pushing people to EVs for a while, but the current administration isn’t into it. The $7,500 credit, which was supposed to go to 2032, now ends on September 30 this year, which is causing a potentially record-breaking spike in EV sales. For now.
One issue that might be keeping people away from EVs is the believe that you can’t recycle the batteries used in EVs. That’s not true at all. They can be recycled and rehabbed. Over and over. Some won’t even have any performance loss. Also, the minerals inside are far too expensive and critical to just let be buried in a landfill.
For more, read Chasing Black Mass: Inside the Electric Vehicle Battery Recycling Process.
(Credit: René Ramos)
11. 5G Towers Can Make You Sick
Certain people have long been worried that cellular signals, Wi-Fi, and even radio 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, 5G gets a lot of attention.
Our friends at Mashable have covered some of the conspiracy theories, like that 5G being “turned up” will cause people who are vaccinated for Covid 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.
What it all 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.
For more, read Is 5G Safe?
12. Electromagnetic Fields Are Making You Radioactive
Electromagnetic fields (EMFs) are everywhere because just about everything with power emits such a field, from the sun 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.”
An entire world of products exists to protect you from this invisible radiation. 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. Some so-called negative-ion jewelry claiming to “block 5G” was found to actually emit ionizing radiation that was truly dangerous.
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Some products might do what they claim, but when all EMF is blocked, so is the signal for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and so on. You may as well put your devices in a Faraday cage and make them inert. If you’re that scared of EMFs, just stop using your phone and the internet altogether.
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. Examples include 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 remains 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.
13. Expensive HDMI Cables Provide a Better Picture
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 once found a 20-meter cable online priced at $10,500! No 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 under 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 TV 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, or 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 a longer HDMI cable—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.
(Credit: Brian Westover/PCMag)
14. Starlink Will Replace Everyone’s ISP
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. 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 bad 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 is congestion. It was a huge deal for the service in 2022 when new users flooded in. The service hit 2 million users in July, via only 8,000 operational low-earth-orbit (LEO) satellites. It won’t hit 12,000 until 2026; yet that was originally the amount cited to support a quarter of that many subscribers. Starlink is happy to apply a “congestion charge” to new customers in areas where the satellites are strained.
The numbers indicate that Starlink may have overcome some congestion issues, but it still has a problem with speed. It doesn’t even measure up to the FCC’s paltry definition of broadband yet. Musk himself once said the service would be best for places with low to medium population density. In cities, he said, 5G will be better.
Starlink ultimately isn’t meant to replace other connections. It’s a supplement. And not a very affordable one. It’s priced from $80 to $165 per month, depending on your needs, plus the cost of equipment. It’s no solution to the digital divide.
(Credit: René Ramos)
15. Airport X-Rays Erase Laptop and Smartphone Memory
The airport security conveyor belt scanners the TSA uses to check 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, particularly to high-speed film that’s 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 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 the devices are so dense that agents can’t see through them on a screen, potentially obscuring the view of your four ounces of forbidden shampoo.
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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. Still, it’s not really that dangerous, unless you’re a crew member.
16. PCs Should Be Shut Down Every Night
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 and found that, for work computers at least, 37% of respondents shut down nightly. 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.
17. Apple Slows Down Old Devices to Get You to Buy New Ones
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 that 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 planning to run iOS 26 on the six-year-old iPhone 11, which came with iOS 13 in 2019, even running newer updated apps with it, the chips inside aren’t what that software was designed for.
(Credit: René Ramos)
18. Cutting the Cord Will Save You Money
This could 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 to see it all, it’ll cost you.
If you crave NBC content (say, The Office reruns), you need Peacock. If you want CBS shows (and Star Trek), you need Paramount+. Want to watch Game of Thrones or The Pitt? You require HBO Max. ABC has stuck with Hulu because Disney owns the streamer—but Disney launched Disney+ for everything else. Hulu and Disney+ make you pay for both, even though next year the Hulu app will be discontinued entirely.
Meanwhile, Netflix began a crackdown on password sharing on smart TVs and didn’t suffer any appreciable subscriber loss. Many other streamers followed suit, like HBO Max, YouTube Premium, and Disney+, charging extra for you to add a household to your account. So thanks for nothing, Netflix.
Streamers are almost all now grubbing for extra money in a way that feels familiar: Adding advertising. Usually, that means paying a little less for you, but at least one (Prime Video) is forcing advertising, expecting users to pay more to avoid commercials.
The cost of having even the minor tier on all these services is egregious—around $1,000 a year, according to a CNET survey—and all the services are addicted to price hikes. CNET also found that, on average, people are paying $200 a year for subscriptions they don’t even use. Even if it is cheaper than pay TV or a live-TV streaming service, you still won’t have access to everything. No matter which way you go. Who has the time (or the money) for that?
(Credit: René Ramos)
19. The Cloud Is in the Sky
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?
20. Rice Saves Wet Phones
Phones get wet. It happens. Today, most are rated to be water resistant, but liquids and electronics seldom greet each other as friends. But there’s always been a solution at hand in many a kitchen: uncooked rice. Its absorbent properties can save a phone after it gets a “liquid detection alert,” right?
Anecdotally, sure, it has happened. But don’t do it. Apple made it official in its liquid detection alert support doc recently. It now reads, “Don’t put your iPhone in a bag of rice. Doing so could allow small particles of rice to damage your iPhone.” Particles in the Lightning or USB-C charging port are a much bigger deal than water probably is. It can also scratch the screen.
The rumor that rice is the desiccant that will save your moist handsets goes back to the same summer the iPhone was first announced, according to The Verge. It found a MacRumors forum where a member posted using rice to try and revive a pre-iPhone phone—and it didn’t work for them. The use of rice goes even further back, to when it was used for keeping camera equipment dry.
A better option, recommended by the tech insurance service Asurion, is to place a wet phone into a sealable plastic bag with silica gel packs—the kind you get in all sorts of shipments. (Collect a few for just this emergency, or buy some.) It might be safer than storing your precious pocket computer in actual food. You could also try one of those apps that are supposed to play a noise or cause a vibration that will expel any juices in the charging port and speakers. On an iPhone, you can set up a shortcut to do the same thing.
21. Closing Mobile Apps Saves Phone Battery
This one is for my family members, who recently learned how to swipe up to close apps on their phones and now do it constantly, thinking it saves their battery.
It doesn’t matter what mobile OS you use, Android or iOS (or iPadOS)—they are all pretty great at handling background apps. While it’s true that some apps use a lot more battery than others (you can see this, for example, in iOS under Settings > Battery). That’s usually a function of how much time you spend in an app. Read a lot of Kindle books? Can’t stop watching TikToks? Doom scroll all day on X? Whatever you use most will be at the top of the list.
Shutting down the app with a swipe (on iOS, swipe up from the bottom of the screen to see all apps, then swipe up on an app to “close” it) doesn’t play much into it. Yes, background apps that refresh data even when you’re not looking at the screen can use some juice. But it’s nothing compared with, say, how bright your screen is. And arguably, it takes more energy for you to restart the app.
The best solution: Turn on the Battery Saver mode (Android) or Low Power Mode (iOS). It will turn off a lot of the background refreshing that does use up the battery. Or go into the Background App Refresh options (on Android, it’s called Data Saver) and turn them off on any app that doesn’t need to talk to the internet constantly.
22. You Can’t Stream Netflix While Traveling
If you’re going out of the country but have hours left in your viewing of a streaming TV show like Dept. Q or movies to re-watch, like K-Pop Demon Hunters, you probably believe you’re out of luck. After all, Netflix has cracked down not just on password sharing but also on allowing people to view its service in other countries. It does so by not only knowing your account is tied to the US, but also by blocking people who use a VPN service.
A VPN is a typical way of spoofing a location. It can let you appear to be in a different country. For example, if you’re in Italy, a VPN connected to the right server can make it look like you’re still in the US. This matters because the Netflix offerings in one country aren’t the same in every other country. To have access in other countries, Netflix expects you to pay…again. So it blocks VPN users, even if they’re only using the VPN for online privacy.
But in PCMag testing, we found that (murky ethical considerations aside) Netflix’s blocks aren’t absolute. We tested a multitude of VPN services and found plenty of openings for streaming. Some depend on which countries you’re attempting to access. If you can’t unblock Netflix with a VPN, you can almost always do it via proxies.
For details, read How to Unblock Netflix With a VPN. It should, in theory, work just as well if you encounter a block on other streaming services.
23. The Difficult-to-Access Dark Web Is Illegal and Full of Contraband
There are three myths in that statement alone. But first, let’s cover what the dark web really is. Unlike the standard “World Wide Web” of sites you’re used to, aka the “clear web” or “surface web,” the dark web isn’t something you can just stumble upon.
That said, the first myth is that it’s difficult to gain access to. In fact, it’s easier to access the dark web in some ways than the “deep web,” that layer of data between the surface web and the dark web. The deep web stores as much as 7.5 petabytes of data that is not for public consumption—think medical records, science reports, and other documents hidden behind paywalls and passwords, and not indexed by search engines. (In comparison, the surface web is only 19 terabytes—394.7 times smaller than the deep web.) The size of the dark web is harder to pin down since it’s encrypted and decentralized.
It’s not illegal to access the dark web in the US (things are different in China and Iran). You just need the right software to get on it, such as the Tor Browser.
Yes, the dark web contains some heinous stuff and is certainly used for some illegal activity. Any writing about the dark web comes with an obligatory mention of Silk Road, the dark web marketplace of illegal stuff that was shuttered in 2013. The dark web is a haven for people selling and buying personally identifiable information (PII) from data breaches and hacks—it’s literally why you get so much spam and have to change passwords all the time.
But heinousness is not all the dark web is about. It’s also a haven for communication for activists, whistleblowers, victims—anyone who needs to be anonymous yet still needs to talk. Your privacy on the dark web is a given, free from the prying eyes of corporations and governments, unlike privacy on the surface web, which is essentially for sale.
For more on how to access it, read our full explainer on what the dark web is (and isn’t). You should also read about the privacy differences between Tor and VPNs.
About Our Expert
Eric Griffith
Senior Editor, Features
Experience
I’ve been writing about computers, the internet, and technology professionally since 1992, more than half of that time with PCMag. I arrived at the end of the print era of PC Magazine as a senior writer. I served for a time as managing editor of business coverage before settling back into the features team for the last decade and a half. I write features on all tech topics, plus I run several special projects, including the Readers’ Choice and Business Choice surveys and yearly coverage of the Best ISPs and Best Gaming ISPs, Best Products of the Year, and Best Brands (plus the Best Brands for Tech Support, Longevity, and Reliability).
I started in tech publishing right out of college, writing and editing stories about hardware and development tools. I migrated to software and hardware coverage for families, and I spent several years exclusively writing about the then-burgeoning technology called Wi-Fi. I was on the founding staff of several magazines, including Windows Sources, FamilyPC, and Access Internet Magazine. All of which are now defunct, and it’s not my fault. I have freelanced for publications as diverse as Sony Style, Playboy.com, and Flux. I got my degree at Ithaca College in, of all things, television/radio. But I minored in writing so I’d have a future.
In my long-lost free time, I wrote some novels, a couple of which are not just on my hard drive: BETA TEST (“an unusually lighthearted apocalyptic tale,” according to Publishers’ Weekly) and a YA book called KALI: THE GHOSTING OF SEPULCHER BAY. Go get them on Kindle.
I work from my home in Ithaca, NY, and did it long before pandemics made it cool.
This article was published by WTVG on 2025-09-21 12:00:00
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