Welcome, Wednesday! You know how we start: Trivia! What’s the most hated font in the world, meaning you should never use it, especially on a resume? Is it … Arial, Comic Sans, Courier or Roboto? You’ll find the answer at the end.

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Hold on to your hats, folks. Today’s tech news is coming in hot and heavy, so let’s dive in! — Kim

Big Tech makes big money tracking what you do online. You may have heard of tracking pixels, cookies and scripts. I bet you didn’t know fonts can track you, too.

Google gives away special fonts for website owners to use. At last count, they’re installed on over 60 million websites.

Google says its free tracking fonts help websites load quickly and look the same across your iPhone, Android, Windows PC, Mac and tablet. That’s true, but nothing's free. It comes at the price of your privacy.

Secret exposed

When you visit a site that uses Google Fonts, you automatically hand over to Google:

• Your IP address, aka your unique online identifier tied to your device.
• Every webpage you visited and how long you spent there.
• The links you click on that page.

This gets lumped in with all the other data Google collects on you everywhere else. If you want to be shocked, these three creepy lists show everything Google knows about you.

What can you do about it?

Right now, only Firefox allows you to set your own font choice. That’s why software developer Jeff Johnson created a browser extension that does it for you.

StopTheFonts block fonts from sources like Google with built-in tracking codes. Right now, the extension is only available on Safari.

If you use Chrome, Edge or any other browser, your best bet is telling Google to forget your search history and activity. It’s not a perfect solution, but it beats not doing anything. Luckily, that’s easy to do, and you can set it up to happen automatically.

• Go to myaccount.google.com and log in.
• Click Data & privacy on the left side of the screen.
• In the History settings section, checkmarks are next to Web & App Activity, Location History and YouTube History. Click each to adjust your settings.
• On these pages, set up Auto-delete for future activity. Select your activity to delete automatically every three months.

✅ Your search history will be gone, but there’s another step to take. You must also disable tracking through apps, your location history and YouTube. Get all the steps to do that here.

A pizza dat: There’s a scary s*xtortion scam you need to know about. Scammers are pretending to have images or videos of you — yes, you — performing, well, adult acts. They demand you pay anywhere from $500 to $5,000, or those videos are going out to everyone you know. If you get a message like this, ignore it. They don’t have anything.

🔴 Red card: Artificial intelligence (AI) experts say within 20 years, bots will take over the very important job of referees. The more growth in AI, the more data digital refs will have to train on. If it’s 20 years until an AI ref, it’ll be 20 years and about 12 minutes until everyone hates it.

No cruise control: A patient died in an ambulance on the way to the hospital — and the San Francisco Fire Department says two self-driving Cruise taxis that blocked the ambulance are partially to blame. Cruise says their taxis never impeded the ambulance. These robocars just aren’t ready for prime time.

Finally, Google took a small step for mankind: Hate the scammy ads that slide through its approval process? Maybe they’re going to slow down. A new policy limits how many ads appear from a brand without a history of good behavior, and advertisers will now need to go through an identity verification step.

$53,000: That’s how much the federal government is paying to connect each household and workplace in a rural Nebraska area. Connecting remote communities, like the Winnebago Tribe, via fiber-optic cable is wildly expensive. The government has given $15.3 billion to Elon Musk to launch Starlink satellite service. Ahem, use that!

🏖️ New career alert: Vacation photographer! Want to capture perfect candid shots and no more bad selfies? Folks are paying around $125 an hour for someone to follow them around for vacation pictures. Honestly, not a bad idea if you want to use those pics for holiday cards.

Another dumb social media challenge death: A 14-year-old Massachusetts boy died after eating a spicy chip from the brand Pacqui. Get this: The company’s “one-chip challenge” invites consumers to post videos eating chips made from two of the hottest peppers, the Carolina Reaper and Scorpion. Talk to your kids, please.

🎤️ An ABBA-riginal: ABBA performs seven times a week to a sold-out crowd in London. The show has brought in $150 million in sales in 15 months, and the venue’s at 99% capacity every night. Who’s on stage? Not the 70-something rockers but AI avatars of their 28-year-old selves. “Mamma mia, here I go again!” (You just sang that in your head, right?)

I turn tech complexity into simplicity with my Daily Tech Update podcast. I’ll give you the top tech news and a useful digital life hack, all in under two minutes. It's the perfect match for your daily routine — no tech expertise required.

👉 Your journey to tech confidence is a click away!

Sick of slow Wi-Fi? Your provider might be to blame. Let’s look at the fastest (and slowest) average download speeds for providers across the U.S. in megabits per second (Mbps):

• Spectrum: 243.02 Mbps
• Cox: 241.78 Mbps
• Xfinity: 233.25 Mbps
• AT&T Internet: 210.12 Mbps
• Frontier: 200.95 Mbps
• Optimum: 200.41 Mbps
• Verizon: 184.03 Mbps

Your mileage may vary

Test your connection speed here. Oh, I hear you — “My speed isn’t anywhere near those, Kim.” It depends on your location, plan, number of connections and lots more. Even your devices can limit connection. You won’t see 300 Mbps on a 10-year-old laptop, sorry.

Router feng shui is critical

Don't expect a strong signal in the living room if your router is in some far corner of the house.

• Put your router in a central location, away from kitchen appliances, Bluetooth devices and other electronics.
• Place it high up on a bookshelf or mount it to the wall to ensure the signals can go where needed.
• Put kids and guests on their own network. When too many devices share the same network, internet speeds can grind to a halt. 

😂 God said to set up a router and free Wi-Fi in the Tabernacle. But Moses is having a little trouble finding the promised LAN.

You loved the hidden apps I shared. (It’s here on my site if you missed that.) Here are a couple more handy features you might not realize are there already — no downloads necessary!

For my iPhone pals

Markup lets you edit screenshots and photos, add signatures to PDFs or other documents, insert text, and draw on images. I use it all the time.

• Open a photo and tap Edit, then the Markup button. It looks like a pencil inside a circle.
• Tap the Plus button to add a description, text or signature, or tap Magnifier to zoom in.
• Tap Done twice to finish up.

For the Android people

Does someone need to use your phone? Create a new profile so they can’t see your texts and pics. Boy, I wish you could do this on an iPhone.

• Open Settings and search for “guest.”
• You may need to enable multiple profiles, then you can set one up. Follow the on-screen instructions.

Think "hiring" and what site comes to mind? Yup, LinkedIn. Every week, nearly 52 million job seekers visit LinkedIn — and with good reason.

With LinkedIn, you can find the right person for any job, fast and free. Pro tip: Add your posted job and the purple "hiring" frame to your LinkedIn profile photo to spread the word.

Love this: LinkedIn screens questions and has other great tools that automatically weed out resumes that don't fit. Such a timesaver.

And she got all the money — I mean, “alimony.”

The answer: Comic Sans is despised by many because it looks like a kid’s handwriting. Now, this is interesting. Comic Sans is very useful for dyslexic people because its asymmetrical style means the letters are easier to discern.

🥇 Look below and you’ll see your unique referral link. That, my friend, is your golden ticket to winning a $1,200 Apple iPad or Windows laptop. Share that link on Facebook, Twitter, Nextdoor or LinkedIn. The more people you encourage to sign up for my free newsletter, the greater your chances of winning!

Since it’s Wednesday, eat some watermelon. Smile, too, because you just expanded your tech know-how with the greatest tech newsletter in the world! — Kim