The greatest financial danger in retirement isn’t always the stock market. It’s the constant, nagging fear of running out of money. This anxiety causes many people to underspend and worry, even when their finances are sound.Here are eight ways to replace that worry with lasting security.
Determine your spending baselineWorry often starts with the vague question, “Am I spending too much?”Instead of operating on gut feeling, work with an advisor to determine your personal sustainable withdrawal rate (often between 3% and 5%). Once you know your lifestyle is covered by a responsible withdrawal rate, you can stop guessing and start living confidently.
Make adjustments when neededMany retirees treat their spending plan like an all-or-nothing system. This rigidity creates panic during market downturns.Instead, adopt a dynamic spending strategy. Slightly reduce or delay discretionary spending in poor market years. By reducing your withdrawal rate by just 10% when your portfolio is down, you dramatically reduce the risk of permanent capital depletion, allowing the assets time to recover.
Realize your spending will naturally declineThe high level of discretionary spending you need at age 65 will likely not be the same at age 85, especially once you have long-term care coverage (see No. 7).Expenses for travel, hobbies, dining out, and maintaining multiple homes typically decrease as you age. Knowing that your major risk (long-term care) is insured, you can trust that your remaining costs will naturally ease over the next two decades. Your money is working harder when you’re younger and enjoying it most, and your needs will taper off as your capital naturally draws down.
Create a recession buffer (the ‘anti-panic’ fund)The greatest tactical threat to longevity is experiencing a large market crash early in retirement and having to sell depressed assets to pay for basics such as groceries. To protect yourself, maintain a six- to 12-month cash cushion outside of the market.This “recession buffer” allows your growth assets (equities) to sit untouched and recover during a market downturn, preventing you from locking in losses. This separation between your living money and your long-term growth money is the most direct way to eliminate panic during volatility.
Buy out the risk of surprise taxesFuture, unknown tax rates and large required minimum distributions from traditional retirement accounts are a major source of financial uncertainty.What can you do? Eliminate the tax uncertainty by creating a tax-free bucket.By using targeted Roth conversionsusing up lower tax brackets to recharacterize traditional IRAsyou ensure a significant portion of your savings is shielded from all future tax increases. Having a large tax-free account gives you maximum flexibility to control your taxable income every year, protecting you from future legislation and eliminating the anxiety of surprise tax bills.
Anchor your essentials with guaranteed incomeRetirement is worry-free when your core, non-negotiable needs (housing, food, utilities) are covered by income sources shielded from market volatility.Social Security is your primary source of inflation-adjusted, government-backed income. While claiming at full retirement age is a safe minimum, aiming to delay Social Security until age 70 maximizes your lifetime benefit.If a gap exists between your guaranteed income and your essential expenses, you can buy a single premium immediate annuity. This annuity converts a lump sum of savings into an unbreakable income stream throughout your lifetime, closing the gap and securing your basic lifestyle.
Buy protection against catastrophic care costsLong-term care is the single largest threat to a lifetime of savings. Getting a quality long-term care insurance policy protects your nest egg from being wiped out by nursing home or in-home care costs. Once that risk is contained, you no longer need to worry about a seven-figure expense appearing unexpectedly.
Use home equity as your ultimate backstopHome equity is your parachute, a huge, flexible reserve.In an extreme situationsuch as severe market crashes or unforeseen emergenciesaccessing this capital through a reverse mortgage, a line of credit, or eventually downsizing and selling provides an unparalleled safety net, allowing you to invest your remaining liquid portfolio with more confidence.You are now equipped with multiple strategies to build financial security. Feel better?
This article was provided to The Associated Press by Morningstar. For more personal finance content, go to https://www.morningstar.com/retirement.Sheryl Rowling, CPA, is an editorial director, financial advisor for Morningstar.Related Links
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The State of Retirement Income for 2026https://www.morningstar.com/business/insights/research/the-state-of-retirement-income
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Sheryl Rowling of Morningstar
It’s more obvious than ever why recording encounters with federal agents matters: without bystander videos, it would be much harder to disprove the governments Orwellian lies about how Alex Pretti was killed last Saturday.
But there are also risks when you pull out your phone to take a video at a protest or if you see an ICE agent abducting, say, a 5-year-old child. Heres what to know about how to protect your technology and yourself.
The First Amendment gives you a right to record
It’s really important to start with the fact that individuals have a First Amendment right to record police officers and law enforcement, says Maria Villegas Bravo, counsel at the nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center. If you’re lawfully allowed to be somewhere, you are legally allowed to record law enforcement in the course of their duty.
Some ICE agents seem to have missed that in their training. A recent video from Maine shows an agent telling a legal observer that now she’s considered a “domestic terrorist” for filming him. Then he took a photo of her license plate and told her that she would be added to a database. Federal agents have targeted people taking photos at protests, including a professional photographer who was tackled and pepper-sprayed and tossed his camera to another photographer to save it.
Everyone has to judge the risks for themselves, but the more people who record, the harder it is for authorities to erase what actually happened.
Minneapolis, January 11, 2026. [Photo: Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg/Getty Images]
Consider leaving your phone at home
Your phone is obviously filled with data about younot just all of your photos and messages and apps, but location data for everywhere you’ve been. Google, for example, “can track you really granularly,” says Villegas Bravo. “Their location tracking can get you within three meters and it can also pinpoint what floor of a building that you’re on.”
If you’re arrested and your phone is confiscated, law enforcement needs a warrant before it can legally look at the contents. But after there’s a warrant, forensic extraction technology can make a complete copy of your phone’s contents, Villegas Bravo says. Then agents can search through it, either manually or with AI.
If you’re going to a protest, consider leaving your phone at home (leave your smartwatch and other digital devices at home, too). “You can’t have data extracted from a phone that you don’t have on you,” says Bill Budington, a senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Bringing a secondary device, one that can capture footage in high quality, for instance, is a good suggestion.”
Consider bringing a burner phone to take video. An old-school digital camera with no internet connection could also be an option. (In theory, you could quickly pop an SD card out of a camera if you think the camera’s about to be taken away.) There are trade-offs with different choices: a camera doesn’t give you the option to upload a video after taking it, and the videos and photos can’t be encrypted like they could be on a phone.
Burner phones can also have trade-offs, since you probably won’t have a new model with the best security and updates. “There’s an arms race of forensic extraction devices versus the Apples and device manufacturers in the world that are trying to protect against [extraction],” Budington says, and the newest phones have the most protection. But you should have little data on a burner to steal.
To avoid being targeted for filming, some observers are using less obvious technology, like smart glasses or very tiny cameras. One downside: they’re often expensive. The data isn’t always secure; small cameras may have an SD card and lack encryption. Some smart glasses and cameras can stream to a phone in your pocket, so the video will be as secure as the phone is.
Make your phone more secure
Of course, you might not have the chance to plan in advance if you suddenly need to document something happening in your neighborhood. Or you may decide to take the risk of bringing it to a demonstration. In either case, it’s possible to take steps to make your phone more secure.
First, change your settings so that your phone can’t be unlocked with biometrics like your fingerprint or facial recognition. Right now, courts have said that law enforcement can force you to unlock your phone this way. Traditional passcodes have more protection.
Keep your phone locked. You can access your camera without unlocking the phone; on an iPhone, for example, just swipe left from the home screen. You can also temporarily change the settings on your phone so it’s only possible to access one app. (On an iPhone, this is called guided access; on Android devices, you can turn on “app pinning” in your settings.)
Make sure that your phone is encrypted. On an iPhone, check under the settings for Face ID and password to make sure that it says data protection is enabled. On Android phones, look under security settings for encryption and encrypt your phone. Android phones also have the option to add the Graphene operating system, which is designed to make the devices more secure.
To stop your phone from tracking you, turn off location services and keep it in airplane mode. And when you text friends about anything sensitive, it’s better to use an app like Signal with end-to-end encryption.
Minneapolis, January 13, 2026. [Photo: Octavio Jones/AFP/Getty Images]
Sharing videos
When you share videos, consider the privacy of others. Immigration nonprofits don’t recommend livestreaming immigrants’ encounters with ICE. If you upload a video after a protest, the best practice is to blur out the faces of fellow protesters. Law enforcement agencies sometimes use facial recognition on images to arrest protesters after the fact.
The ACLU previously offered an app called Mobile Justice that automatically uploaded videos of encounters with law enforcement in real time, but took the app down last year, citing that it wanted to “ensure compliance with a growing number of consumer privacy laws and the ACLUs own privacy policies.” While it’s possible to upload a video to store it in the cloud yourself while you’re at an eventas a backup in case your phone is confiscated or damaged in a scuffleit may be difficult if there’s a crowd and limited bandwidth. The best option may be to make your phone as secure as possible.
Despite the challenges, it’s critical to get the footage. “This is a really dangerous time,” says Villegas Bravo. “And I think it’s really important to continue recording law enforcement and creating this chain of evidence to keep the government transparent and accountable.”
French lawmakers approved a bill banning social media for children under 15, paving the way for the measure to enter into force at the start of the next school year in September, as the idea of setting a minimum age for use of the platforms gains momentum across Europe.The bill, which also bans the use of mobile phones in high schools, was adopted by a 130-21 vote late Monday. French President Emmanuel Macron has requested that the legislation be fast-tracked and it will now be discussed by the Senate in the coming weeks.“Banning social media for those under 15: this is what scientists recommend, and this is what the French people are overwhelmingly calling for,” Macron said after the vote. “Because our children’s brains are not for sale neither to American platforms nor to Chinese networks. Because their dreams must not be dictated by algorithms.”The issue is one of the very few in a divided National Assembly to attract such broad support, despite critics from the hard left denouncing provisions of the bill as infringement on civil liberties. Weakened domestically since his decision to dissolve parliament plunged France into a prolonged political crisis, Macron has strongly supported the ban, which could become one of the final major measures adopted under his leadership before he leaves office next year.The French government had previously passed a law banning phone use in all primary and middle schools.The vote in the assembly came just days after the British government said it will consider banning young teenagers from social media as it tightens laws designed to protect children from harmful content and excessive screen time.The French bill has been devised to be compliant with the European Union’s Digital Services Act, which imposes a set of strict requirements designed to keep internet users safe online. In November, European lawmakers called for action at EU level to protect minors online, including a bloc-wide minimum age of 16 and bans on the most harmful practices.According to France’s health watchdog, one in two teenagers spends between two and five hours a day on a smartphone. In a report published in December, it said that some 90% of children aged between 12 and 17 use smartphones daily to access the internet, with 58% of them using their devices for social networks.The report highlighted a range of harmful effects stemming from the use of social networks, including reduced self-esteem and increased exposure to content associated with risky behaviors such as self-harm, drug use and suicide. Several families in France have sued TikTok over teen suicides they say are linked to harmful content.The French ban won’t cover online encyclopedias, educational or scientific directories, or platforms for the development and sharing of open-source software.In Australia, social media companies have revoked access to about 4.7 million accounts identified as belonging to children since the country banned use of the platforms by those under 16, officials said. The law provoked fraught debates in Australia about technology use, privacy, child safety and mental health and has prompted other countries to consider similar measures.
Samuel Petrequin, Associated Press
Nike isnt the only household corporate name to announce significant layoffs this week. Just a day after the sporting goods giant announced layoffs, citing a further embrace of automation, social media giant Pinterest has announced it will cut jobs. The driving factor here? Artificial intelligence.
Heres what you need to know about the Pinterest layoffs.
Whats happened?
On Tuesday, the image-sharing social media platform Pinterest announced it plans to lay off around 15% of its workforce. The company made the announcement in a Form 8-K filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
In that filing, Pinterest said that its board of directors had approved a global restructuring plan for the company. As part of that plan, Pinterest will pare its workforce back by less than 15%. In addition, the company will also reduce its office space.
When reached for comment, Pinterest told Fast Company that it had around 5,200 employees as of December 2025. A 15% reduction then would result in approximately 780 jobs being lost. The company says the restructuring charges resulting from its plans will cost the company between $35 million and $45 million.
Pinterest said that its restructuring plan is expected to be completed by the end of its third quarter, which finishes on September 30. It is unknown whether the layoffs will take place immediately or be spread over the period from now until September.
Why is Pinterest cutting jobs?
When reached for comment, a Pinterest spokesperson told Fast Company that it was making organizational changes to further deliver on our AI-forward strategy, which includes hiring AI-proficient talent. As a result, weve made the difficult decision to say goodbye to some of our team members.
In its Form 8-K, the company elaborated on the AI shift that is occurring with the layoffs, stating that it plans to reallocate resources to AI-focused roles and teams that drive AI adoption and execution while prioritizing AIpowered products and capabilities.
While Pinterest boasts 600 million monthly active users, that number is well below the billions its main competitor, Meta, has across Facebook and Instagram, as well as TikTok. Users now use all four platforms for shopping to some degree, making them all attractive to advertisers.
However, while Facebook and TikTok wasted no time embracing AI to improve their user experience and the tools and technologies powering their ad business, Pinterest has been slower to adopt AI. Yet that began to change significantly last year with the rollout of its AI chatbot, Pinterest Assistant, which lets users get personalized style and shopping recommendations.
With todays announcements, Pinterest is clearly signaling that it plans to accelerate its AI adoption going forward.
How has Pinterests stock price reacted?
Pinterest, Inc. shares (NYSE: PINS) are currently down heavily in early-morning trading. As of the time of this writing, PINS shares have fallen over 8.5% since the market opened, to $23.68.
Todays fall means PINS stock is now negative around 8.2% for the year so far. Over the past 12 months, Pinterest shares have fallen by over 29%.
In its Q3 2025 earnings report in November, Pinterest reported 17% year-over-year earnings growth of just over $1 billion.
Prominent Republicans and gun rights advocates helped elicit a White House turnabout this week after bristling over the administration’s characterization of Alex Pretti, the second person killed this month by a federal officer in Minneapolis, as responsible for his own death because he lawfully possessed a weapon.The death produced no clear shifts in U.S. gun politics or policies, even as President Donald Trump shuffles the lieutenants in charge of his militarized immigration crackdown. But important voices in Trump’s coalition have called for a thorough investigation of Pretti’s death while also criticizing inconsistencies in some Republicans’ Second Amendment stances.If the dynamic persists, it could give Republicans problems as Trump heads into a midterm election year with voters already growing skeptical of his overall immigration approach. The concern is acute enough that Trump’s top spokeswoman sought Monday to reassert his brand as a staunch gun rights supporter.“The president supports the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding American citizens, absolutely,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters.Leavitt qualified that “when you are bearing arms and confronted by law enforcement, you are raising the risk of force being used against you.”
Videos contradict early statements from administration
That still marked a retreat from the administration’s previous messages about the shooting of Pretti. It came the same day the president dispatched border czar Tom Homan to Minnesota, seemingly elevating him over Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino, who had been in charge in Minneapolis.Within hours of Pretti’s death on Saturday, Bovino suggested Pretti “wanted to massacre law enforcement,” and Noem said Pretti was “brandishing” a weapon and acted “violently” toward officers.“I don’t know of any peaceful protester that shows up with a gun and ammunition rather than a sign,” Noem said.White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, an architect of Trump’s mass deportation effort, went further on X, declaring Pretti “an assassin.”Bystander videos contradicted each claim, instead showing Pretti holding a cellphone and helping a woman who had been pepper sprayed by a federal officer. Within seconds, Pretti was sprayed, too, and taken to the ground by multiple officers. No video disclosed thus far has shown him unholstering his concealed weapon - which he had a Minnesota permit to carry. It appeared that one officer took Pretti’s gun and walked away with it just before shots began.As multiple videos went viral online and on television, Vice President JD Vance reposted Miller’s assessment, while Trump shared an alleged photo of “the gunman’s gun, loaded (with two additional full magazines!).”
Swift reactions from gun rights advocates
The National Rifle Association, which has backed Trump three times, released a statement that began by casting blame on Minnesota Democrats it accused of stoking protests. But the group lashed out after a federal prosecutor in California said on X that, “If you approach law enforcement with a gun, there is a high likelihood they will be legally justified in shooting you.”That analysis, the NRA said, is “dangerous and wrong.”FBI Director Kash Patel magnified the blowback Sunday on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures With Maria Bartiromo.” No one, Patel said, can “bring a firearm, loaded, with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want. It’s that simple.”Erich Pratt, vice president of Gun Owners of America, was incredulous.“I have attended protest rallies while armed, and no one got injured,” he said on CNN.Conservative officials around the country made the same connection between the First and Second amendments.“Showing up at a protest is very American. Showing up with a weapon is very American,” state Rep. Jeremy Faison, who leads the GOP caucus in Tennessee, said on X.Trump’s first-term vice president, Mike Pence, called for “full and transparent investigation of this officer involved shooting.”
A different response from the past
Liberals, conservatives and nonpartisan experts noted how the administration’s response differed from past conservative positions involving protests and weapons.Multiple Trump supporters were found to have weapons during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Trump issued blanket pardons to all of them.Republicans were critical in 2020 when Mark and Patricia McCloskey had to pay fines after pointing guns at protesters who marched through their St. Louis neighborhood after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. And then there’s Kyle Rittenhouse, a counter-protester acquitted after fatally shooting two men and injuring another in Kenosha, Wisconsin, during the post-Floyd protests.“You remember Kyle Rittenhouse and how he was made a hero on the right,” Trey Gowdy, a Republican former congressman and attorney for Trump during one of his first-term impeachments. “Alex Pretti’s firearm was being lawfully carried. He never brandished it.”Adam Winkler, a UCLA law professor who has studied the history of the gun debate, said the fallout “shows how tribal we’ve become.” Republicans spent years talking about the Second Amendment as a means to fight government tyranny, he said.“The moment someone who’s thought to be from the left, they abandon that principled stance,” Winkler said.Meanwhile, Democrats who have criticized open and concealed carry laws for years, Winkler added, are not amplifying that position after Pretti’s death.
Uncertain effects in an election year
The blowback against the administration from core Trump supporters comes as Republicans are trying to protect their threadbare majority in the U.S. House and face several competitive Senate races.Perhaps reflecting the stakes, GOP staff and campaign aides were reticent Monday to talk about the issue at all.The House Republican campaign chairman, Rep. Richard Hudson of North Carolina, is sponsoring the GOP’s most significant gun legislation of this congressional term, a proposal to make state concealed-carry permits reciprocal across all states.The bill cleared the House Judiciary Committee last fall. Asked Monday whether Pretti’s death and the Minneapolis protests might affect debate, an aide to Speaker Mike Johnson did not offer any update on the bill’s prospects.Gun rights advocates have notched many legislative victories in Republican-controlled statehouses in recent decades, from rolling back gun-free zones around schools and churches to expanding gun possession rights in schools, on university campuses and in other public spaces.William Sack, legal director of the Second Amendment Foundation, said he was surprised and disapointed by the administration’s initial statements following the Pretti shooting. Trump’s vacillating, he said, is “very likely to cost them dearly with the core of a constituency they count on.”
Associated Press writer Kimberlee Kruesi in Providence, Rhode Island, contributed to this report.
Bill Barrow and Nicholas Riccardi, Associated Press
Yahoo may not be the most headlined company in tech anymore, but its reach cant be denied. With nearly 250 million monthly users across the country and 700 million globally, its still the second most popular email client in the world, and the third most popular search engine in the U.S. (even though that search engine has technically been powered by either Bing or Google since 2009).
As a privately owned company since 2021 (once worth $125 billion, but purchased for a mere $5 billion at the time), its CEO Jim Lanzone says that the last few years have been about getting the house in order. But now, he promises, this is one of the biggest turnarounds people have tried in internet history.
Lanzone says that turnaround begins with Yahoo Scout, which launches today in beta. In short, Yahoo Scout is a new, free AI search engine (its also an omnipresent button across Yahoo verticals like Finance, Sports, and Mail) that’s there to summarize the performance of a business or break down the key moments of a game.
In one mode, it’s essentially Yahoo’s version of Claude or ChatGPT. (Yahoo Answers for the AI era!) In the other, it’s an AI-translate button accompanying Yahoo’s editorial content, boiling down articles into takeaways. It will even summarize the sentiment of the comments on stories you read across Yahoo.
We [arent] the first to market here, but in evaluating whether we should keep outsourcing or build the AI layer ourselves, it just became clear that we could do this best for our users, says Lanzone. We had a lot of unique assets to do that. And so in that context, timing is almost irrelevant, right? Because this is about Yahoo users on Yahoo, searching on Yahoo, versus what they were getting before.
[Image: Yahoo]
Led by Eric Feng, SVP & general manager of the Yahoo Research Groupwho is best known for recruiting and leading the technical team that created Huluits powered by a combination of Yahoos knowledge graph, Anthropics Claude, and Bings open web APIs. (Yahoo says that user data is kept internally and does not train Claude or Bing.)
Yes, that means Yahoo is still relying on external partners, but the team says that search will feel like Yahoo because its so based within the Yahoo ecosystem. Specifically, Yahoo Scout can answer a question with everything Claude knows within its LLM (and gosh, does Yahoo Scout love to build a table breaking down information!) And it can also search the web itself as well as Bing.
But the team insists that Yahoos own knowledge graph provides a lot more on top of Claude and Bing today, and it promises even more into the future. Specifically, Yahoo publishes 30,000 pieces of licensed stories and other content each day that are at its fingertips, and users create 18 trillion events across its services each year. Every event you get just makes the overall totality of the experience smarter, says Feng.
Even if its something as simple as searching for the score of your favorite team, thats actionable data for Yahoo in the short term, but even more so in the medium to long term as it shifts Scout from a generalized AI search engine or summarizer to more of a personal AI.
Just to be direct about it, you will see the roadmap include personalization [of AI], says Lanzone. Thats certainly where the category is headed, and it is a unique asset to Yahoo to be able to already have that built in. You know, we’re not trying to acquire an audience to start to build that up from scratch. We actually have all that knowledge and that relationship to dip into then layer this on top of.
The experience of Yahoo Scout, and what that means for publishers
Yahoo Scout lives as a responsive website and also as a standalone app.
As a search engine, Scouts white search bar is accompanied by an ever-changing rotation of animated clipart (yeehaw, its quite a cute cowboy hat), bringing back some of the brands original quirk.
The rest of the experience will be pretty familiar to anyone who has used an LLM, as every query is less a collection of blue links than an explanation of an idea.
From a demo I watched, it really does have a bias to break searches down into comparative tables (which may be useful or cloying, depending how often that approach is taken). But its also less text heavy than many LLMs, because it makes liberal use of thumbnails listing news stories and products to buy.
That penchant for prominent, colorful linking isnt coincidence. Publishers are amidst a 30-year mass extinction event, spurred on most recently by AI search tools that mine their reporting and present it to a public that no longer needs to click through to the actual story. Lanzone argues that prominent linking is key to protecting the health of the publishing industrypublishers that Yahoo relies upon for its core media aggregation business.
Our No. 1 job is to bridge the gap for publishers . . . [with] a beautiful UI that’s very rich and intuitive but still leans into linking out without cluttering the page, he says. Well see if this is the exact version of where we wind up, but from day one, that’s a priority for us. And then [priority] two is, can we bring search advertising along as well?
Speaking from two decades in digital publishing, I know that what Yahoo has shown thus far is certainly not enough to protect publishersand I challenged Lanzone on this point. Yahoos design may improve clickthrough rates a hair, but not nearly enough to support the publishing industry. Cloudflare research on search engine referrals demonstrates just how dire this moment is: For every 70,900 times Anthropic bots scraped information off a website, users clicked through only once. Much like McDonalds couldnt survive if Uber Eats began distributing its hamburgers for free, reported news cant live on if search engines are snatching their insights without meaningful compensation.
“It’s not in version one, but we are also passionate about the idea that search advertising was really effective for both publishers, search engines, and advertisers. And there should be a way to cross the chasm, and to bring that model along with generative AI search engines says Lanzone. I don’t know. It won’t wind up exactly where it was, but it can be a lot closer to it than we’ve seen to date. And we are actually working on versions of that. It’s just going to be very hard to scale nine-step agentic processes where you get paid downstream, and it’s just a very difficult model to really scale up.
And make no mistake, Yahoo is advertising with Yahoo Scout. While Anthropic has yet to introduce ads and OpenAI is only starting to, Yahoo is including ads in Scout searches from day one. Those ads appear in traditional paid links in the feed (think Google Adwords). Its also monetizing its shopping referrals (thanks to an AI shopping platform Vetted it acquired late last year). These are just the beginning of Yahoos extensive advertising roadmap, which will be realized with more intricacy later this year.
Outside search, though, Yahoo believes that Scout living across Yahoo services will offer indirect benefit to monetization. If you are on Mail, Finance, or Sports, we want the technology that we’re providing to make that experience better, and then we get more engagement, says Feng. We get those users sticking around longer, and then those properties are able to better monetize.
For now, Yahoo believes that monetization will be significant enough that it justifies keeping Scout free. That said, even Yahoo cannot resist the allure of subscription service revenue, and suggests that a premium paid version of Scout could live somewhere in the future.
Look, we have subscription products of finance and sports and places, and you can definitely see a version of that coming here, says Lanzone. But 100% of our effort [for launch] has been the evolution of Yahoo search into Yahoo Scout. And we have the luxury of doing that because we have a really good business search already.
A privacy-centric cellphone carrier called Cape is now officially available across the United States, offering a unique set of features to protect users from surveillance and identity theft.
Many cellphone users already use virtual private networks, encrypted messaging apps, and secure password managers to help keep their data safe. But those tools cant always protect against security issues with the underlying cell network itself, and other phone companies dont typically compete on privacy, says Cape CEO John Doyle.
Before we built Cape, there was not an obvious differentiated choice in the network space, Doyle says.
[Photo: Cape]
But Cape, founded in 2022, is designed to protect customers from privacy risks like SIM swapping, where a cellphone number is transferred to a new phone without the owners permission to intercept sensitive messages like authentication codes, and IMSI catchers, which snoop on phone users by impersonating legitimate cell towers and monitoring the unique international mobile subscriber identity (IMSI) codes they transmit. That enables their operators, whether spy agencies or other mysterious parties, to track how people move about and potentially intercept calls and texts. (Cape also assisted the Electronic Frontier Foundation in developing technology to spot such devices, which led to evidence of one being found near the 2024 Democratic National Convention.)
The company also doesnt collect subscriber names, addresses, or Social Security numbers, and automatically encrypts voicemails its customers receive so that the company cannot access them.
Cape has raised $61 million in funding from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Costanoa Ventures, Forward Deployed VC, and Karman Ventures. Doyle says he launched the company after learning about various vulnerabilities in cellular networks, with an early focus on people involved in security-sensitive work. It then expanded to offering service to users like survivors of domestic violence, investigative journalists, and people working in other high-risk fields, says Doyle, who previously ran the national security business at Palantir and served in the U.S. Army Special Forces.
Cape launched an open beta program in March 2025 and has now officially emerged into general availability. Doyle says he believes new consumers will appreciate the companys privacy features enough to pay Capes monthly fee of $99 per month before discounts.
Thats pricier than many plans from carriers like T-Mobile and Verizon, which offer base plans at $75 or less before their own discounts, not to mention discount providers like Mint Mobile, though Doyle points out that Capes cost includes all taxes and feesnot to mention the added privacy features.
And with most people essentially required to carry cellular phones for business and personal reasons, and growing concerns about data privacy and security, he believes theres a market for a service that makes everyday people harder to hack and track.
We find there’s just a wide swath of citizens who are really attracted to the idea of having some choice and taking that little bit of control over how their data is presented to and shared on mobile networks, Doyle says.
[Photo: Cape]
Though Cape doesnt own its own cell towersits whats called a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), paying for radio spectrum and other services from carriers with their own physical networkthe company operates its own mobile core network, meaning its able to offer a level of customization and security beyond what other carriers offer. In other words, its partner carriers handle radio connectivity, but Capes cloud-based system then takes over the logic of verifying that phones have access to the network, routing calls and messages, and maintaining and securing its own logs.
The company disallows less secure 2G and 3G connections, and regularly changes IMSI numbers to discourage tracking, similar to how iPhones randomize Wi-Fi network addresses. And when users travel overseas, Cape verifies their phones locations using its app before routing connections through foreign networks, reducing the risk of impersonation attacks.
The company also offers a partnership with Proton, a Switzerland-based provider of secure email, VPN, and other digital services, enabling a discount for new customers. Proton offers email features like encrypted message storage and filtration of trackers embedded in messages and a VPN that can filter out ads, trackers, and malware.
And Cape explicitly supports GapheneOS, an Android app-compatible mobile operating system optimized for security and lack of dependence on Google and Apple. The company doesnt have an explicit partnership with the nonprofit behind Graphene, but it does make a donation to the organization for each new Graphene user that signs up, and even offers phones preloaded with the OS, unusual among mobile carriers.
It’s a somewhat technical process to install Graphene, says Doyle, so we do that for people if they want.
[Photo: Cape]
Customers with modern iPhone or Android devices that support eSIMessentially, purely digital SIM cardsdont have to buy phones through Cape and can activate an existing device and port existing numbers. If you do purchase a phone through Cape, which currently offers a range of Google Pixel devices, Cape offers a $500 phone bill discount spread over six months to help defray the device cost (and pledges to delete customer shipping and billing info after 180 days).
Users are also entitled to three numbers per line as a privacy measure, so they can provide one to friends and family and use others to receive authentication codes from businesses, for online dating, or any other privacy-centric purpose they wish. The numbers show up as ordinary numbers, so theyre not barred from services that ban purely internet-based numbers like Google Voice assigns, Doyle says. While the carrier cant entirely protect peoples privacy when they interact with other appsride-hailing apps will still know peoples locations, and users may still elect to share photos or other potentially sensitive data with apps and websitesit can help people keep their primary phone numbers safe.
If subscribers wish to port their numbers to another phone or out of the Cape network, they need to provide a predetermined 25-word passphrase. That may seem daunting, but its designed to prevent number hijacking accounts that can be a serious risk to privacy.
In general, though, Capes privacy measures are designed to be relatively unobtrusive. Some may even save users time and complexity: Requiring less personal information from account holders makes the sign-up process quicker, Doyle says.
For potential customers wanting more detail about Capes privacy policies, the company offers a set of privacy principles along with information about how it will handle law enforcement requests for customer information. Cape pledges to notify customers of such requests whenever its legally allowed to do so (and says so far it has not received any requests for subscriber data that contained a nondisclosure obligation) and to challenge any secret request that is not narrowly tailored or otherwise lawful.
In addition, Cape says it doesnt log phone GPS coordinates, deletes more general location data, and purges call logs after 60 days, except in situations like resolving fraud cases. And if the company is ever acquired, Doyle says, it will require the buyer to agree not to monetize user data.
Of course, its possible some security-conscious users will be wary that Cape will keep its promises, perhaps especially given Doyles background in the military and at Palantir. But Doyle says he hopes the companys record of transparency will help it continue to establish trust among potential customers.
We do everything we can, basically, to be transparent and to do what we said we would do, and say what we’re going to do, he says. And I think that over time, that will just build more and more trust in the market.
President Donald Trump said Monday he is increasing tariffs on South Korean goods because the country’s legislature has yet to approve the trade framework announced last year.Trump said on social media that import taxes would be raised on autos, lumber and pharmaceutical drugs from South Korea with the rate on other goods going from 15% to 25%. The U.S. president previously imposed the tariffs by declaring an economic emergency and bypassing Congress, while South Korea needed legislative approval for the framework announced in July and affirmed during Trump’s October visit to the country.“Our Trade Deals are very important to America. In each of these Deals, we have acted swiftly to reduce our TARIFFS in line with the Transaction agreed to,” Trump said. “We, of course, expect our Trading Partners to do the same.”The threat was a reminder that the tariff drama unleashed last year by Trump is likely to be repeated again and again this year. The global economy and U.S. voters might find the world’s trade structure constantly being subject to disruption and new negotiations as Trump has already sought to levy tariffs in order to bend other nations to his will.Trump has in the past tied his tariffs to commitments by South Korea to invest $350 billion in the U.S. economy over several years, including efforts to revitalize American shipyards. But the Trump administration’s relations with South Korea have at times been rocky with the raid last year by immigration officials at a Hyundai manufacturing site in Georgia in which 475 people were detained.South Korea’s presidential office responded after a meeting of top South Korean officials that it will convey its commitment to implementing last year’s deal to the U.S.The presidential office said that South Korea’s Industry Minister Kim Jung-Kwan will travel to the U.S. for talks with Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, while Trade Minister Yeo Han-koo will travel separately to meet with Trade Representative Jamieson Greer. Kim was on a visit to Canada.South Korean lawmakers have submitted five bills on implementing South Korea’s proposed $350 billion investment package to the National Assembly. The bills are currently before the assembly’s finance committee.Kim Hyun-jung, a spokesperson for South Korea’s governing Democratic Party, said his party will coordinate with the government to organize swift debate and action on the bills.Assembly officials said the five bills will likely be incorporated into a single proposed law, which will need approval from the finance and judiciary committees before it can go to a floor vote.Trump’s announcement of new tariffs fits a pattern in which Trump plans to continue to deploy tariffs, possibly to the detriment of relations with other countries.Just last week, the president threatened tariffs on eight European nations unless the U.S. gained control of Greenland, only to pull back on his ultimatum after meetings at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Trump on Saturday said he would put a 100% tax on goods from Canada if it followed through with plans to bolster trade with China.Trump has bragged about his trade frameworks as drawing in new investment to the U.S., yet many of his heavily hyped deals have yet to be finalized. The European Parliament has yet to approve a trade deal pushed by Trump that would put a 15% tax on the majority of goods exported by the EU’s 27 member states.The United States is poised this year to renegotiate its amended 2020 trade pact with Canada and Mexico. There are also ongoing Section 232 investigations under the 1962 Trade Expansion Act, as well as an upcoming Supreme Court decision on whether Trump exceeded his authority by declaring tariffs under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act.
Kim reported from Seoul, South Korea.
Josh Boak and Hyung-Jin Kim, Associated Press
After two weeks of intense political and legal scrutiny, the Federal Reserve will seek to make this week’s meeting about interest rates as straightforward and uneventful as possible, though President Donald Trump probably still won’t like the result.The central bank’s interest rate-setting committee is almost certain to keep its key short-term rate unchanged at about 3.6%, after three straight quarter-point cuts last year. Fed Chair Jerome Powell said after December’s meeting that they were “well positioned to wait to see how the economy evolves” before making any further moves.When the Fed lowers its short-term rate, it can over time influence other borrowing costs for things like mortgages, auto loans and business borrowing, though those rates are also affected by market forces.This week’s meeting one of eight the Fed holds each year will be overshadowed by the bombshell revelation earlier this month that the Justice Department has subpoenaed the Fed as part of a criminal investigation into testimony Powell gave last June about a $2.5 billion building renovation. It’s the first time a sitting Fed chair has been investigated, and prompted an unusually public rebuke from Powell.Now, Powell will have to shift from a dispute with the White House to emphasizing that the Fed’s decisions around interest rates are driven by economic concerns, not politics. Powell said Jan. 11 that the subpoenas were “pretexts” to punish the Fed for not cutting rates as sharply as Trump wants.Powell will be “under even more pressure to underscore, ‘everything we’re doing here is all about the economics,'” said Claudia Sahm, a former Fed economist and chief economist at New Century Advisors. “‘We didn’t think about the politics.'”Michael Gapen, chief U.S. economist at Morgan Stanley and also a former Fed staffer, said that despite the scrutiny, the Fed can be expected to consider its interest rate policies like it always does.“The meetings have a regular flow to them,” he said. “There are presentations that are made, there are discussions that have to be had. Some of these other broader-based attacks on the Fed don’t really come up.”Not long after the Justice Department’s subpoenas, the Supreme Court last week considered whether Trump can fire Fed governor Lisa Cook over allegations of mortgage fraud, which she denies. No president has fired a governor in the Fed’s 112-year history. During an oral argument, the justices appeared to be leaning toward allowing her to stay in her job until the case is resolved.Other Fed officials have also signaled the central bank is likely to keep rates unchanged at their two-day meeting that ends Wednesday. The Fed’s three rate cuts last year were intended to bolster the economy after hiring slowed sharply over the summer and fall in the wake of Trump’s April tariffs on dozens of countries.Yet the unemployment rate ticked lower in December, after picking up for much of last year, and there are other signs the job market may be stabilizing. The number of people seeking unemployment benefits has stayed historically low, a sign layoffs haven’t spiked.Meanwhile, inflation remains elevated and actually ticked higher last year, according to the Fed’s preferred measure. Prices rose 2.8% in November from a year earlier, the latest data available. That is up from 2.6% in November 2024.Unless businesses start cutting jobs or the unemployment rate rises, the Fed is unlikely to cut rates again for at least a few months, economists say. If inflation slowly declines this year, as economists expect, the Fed may cut again in the spring or summer. Wall Street investors expect just two quarter-point rate reductions this year, according to futures prices.Many economists expect growth could pick up in the coming months, which would be another reason to forego rate cuts. Gapen estimates that tax refunds could be about 20% higher this spring than last year as the Trump administration’s tax cuts take effect. Refunds could average $3,500, Gapen said.The economy expanded at a 4.4% annual rate in last year’s July-September quarter and may have grown at a similarly healthy pace in the final three months of last year. If such solid growth continues, Fed officials will likely wait to see if hiring picks up as well, further reducing the need for more rate cuts.
Christopher Rugaber, AP Economics Writer
Whether hes climbing skyscrapers in Taiwan or working to build the Honnold Foundation, free solo climber and activist Alex Honnold remains an optimist. He sat down with Fast Company to talk about why a good outlook is essentialboth for his sport and in the fight for the planet. Honnold also reflects on education, human potential, overconsumption, and whats at stake for American national parks and public lands.
