Modern smartphones have a potentially life-saving feature called “SOS” or “Emergency” mode that can give first responders critical medical information and automatically dial your country’s emergency phone number. It can report your location and even notify selected contacts. In today’s show, I’ll share a story from one woman who believes this mode saved her life. It’s easy to use and set up, but it won’t do you any good if you don’t know about it. I’ll tell you everything you need to know.

In other news: Clearview AI is looking to expand its services to schools, banks and other institutions that wish to authenticate people; MasterCard is launching a new facial recognition system that will allow users to pay “with a smile”; the US Department of Justice has finally issued long-overdue guidance on common sense limitations for prosecuting security researchers and regular people who might run afoul of the tragically over-broad Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA); Twitter has been fined and Google has been sued for abusing customer data; local governments forced children to use EdTech software that surreptitiously harvested their data and fed them behavior-based ads; DuckDuckGo is in damage control over reports that it isn’t blocking some Microsoft web tracking due to an agreement which they legally can’t discuss; there’s a new Wells Fargo phishing campaign going around which seeks to gather tons of data that would easily enable identity thefts; and a security researcher has found a bug with the OAuth single-sign on functionality used by Facebook.