Help & Support

What’s this? A plain-language glossary

If a word on this site sent you here, this is where it gets explained properly. No definition uses another word that also needs explaining.

Advertising ID: A unique code your phone hands to every app you open, so advertisers can join up what you do in one app with what you do in another. You can switch it off, and your apps keep working exactly as before.
AI (Artificial Intelligence): Software that can do things we used to think needed a person: answering a question, recognizing a face in a photograph, suggesting a route. It is very good pattern-matching, not a thinking being.
AI Agent: An AI that carries out a job rather than just answering a question: working through several steps, filling in forms, booking things. The difference from a chatbot is that it acts rather than replies.
Algorithm: A set of steps a computer follows, like a recipe. Nothing mysterious about it.
App: A program on a phone or tablet. The little squares on your home screen are apps.
Assistant: An AI you talk to: Claude, ChatGPT, Alexa, Siri. It takes your question and gives you an answer.
Authenticator App: A free app on your phone showing six-digit codes that change every 30 seconds, used as the second check after your password. It needs no signal, so it works where a text message would not arrive.
Autodialer: Equipment that dials numbers or sends texts automatically, in bulk, without a person doing it. Much of the law on marketing calls turns on whether one was used.
Backup Codes: A short list of one-time codes given to you when you switch on two-factor authentication, for the day you lose the phone. Print them and keep them with your important papers.
Browser: The program you look at the internet through: Chrome, Safari, Edge or Firefox. It is the window, not the internet itself.
Chatbot: An assistant you type to rather than speak to. Same idea.
Cloud: Someone else’s computer, somewhere else, that yours talks to over the internet. Your photos being “in the cloud” means a copy sits on a company’s machine.
Data: Information: your name, your photos, what you searched for. When people talk about protecting your data, this is what they mean.
Data Breach: When criminals take a company’s list of customer emails and passwords. The danger is rarely the site that was breached; it is every other site where you used that same password.
Data Broker: A company whose business is collecting and selling personal information about you: your address, your age, your relatives, usually without you ever hearing from them.
Deepfake: A photograph, video or voice recording generated by AI to look or sound like a real person saying something they never said. Good enough now that seeing and hearing are no longer proof.
Do Not Call Registry: A free national list at donotcall.gov. Registering is permanent and covers cell phones as well as landlines. It stops legitimate companies; it does not stop scammers, who are breaking the law anyway.
GPU: The specialized chip that does the enormous amount of arithmetic AI needs, billions of calculations a second. It is the reason data centers draw as much electricity as they do.
Hallucination: When an AI states something untrue with complete confidence. It is not lying; it has no idea it is wrong. This is why you check anything that matters.
Inference: The AI actually answering your question. It happens billions of times a day and never stops, as against training, which happened once. Inference is what the running costs are.
Large Language Model: The kind of AI behind assistants like ChatGPT and Claude. It learned patterns from an enormous amount of writing, and predicts what words should come next.
LiDAR: A sensor that maps its surroundings by bouncing laser light off them and timing the return. It is one of the ways a self-driving car sees.
Machine Learning: How software gets better by working through millions of examples rather than being given rules by a programmer. It is the engine underneath most things now labeled AI.
Opt Out: Telling a company to stop: stop selling your details, stop mailing you catalogs, stop texting. Legitimate companies must offer a way, and it is usually a small link in the footer of their home page.
Passkey: A replacement for the password. Your device proves it is you with your face, fingerprint or PIN, so there is nothing to type and nothing for a scammer to talk out of you.
Passphrase: A password made of several ordinary words: brass-otter-canyon-77. Longer than a password, far easier to remember, and much harder for a computer to break. Length beats complexity.
Password Manager: A locked book for your passwords. You remember one password, and it remembers all the others.
People-Search Site: The consumer-facing sites that publish your address, phone number, age and relatives. They are what a stranger actually sees when they look you up, and you can have yourself removed from them for free.
Phishing: A fake message pretending to be your bank, your doctor, or a grandchild, designed to get a password or money out of you. AI has made these harder to spot.
Privacy Settings: The controls that decide how much a company keeps about you. Worth going through once, slowly, when you set up something new.
Prompt: What you type or say to an AI. Your question is the prompt. A better prompt gets a better answer.
Provenance: Where something came from. Asking for the provenance of a photograph or a claim means asking who first published it, and when. That is the question that matters most now that anything can be generated.
Self-Driving Levels: The industry’s 0 to 5 scale for how much of the driving a car does. 0 is all you; 2 is the car steering while you stay ready to take over; 5 is no driver at all. Most new cars sold today sit at 1 or 2.
Smart Home: Lights, locks, and doorbells you can control by voice or from your phone.
Smart Speaker: A speaker that listens for its name and then answers: an Echo, a Nest, a HomePod.
Streaming: Watching or listening to something over the internet as it arrives, rather than owning a copy.
Subscription: A charge that repeats every month or year until you cancel it. Always check whether a “free” tool becomes one.
Synthetic Content: Text, images, reviews or whole websites produced by AI rather than by a person. Not automatically false, but worth knowing about before you trust it.
TCPA: The Telephone Consumer Protection Act, the federal law limiting marketing calls and texts to your phone. It is what makes an unsolicited sales text to a cell phone number a legal matter and not just a nuisance.
Training: Teaching an AI by having it work through an enormous amount of writing. It happens once, takes months and costs a fortune, as against inference, which is every question you then ask it.
Two-Factor Authentication: A second check after your password, usually a code sent to your phone. It is a nuisance, and it is the single best thing you can turn on.
Virtual Reality (VR): A headset that puts you somewhere else: a street from your childhood, a concert hall. You look around and it moves with you.
Voice Cloning: Copying someone’s voice from a short recording so a machine can speak in it. Three seconds of a video is enough, which is why a familiar voice on the phone is no longer proof of who is calling.
Voice Typing: Speaking instead of typing. Tap the small microphone on your keyboard and talk.
Wi-Fi: How your devices reach the internet without a cable. If something “is not connecting,” this is usually the culprit.

Something missing? If you met a word here that is not on this list, that is a gap we want to close. Tell us the word and we will add it.