You can not guarantee data safety at home/within your org either. Remember all the home/prosumer devices that get infected and become part of the botnet? Well, that botnet is not only used for ddos, it can also scan your local systems for vulnerabilities. So don't be so sure your data is safer at home/org. At least Google is very likely to discover data leak quickly, will you even notice your data leaking at home/your company?

And yet almost most of organizations are using it. If implemented right - where you have encrypted passwords stored and it's the client that does the decryption locally - they are quite secure. Now, whether you trust the vendor to implement it properly is a whole different conversation.

Most important thing to learn from this lesson: it's important to not only read the advice, but also to understand why certain advice is given. In your example, the recommendation is to not share salary (be it current or desired) is there to avoid getting a low offer. But if you have done research and know how much the position is worth, there's no harm at all in sharing your desired salary in that range.

And then never forget that recruiters are humans. In good companies, recruiters are actually pretty good humans. Good companies understand that giving a candidate an offer below market rate is the easiest path towards attrition issues. So they are not trying to screw you over. Twice already I have said to a different recruiters "I would accept the offer as it is, but I would highly appreciate it the numbers were a little higher" and twice I got a better offer (if you read Reddit you would think this can never ever happen). So read the people, read the company. Lots of crappy places out there, but lots of decent ones too - so don't go into conversation with hr as a battle, rather a discussion with a human being where you can learn more about company and they can learn about you.

It's hard to say without you providing additional details (i.e. how you figured out it's 110V and not anything else).

But in general, thermostats are wired to receive power from the furnace or ac. If your furnace has 24V and you have extra wires in the wall - you can just buy a new thermostat and connect it to the new power wires. If you don't have extra wires, you may be able to use a kit that allows you to send multiple control signals over the same wire (you may need to add a c wire, or something else - depending on your current wiring). Worst case scenario - you can always buy a 24V adapter for the wall plug and power thermostat from it.