← Digital Social Hour
Digital Social Hour
Naomi Brockwell Exposes The Government's Horrifying Civilian Tracker | DSH #2060
00:31:26
| DSH #2060 Your phone is not just a device. It may be the most powerful tracking tool you own. In this Digital Social Hour episode, Sean Kelly sits down with privacy expert Naomi Brockwell at the Bitcoin Conference to discuss government surveillance, data brokers, app tracking, encrypted messaging, AI privacy, VPNs, smartphones, and how much personal information people give away without realizing it. Naomi explains how third-party trackers can collect location data, contacts, browsing activity, app usage, and behavioral patterns. She also breaks down how governments can purchase or request that information without using the traditional warrant process. The conversation covers Pegasus spyware, Signal versus WhatsApp, GrapheneOS, private browsers, encrypted email, Google tracking, AI chat history, targeted advertising, and practical steps people can take to protect themselves online. Naomi also discusses the Surveillance Accountability Act and why privacy is not only about hidi...
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- [00:00]
A
There, there's like stks in your apps that are from third parties. You could have like 77 trackers in there that you have no idea about. Like, there was a famous app. It was actually targeting like the Muslim population. It was one of the most, like, popular apps in phones. And it turns out that it was like harvesting contact lists and location data and all this stuff. I mean, governments don't want you to know what kind of surveillance power they have.
- [00:28]
B
Okay, guys, here at Bitcoin conference with Naomi, doing big things in the privacy space. Thank you for coming on.
- [00:33]
A
Thanks so much for having me. It's great to be here.
- [00:35]
B
These things are pretty much ankle monitors, right?
- [00:37]
A
They sure are. I see you've got your ankle monitor. I've got mine in my bag.
- [00:40]
B
Yeah. I don't know where I'd be without it my whole life at this point.
- [00:43]
A
I love my ankle monitor. Well, here's the thing. We can make our ankle monitors less invasive in our lives. We can actually do things to stop the egregious data collection that is currently going on. A lot of us just take the default and we're just like, well, it's an ankle monitor. I guess I'm wearing this now. And we don't realize we're more empowered than we actually are.
- [01:03]
B
Yeah, we'll dive into that. But basically, when you download an app, your data is being sold right, for pretty cheap.
- [01:08]
A
Absolutely everything there. There's like stks in, in your apps that are from third parties where they, you, they, they. You could have like 77 trackers in there that you have no idea about. And, and it's just, it's the same with everything in our lives right now. It's tech is this asymmetry of information. We have tech integrated in everything we do. And most of us have no idea how that tech works. And if you look behind the scenes, what's going on is actually kind of horrendous. I think it's an egregious violation of our rights, especially our fourth amendment rights. So we've kind of lost that in the digital age. And so I, Yeah, I try to get people back to a place where they at least understand the trade offs they're making and then they can make a choice either way. Most people don't even know that this stuff is going on.
- [01:53]
B
That makes sense for you. No SIM card in your phone, right?
- [01:56]
A
No SIM card.
- [01:57]
B
Yes.
- [01:58]
A
Yeah, no, it's. It's crazy. I can talk about, like what I do. It's definitely not the advice I would give to People starting out. When people start out and they're like, well, what can I even do? And privacy is dead and should I even try? And I tend to just lead them to the lower hanging fruit. Like, there's a huge amount of stuff that you can do, right? I. The stuff that I do is a little more extreme, but that's my job description. It's to figure out, like, what are the extreme. Like, if I actually wanted robust privacy, what lengths would I have to go to? And then I find that middle ground for most people for their threat model, what actually works for them and what protects them meaningfully without having to make them live like a hermit, you know.
- [02:39]
B
So how do you call an Uber then?
- [02:41]
A
No, I call an Uber on my phone, but I have a hotspot, so. So I have. Yeah, I have a hotspot that I turn on when I need connectivity. A lot of the stuff I do doesn't actually need connectivity. You know, I'm like recording voice memos, I'm listening to audiobooks, I'm listening to music, I am taking photos, I'm writing notes. None of that stuff needs to be on the Internet. And so I try to keep connectivity limited. And then when I need it, when I need to call my Uber, I can do that.
- [03:07]
B
Right. What got you into all this? Because you were doing something completely, completely different before this?
- [03:11]
A
I. I would say that it. Well, yeah, originally I was an opera singer, but then I. I got into decentralized tech pretty early. So I had one of the, like, first crypto channels. And I was really interested in Bitcoin as, like, a tool for freedom. So I was interested in this, like, versioning area of decentralized technology where you didn't have these choke points that, that governments could control. And I'm seeing authoritarian regimes basically using the banking sector as a tool, like, to weaponize it against people. And so I was looking to decentralize tech as like, oh, wow, this could be the solution. You know, we could have a meaningful way to exchange value across the globe without authoritarians, like, stealing it or, you know, getting in the way of censoring it. I pivoted pretty hard, like starting around, like 2018, 2019, because I started to realize that you could have decentralized tech at the protocol level. But if the government decides that they're going to ban Bitcoin or they don't want you using it, they're just going to target you to stop it. And if you don't know how to use the Internet privately, they can see you using It. So how do we make the most of all this decentralized tech? We have 3D printers, we have all these cool tools, but if governments don't want it and we don't know how to use the Internet privately, we actually can't make use of all this freedom tech. So I pivoted pretty hard again, just thinking, like, I don't really understand how the tech in my life works. If I wanted to become private, could I? Like, how would I. And so, like, 700 videos later is just like me implementing, you know, one privacy thing after another. Until now. I'm in a place where, you know, I give masterclasses to people in really hostile nations who are trying to hide from authoritarian governments about, like, how to protect themselves and keep, like, an opposition party or a protest movement alive. But, yeah, it's been a long journey. And I, when I started out, I kind of felt like this imposter because I'm like, you know, guys, I discovered this thing. But I must be wrong, because if this were a real thing, we'd all be talking about it, right? And it turns out no one was talking about it. No one was looking into this stuff. So it's. Yeah, it's been a wild journey for sure.
- [05:27]
B
Well, I'm sure it was censored, right?
- [05:29]
A
I haven't been since I've been demonetized a bunch. But I, I would say the reason why people don't know about it, it's censored in a different way. I mean, governments don't want you to know what kind of surveillance power they have, right? And then corporations don't want you to know what kind of spying they're doing in your life. You know, when you buy a car, they're not saying, oh, and we're going to be collecting your. Your sexual activity from everything that you do. You know, Instead, they say, we might potentially share telemetry and metrics for measurement with third parties. Probably, maybe. And you're like, that seems fine. But yeah, if they were actually explicit and they were saying, like, yeah, Bill is going to watch you through your camera. He'll get access to your microphone recordings and every private conversation you have. And then we're going to give that information to the government, and then Fred in the government department is actually going to use that to target you and piece together fragments of your life to build a narrative because you've been part of a protest movement. And actually we're trying to find a reason to target you, and we're going to track your locations. Then we're going to build out a social graph of everyone that you're visiting and then we're going to use that data to go after that entire like opposition movement. Like they're not going to tell you that stuff. So instead we get told that it's measurement and metrics and. And then we sign the piece of paper saying yeah, I consent to that. That's fine.
- [06:43]
B
Yep. It's all about the wording.
- [06:44]
A
It's all about the wording.
- [06:46]
B
Yeah. I always operated with the idea that my texts and emails are being monitored and phone calls. But yeah, it's. When I started watching John Kiriakou talk about this.
- [06:55]
A
Yeah.
- [06:56]
B
I was like, oh my God, there's levels to this.
- [06:58]
A
So here's the thing I asked you. I mean you're operating under the assumption this stuff is being, being read. I just think that's such a terrible thing for society when we have to self censor and tread on eggshells knowing that, okay, well this might like release that changes the fabric of society. That makes us less brave, less willing to go against mainstream narrative like it. Most people are not going to be brave enough to have independent thought that environment. And I worry about a culture where people are just so concerned about like the private conversations that they're having and that getting leaked that they no longer feel free to express themselves.
- [07:37]
B
I agree. Yeah, you can't really have growth when you're operating.
- [07:39]
A
Absolutely.
- [07:40]
B
You can't speak your mind, speak your truth. Right. It's scary.
- [07:43]
A
It's really scary.
- [07:43]
B
That's why there's these apps like signal now, because people don't trust imessage.
- [07:47]
A
Exactly. And, and yeah, it's so funny. Even like the tech gets complicated. There was a great talk at defcon last year, Yoav Magid, and he did a deep dive into Siri and like, like the tech stack, it's just so complicated and there's so many lines of code that when you start implementing like cool things, I think that like in Apple intelligence, which is, you know, they use private compute and it's a cool tool, but when you interface with the existing tech stack that isn't privacy preserving. There are all of these holes that show up. And so his talk was about how imessage, um, people didn't realize that if they're using Siri dictation, imessages are meant to be intent encrypted. But when you use Siri it's all recorded in plain text and sent to Apple servers. So they're actually getting access to your imessages through that. So Things like that. It's, it's that kind of awareness that I try to let people know about because then you can make a better decision. You're like, oh, I'm not going to dictate that message to Siri. I'm just going to use imessage or I'm even better, I'm going to use signal. So. So it's all just about understanding how this stuff works so we can make better choices and protect ourselves.
- [08:56]
B
Yeah, there's a big zero day hack with imessage to do with crypto.
- [08:59]
A
Absolutely.
- [09:00]
B
Update your phone or something.
- [09:01]
A
Constant. Yeah. I mean, we have mercenary spyware now exploiting all of these zero days and basically having it as like malware as a service. And that's really changed the value proposition of how intensive the spying can be on people. It used to be, okay, it's going to be $50 million to burn this zero day. We're only going to do it on like a high target person. Okay, well it's going to be $100 million, but you get a platform and you could deploy it to 25,000 people and you know, if we burn one zero day, we'll just replace it for you. And that's part of the service package. That's kind of the era that we're living in now with tools like Pegasus, things like that, where people think, oh, well, I'm not important enough to be a target. But what we found through the Pegasus leaks is the people who are targeted would journalists, they were protesters, they were everyday people who said something that criticized governments around the world. And so the, I think that really the, the calculus has to change for people and they have to understand that with the advent of AI, this stuff gets easier and we're just all caught up in a dragnet. So now the question becomes, okay, well what do we do now that we're all in the dragnet and we can no longer pretend we're not important enough? Like, is there anything meaningfully meaningful we could do to protect our privacy? And there is, there absolutely are things that people can, can do.
- [10:23]
B
VPNs. Right.
- [10:25]
A
So we will be, I would say, stay away from almost all VPNs and be very careful and simultaneously that VPNs are essential in your privacy toolbox. It's like, it's a, it's a landscape filled with landmines. A lot of VPN companies are really scam where that are harvesting your data. And so I think you've got to be careful when choosing a vpn. But it's an essential tool because otherwise you're giving your IP address to every website that you visit that can. Absolutely. You can find people's actual address from their IP address. You know, there are services on the dark web and there are services on the normal web where you can get the general vicinity from an IP address, but there are services where you can, like, buy people's home addresses with that IP address. So, yeah, there's like a whole spectrum of things you can do. Oh, it comes down to, like, I think it is helpful to people to understand, like, from a government perspective, what can governments, especially in the US get about you without a warrant? And right now they can basically get access to everything. If you store your photos in a cloud provider, they can get your photos without a warrant. If you. Yeah, if you, you know, messages, email, like all of these things, they can get this information without a warrant. Wow. Why is that something called the third party doctrine? The third party doctrine. Basically, in the United States, we're meant to have a fourth Amendment. And the Fourth Amendment basically says no unreasonable searches and seizures. If someone wants to search you, they got to get a warrant. And it's a good safeguard. You know, it means someone doesn't just have unfettered access to everything in your life. Now the courts are meant to decide, okay, well, here's a case. Was your fourth Amendment, like, right violated? And they've got to decide, okay, in what cases do you have this fourth Amendment protection? They came up with this thing in the 70s, 70s, before the Internet, before, like this digital era that said if you have into like, your information with a third party, you no longer have a reasonable expectation of privacy. But the Internet runs on third parties. Everything is a third party. You're doing DNS queries, you're using the infrastructure, you're using cloud providers, you're pinging APIs and servers. Like, your data, like everything you do in your life is now data point that is just harvested by countless third parties. And governments are using that precedent from the 70s before they people could even envision this tech and saying you have no longer have a reasonable expectation of privacy, which is insane. And so I have worked on some legislation to try to close that loophole. You know, you have governments that are buying giant data sets of all of our information that, you know, being harvested by people scraping the Internet for everything they can find. They're just buying this stuff, or they're just saying, google, I want to query your data base and I don't need a warrant for it because you're a Third party. So I can just give you a subpoena and take it. And so we worked on some legislation that basically says if the government wants to do a search, they need a warrant, which is kind of what the fourth Amendment already says. But really we just wanted to get rid of those loopholes, get rid of the data broker loopholes, get rid of the third party doctrine. It's at a stage now where legislature has to step in, because I think that our rights are all being completely evaded, being disregarded in the digital age.
- [13:46]
B
Absolutely. So you just introduced that.
- [13:48]
A
Yeah, on Thursday. So. So that was introduced to the House, where a great thing people could do is like, reach out to their representative and tell them to co sponsor it. A lot of these bills will just die in committee.
- [13:59]
B
It should be bipartisan too.
- [14:01]
A
Absolutely bipartisan. I mean, we're seeing this around the FISA push right now. It's a bipartisan push back to Pfizer reauthorization, a clean reauthorization. And, and so we do know that there is bipartisan support for this kind of stuff. I, I think that we need to double down right now. Like, we have a window of opportunity that is rapidly diminishing the more entrenched these AI tools get for, like, analyzing all the data points they're collecting about you. And that's where we enter the territory of, like, preemptive law enforcement. That's where we enter the territory of being able to silence protest movements before they even start. That's bad territory. Like, if we want, like, all of our freedoms in society to remain intact, then we absolutely need to fight for privacy.
- [14:46]
B
Yeah, that's like the mass surveillance technocrat world. That's a possibility at the current pace, right?
- [14:51]
A
Yeah, it's speeding up so quickly. AI is, has kind of been an interesting awakening moment for people. This stuff's been going on for a long time, but it wasn't until AI came about that people had, like, immediate contact with it and they started to understand, oh, wow, this is the capability of this stuff. You know what, how dangerous could this be in the hands of someone that has access to every data point in my life?
- [15:18]
B
Yeah.
- [15:18]
A
And now people are starting to understand and push back, but I don't think they're pushing back nearly hard enough. I don't think they're voicing their, like, opinions. I think we're, we've become really complacent. You know, we deal with companies that are harvesting this data. Governments are just taking that information from the companies, and we're not even voicing Our opinions saying, privacy is a value.
- [15:38]
B
Yeah.
- [15:39]
A
And these companies think that we don't care about it. So they're doing all these practices, you know, that put us at risk as well, because we're just not voicing our opinion and saying, no, privacy is a value, and I want you to respect it for sure.
- [15:51]
B
I think everyone's so distracted too.
- [15:53]
A
Absolutely.
- [15:53]
B
Like, everyone wants this, but they're just. Were so all over the place, you know?
- [15:58]
A
Yeah, that's a structure. I mean, it's really the attention economy. Right. It's. Everyone is. Is trying to pay for your eyeballs. They're trying to pay for your attention. I get. I get a lot of pushback. People will say, like, well, I have nothing to hide about all this stuff. And it's interesting because they're thinking about this in terms of, like, consumer choices. They're like, this attention economy. Oh, someone just wants to sell me a better pair of shoes. Why don't I care? It's like, well, no. Someone wants to put political content in front of you, change your voting patterns. Someone wants to put things in front of you to make you hate certain people so that you, you know, because you think that they hate you, hate you. People want to shape the fabric of society. We have hostile nation actors that are trying to literally disrupt, like, the fabric of other nations. And America's doing it to other countries as well. We're doing the exact same thing. So in the attention economy, we have to understand what's at stake. And what's at stake is our autonomy of thought, our ability to actually think independently while we have everyone paying and knowing exactly what pushes our buttons as well. They're not just putting ads in front of us. They're being fed a fire hose of information, like, thousands of data points to say, this is Naomi Brockwell. This is exactly her political persuasion, her sexual persuasion. You know, which animals she likes best, which food she likes best, where she goes on holidays, is sending that data to thousands of entities who can then bid, you know, on putting things in front of me. But they know exactly what makes me tick. They know it better than I do. They know I'm more likely to click on a video with a thumbnail with this person than with this person or whatever. So they can use all of that as, like, a weapon. And so sometimes it's. It's benign. Sometimes it's consumer choices or whatever. Sometimes it's not benign.
- [17:44]
B
Sometimes it's creepy.
- [17:45]
A
Yeah, well, it's 100% always creepy. That's. That's across the board. But yeah, no, sometimes it's dangerous. I think that you can absolutely influence people's behavior. I mean, Facebook alone has done studies about how they influence people. And that's not even like, I mean, Google is like embedded into everything we do. They're getting access to our emails, they're getting access to our drive, they're getting access to our calendar, they're getting access to, you know, Google Meet and like everything that we do, our Android devices. Yeah, they know how we tick and, and people are paying for the opportunity to put things in front of, actually leverage that power easily.
- [18:26]
B
Yeah. When it comes to the algorithm, the social media algorithms, they really favor controversy.
- [18:30]
A
Oh absolutely.
- [18:31]
B
Scrolling. Like you see the craziest videos and you read the comments, everyone's just fighting everyone.
- [18:36]
A
Yeah, I mean it's, it's. And that's only part of it. Like, I do think that you have people who are fueling that kind of controversy. I mean, you see, it's so interesting when you read about the history of how different countries like to disrupt each other and you kind of learn about, okay, let's read about like Russian tactics pre Internet. And you would literally have like sleeper cells that would grow up in the United States. But their mission was, you know, to become like trusted members of society and then they can start to like influence thoughts and fast forward to the digital age. And it's supercharged. You know, you can have sock accounts that you have been incubating for a decade and then you get like, create friends, you join groups and all of this. And you have automated systems that fuel any controversy that comes up to try to like just create that tension in society. Yeah. If you can distract people with that kind of stuff, then you can do a lot of damage when people aren't looking.
- [19:31]
B
They say Tick Tock was like the ultimate psyop.
- [19:34]
A
Yeah, I mean, well, I think that Tick Tock honestly was, it's a little bit of a, a scapegoat because we're, we're pretending that Tick Tock's the only one doing this. I mean, the Google real time bidding system is doing this. Facebook's real time bidding system is doing this. And so like this stuff is embedded into the entire ad economy that people aren't just buying ads for your consumer choices, they're buying it to influence your viewpoints. And that's just one aspect. Right. The whole all kinds of like surveillance mechanisms going on. Like in your phone you probably have hundreds of apps and in those apps you've got SDKs. In those apps that you know, potentially owned by government shell companies. Like, there was a great book by Byron Tao, and he explored the four epochs of data brokers. And this new epoch that we're in is this SDK epoch. Honestly, we're probably in a fifth one by now. It's probably old news. But essentially what will happen is, like, let's say that you're an app developer and you and your spare time are like, I'm going to learn how to create an app. I'll make a compass app. And then, whoa. Turns out people really like compass apps. And so they downloaded your compass app and you get, like, a million downloads. You will invariably get someone reach out to you to say, hey, we're an analytics company. Can we put this SDK in your app? We just want to collect some analytics, and we'll pay you $1,000 a month. Like, you just created a side project and now you're earning $1,000 a month. You're absolutely going to say, yes. You don't know what's in that SDK. You don't know which libraries it's referencing. You have no idea what this does, but you're getting paid $1,000 a month. That is what's happening with, like, countless apps in your devices. And what Byron did, through a bunch of FOIA requests is basically discover that a lot of these apps are actually owned by, like, these shell companies are actually, like, government contractors or selling to governments or run by governments themselves. Like, there was a famous app. It was actually targeting, like, the Muslim population. It was one of the most, like, popular apps in phones. And it turns out that it was, like, harvesting contact lists and location data and all this stuff to spy on an entire demographic. And that's just one demographic. It could be like, you know, think of any demographic you possibly want. And we now basically have registries for every person that goes to a gun range, every person of this, you know, sexual persuasion, every person, like, who is part of this, like, social group. We have a registry for all of that, basically by having all this data aggregated and indexed and. And that searchability.
- [22:08]
B
Crazy. Yeah. Pokemon Go was one, too.
- [22:10]
A
Oh, absolutely.
- [22:11]
B
That was a CIA off, right?
- [22:13]
A
Well, I don't even know.
- [22:14]
B
I mean, have you looked into this VR mapping Go?
- [22:16]
A
You probably know more about it than me, but I. I read a little bit about that, about how they were just using it to train AI and do all kinds of stuff.
- [22:23]
B
They sold it to those. Those food robot delivery things that you see on the streets. They sold all the data to that company that was just one company they sold it to, they sold it to a bunch. But yeah, they, they ended up selling the whole app for like tens of billions to someone in Saudi Arabia too. So now they have our data.
- [22:37]
A
Yeah, data is incred. Data is power. Your information is powerful. So yeah, people pay a lot of money for it. People think, why am I important? Like why does anyone care? No, information is power and people pay a ton of money for that power. So as long as your data is caught up in all of that, you are indexable in some database that Saudi Arabia or whoever else is looking at.
- [22:59]
B
That's not. So you have like no apps on your phone?
- [23:01]
A
Well, I do a few things. So I, I have a graphene phone. It's an alternative operating system. Most people use Android or iOS but graphene is just far more secure and private. But then on the graphene phone I have different profiles and they're all completely siloed from each other. They have their own encryption keys and it means that you can silo apps without them being able to communicate with each other and talk to each other, see each other. A lot of people don't realize that on a normal phone apps can see which other apps are on the device. So like your banking app knows that you have that crypto app and how does that affect, you know, your credit score, how does that affect bank's willingness to do business with you if they know that you're in like a high risk industry?
- [23:44]
B
Wow, I got debanked.
- [23:46]
A
Yeah, well, it's probably, it could have to do with a lot of things, you know, but definitely there is data that you are leaking just by simply having someone's app on your phone and then being able to see which other apps are on your device. So yeah, I do keep it to a minimum, but then I do have some invasive apps that I like to silo across other profiles. I have Google Play services siloed in a certain area because I don't want Google accessing everything that I'm doing. So there are definitely things people can do for sure. It's not a lost cause. And I think most because of this third party doctrine thing, government relies on just being able to collect information from companies. That's how they get a lot of it. People don't realize, okay, they could just stop giving their info to companies. They could use instead of Gmail, something like Proton or Tutorial where they actually don't get the contents of your email. They don't see it, they don't analyze it, they don't, you Know, like flag things like Gmail is doing. If you want to use Signal instead of Instagram, DM or sms, that is a way that you're actually keeping that data private. That can't be subpoenaed. That, you know, well, it can be subpoenaed, but Signal has nothing to hand over. And they've published subpoena responses before. They've said, yeah, they've said like, okay, here's everything we have and it's nothing.
- [25:03]
B
Wow. Shout out to Signal.
- [25:04]
A
Yeah, absolutely. So people can just make choices like that and they can protect themselves.
- [25:09]
B
What about WhatsApp encryption?
- [25:10]
A
Is that okay? I'll tell you a story about WhatsApp's founding. So WhatsApp created by Brian Acton and when it was sold to Meta, he stayed on but just increasingly got unhappy with how the privacy direction was going. Now he had all these vested like options that were about to vest would make him a ton of money. And my understanding is he would, could have just waited like a couple of months, but he was so outraged with how bad the privacy, the direction was going with WhatsApp that he left all that money on the table and just said, no, I quit, left at all. He then went and founded the Signal foundation with Moxie Marlinspike and put $50 million into founding Signal. So that gives you an idea of the difference in privacy between WhatsApp and Signal Privacy. Like WhatsApp, there, there's a lot of speculation about how that information can be exfiltrated. Like apparently it's end to end encrypted, but key management is a little ambiguous, like who gets access to the keys, whether they stay on your device, there's updates or another big ambiguity. You know, if your whole device is being archived in real time and not end to end encrypted. Okay, so governments are just going to query the archive, you know, the backup. So there's. I don't use WhatsApp, but I do, I do use Signal.
- [26:32]
B
Yeah, Signal seems to be the one that people like the most.
- [26:35]
A
I like it because it offers privacy and it also has just been like around for a long time. A lot of eyeballs on it, looking at the code. It's open source, so, you know, we can never guarantee any of these things. But as far as like trust goes, I definitely have more trust for Signal than I do for Meta for sure.
- [26:56]
B
What else do people got to watch out for?
- [26:58]
A
I say, like, browser is an easy thing. People can switch out. A lot of people are just using Google, they're using Chrome. Yeah, yeah. And Safari is not terrible. To be honest, Safari is pretty good if you're in the Mac ecosystem. I really like Brave. They do a tremendous job with privacy. They're blocking all kinds of things like bounce tracking and fingerprinting and third party cookies and all of that. If you're on Chrome, absolutely. Just switch out your browser and it's a big privacy win. Honestly. AI is another thing. If you instead of using something like Anthropic and OpenAI and using their very powerful awesome tools, you can access all of their models through more private providers like Venice AI or Confer to or leo. I use Brave has AI integrated into their browser through leo. No logging policy. They're using proxies to strip out your IP address. They're doing all kinds of things to make it more private. So you can actually opt to make use of these models without even going to these providers that are keeping a log of all of your queries.
- [28:04]
B
Yeah, I've heard some weird stories with certain AI stuff where people look up things and then you should.
- [28:08]
A
Yeah. I mean, I have friends who've been like denied gun licenses because they've gotten a report saying based on their chat history with chat GPT, you are, you are. Yeah, you're not eligible. Because if you think about it, if you say something to like an LLM where you're like, oh, I'm feeling sad today, give me a pick me up. You know, treating it like you're therapist.
- [28:30]
B
A lot of people do that.
- [28:30]
A
Yeah. And then you're saying something about like, oh, what's the best, like medical marijuana I can use. Okay, well now you've just told it that you're a drug user and you're not in your right state of mind. Like that's absolutely a prerequisite like for being able to deny you certain, certain rights.
- [28:47]
B
So is Google like that too?
- [28:49]
A
Google's absolutely like that. Even before you click enter in a search bar, they've already logged those keystrokes. So if you write in, you know, is Naomi. No, delete it. They already got those keystrokes. They know that you already wrote that in there. So Google is. Yeah, you can just look at a company, figure out what their business model is and then determine. Okay, what does that tell you about what they're doing with my data? Google is an ad company. That's the service. Like you are the product. And so they offer free email, they offer free search, they offer a free browser, all of these things because they're vehicles for extracting data. And then they profile you and Bundle that together and then they sell that to people so they make all of their money having the most accurate profile of you that they possibly can so that people, you know, trust that data and buy it. So when you're interfacing with these companies and you understand that ad is their business model, you should be very wary about giving them information.
- [29:44]
B
Yeah, that's every social media platform too. Every social longer you're on there, the more they make.
- [29:47]
A
Right, absolutely.
- [29:49]
B
Got on you.
- [29:50]
A
And that's something like in terms of psychology to be aware of, you know, you're more engaged when you're outraged. And so what is this stuff doing to your mental state as well? Like I, I love social media. I, I'm definitely not a, a hermit who's like off it.
- [30:03]
B
I'm a scroller.
- [30:04]
A
Yeah, absolutely. But I think we, it's important to be aware of this stuff so that if we do feel like we're in a little bit of a loop, we know how to remain in control of it. We're not else dictate our attention. We're determining, you know, how much time we're spending on things, where we're putting our attention, etc.
- [30:21]
B
Absolutely. Well, this was fun. How could people watching to support you and hopefully get this thing passed.
- [30:26]
A
Yeah, I would love like if they go to surveillance accountability.com we're currently looking for co sponsors for the bill. So an amazing thing people could do is reach out to your rep. It actually makes a difference if you contact your rep and say I would like you to be a co sponsor for this bill. They have to listen to that and you get enough people and then they start to realize this is something their constituents are interested in. So surveillance accountability accountability.com is the website. We have like a script there if you like. Just wanted to copy and paste it into an email, make it super easy for people to do.
- [30:59]
B
Nice.
- [30:59]
A
And then we have like 700 free tutorials and videos and articles on our website, ludlowinstitute.org so if you want to learn how to just, just make better tech choices that protect you better, you can go to ludlowinstitute. Org and find all that cool.
- [31:14]
B
We'll link it below. Thanks for coming on.
- [31:16]
A
Well, thank you so much for having me.
- [31:17]
B
Check them out guys. See you. Thanks for watching to the end, guys. Please comment below your thoughts on the episode if you agree. If you disagree, I'd love to hear it. I read every single comment. Means a lot to me. Thank you so much.