Speaker 1: Now here's a highlight from coast to coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Well, that's interesting. You mentioned artificial intelligence, So there is
Speaker 2: a way of utilizing using AI without jeopardizing or risking
Speaker 2: your privacy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so the common approach to AI in its current manifestation, right,
Speaker 3: the current manifestation of AI are these large language models
Speaker 3: like chat GPT that people are familiar with. We're not
Speaker 3: at the terminator level or anything like this, and I
Speaker 3: understand and fully appreciate people's skepticism about it. In fact,
Speaker 3: that's what we talk about. But yes, if you're using
Speaker 3: chat GPT. Well, the company Open AI a few months
Speaker 3: ago they hired the former director of the NSA on
Speaker 3: their board of directors, So Richard, that kind of tells
Speaker 3: you what they think about your privacy. So it's a
Speaker 3: total black box with a lot of these big tech companies.
Speaker 3: You don't know where your data is going. You can
Speaker 3: just assume that it's being collected, right, And they also
Speaker 3: do a lot of censorship so that you can't ask
Speaker 3: certain questions, you can't generate certain images on the art
Speaker 3: based AIS. And so we have you know, part of
Speaker 3: part of our course is showing you how you can
Speaker 3: install these, download these on your own computer, the open
Speaker 3: source versions, and you can use them without even connecting
Speaker 3: to the internet. So it's a really cool way of
Speaker 3: making use and understanding these tools, which are pretty useful.
Speaker 3: Even if you just want to understand how they work.
Speaker 3: It's certainly possible to do that. And you know, of
Speaker 3: course that is our at the end of the day,
Speaker 3: we're not about feeding big tech at all. We're about
Speaker 3: self sufficiency, self hosting, open source stuff. And yeah, that's
Speaker 3: that's kind of our model when it comes to not
Speaker 3: just AI, but everything.
Speaker 1: That we do.
Speaker 2: So, how do you protect your privacy in the let's
Speaker 2: call it the digital age, And what do you suggest
Speaker 2: for other people? Like, let's start with I mean, you're online,
Speaker 2: you're a podcaster, you have a website, so you have
Speaker 2: a digital footprint. Walk us through I don't know, four
Speaker 2: or five really important steps we can make to safeguard
Speaker 2: our privacy in the digital age.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so number one, don't be a podcaster, but don't
Speaker 3: worry on too late. I'm jumping on that grenade for
Speaker 3: everyone else. So that's fine. But what I typically tell
Speaker 3: people Richard to start with is just start being aware
Speaker 3: of some of the systems around you start being aware
Speaker 3: of when somebody's asking for an email address or your ID,
Speaker 3: or the moments where you give away data all the time,
Speaker 3: your name, your photograph, and then start to find tricks
Speaker 3: of getting around it.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: So, like you go to the airport and they say, here,
Speaker 3: step in front of the facial recognition, Well, just ask them,
Speaker 3: is this mandatory? Oftentimes it's not. You go to a website,
Speaker 3: do you really have to create an account? Well? Maybe not, right,
Speaker 3: you go to the dentist, you really have to fill
Speaker 3: out the iPad with all of your name and all
Speaker 3: of your information if you're paying cash, No, you certainly don't.
Speaker 3: And so it just starts with an awareness of all
Speaker 3: the data that you're giving out, and then you will
Speaker 3: find a way to get around it.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: So that's just kind of the mindset I would encourage
Speaker 3: everybody to get and learn a password manager. And what
Speaker 3: a password manager is going to do is it's going
Speaker 3: to train you to every time you create an account,
Speaker 3: you're going to put all of your information into that
Speaker 3: password manager, and the password manager is kind of the
Speaker 3: way that you protect that data and it simply helps
Speaker 3: you to organize your digital life in a better way.
Speaker 3: So all those logins that you have, that you have
Speaker 3: your browser remembering and things like this, put those all
Speaker 3: into a password manager. I like to key pass XC
Speaker 3: that's one that I like. But and so you just
Speaker 3: start to organize your digital life a little bit more.
Speaker 3: You start to be aware of how many accounts you have,
Speaker 3: and then you know it can start to teach you, Hey,
Speaker 3: I can I can use the service with that, Like
Speaker 3: I can use YouTube without being logged in, right, I
Speaker 3: can use a lot of these other services without being
Speaker 3: logged in. I don't have to give my real name,
Speaker 3: my real information whenever somebody's just asking for it. So
Speaker 3: that would be something I think everybody should be moving
Speaker 3: to private messengers. And the big one is signal. So
Speaker 3: that's an easy one to recommend, is to instead of
Speaker 3: using regular text messages, even instead of using something like WhatsApp,
Speaker 3: move to signal as your default method of communication. And
Speaker 3: then in addition to that, I would say people can
Speaker 3: consider a VPN. A VPN is a virtual private network
Speaker 3: and this basically is able to hide your internet traffic
Speaker 3: from your internet service provider, who otherwise can see the
Speaker 3: websites that you visit. So this is a really useful
Speaker 3: tool to get that basic Internet based privacy. I like
Speaker 3: mold that and IVP, So those are ones that I
Speaker 3: would I would typically recommend. But if you take those
Speaker 3: those few steps, you're you're certainly moving in the right direction.
Speaker 3: And you know, after that, some of the steps become
Speaker 3: more extreme, but that definitely gives you a good baseline
Speaker 3: of privacy.
Speaker 2: But then when you go out into the world, out
Speaker 2: under the street and there are now there are red
Speaker 2: light cameras and and uh, surveillance camera like London in England,
Speaker 2: I can't remember how many. It's just a ridiculous number
Speaker 2: of surveillance cameras. You'd think it was you were living
Speaker 2: in you know, Beijing, Communists China. I mean, it's inescapable,
Speaker 2: isn't it that you're going to be surveilled.
Speaker 3: Yeah, especially in London. The UK seems to have taken
Speaker 3: George Orwell's books as inspiration and not as warning. I'm
Speaker 3: not sure how that happened exactly, but you're right, I mean,
Speaker 3: and some places are worse than others. So you know,
Speaker 3: during during the COVID era, it was possible to and
Speaker 3: acceptable to walk around with a mask on Now these days,
Speaker 3: a lot of these. A lot of these these cities
Speaker 3: have returned to the anti mask laws that have been
Speaker 3: there historically, so you know, when you're walking around, maybe
Speaker 3: you can't escape some of it. So you can, you know,
Speaker 3: choose where you live. You don't have to live necessarily.
Speaker 1: In the UK.
Speaker 3: If you're a British citizen, you don't have to live
Speaker 3: in London. You can choose, you know, what part of
Speaker 3: London that you live in. You can certainly make us
Speaker 3: think about these things to your local government and all
Speaker 3: the rest. And there are various maps and resources where
Speaker 3: you can see where, for example, license plate cameras are.
Speaker 3: I interviewed a guy recently on my show who has
Speaker 3: a website called the Flock and this kind of just
Speaker 3: points out where all these license plate readers are. So yeah,
Speaker 3: I mean that that's hard to escape from. That's kind
Speaker 3: of the worst example we could imagine of these public cameras.
Speaker 3: There's not a whole lot you can do. But in
Speaker 3: other aspects of your life you certainly can carve out
Speaker 3: a nice encrypted slice of private Internet for yourself.
Speaker 2: And what about the advent of digital IDs? And I
Speaker 2: know that in the European Union they're really pushing these
Speaker 2: I think they've already arrived. In other words, they've created
Speaker 2: the digital ID wallet. Now they have to figure out
Speaker 2: what's going to go in there. Some say it's inevitable,
Speaker 2: it's going to be worldwide. How do we push back
Speaker 2: against that or can we?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't think we have to consider any of
Speaker 3: these things to be inevitable. Certainly we should be pushing
Speaker 3: back against these. You know, however, you think a lot
Speaker 3: of people would go about this by voting, by making
Speaker 3: again a stink about it in your local government, by
Speaker 3: voting with your feet and moving to places where this
Speaker 3: stuff does not exist. You know, I know a lot
Speaker 3: of people who choose maybe option C, which is they're
Speaker 3: building systems outside of the system. So I know a
Speaker 3: lot of people who don't have any bank accounts, actually Richard,
Speaker 3: who for the last ten years have been living on
Speaker 3: bitcoin and maybe something like minaro Manaro being a privacy cryptocurrency.
Speaker 3: And you know, it's funny because I'm in these groups
Speaker 3: of people and they're like, yeah, I can't pay for
Speaker 3: this because I don't have any coat money, right, So
Speaker 3: I'm like, okay, So there are ways to get around
Speaker 3: the system. There There always will be that's the hacker mindset,
Speaker 3: and it's not as difficult as you think. And these
Speaker 3: are things that we talk about on our escapee technocracy
Speaker 3: dot com tutorials. It's certainly possible to do that. There's
Speaker 3: always an escape patch, and you can use all of these,
Speaker 3: all of the digital things against the system. So the
Speaker 3: hacker mindset is that we, you know, the cipherpunks are
Speaker 3: the ones who really created a lot of these tools.
Speaker 3: So we're the masters here, and we can choose to
Speaker 3: have our own alternative, parallel systems. And it's happening right now.
Speaker 2: Do you own a smartphone?
Speaker 3: So I own a lot of things, mostly for testing.
Speaker 3: I don't really use a smartphone, and I know people
Speaker 3: who don't. And one of the good things about something
Speaker 3: like Signal the private messenger I mentioned is that you don't.
Speaker 3: I believe you do need a smartphone to uh to
Speaker 3: kind of be the default account for you. But after
Speaker 3: that you can have conversations on your computer. Right we're
Speaker 3: having a conversation right now on our computer. We don't
Speaker 3: really need a phone to do these things. A phone,
Speaker 3: in my view, is simply an emergency device for when
Speaker 3: you're away from home, and I treat it in that way,
Speaker 3: and I really don't rely on the phone for much
Speaker 3: of anything, and I don't really think that most people
Speaker 3: need to if they're if they're being honest about it.
Speaker 2: What about social media.
Speaker 3: For business purposes, yes, for personal aspects of my life, no,
Speaker 3: you can certainly be disconnected as a result. But that's
Speaker 3: simply what I've chosen. I take the extreme route. And
Speaker 3: my excuse Richard of course, say hey, this is you know,
Speaker 3: market research or you know, I'm not I'm not on
Speaker 3: social weirdo. You know, this is this is my brand
Speaker 3: for the regular saying people. Though, I would say, you know,
Speaker 3: if you don't want to give up social media, just
Speaker 3: start to be cautious and aware of the things you post. Right,
Speaker 3: Maybe you don't need to post everything about your personal life.
Speaker 3: Maybe you don't need to install it on your phone
Speaker 3: where you're going to become addicted and where it's going
Speaker 3: to start tracking your geolocation and other sorts of things,
Speaker 3: so you know you can have these you know, some people,
Speaker 3: for example, they like Instagram. That's how they connect with
Speaker 3: their friends and family. And I understand that, and you know,
Speaker 3: maybe you could move that over to signal. I think
Speaker 3: you probably could, but even if you had your your
Speaker 3: Instagram app on your phone, not the end of the world, right,
Speaker 3: Go in the privacy settings, play around with some of those,
Speaker 3: kind of be aware that all the data that you're
Speaker 3: posting there is going to be sucked up by big tech.
Speaker 3: It is in some cases most cases public information, and
Speaker 3: it's going to be used to train AI. So you
Speaker 3: know there are consequences, So just be a little bit
Speaker 3: more selective about what you post. But you know, I
Speaker 3: think you can certainly be social without social media, so
Speaker 3: consider that as well.
Speaker 2: In all honesty, I think I've been kind of lackadaisical
Speaker 2: because you know I have I've been in radio and
Speaker 2: podcasting for a very long time, and so I've got
Speaker 2: a very large, messy digital footprint. How can I I mean,
Speaker 2: is it too late? Can I go back and I
Speaker 2: don't know, to start pairing that down reduce my digital footprint?
Speaker 3: Absolutely? Yes, it's never too late to make yourself out
Speaker 3: of what you've been made into. As the philosopher John
Speaker 3: Paul Start said, this is certainly true. So a lot
Speaker 3: of people take the it's too late for me approach,
Speaker 3: and I don't think that's at all the case. And
Speaker 3: it's not the case because there's all the all of
Speaker 3: the next things that you might Richard. You can stop those, right,
Speaker 3: you can stop piling on. And it's not as if
Speaker 3: there's this one system that you're feeding, right. These are
Speaker 3: all individual systems that don't necessarily aren't necessarily connected to
Speaker 3: the other. So for people who feel discouraged, as I
Speaker 3: said that, you know, the the organization of your digital
Speaker 3: life is a key. And so for me, when I'm
Speaker 3: looking at my computer, I log into my computer, I
Speaker 3: have a very organized desktop. I put all my things
Speaker 3: in folders on my you know, on my desktop. I
Speaker 3: try not to rely on cloud storage things like this.
Speaker 3: And so that doesn't mean you want to back up
Speaker 3: your stuff right or you'll lose it. But I try
Speaker 3: to just start with the organization. I think that's the key.
Speaker 3: Have all of your your your folders, your files, and
Speaker 3: then with your password manager, you have all of your
Speaker 3: accounts and just start drotting down as you think about it. Okay,
Speaker 3: I have an account. Here, here's the information I gave
Speaker 3: to them. And as you go about that, you're going
Speaker 3: to find that once you have all of your accounts
Speaker 3: kind of written down onto this password manager, you're going
Speaker 3: to say, hey, I didn't realize I still have this account.
Speaker 3: Why don't I go in and purge this account, delete
Speaker 3: the data, maybe give some fogus data can be useful sometimes,
Speaker 3: and just delete this account entirely. Let me go into
Speaker 3: my email and just start unsubscribing from all these newsletters
Speaker 3: and you know, kind of have this cleansing, cleansing pursing ritual.
Speaker 3: And once you start from there, you start having your
Speaker 3: private messengers on your app like signal you're going to
Speaker 3: stop giving out data that you previously were giving. So yeah,
Speaker 3: I don't think it's too late. And you know, we're
Speaker 3: all we're all starting from somewhere. I was using a
Speaker 3: lot of these things when I started my journey as well,
Speaker 3: So just start where you are, don't you know, don't
Speaker 3: give into defeatism, and uh, you know, you don't have
Speaker 3: to give up to too much convenience to live this
Speaker 3: kind of lifestyle. I take the extreme route, and I
Speaker 3: still get to participate in all of the you know,
Speaker 3: the things that I want to participate in for the
Speaker 3: most part. So it's not some gloomy future. It's actually
Speaker 3: quite refreshing to wake up in the morning. Know that
Speaker 3: I'm on an operating system that isn't surveying me. Right,
Speaker 3: I'm using Linux, and I'm using programs and apps that
Speaker 3: are not surveying me. I'm not selling my data. I'm
Speaker 3: all in control of my data. It's really a peaceful
Speaker 3: kind of lifestyle once you start taking these steps.
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