Speaker 1: In March, I got an email from a guy named
Speaker 1: Andrew Friedman. It said, Brett, I am desperately trying to
Speaker 1: get in touch with Jonathan Kaplan of The Melt and
Speaker 1: more importantly, Flip Video fame. To make a long and
Speaker 1: bizarre story very short, I have a flip video cam
Speaker 1: that I believe has on it a video of my
Speaker 1: late father in law playing with my son. Without boring
Speaker 1: you with too much detail, the camera, the flip Video
Speaker 1: it was a small, simple video recorder that was pretty
Speaker 1: popular in the mid two thousand's. I had a few myself,
Speaker 1: and I remember using it to film my kids taking
Speaker 1: their very first steps. Good Daddy is dad? He needs
Speaker 1: to talk on the phone. Go Izzy. I vaguely remember
Speaker 1: the flip video. Most people called it the flip Cam.
Speaker 1: It was good for shooting home videos. But the company
Speaker 1: shut down a while ago, right, and that's why Andrew
Speaker 1: was writing. His camera was broken and he was having
Speaker 1: trouble fixing it. Three data recovery companies told me today
Speaker 1: that they don't deal with Flip Video. I can't tell
Speaker 1: you how difficult it is to get reliable intel about
Speaker 1: a product that, by tech standards is prehistoric. Andrew had
Speaker 1: a cherished video stuck on his device, and he didn't
Speaker 1: have a way to get it back. As a last resort,
Speaker 1: Andrew decided he needed to find the flip cam founder,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Caplin, and that's why he emailed me. I'm hoping
Speaker 1: you might be able to help me out. Either give
Speaker 1: me a way to contact him, forward this email to him,
Speaker 1: anything if he's willing to contact Thanks Andrew. I've written
Speaker 1: an article on Jonathan Caplan a few years ago. I
Speaker 1: still had some contacts I could try to call, so
Speaker 1: we decided to help. I'm Brad Stone and I'm Christy
Speaker 1: Westgard and this week under cryptod we're on a mission
Speaker 1: to get Andrews video back. This season, we're exploring the
Speaker 1: unintended consequences of technology. Our story today takes a look
Speaker 1: at the tech industry's constant race for the next big
Speaker 1: thing and how that sometimes comes at a hidden cost
Speaker 1: to you and me, the consumers of technology. Just as
Speaker 1: we get used to one set of apps and gadgets,
Speaker 1: we find out that the industry has moved on, leaving
Speaker 1: us stuck. Stay with us. Andrew lives in New Jersey
Speaker 1: with his wife, Ginger, and their two young children. One evening,
Speaker 1: Andrew and Ginger were watching a popular NBC family drama,
Speaker 1: This is Us, like they do every week. It might
Speaker 1: have been the super Bowl. In the post super Bowl
Speaker 1: episode in which one of the characters was thinking about
Speaker 1: her dad's passing and on the anniverse three of her
Speaker 1: dad's testing Every year watches a video tape that her
Speaker 1: dad made of her when she was a kid. Um
Speaker 1: and in this particular episode, the VHS tape got destroyed
Speaker 1: in an in an old fashioned dcr Um and her
Speaker 1: fiance went to sort of great pains to try to
Speaker 1: get the tape restored and find somebody who could school
Speaker 1: it back together like everybody used to have to do
Speaker 1: on VAJ tapes. Ginger's father had passed away just about
Speaker 1: five years ago, and watching that episode gave Andrew an idea.
Speaker 1: He went upstairs to look in the corner of a
Speaker 1: closet for a flip cam he hadn't used for many years.
Speaker 1: He wanted to find a video of Ginger and her
Speaker 1: dad they had filmed around the time when their first
Speaker 1: child was born all these years later. Andrew was a
Speaker 1: little fuzzy on exactly what was in the video, but
Speaker 1: he said Ginger remembered. Her memory of this tape is
Speaker 1: that we made it. Probably I shot it um in
Speaker 1: when we were in the hospital while she was in
Speaker 1: labor with my son, who is now six years old.
Speaker 1: You know, it was exciting to be there while we
Speaker 1: were about to have our first son. But also there
Speaker 1: were certainly a tone of sadness in the room. That's
Speaker 1: because Ginger's father was battling cancer. The family knew he
Speaker 1: didn't have much time left. Um, would you mind telling
Speaker 1: me a little bit about your father in law? Sure? Um, Sorry,
Speaker 1: that was the one question I wasn't quite ready for it. Um.
Speaker 1: He died a few months asked, maybe even a month
Speaker 1: after his seventieth birthday. Um. He was a wonderful father,
Speaker 1: a wonderful human, a wonderful man, a wonderful everything. It
Speaker 1: is impossible to overstate how important my wife's father was
Speaker 1: to my wife and what he meant to her. If
Speaker 1: this flip cam could bring a little bit of that
Speaker 1: man back to the family, Andrew would try to salvage it.
Speaker 1: Almost immediately, things got complicated. Andrew hadn't used his camera
Speaker 1: for years, and it wouldn't turn on, and flip cams
Speaker 1: hadn't been in production for over seven years. In two
Speaker 1: thousand nine, Cisco, the giant technology company, bought Pure Digital Technologies,
Speaker 1: the company that made the flip cam. But two years
Speaker 1: later in Cisco's broader consumer unit was having trouble, so
Speaker 1: Cisco killed the flip camp and they laid off fifty people.
Speaker 1: That minute, stopped manufacturing the flip cam, and it also
Speaker 1: stopped all the customer service support to This kind of
Speaker 1: thing is more common than you might think. What happened
Speaker 1: to the geo cities, the friends, Stirr's, the my spaces,
Speaker 1: all of those are where our digital library are digital
Speaker 1: memories live, and we're a little stuck. That's Brewster Kale.
Speaker 1: He runs a nonprofit called the Internet Archive. They hope
Speaker 1: to catalog every web page, old computer, game, piece of software, song, video, book,
Speaker 1: and more, you name it, and they're trying to get
Speaker 1: their hands on it. Brewster says, this problem Andrew was
Speaker 1: facing happens to people all the time, and we're increasingly
Speaker 1: vulnerable to it as we keep more and more of
Speaker 1: our memories and our data online. And now we have
Speaker 1: even more of a problem because a lot of our
Speaker 1: memories are on Facebook, Twitter, um, YouTube, Flicker, and those
Speaker 1: are naming the ones that are still alive. Yet those
Speaker 1: companies go away or they just change direction. Apple Computer, Um,
Speaker 1: they had mobile Me that was their web hosting platform.
Speaker 1: It was two terabytes of other people's stuff, but they
Speaker 1: just said we're going to turn it off. And when
Speaker 1: they said they're going to turn it off, it just
Speaker 1: went away. Apple replaced mobile Me with the now ubiquitous
Speaker 1: I Class out. The company did warn that it would
Speaker 1: be switching over to give users time to jump ship,
Speaker 1: but on June two twelve, everything left was deleted. And
Speaker 1: if it could happen to Apple customers, it could happen
Speaker 1: to anyone. I mean, I personally like to use Google
Speaker 1: Photos to back up all of my images when I
Speaker 1: don't have enough space on my iPhone, and I can't
Speaker 1: really imagine what I do if that platform were to
Speaker 1: just go down. Yeah, and just think of what losing
Speaker 1: I Cloud would mean. I mean, that service can store
Speaker 1: up to two terabytes of information for every single one
Speaker 1: of its hundreds of millions of active customers. So, with
Speaker 1: no customer service number to call, Andrew tried online forums
Speaker 1: to revive his dead flip cam. Started googling online um
Speaker 1: things like flip video instruction Flip Video Manual, how to
Speaker 1: reset flip video flip video camera won't power on. Andrew
Speaker 1: tried a few of the tips, but none of them worked.
Speaker 1: Finally came across one that no did that there was
Speaker 1: a little pin prick reset button built into the camera.
Speaker 1: Looked and found that, but was afraid, for sort of
Speaker 1: the obvious reason too, to trigger it, not knowing if
Speaker 1: it would wipe out the memory of the camera. After
Speaker 1: a couple of days of trying to fix the flip
Speaker 1: cam on his own, Andrew started calling data recovery experts.
Speaker 1: I mean I called three data recovery companies. One was
Speaker 1: what are you talking about? Two We're sorry, we don't
Speaker 1: do that click more or less. Um. None of them
Speaker 1: were willing to go near this. All said that they
Speaker 1: dealt only with external storage devices. What I sort of
Speaker 1: expected to happen was someone would say to me, sure,
Speaker 1: bringing your camera for two hundred bucks, three hundred bucks,
Speaker 1: we can do it. And figured they would take the camera,
Speaker 1: they would do three minutes of work, they would get
Speaker 1: the video. They would charge me three for three minutes
Speaker 1: of work. And I was signed with that, Like I
Speaker 1: was willing to be suckered on this one. If I
Speaker 1: could get the video. I called two of the data
Speaker 1: recovery companies that Andrew remembered, using right with you, please
Speaker 1: hold both on site and in lab twenty four hours
Speaker 1: a day, seven days per week, so if you suffer
Speaker 1: data loss, don't panic, we can help. One said it
Speaker 1: would run me anywhere from five hundred dollars. They warned
Speaker 1: that the video might be lost since their specialists were
Speaker 1: not experts in internal data recovery. Internal data is tricky
Speaker 1: because it requires the device itself to be functioning in
Speaker 1: order to get at the memory, so if the device
Speaker 1: is dead, you can't really get to the data. In
Speaker 1: other words, Andrews still wasn't any closer to getting his
Speaker 1: videos back. That's when I got Andrew's email. It was
Speaker 1: in March. Jonathan is an entrepreneur and part of his
Speaker 1: work requires lots of travel, so it took some time
Speaker 1: to get in touch, but eventually he did agree to help,
Speaker 1: and over a three months or so of email ping pong,
Speaker 1: we followed Jonathan through China and sailing across the Atlantic,
Speaker 1: all these off the grid places all right, And finally
Speaker 1: in May I got word that Andrew's camera was in
Speaker 1: the hands of someone named Taylor Libby. He'd been part
Speaker 1: of the original flip cam engineering team, and Jonathan said
Speaker 1: he was doing a more serious intervention on the camera.
Speaker 1: Taylor is an old college friend of Jonathan's, and after
Speaker 1: the flip cam unit folded, Taylor worked at Apple for
Speaker 1: six years. Now, he's a full time dad two kids
Speaker 1: a little younger than Andrew's son. Jonathan and Taylor still
Speaker 1: casually stay in touch, so he agreed to help salvage
Speaker 1: Andrew's videos. So I got these two cameras UM from
Speaker 1: John and they both appeared dead or or bricked. UM
Speaker 1: the same utility as a brick. They can prop us
Speaker 1: in the door. But Taylor's first challenge was to charge
Speaker 1: up the battery. When batteries are too depleted, an interesting
Speaker 1: thing happens. They can kind of get into a catch
Speaker 1: twenty two spain where they don't they don't even have
Speaker 1: enough battery available to charge the battery. Taylor plugged the
Speaker 1: camera into a USB port that measures currents to see
Speaker 1: if the slightest tremor could be detected. The recipe there
Speaker 1: as you would have to charge it for a few
Speaker 1: minutes and then unplug it, reset it, and then and
Speaker 1: then charge it again. Taylor did this several times, over
Speaker 1: charging and resetting, but no dice. It was behaving in
Speaker 1: a way that didn't look familiar to me, so I
Speaker 1: kind of was worried about that. One didn't didn't think
Speaker 1: that camera was going to be salvageable. So what did Tailor,
Speaker 1: the computer engineer who had helped build the flip cam,
Speaker 1: end up doing. Just like the rest of us, He
Speaker 1: googled it. So I found a video where someone had
Speaker 1: opened up a camera um similar model, and that kind
Speaker 1: of gave me a confidence and had can probably open
Speaker 1: this up without breaking any thing. Taylor dug up a
Speaker 1: flipcam of his own to practice on, and then cracked
Speaker 1: into Andrew's device. After moved a couple of boards and
Speaker 1: got down into where the batteries could see that the
Speaker 1: battery was swollen. This is the same thing that happened
Speaker 1: to those exploiting Samsung batteries a few years back, which
Speaker 1: were banned from airplanes. A swollen battery can be pretty dangerous,
Speaker 1: I'm sure. So Taylor switched out that shot battery with
Speaker 1: a replacement from Amazon. After a few cycles of charges,
Speaker 1: the flipcam was back online and the memory was intact.
Speaker 1: So six months later and we could finally bring Andrew
Speaker 1: his videos. On a morning in June, I went up
Speaker 1: the elevator of a nondescript office in the Financial District
Speaker 1: to meet Andrew for the first time in person. We
Speaker 1: walked across as open plan office floor to a comfortably
Speaker 1: furnished meeting room where I set up my computer. How's
Speaker 1: how's everything going good? Curious? How sorry this took so
Speaker 1: so long? Hot Journey. Taylor sent us the videos via dropbox.
Speaker 1: I opened the shared folder and let Andrew kind of
Speaker 1: click through immediately. He was looking for something specific, the
Speaker 1: video of his father in law and his newborn son. Okay,
Speaker 1: so these were three let's see here, three our files.
Speaker 1: But thank god, that's Ginger home. That's my apartment on
Speaker 1: my old apartment on NY six straight at first video
Speaker 1: show Ginger sitting in a chair holding her swaddled baby boy,
Speaker 1: just got a hospital personal, Good morning, Simmy, and today's
Speaker 1: day of life. Three. We haven't done a ton of
Speaker 1: recording because we've just been so busy. Love in you,
Speaker 1: yup um, and you're very cute and you're doing very well,
Speaker 1: and Ginger is beaming into the camera. You have a
Speaker 1: visitor though, Okay, we're gonna positive video, sorry for Andrew
Speaker 1: was on the edge of his seat. He was certain
Speaker 1: that the visitors they were about to receive were generous parents.
Speaker 1: Maybe the next file would be the video he was
Speaker 1: after today your visitors for Arial who sometimes cs by Jessica.
Speaker 1: The next video of Ginger was a few hours later,
Speaker 1: and Dad's best friend Adam and Nana and Papa. But
Speaker 1: it was filmed after the grandparents had finished their visit.
Speaker 1: So we had the videos from before and after, but
Speaker 1: nothing from the visit itself. So where the hell is it? Queen?
Speaker 1: Before and then the after that was like the one
Speaker 1: in between is maybe it's somewheres. Andrew spent the next
Speaker 1: moments clicking through the folder, making sure he hadn't missed
Speaker 1: a file. He scrutinized the time codes. The two videos
Speaker 1: had been filmed eight hours apart. It's so funny. My
Speaker 1: biggest fear has been that like they got the video
Speaker 1: off the cameras and there was nothing from the hospital,
Speaker 1: or it was like video of watching paint drive or whatever.
Speaker 1: The notion of actually finding the videos from the hospital,
Speaker 1: but just that one not being there never crossed my mind.
Speaker 1: After that meeting with Andrew, I asked Taylor if it
Speaker 1: was possible that the file was lost during the extraction.
Speaker 1: It's not impossible that the file, yeah, but it's it's
Speaker 1: extremely unlikely that Christine's because because one set swapped out
Speaker 1: the battery, that camera behave flow slee and um, there's
Speaker 1: no indication of any type of vile corruption or anything else.
Speaker 1: Taylor did offer one last idea, though, He said that
Speaker 1: now the camera was running again, we might be able
Speaker 1: to see whether the video had accidentally gotten deleted. So
Speaker 1: let's say you had five videos on there, right, and
Speaker 1: you deleted one of them, and now it looks like
Speaker 1: there's four on there. Well, you didn't actually change what's
Speaker 1: in the memory. All you did was change the table
Speaker 1: of contents. But this video is still there. We had
Speaker 1: our doubts about that. How could such an important video
Speaker 1: just to be accidentally erased? What were the chances that,
Speaker 1: of all the videos on the camera, that was the
Speaker 1: one to vanish? But we had to exhaust all of
Speaker 1: our options. So I called back that data company with
Speaker 1: let's call it memorable hold music. So if you stuffer
Speaker 1: data loss, don't panic. We can help. And I started
Speaker 1: a new case the Data Recovery Company as a short
Speaker 1: walk from the office. Um it was Nestla between the
Speaker 1: luxury boutiques of Fifth Avenue. I went into the glass
Speaker 1: entryway of an unmarked skyscraper and up twenty or so floors. I, um,
Speaker 1: I'm here to just drop off that camera. I have
Speaker 1: a case number now. I handed over the camera to
Speaker 1: this receptionist. He was a heavy setman, and he was
Speaker 1: juggling several ringing phones all the while. So then do
Speaker 1: I just wait for someone to kind of reach out? Okay? Okay?
Speaker 1: And how long does that normally take? Okay? Sounds good.
Speaker 1: Within a week we got our answer. The technician had
Speaker 1: run multiple scans for residual data on the camera. He
Speaker 1: did find a fifth file, but it was badly corrupted
Speaker 1: and only appeared to be seven seconds long. This might
Speaker 1: have been seven seconds of Ginger's father or us seven
Speaker 1: seconds of blank video. Christie, do you do you think
Speaker 1: it's possible that Andrew made a mistake and there never
Speaker 1: was a video of his father in law. It's definitely
Speaker 1: a possibility. Andrew told me in our first conversations together
Speaker 1: that he and Ginger couldn't remember the exact details of
Speaker 1: the video, but they did distinctly recall making and watching
Speaker 1: the video all those years ago. Christie, this story is
Speaker 1: so familiar to me. I mean, I myself have so
Speaker 1: many challenges keeping track of all the photographs and videos
Speaker 1: of my family across services and technologies and devices and phones.
Speaker 1: It feels like in the ever increasing advancement of technology,
Speaker 1: we've lost some stability, Like it's hard to keep the
Speaker 1: perhaps coint a phrase, you know, good digital hygiene. Things
Speaker 1: end up getting spread everywhere. Yeah, I mean I was
Speaker 1: talking with friends and family about Andrew's situation and it
Speaker 1: was amazing they all had a similar story. It really
Speaker 1: is an unintended consequence of deck achnology. I mean, we
Speaker 1: value the new thing, but then it's really it's hard
Speaker 1: to go rescue and organize the old things. I was
Speaker 1: looking for my flip cam videos as we were organizing
Speaker 1: this story. I couldn't find them. I mean, it was
Speaker 1: actually lucky that I had posted a few to YouTube.
Speaker 1: And it actually does sort of highlight a role that
Speaker 1: social media can play. Right when we publish videos, they
Speaker 1: become easier to find. Yeah, but then on on the
Speaker 1: flip side of that, we are kind of desensitized to
Speaker 1: ranking the importance of what we post online because we're
Speaker 1: so used to posting everything. Yeah, that's true. And there's
Speaker 1: the same obsolescence challenge, uh, with with apps and online
Speaker 1: as there is with devices like the flip cam, right,
Speaker 1: like such a small percentage of apps actually go on
Speaker 1: to succeed and thrive, and those that do shut down,
Speaker 1: you know, we end up losing that content that we've
Speaker 1: been relying on it to catalog our memories. So now
Speaker 1: that Andrew has his videos, perhaps not the one that
Speaker 1: he was looking for, but some of the other ones,
Speaker 1: uh that chronicle the birth of his first child, do
Speaker 1: you know is he conducting his digital hygiene differently? Is
Speaker 1: he backing up and storing them differently? Well? I gave
Speaker 1: Andrew a call a few days ago. I wanted to
Speaker 1: ask him just that, how is everything going on your end? Good? Yeah,
Speaker 1: London down, summer. I know, it's kind of After some
Speaker 1: pleasant tries, I cut to the chase. Do you back
Speaker 1: up your videos? Now? Have you put Have you put
Speaker 1: the videos that we got for you on another hard
Speaker 1: drive or whatnot? Yes? Well, I mean they're on a
Speaker 1: hard drive there on a cloud there, they're in two
Speaker 1: or three places. You know, a couple of different um places,
Speaker 1: so that should one get lost again, that we will
Speaker 1: have it somewhere else in theory and not need to
Speaker 1: um implore you guys to help us go to the
Speaker 1: ends of here. Oh that's good to hear. I'm glad
Speaker 1: that you've you've taken the ures to his les and learn.
Speaker 1: And that's it for this week's Decrypted. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1: Do you have a story about digital memories lost and found?
Speaker 1: We want to hear from you. You can email us
Speaker 1: at Decrypted at Bloomberg dot net or I'm on Twitter
Speaker 1: at Christy Westgard and I'm at brad Stone. Please subscribe
Speaker 1: to Decrypted wherever you like to listen, and if you
Speaker 1: haven't already, leave us a rating in the review. It
Speaker 1: helps new listeners find the show. This episode was produced
Speaker 1: by Pia Godkari and Liz Smith and edited by brad Stone.
Speaker 1: Thanks also to Aki Itto, Emily Busso and Vandermy Magnus
Speaker 1: Hendrickson to for Foreheads, and Austin Weinstein. Francesca Levi as
Speaker 1: head of Bloomberg Podcasts. We'll see you next week.