Transcript of #340 Byron Tau - The Government Doesn't Just Spy on You. It Buys You.

Byron Tao, welcome to the show.

Thanks so much for having me.

My pleasure. My pleasure. So like I said, I heard about you in an earlier episode. Your book got shouted out. And so it took us a couple of years, but here you are.

Well, glad to be here.

Yeah, it's good to have you here. So we're going to be talking about basically digital surveillance, what they do with all that information and all this stuff. And this can be kind of a dry subject, so I just kind of want to preface it before we get going. Have you heard about this pricing surveillance?

Yeah, this is a new thing where essentially companies are trying to figure out what the maximum is that you're willing to pay. Try to extract as much money from you as possible through all the data they collect about you.

So I just want to paint a picture real quick, you know, because you get a lot of people and they're like, ah, what does it matter about what are they— what, I'm not trying to hide anything, or, you know. And so I know Walmart is— I think Walmart, and I think there's another big company too. Is it Amazon?

I'd be surprised if most big companies weren't at least thinking about some of this stuff.

So imagine, so basically Walmart is, they want to do surveillance on us all and figure out the maximum amount you're willing to pay. And so just, here's a little scenario. You pull into Walmart, they got the flock cameras, flock cameras talk to the internal cameras, they all talk to each other, and then they're going to have these digital price tags on all the products inside the stores that appear when you look at the product. Well, I mean, just through facial recognition, your phones, all these other things, that those— these cameras and these data systems are all going to be able to talk to each other and display the price that they think that you specifically are willing to pay for each individual product within the store. And so it's— it just falls into this mass surveillance hysteria that everybody is getting extremely concerned about. And, and so this is, this is some of the stuff that we're gonna, that we're gonna talk about today.

Yeah, I think companies, generally speaking, for many, many years now have started to see consumers as data, right? They want to know about you. They want to know about your purchase journey. They want to know about your background. They want to know about your interests. And they use all of that to, to— historically, they've used it to target you with advertising. But increasingly, we're at a We're in an environment where there's enough data out there about you and there's enough of a consumer profile out there about you, whether that's stuff you put out yourself or your purchase history or things they're inferring about you. But yeah, companies are going to be able to start making pricing decisions based on all the stuff that they know about you. And that's a lot.

I mean, it's just crazy to think about, you know? You go, you go to the store and it's— you think it'd be the same price for everybody, no matter how much money you make, no matter any of that. But I mean, it's basically— I think it's all going to be individualized pricing based off what car you drive, what you bought on the internet, you know, all of these, what you're wearing, everything, where you live, you know. And they'll talk to the stores so that they can charge you the maximum amount that they think you're going to pay. And And just going through the outline and doing some research on you, I mean, I did not realize that— I knew that the marketing agencies that collect all this data, I knew it was horrible. I thought the government kind of had their own arm in this, but it sounds like they don't really need their own arm because the marketing agencies that collect all the data from your phone, through the apps, through your tires, through your the vacuums, through TVs, through everything. They're just, they're so good at collecting that they just take the block of it and sell it to the US government.

Yeah, that's right. And this has been going on for a while, but it's accelerated as we've all started putting more and more information about ourselves online. So this originally started with stuff like, well, you know, these data brokers will collect your property history, like who, you know, who bought a certain house. They might get a little information about your mortgage. They might at some point have started, you know, getting consumer lists, right? right? Were you the kind of person that subscribed to a magazine about pets or cooking or guns? And so they gradually started amassing more and more information about people, right up to the current moment where they essentially can, you know, track a lot about your browsing history. They can track a lot about your movements through the world. They know how to link your social profiles to your real identity. And yes, governments have realized that there's a ton of corporate data out there, that consumers are voluntarily handing it over in many cases, and that if they just open their wallet, they can often get information that they would otherwise either be forbidden from getting, because you've worked in the government.

There are all sorts of rules and regulations about when you can target people and how you can target people. But if you buy the data on the open market, some of those rules go out the door. And so, yes, this is a phenomenon That's been increasing in recent years and is only going to keep increasing as long as we keep pouring data about ourselves onto the web.

Well, that's what we'll be talking about for the majority of the day. So let me start you off with an introduction though. Byron Tao, you're an investigative reporter currently at ProPublica following your tenure with Politico and the Wall Street Journal. You're the author of Means of Control: which focused on surfacing the intersection of corporate data gathering and government surveillance. And just this past May, you won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting regarding an investigation into mass surveillance tools built in Silicon Valley, advanced in China, and brought home for secret new uses by the Border Patrol. Congratulations on that, by the way.

Thank you.

And so before we get started, a couple of things to knock out here real quick. I have a Patreon account. They've been with me since the beginning. We've turned it into one hell of a community. I think it's almost 200,000 strong now. And so they get the opportunity to ask every single guest a question.

Okay.

This is from Jesse Martin. Your reporting has shown that commercially available location data can map the movements of phones around military installations, intelligence facilities, and the homes of the people who work there. If a foreign service can simply buy that from an ad broker, has the concept of OPSEC for operators and their families already collapsed? And does anyone in government have a serious answer for it?

That's a great question. And I think even in this current conflict in Iran, we've seen reports out of CENTCOM that the Iranians may have indeed targeted American soldiers using commercially available data. This is a really, really hard problem to solve. There are some solutions. There are sort of hardened phones. There are rules you can put in place, but they're very, very difficult. And it takes discipline. It takes discipline from the leadership of the military. It takes a certain amount of technical expertise, right? It's not just putting your phone in airplane mode. There's a lot of different things you need to do to harden a device and to make sure that, you know, operational security is maintained. And, you know, it requires understanding a bewildering array of data that's collected. And so there are people that are working on this problem. There's probably not enough people that are working on this problem, but it is a serious and ongoing ongoing threat to the people that go overseas and serve our country.

Is there— I mean, I know the FTC's getting involved in the, in the, in the surveillance pricing stuff, but is this, is this even a discussion in the U.S. government right now as far as just from, you know, from a civilian standpoint? I mean, it's so invasive.

So, I mean, I think, um, you know, historically I think the government, and I think this is, you know, leading members of both parties, have not wanted to really interfere in the internet at the very beginning, right? Because they thought it was gonna be this tremendous tool for the advancement of human flourishing and freedom and commerce, and they thought that onerous regulations might interfere with that. And that was a reasonable position to take, you know, 20, 30 years ago. I think as we've seen the internet mature, we've really seen a lack of serious policy discussion about what the rules should be around consumer data, data protection, and we've seen a real leadership vacuum in Congress. I mean, um, you know, the internet's 30-some years old at this point, and, you know, we're the last remaining major industrial democracy that does not have a comprehensive privacy law. We have a patchwork of different laws that are state by state. We have some executive orders that have been meant to deal with some of this from a purely national security basis, right, like trying to stop TikTok and other data flows out of the country. But writ large, I mean, our lawmakers, our political leaders have never really written rules of the road for digital services.

Wow. You said we're the last one?

Yeah, that's something you hear scholars say, but essentially, I think that's correct, that at a national level, we're the last real remaining, you know, major democracy and major economy that doesn't have a privacy law that applies across the board to digital services. Yeah, I think that's true.

Well, I mean, just from our previous discussion before we even started this, I mean, I'll bet they're thinking about it now. I mean, I wasn't even planning on going into this, but I mean, you're— so right now you're working on how foreign governments, specifically Iran, but there's a lot of other ones I'm sure, are buying the data from US marketing firms about us and targeting U.S. soldiers, operatives, State Department personnel overseas? Can you— could you—

Yeah, I mean, it's something I'm interested in because it grows out of my book. But there was a letter, I think a few weeks ago or a few months ago, from Senator Ron Wyden's office. And he asked the Pentagon straight up, are there any reports that Iranians had targeted American soldiers? And the Pentagon answered that, yes, they had received credible intelligence reports saying that, that that Iranians had used commercially available information, information collected from data brokers, to potentially target U.S. soldiers. They didn't give a tremendous amount of detail, but they said they had received that reporting. And so, yeah, this, you know, I've, I've focused in this book primarily on what our government does with this data, but this data is out there and it's available for sale, and our adversaries can and do buy it. You know, there, there have been Um, uh, there have been reports of other foreign governments getting this information, particularly Israeli companies. And, you know, Israel is an ally of the United States, but it would not be at all difficult for China, Russia, Iran to obtain the exact same data that we're talking about here. And CENTCOM seems to believe that it's at least credible that it was used to target Americans.

Wow. Do you have a hardened phone?

I do not. Um, I do use a privacy-first cell carrier, and I do put my Apple phone in lockdown mode. But, you know, being a reporter, you have to balance the need for contacting people with putting your phone number out there in many instances and trying to encourage the public to deliver you tips. And so I try to get a balance with my own personal security.

Well, I got you a present.

Oh, yeah?

I sure did. So here you go.

Oh, thank you.

You're welcome.

This is a hardened phone. Should I open it now?

Go ahead, open it up.

All right, how do I do this?

Oh boy.

You're gonna have to help me. Oh boy.

All right, here we go.

Oh, there's a snap.

Tell me about this. All right, so I'll tell you about that. So you wrote about a company called Glacier.

I did.

In your book. And I wound up going into business with Glacier because this is something I've been extremely concerned with. My podcast got a little political. Now I'm affiliated with heads of state and all these other people. used to work for the agency. I, I get paranoid about this stuff. So anyways, I reached out to them because I didn't want all these people who have my numbers. I don't know what they're sucking out of my phone, talking to people like you, talking to former colleagues and what's being sucked out of the phone. I wanted a hardened phone for everybody on my team.

Mm-hmm.

So I reached out to some former colleagues, you know, about what's, what's the latest and greatest hardened phone. And they pointed me towards a company called Glacier. I wanted to go into business with Glacier, and— but, but first and foremost, I wanted their product. Well, their product is awesome, but it's $10,000 a phone roughly, plus another double that for the service. And, um, and so I lost interest and I said, look, I, I want something that we can do for everybody, Mm-hmm. that, that everyday consumers can can, can afford. It's not— nobody can afford this. And so we developed an application that takes a lot of the best features out of the phone and put it into an app.

Mm-hmm.

And the app's called Glacier. And so basically, in a nutshell, what Glacier does, I think you're going to love this. One, burner numbers. So my number gets leaked all over the internet. I'm sure your number, you know, if you're an investigative reporter, you know what that's like. And so we created— you can get up to 5 burner numbers. And so what that is, you know, you pass your number out, it starts getting leaked, you're getting spammed. You don't want your— the hotel, the pizza place, the political campaign you donate to, any of that stuff, the nonprofit that you do. Everybody's selling your shit constantly. So you hand out the burner number. When you really— when you, when you come to the realization it's been compromised, you burn the number, you get a new one. You can pick any area code in the US. Then the other thing we did is we did secure DNS.

Mm-hmm.

Which keeps the applications that you're not using that are selling all your information, where you are, what you buy, who you're with, all that stuff. It keeps that stuff localized on your phone and blocks it from being uploaded and sold to the marketing firms or the US government or foreign governments. And then the last thing that we did was we put the secure— we put a VPN in there that's— we don't hold any data other than the email that you sign up with. And they're all American VPNs. So that's what we developed. And we made the app as simple as you could possibly imagine. Basically, the real winner in there is the burner numbers and the DNS.

And so that's built into a commercially available app that most consumers can get without dropping $100,000— $10,000 on a secure phone.

Yep. And it's super simple. You— I mean, you connect to the DNS, you shut the app off, and it is done. You don't ever have to open it again.

So can I ask you a question? What's your experience been like with the hardened phone? Because, um, like you mentioned, I, I did talk to Glacier in writing this book and, and a few other people who made hardened phones. And one of the things they said that the challenge was you have to make a hardened phone that people want to use, right? Because if you have a hardened phone and it doesn't work in all the normal ways that people want to use a cell phone, then they end up just getting a non-hardened phone and carrying both of them around together. And then you've defeated the point of the hardened phone. So what's been your experience like using the hardened phone? Does it, does it do everything a normal cell phone does?

It does. It's an iPhone, you know? And so when talking to them, that's because I've had other hardened phones, but they were, they weren't the iPhone and I think most Americans, they— life revolves around Apple, you know what I mean? Unfortunately, it just is what it is.

It's hard to escape that ecosystem.

And so they've found a way to harden that, harden the damn iPhone. And, uh, it's, it's got some, you know, more advanced features on the app, but it's, it's, it's just— it's having an iPhone, they— you know what I mean? And if, if they detect suspicious activity, you get an email, they follow up with it, they track where it went, what's happening. And if it is something malicious, then you get notified, you get a phone call from them. Some other stuff that they can do that the app can't do is, for me, we're all over the world and we're kicking over some rocks that a lot of people don't want kicked over. And And so what, what they can do is they can actually upload a footprint, uh, like a false footprint into your phone to make it look like you've been there for a long time and delete it when you're gone, you know what I mean? So that it doesn't— so you come back to the US, doesn't look like I was doing an interview in Taiwan. I go to Taiwan, it doesn't look like I came from the US. I go to Dubai to interview there, I, I have a whole new footprint uploaded that's, uh, you know what I mean?

Mm-hmm.

So it makes you, it makes you blend in, you know, digitally, and it, it doesn't raise any red flags when you're in and out of all these countries. And there's some kidnapping-type features, um, some of that kind of stuff.

I'm looking forward to checking it out.

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For me, that's the difference. It keeps things secure without slowing me down. It's also made right here in the USA, creating real jobs here at home. They've also got other products like the UCan, which uses that same system but gives you more storage for your firearm, ammo, and gear so you can keep everything secure without sacrificing access. For a limited time, our listeners get 10% off at Stopbox when you use code SRS at checkout. Head to stopboxusa.com and use code SRS for 10% off your entire order. After you purchase, they will ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them our show sent you. So how did you— I mean, how did you kind of get your start into this? What caught your attention Because like I said, this can be a pretty dry subject, especially 2 years ago when, you know what I mean, when you were getting into it.

Yeah, actually, I mean, the story starts almost 6 years ago at this point, maybe even more. Um, but, you know, I was at a dinner party, um, and somebody was telling me about a program that they were working on, um, that involved the Department of Defense, or the Department of War as it's now being called, buying up large amounts of commercially available information on the open market and using it to do some kind of counterterrorism work. And, you know, this was something I had never heard of, right? Like, I didn't know that you could just go out and broker information that showed pretty precise and granular movement of phones. And, you know, this was a vector of surveillance that I had simply not considered, you know? Like, I thought I understood— you know, I was a Washington reporter. I'd covered courts on and off. I knew I knew about how law enforcement was supposed to work, and the idea that there was this data set out there of the movement of hundreds of millions of devices, um, was, was kind of shocking to me. So I'm sitting there, you know, tell me more, that's, that's an interesting program.

Um, and, uh, you know, I, I got some of the tale. Um, I got some of the technical explanation that, oh, you know, um, it comes off these apps like weather apps and games. Um, it comes when you opt in your Your phone number's not in there, your name isn't in there. You're known by an anonymized identifier, a string of letters and numbers. But, you know, we can generally figure out who you are, right? Because where a phone is at night and where it goes during the day and where it goes back to at night is pretty good correlation to a person's real-world movement and identity, right? I'm the only person that gets up at my home in Washington, D.C., and goes to my office in downtown Washington, D.C., and comes home every night, right? My fiancée wakes up there, but she goes to a different office. And so it's not all that difficult to get down to people's identity in these datasets. And so hearing this story, I thought this was rather extraordinary and a kind of surveillance I just hadn't considered. And so, you know, I kept it in the back of my mind, and I started reporting on it.

And, you know, the opportunity really came to delve deep into it when I was kind of a new reporter on the Justice Department and law enforcement beat back in 2020, I remembered this tip from, from a few years before, and I started digging into it. And I— and at this time, the program had matured a bit. DHS had started to use this data to do, um, kind of internal security and, and tracking of unlawful border crossings and trying to find unlawful immigrants in the interior of the country, and had started to start using it for ordinary law enforcement, right? Kidnappings and, and all sorts of other things. And all doing it without a judge's supervision, without a warrant, and without most people in America America knowing that this program was, was happening. And so that's when I really started to delve into it. I published my first story on the, the topic of commercial data tracking in February of 2020, and I've been reporting on it ever since.

6 years ago.

Yeah. And I think— yeah, now that I think of it, I think the tip came in 2017 or 2018.

Wow. Wow. How much has this advanced?

You know, a couple things have happened since I started Working on it. I mean, you know, on the one hand, people are much more privacy aware, and, um, Apple and Google have made some changes into how much data phones can collect without people realizing. So, I mean, in the early days of the iPhone, people were putting all sorts of crazy stuff on their device and clicking, sure, you can track my GPS location, and it would ping the phone every 2 seconds. And, you know, today Apple doesn't really like to let you as a developer, if you're trying to make a game or an app that does that, Apple doesn't really want you to do that, right? It wants people to know how many times an app has tracked your location. So, so now there's a big pop-up that comes up every few days if an app tries to do that and says, yeah, this game collected your location 5,000 times in the last few days. Are you sure you want to continue to allow this? And so a lot more people have opted out. Um, on the other hand, there's all sorts of new ways to infer people's identity and data, right?

Like, there's just— none of this is stopping, right? So there's other technologies that have matured. So there's just a lot more license plate readers out there than there were 5 or 6 years ago. There's a lot more connected cars that are broadcasting data to car manufacturers. You're often pairing your phone with your car, right? And who knows what data is passing between the car and the phone and the manufacturers of different things. And then just, you know, even if you turn off all these location permissions and don't download shady apps, you're still getting served ads every day, and those ads can collect information about you. All the people that are sitting there trying to serve you ads get a ton of information about you, even if it's not your precise GPS location. For example, if I connected to the Wi-Fi network here in your studio, someone might well know that I'm here at an IP address that is here in Tennessee. And so, There's all sorts of ways to continue to track people, and marketers aren't just giving up because these technical changes have been made.

What information that's being sucked out of, whether it's your phone, your TV, your vacuum, your vehicle, your tires, FlockCam, what concerns you the most?

Actually, what I would say is the aggregation of all this data is what concerns me the most. In, in isolation, you know, a snapshot of your license plate driving down a road is just one data point. But when you correlate it with all the other things that you're generating in terms of data trails, it makes it very easy to put together a pretty holistic picture of your life. And it's not one single data set, it's not one particular technology, it's the aggregation of all these different bits and bytes of information about us, all these different data points, some of them in government hands, some of them in commercial hands, some of them only available if you go get a judge to give you a search warrant, some of them available on the open market. But the data's out there, and increasingly there's a lot of pressure to weave it together, to put it together, to sell it, to trade it, to share it with the government for public safety. All of that leads down a path in which it's very hard to exist in a modern society, even a democracy, without giving up a ton of information to parties that you don't know who you're giving it to.

So how are they able to— are they able to piece all this together? You know, when they take all these different ways to collect on you, how do they— how does it all come together? into, you know, a personal profile snapshot?

Yeah, I mean, I think it depends on the government agency, and it depends on the mission that they've been charged with doing, right? So I think our military and our intelligence agencies are largely focused overseas, and there they're obtaining the exact same kind of data that's available on Americans, and they're doing intelligence gathering, right? They're spotting and assessing and trying to recruit foreign spies. They're trying to understand the behavior of important people in, in in foreign countries, and sometimes they're doing counterterrorism work, right? They're trying to target people, and often kinetically. But then you think about an agency like the Department of Homeland Security. Well, they're actually much more inward-focused, right? They're trying to look at who's coming into the United States, what goods are coming into the United States, who's applying for a visa. When you're here, what do you do? What's happening around this border region, which, by the way, encompasses many, many parts of the United States, including a lot of our major cities? You know, DHS has authorities within 100 miles of a border, and that includes airports, that includes coastal borders, and that includes the land borders. And so this is an agency that's very powerful and has a lot of authorities to do things in that zone and is interested in understanding what happens in that zone.

So that's an agency that's interested in collecting a lot more information about the American public, right? That's the agency that wants your face so that you can go quickly through the touchless TSA PreCheck. It's the agency that wants to know who you're traveling with and whether you pose a threat to civil aviation. It's the agency that wants to know who— where visitors are going and what they're doing. And that's a perfectly legitimate mission, but they're collecting a ton of information as part of that. And then you think about local police departments, right? They're charged with solving crimes and issuing speeding tickets and, you know, and just general public safety. Then they also get a piece of this information, right? They're thinking about, well, who's saying what on social media about local politicians, about the local school system? system. Um, you know, where are cars going, uh, in the mornings and the evenings? Are they, are they traveling to downtown? Are they going to known drug trafficking spots? And so there's— depends on who the they is. But in all of these cases, in all these government agencies, they're getting increasing amounts of data, much of it from commercial sources.

And a lot of this is being done without a tremendous amount of thought public conversation or guardrails around what the limits are, what the rules are about accessing this data, when you can access this data, who gets to access this data. Some of those conversations just aren't really happening. Let's—

what about— I mean, I wasn't even ready to go into the government yet, but what about just the civilian, like, just your basic corporation that's collecting data? I mean, do these all What are they collecting?

Yeah.

What do they do with it? And when we're talking about all these different devices, how does it come together into one specific profile piece about Byron Towle?

Yeah. So, I mean, first of all, corporations are very interested in where I live and what I do for a living and how much money I make. Right. That, that helps them target products and ads to me. It helps them know, am I a consumer that's interested in a Lexus or am I interested in a used Nissan Versa? That's a helpful data point. So they'll pull property records based on where I live. They'll get email addresses, right? That's how we get most of our communication from companies these days, is these things that fill up our inbox with offers. And often that comes from you giving your email address to a company when you want to buy something. Often those companies will sell or rent your email address to data brokers. Beyond that, they're interested in your purchasing habits, right? So like, what did you buy? What did— what are you interested in? They're interested in your browsing habits. So that's what cookies are. As you move around the web, they're, they're kind of trying to create a profile of you. Is this someone who's interested in sports or cars or guns or ballet or liquor?

So, so it's, it's a tremendous amount of consumer information. And then, you know, if you're talking about digital devices, companies are trying to extract information off of those too, right? So when I, when I go to a store, they want to know if I'm in that store, so they'll buy geolocation data. Did I inadvertently let the Starbucks app collect my information? Well, now a bunch of data brokers know I was at Starbucks because I've enabled GPS on that particular app because I want the rewards when I walk in there. So, so companies are building these pretty detailed dossiers. You know, some of them are kind of aggregated in the hands of data brokers, Some of them are their own internal data on you and you as their customer. And sometimes they trade this information amongst themselves or sell it when they go bankrupt. So companies know a lot about you too.

So do the— how do I say this? So we have different sets of data being collected from different devices, I guess, is what I'm trying to say. And so do, do those data sets come together in a centralized location to give a better snapshot of who you are?

So there's not— this is kind of where the primary difference between us today in the United States and in other Western countries and China is, is that no, today there is not one gigantic master repository of all the information about me. as, as a citizen, as a consumer sitting in a single database. It's spread out, it's dispersed. The Chinese model, the authoritarian model is no, you have to give it all to the public safety entities. And they're going to, you know, they're going to look at your power data to figure out if you're doing Bitcoin mining. They're going to look at your public transit data to make sure you're not meeting with subversive people. You know, they're going to read your text messages. That's what an authoritarian government looks like. Today we don't quite have that. We have a lot of different databases spread out a lot of diff— in a lot of different places, some of them in government hands, some of them in corporate hands, um, some of them available for sale, some of them not available for sale. But the data that's collected on Westerners is not all that dissimilar from the data that's collected on, on Chinese citizens.

It's just not all quite 100% weaved together in some sort of public safety portal.

Are there any— I mean, that's actually surprising. Are there any companies that are— I mean, why wouldn't in a capitalistic society you would think that would be— I mean, I think, was it Elon Musk that was saying, you know, data is the next oil?

Yeah.

I mean, lots of these guys are saying that.

So there's a lot of pressure to do exactly that, right? For a lot of different reasons. Some of it, um, some of it like public health and transportation planning, right? Can we pull in all this corporate data and, and all these kind of this movement data and the, you know, public people's public transit trips and their toll transponders? Can we pull all that into, into a portal to do transportation planning? And then once it's in a government database for transportation planning, well, now there's a public safety imperative. Well, you know, can we, can we detect when someone's fleeing from the authorities or there's a, there's an Amber Alert on a missing child? Maybe we should pull all that transportation data into a public safety database. So there's pressure to do a lot of that. In fact, that's a lot of what Doge was talking about when Elon Musk came into government is taking all these different databases that exist for different reasons and trying to merge them to give the central government, the federal government, a better picture of everything that's happening. Well, sometimes those databases are in different places for a reason, because we don't necessarily want, you know, our medical data being used for immigration enforcement, or we don't want our tax data to be used by immigration authorities, or we don't want our our toll transponders to be used to track us around without a search warrant.

And so that's why a nuanced conversation about the dangers of this kind of data fusion is really important. And I think, you know, the Doge moment was an interesting one where there was a lot of pushback about this. But this is, in many ways, the difficulty of obtaining data is a privacy protection. It exists, but the privacy protection is that it's hard to get and it's hard to merge. And there's a lot of pressure now to say, well, have this data and we have these important problems, let's just dump it all in one place.

Are there any companies that are close? What about something like a Palantir?

Yeah, I mean, I think Palantir is one of many companies that's out there to solve exactly this problem, right? Is to take different disparate datasets and try to extract unique insights from them. So yes, I mean, Palantir doesn't themselves buy up all the data or get it, But they exist to help government agencies go and take different databases and merge them together and say, well, now we can take your toll transponder data and combine it with the crime data, and— and I'm not saying this is happening, but this is a hypothetical project you could do— and look for criminals who pass through tolls. And maybe we can start to look for not just known criminals, but people whose driving patterns look suspicious, right? They take a 1-day trip from Houston to the border region, Does that mean they're— and then they turn around. Does that mean they're drug smugglers? Does that mean they're human smugglers? Maybe we should find out based just on that pattern of behavior. So Palantir— and in fairness to Palantir, they're not the only ones out there, right? You could do this with Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets if you had enough computing power.

But yes, there's all sorts of companies that are out there, and they're trying to help governments and private entities. Palantir sells to private companies, including some journalistic outlets, to take all the data they have and merge it and make sense of it.

How— I mean, how many of these companies are there that are out there collecting? Do you have any idea?

That are collecting data on the global population? Probably tens of thousands. If you just look at— take one example, you know, all the ads that you see that Google serves you, that's a product called AdX. Google probably has several thousand partners that are able to serve ads and also get information off of Google's ad servers about the people they're trying to serve ads to. And that's just Google. That's just one company. You know, there's a Meta ad service. There's plenty of smaller ones that don't have a consumer-facing business that no one's ever heard of. Each of those has hundreds, if not thousands, of other business partners. And so Um, that's just in advertising, never mind, you know, the other parts of the economy that also collect data. So there's, there's thousands, tens of thousands, maybe even more.

How are they— I mean, it's— could anybody start one of these companies?

That's a good question. Um, so you need a little capital, right? Um, but to access some of this data data. Some of it's cheap. So you can go on websites right now. There's one called Data Raid, and you can go on there with your credit card. You can get a sampling of data. And there's a few others.

There's some—

it's called Alt Data. There's conferences. There's just these places where you can go and get mobility data. You can get internet data. You can get some point-of-sale data. Some of that's only a few hundred or a few thousand dollars. You know, I've— in the course of writing my book, I had a very good researcher who's essentially a private investigator, and he said, yeah, I have a contractor that can go look up the movement of a phone for you, that can see if there's anyone in there. He'll do that for $2,500 for you. You know, give him a name of a person who you want to track, and he'll run the data for you. He'll see if we can find where this person goes, and he'll give you a full report about it.

So you can get a full life pattern just like that. Yeah.

I mean, again, it doesn't always work, right? data is spotty. Some people, some people are more careful with their phones than others. But yeah, $2,500. This was a few years ago. Maybe the prices have gone up, maybe they've gone down. I don't know. Um, but yeah, private investigators are out there and can do this for you for, for what I think is relatively cheap. Um, and then, you know, if you and I wanted to set up a company and start, you know, getting data on, let's say, mobility data on, you know, a state in the United States or a small country, we could probably do that for a few thousand dollars. And then, you know, if you and I wanted to start up a defense contractor and, um, you know, broker, uh, commercially available mobility data— so the data that comes off of your phone when you opt into, you know, the weather app— um, to the government, and we wanted the whole feed of the whole world, you know, the contracts I've seen on this are 6 figures, you know. So yeah, we could buy the data for 6 figures and sell it at a 20% markup to the government.

And, um, That could be our business model.

So you just— you're— it's literally just a middleman. We'll buy it from this company, sell it to the government. How, how long do they hold this data? How long before the data becomes irrelevant?

It depends, right? Like, you could be one of these companies that wanted to hold on to it forever, um, and, you know, keep years and years and years worth of mobility data on the whole world. Like, if you wanted to pay for that storage and it was important to whatever mission you were doing, you could do it. It's, it's a matter of, do you want to pay the Amazon cloud storage bill? Um, and do you have a customer for it? And is it still relevant? Um, uh, you know, most of the time data's kind of stale after a few years. Um, because, you know, like, are we really going to want to rewind 10 years back in someone's life? I mean, how relevant is that going to be? But I could see companies or government agencies being— saying, you know, actually, maybe we should keep a lot of this so we can look back historically if there's a reason I'm picky with eyewear because I wear it every day.

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Ready to upgrade your eyewear? Check them out for yourself at roka.com and use code SRS for 20% off sitewide at checkout. That's roka.com, code SRS. Let's get into— I want to get into the laws again about, you know, who's protecting us, if anybody. Is there anybody in the government that is I mean, is this even a concern to them? Or, or are the— I mean, lobbying firms, are, are they all lobbied? Are all— I mean, it seems as time goes on, more and more and more, it just seems like all of our elected officials are owned by lobbying firms, at least from my vantage point.

Well, I mean, certainly almost all these companies have a significant presence in Washington. And, and, you know, advertising alone, never mind the data broker economy, is, is probably a trillion-dollar global industry. So there's a lot of financial incentives that keep the data market afloat. Not only that, but artificial intelligence companies increasingly need data to train these models that everyone seems very excited about and that they think will transform the economy in many ways. So data is becoming even more important than ever. So the answer is complicated, right? I think there are— there is interest in the national security space. We have seen administrations of both parties, including the Trump administration and the Biden administration, try to do things that limit the flow of data to adversarial countries. Um, and we saw Congress on a bipartisan basis a few years ago pass a law that said, you know, you, you know, you can't transfer certain kinds of data to Iran, North Korea, China, and Russia, among others.

Why would they allow any of our data to go to any country at all?

Well, that's a good question.

Even allies? Israel? Any Yeah.

Um, I mean, the honest—

Spying on our own citizens.

The honest answer is because there's so much cross-border data flows that it would maybe break the global economy. You know, that, that the way the internet works is that sometimes you'll ping a server in Europe and download your own Google Drive file from Europe because that's just where Google's cloud decided was the most efficient place to store your file at that given moment. Moment. And, you know, companies in these countries need to swap data, or they say they need to swap data with one another. At the same time, there are countries that have very strict data export rules. So, so Europeans have increasingly started to pass laws that say, you know, if any company is gonna hold data on our, on our citizens, it sits in a server that sits physically in our country under our control. That's called data sovereignty. China is very, very strict. It does not allow American companies to go into China and just start collecting huge amounts of data on the Chinese population because they've decided that, you know, their national security imperatives are more important than whatever commerce benefits would flow from letting that kind of data market exist.

So the honest answer is these multinational corporations have made the case successfully so far to Congress that it would disrupt commerce too much to do something like that in the United States.

What do you think about that?

Well, you know, I'm a reporter, so it's, it's, it's my job to kind of just tell, tell people how this is. I think there are ways that Congress could solve this problem. It could mandate that Americans' data stay within the United States and stay on servers that are physically controlled by American companies. It could insist on that. It could make it much harder to transfer bulk U.S. data to even allied countries, right? You could stop data brokers from selling to any foreigner, and, and that would at least, um, uh, that would at least kind of clamp down on some of this export of data that we're seeing. Um, but that's just a choice Congress hasn't made, and, you know, I can't make it for them. I can just tell them what the consequences are.

I mean, couldn't a foreign adversary just— I mean, buy US data from a foreign— from a different foreign country?

Yeah, and that happens all the time.

So that— so this— so the protection to North Korea and China and all this other bullshit is just— yeah, it's completely obsolete.

They have to set up a shell company in Germany. That's what they will have to do to get the data. Yes, and there's very little way to police that.

So it does nothing? Nothing at all?

It adds a— it adds a layer that, um, potentially pays for some compliance law firms that, uh, the checks and boxes. But in— if you're asking, does it shut down the global trade and U.S. data and the flow of it to our adversaries, I would say the answer is no.

Would you say that technology outran the law?

Oh, 100%. In, in this instance, um, yes, that, you know, we stood up and created a digital society so quickly and we simply didn't have time or didn't thoughtfully do it when it came to writing rules. And I mean, historically, Congress has actually done a pretty good job. I mean, if you, if you look before the digital era in the 20th century, Congress, you know, made some reasonable compromises around privacy versus security. So, you know, when, when telephone wiretaps first came up, and originally the Supreme Court said, yeah, well, you know, you, you don't need a warrant to wiretap people. You don't have an expectation of privacy because, you know, sound is traveling on a physical wire, and if someone grabs the wire and listens in on it, well, you don't need privacy. Well, Congress said, yeah, that's kind of crazy. That's not some— that's not a world we want to live in. So they, they passed a law in the 20th century that said, you know, you want to listen in on 2 people's private phone calls, you need to go to a judge. You need to have a reason to do so.

do so.

Um, you know, Congress did that with, with all, all other, all sorts of other data. It did it in the '90s with health data. It said, yeah, doctors can't just willy-nilly give away your, your private health information. No, we're gonna, we're gonna control that. It did that in the '70s with credit information. Credit information is very well controlled. Um, there's, there's a lot of laws around it. What it didn't do when the internet came about is do any of those things for digital information.

Geez, but it kind of seems like— it just feels like they have access to just about everything. It feels like we don't even have a Fourth Amendment anymore.

In, in, in a lot of ways, um, you know, that's true, right? Like, if, if there's data that's collected from, um— sorry, there's data that's collected from a company, a private company, um, the Fourth Amendment no longer applies.

Wow.

It's because it's a commercial transaction. The government is just getting it in an, in an ordinary— it's just buying the information, right? So you, you do need a warrant to go look at somebody's cell phone movement patterns if you go to their cell carrier, right? You, you you— the government can't go to AT&T and say, you know, give me all of Sean's movements over the last 30 days. But if you've opted into a weather app that collects your information, well, all of a sudden, uh, they don't need that warrant, right? They— the weather app can sell it to them. And so that is this loophole at the heart of our current Fourth Amendment doctrine, um, that several in Congress, a, a very vocal bipartisan majority in Congress, or a group of people in Congress want to fix. But so far, the body hasn't acted.

I mean, do you think it's even— I mean, maybe you don't want to talk about it. I look at our political system and we have people, 50% of these people probably can't even figure out how to open their fucking email. You got people dying in office. We've got, we've got people we don't even know if they're alive. They're sending out little subliminal, subliminal proofs of life with dates on newspapers. And I mean, this is like a foreign language to them. How would they even be— you see what I'm getting at?

I do.

Our governmental structure— maybe not the structure, but the people in there are obsolete.

Yeah, and, and there's a lot of— there's a lot of problems with Congress, um, and one of those problems is expertise. You know, if you are a member of Congress, you have a small staff of a few dozen. Um, you know, these young people— these are often quite young people, and sure, they're tech savvy, um, often, but they're not very well paid, and they don't last very long in these jobs. And they find that, you know, working for a Congress member is great, and making, you know, $60,000 in an expensive metro area just doesn't cut it. And so they'll go to a lobbying firm and make triple that. And so, you know, Congress in many ways is responsible not just for not passing laws about this, but for not even paying good staff and developing the expertise and having the in-house experience to even address these tech questions. Questions. And a lot of that goes back to, um, uh, salaries. It goes back to staffing. It goes back to resources. Congress just doesn't have the capacity to think about and analyze a lot of these technical problems because they don't, they don't pay good people.

Um, the people that are good who, who want to make a career there are often sacrificing, uh, a lot more money that they could be making in the private sector. So, so this is an entrenched problem in our political system that our political system both unresponsive to many of these issues and, and not really well equipped to deal with them.

Let's talk about— we kind of talked about it in a roundabout way, but let's talk about the, the flow of data.

Yeah.

And how it goes, how it gets to the government, where it goes from there. Do all the agencies collaborate on it? I mean, sure. Same with foreign adversaries, foreign governments. Where does it— you know, let's talk about this flow from start to finish.

Yeah. I mean, I can, I can talk about a couple of different data flows, right? So, so, I mean, first of all, there's your just general consumer information. So your address, your voting history, you know, all that is held by data brokers. Your phone number, your email address. And those data brokers work with the government, right? They sell identifiers to government agencies. These are traditional data brokers. They've been around for a long, long time. You know, many of them come out of the 20th century. They've been collecting people's address histories, their phone numbers, their email addresses for a long, long time. That's, that's one set of data, and that they just have a straight-up government sales arm. They sell it. Um, then there's social media data, right? Because the government has been very interested in understanding what people say in social spaces. Um, and, uh, you know, to get that kind of bulk data is, is kind of hard because some of these social networks are closed spaces. So, you know, Twitter, back when it was called that, was very open. You, you could kind of just read, read everything that was public. Facebook is semi- closed, right?

You need to log in, you need to be friends with someone often to see what they're saying. Um, and then there's, there's kind of more purely closed, um, like group, big group chats and, and Telegram channels and, and other things that are, that are more closed. Well, there's all sorts of specialized data brokers that have sprung up to collect public social media data from places like Twitter, to collect semi-private social media data from places like Facebook, and to collect, um, private social media data from group chats, including some, some, you know, there's some very large— there were some very large ISIS-related group chats, or there were some very large, you know, protest-related group chats in the United States. And these companies would infiltrate them under false pretenses, collect all the messages, collect the whole list of everyone that was in them, and sell all that to the government. So that's another kind of data. Then there's the mobility data, the cell phone movement data I was talking about in the thing that I heard about at a dinner party that I spent a couple years unwinding. You know, that comes originally as collected by commercial entities for advertising or for analytics reasons.

And then, you know, there's a couple ways the government gets it. Sometimes they set up a shell company. So there's a defense contractor in, in the United States called Sierra Nevada Corporation, and if you look, they own a very tiny little marketing company that's based, uh, you know, in the, in the Virginia area. And if you go to its website, it's called N-Context, and it's got, you know, it's got a picture of, you know, the, the Y in Philadelphia and a cultural center in, in, you know, New York City. And it says, these are our clients, and, you know, we help people obtain data and, and understand them and do marketing campaigns. But if you look on the government's procurement website, you'll see that this little marketing company actually has a contract with the intelligence community. And, um, that sure looks like a shell company to me, right? That looks like something a defense contractor set up in order to collect large amounts of this of commercially available advertising data and give it to parts of the government that want to do things with it. Um, and so there's just a lot of different ways, um, governments get these, these datasets.

In other cases, some, some vendors have just set themselves up as contractors. They say very openly, we're a government contractor, and we're going to buy data on the open market from other vendors just like us, and we'll sell it— we'll sell to the government that way. We're not going to be even sneaky about it. We're not going to pretend to have a shell company. So there's, there's lots of ways it gets to government agencies.

Are there foreign companies within the US? Israel has some, correct?

Yeah, there was some journalism about several Israeli companies that were doing exactly the same thing. They had set up a fake marketing company. They were really associated with the defense contractor, and they were brokering that data to, to foreign governments, probably not just the Israeli government, but probably many foreign governments. We don't know their exact list of clients, But Israeli companies often perform that service. And, you know, while that's the only kind of foreign one that's been identified, I am, I am certain that other countries are doing the same thing.

But we just allow them to do it.

Well, it's not actually illegal.

Why would they be so interested in what we're doing here in this country?

Why would foreign countries be interested in our population? They want to— they want to understand the world. They want to understand how Americans move around, how they live their lives. If there's high-profile Americans in those datasets, they might want to understand their patterns of movement. If there's American soldiers who've been a little bit careless and not locked down their phones, there might be some operational security risks to those soldiers because adversaries might want to figure out where this unit is going. And they may want to straight up do espionage, right? They may want to recruit people. They may want to know where the person who works at the GM factory goes after work and, and whether they can send, you know, an intelligence officer there to convince them to give, give, you know, critical infrastructure, critical information. So there's all sorts of reasons why a foreign government might be interested in our data.

Have you ever purchased any of these datasets?

Um, I have used tools that, uh, let me look at social media data. I've, um, I've sometimes built little scrapers to scrape open web data. I've had people show me demos of some of the tools that the government's used. Um, and I, when trying to write this book, did ask, um, one of the private investigators who was willing to run people for $2,500, I asked him to look up whether I was in the data and whether some of the CEOs of these data brokers were in the data. But I didn't actually pay him for it. He, he was willing to do it for free. So I've never— I've never outright purchased data, but I know that some journalists have, or they've obtained it. The New York Times did a whole series on what you could tell from location data. And in that case, I don't think they bought it, but they, they got a huge leak of data, and they were able to show what commercially available data was out there. And other journalists do buy data, and they're usually transparent about it when they do.

So it's fairly— it's pretty simple.

Yeah. I mean, there's all sorts of datasets out there. And then, you know, some of these data brokers will actually, you know, give reporters accounts because it's meant for investigators. It's meant to help, you know, understand the world better. And from their point of view, they're collecting data that they're legally allowed to collect and that they're legally allowed to sell as a service. And investigative journalists are just like anyone else. They're trying to understand the world. They're trying to do stories. And some of this data might be valuable. So there's data brokers that have trade data and some internet data and all, and will often provide very useful accounts to journalists and to do very important information and stories in the public interest. And, you know, often we usually disclose when we do that in our stories. In fact, We almost always disclose when we do that. But it's a world that also encompasses us as investigators, for sure. What—

I mean, what does it look like? Is it nice and organized? I mean, what does the dataset look like? Is it easy to navigate?

Yeah, I mean, it depends on the tool, and it depends on the dataset, right? So sometimes you get what's called unstructured data, which is just a giant spreadsheet, and you are responsible for figuring out how to make sense of it. And, you know, in the old days, this was something I struggled with, but now that AI can really help process data better. It's a lot easier for the ordinary person to work with unstructured data. And then sometimes these vendors just build a tool, right? Like, it's just— it's like any old subscription service that you can just log in, you do a search, or it's just like Google Maps. You can draw a circle, or you can draw a geofence, and you can watch phones move around, or you can do a search term for what people are saying on social media. So it's a very slick interface, just like any other web app that you might When it's bought, is it duplicated or can you own—

let me, let me—

Yeah, can you—

Basically, and I should probably wait until we get into all the devices that are tracking you and sucking on the information out, but I'll probably ask it again, but can you purchase your own data back?

Yeah.

Or is it just a duplicate?

Um, so some of these vendors will sell you the raw data, right? They'll just be like, here's a spreadsheet of— or, you know, a giant file of, of all the phones in the world, and you can do whatever you want with it. That, that's our commercial agreement. Um, so that, that's one business model. And others will say, no, you can't just take out all the data. That's our— that's our secret sauce, right? But you can do the searches on our platform. You know, you can— and you can export the results of your search, but you're not just gonna get all the data that we have. So there's different models of data brokering, and some build the slick interface and the tool, and they'll sell access to it for $1,500 a year or whatever. And some of them will just say, no, here's the raw data, you do what you want with it. We're just a pass-through. You pay us, you visualize it the way you want. So there can be different arrangements. Definitely.

Gotcha. Well, Byron, let's take a quick break.

Okay.

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All right, hot question.

Here we go. So Byron, we had Chris Beck on the show, former SEAL Team 6 guy who spent years around advanced military R&D. He told us something that went insanely viral. If you take the battery out of your phone, I can still listen to you. He was talking about technology developed for national security applications. You've spent years investigating where surveillance technology has gone since then. So if I shut my phone off today or leave it home entirely, can I still be tracked? And what is it giving away?

That's a good question. So unfortunately, phones these days, you can't even take the battery out of them.

them.

Um, the honest answer is I don't know. I don't know what you can— what, what can happen if the phone is off. Certainly the phone being off is a better privacy protection than the phone being on, um, but is there something very tricky governments can do to make phones seem to be off when they're not? That's entirely possible. I don't know the answer. Leaving your phone behind, again, that reduces the vector of tracking you through your phone, but of course, as we've been talking about, there's all sorts of other vectors to track you, right? There's Ring cameras mounted on all these houses now. There's license plate readers that will track your car. There's the toll transponder that you use when you go through a toll now. So leaving your phone behind is not a way to evade surveillance. It's just a way to reduce some kinds of surveillance.

Right. Here's some true or false questions.

Okay.

My phone can track me while— excuse me, my phone tracks me with location services off. True or false?

If the developers are following the rules, that's false. Of course, there's very little way for the average person to know if the developers are following the rules.

Airplane mode protects me.

Uh, I'm not sure airplane mode even protects airplanes, so, uh, I'm not, I'm not sure, not sure what it does.

Powering off the phone protects me.

Actually, that's true. And, um, and, and for a kind of a, kind of a strange reason, that a lot of even like very advanced malware— so if, if a country was to try to put a virus on your phone, actually one of the best defenses against that is to turn your phone on and off every once in a while. And yes, in theory, turning the phone off should drastically reduce the amount of data that comes off of it. Now again, I can't say for sure that there aren't very clever pieces of malware that, that can do things when the phone is off, but in general, turning the phone off should offer some privacy protection. That's true.

A Faraday bag actually works.

I don't know. I've, I've seen some tests that show yes, and I've seen some tests that show no. No. In theory, a well-designed Faraday bag should prevent signals from coming off of an electronic device. I don't know how well-designed the ones you get on Amazon are.

Mm-hmm. All right. So kind of a random thing here, but I heard you talking about something about you have something going on with UPS or USPS. Excuse me.

USPS. Yeah, a few years ago, I got interested in how all sorts of government agencies handle your data, including the Postal Service. And, you know, it kind of came to my attention that the Postal Service was in the process of making a pretty aggressive push to collect all sorts of, like, your, like, electronic information, your phone number, right? So when you sign up for informed delivery or you fill out a change of address form, now you're giving the Postal Service your digital identifiers, including your email and often your phone number. And now they're very aggressive in wanting a receipt from you. Uh, you, you want it by email? You want it by text? So they seem to be collecting digital identifiers, while at the same time the post office is the government agency that knows where you live. And so it seemed to me this was a government agency that, um, you know, knew a lot about your physical real-world life and then was also kind of branching into trying to learn about your digital life, or at the very least linking them. And so I asked some very basic questions of them, like, hey, can you give me all the privacy documents that are required by a law from the 1970s known as the Privacy Act that are supposed to be public anyway?

And, um, uh, they stonewalled me for 3 years. And so—

3 years?

I had to hire lawyers. I'm being represented by the Harvard Cyber Law Clinic. Um, but we brought suit in, uh, in, in federal court in Washington, D.C., to try to force the Postal Service to turn over the most basic information about how it handles our data.

Why do you think they're guarding it?

I have no idea. I couldn't tell you if it's just that they didn't do a very good job in writing these documents, that they don't have them, or if there's something they don't want people to know. I don't know the answer. I'm looking forward to getting the documents back.

How are they— you had mentioned there's a digital component to the— how are they doing that through the mail?

Well, just when you sign up to change your address, or to get kind of the scan of your, of your mail, they often ask, well, how do we contact you electronically? Do you want it by email? Do you want it by phone? And, you know, that, that capability of linking someone's online identity with their physical real-world location is a very difficult problem in marketing a lot of the time. You know, people change addresses, they, they give fake, fake addresses. They, you know, they're not always honest with corporate companies, but, you know, you do want your tax returns, you do want your property tax bills, so you're usually— you're usually gonna— the post office is gonna know where you are. And so I just got curious, well, what are they doing with all this digital information now that they also know a lot about your physical world location? It was, at the very least, a question worth asking of a government agency with a lot of data, and I didn't get an answer without filing a lawsuit.

Jeez. And that's coming up, right?

We'll see what they give back.

I'm sure they'll get right on it. I want to go down device to device that people have in their homes and see what you can tell us about it. But a big question in everybody's mind, and some people say yes, some people say no. Are our phones listening to our conversations, whether you're actually on the phone or off the phone? Everybody's, everybody's brought up, I want to buy means of control, and then the ad pops up, or I'm, you know, whatever it is, you know, it just a passing conversation. It's like, holy shit, there it is, 5 minutes later. And then, no, they're not listening. Oh, I'm sure it's just a coincidence. This has happened 20 times this week.

Yeah, it's a great question. I've never seen any evidence that I am comfortable reporting here on, you know, on your show that says that they're doing it. But as you say, like, an awful lot of people experience those coincidences, including me. I mean, one the other day, I got a weird weird text message saying, hey, we know you just put— I put solar panels on my roof and a friend was asking if I liked it. I got a text message saying, hey, recommend a friend and get $750 back on your solar panel install. And I'm like, well, that's weird. That's really weird timing. So, I mean, I think if phones were listening 24/7, there'd be a lot of data coming off of them and researchers would be able to figure it out. But, you know, is there some interesting technical way where they— where phones could listen for a keyword and then that sends a piece of information back? I don't know. I've never seen evidence of it. But as you say, a lot of people have really weird experiences.

So let's go— let's just go through a lot of devices that average Americans have in their home every day and outside of their home that is collecting a dataset on them?

Sure.

TVs.

Well, modern smart TVs really want to know what you watch. And so a lot of them have built-in sort of screen capture technology that are trying to figure out what you're watching, when you're watching it. Because they want to understand your preferences, and some of that helps subsidize the TV. That's why TVs are kind of cheap now, and they used to be much more expensive. So, um, yes, TVs are data collection machines. Um, uh, you know, I think some people are even starting to connect cameras to them. Um, I'm sure there's some, some stuff you could do about detecting whether people are in the living room or watching ads at the time when they're served. I don't know that that's being done, but But it's, it's certainly a possibility and not something that marketers would be particularly ashamed from, dissuaded from trying.

And so you think that— you're saying that TVs are so cheap now because it's become the, the, the major sale is you, the person, the human being?

Yeah.

Your data is being sold from the TV companies.

I think, yes. I think anytime a company can kind of extract a data stream Um, that can help subsidize a product. You know, maybe it just ends up subsidizing their executive's bottom line, but if you're in a competitive market where there's a lot of vendors and you're able to monetize the customer in some additional way, um, including collecting data about them, then yeah, like, yes, that can help subsidize the, the cost of the product.

How about robot vacuums?

It's a great question. I don't know. I mean, um, I'm sure Sure. So there have been some scandals about them taking pictures, including, you know, some really horrific stuff like catching people on the toilet. And humans were like reviewing these datasets for machine learning. Now, they're not exactly selling that, but that's a— that's an invasive privacy violation if there's, you know, contractors to a robot company that are watching people move around their house. And I'm sure that's disclosed somewhere on page, you know, 25 of the 100-page privacy policy. But Um, so yes, there's cameras on some of them. Um, they certainly— some of them map your house. Um, I had a pretty dumb one for a while, like it would just go until it hit a wall and it, it didn't really do anything beyond that. But I think it depends on the vacuum, and I don't know what's happening with that data, to be honest.

I mean, didn't— didn't one company— didn't one just get busted selling it to China?

Um, I mean, I think some of these are Chinese-owned, so the—

or yeah, that was For sure. Why— I mean, why would China want to know the layout of my house?

Well, I mean, it's hard to— they probably don't want to know the layout of everyone's houses. But if, you know, if in a world in which you were a valuable person and they needed to do an intelligence operation, or they wanted to know how many people were in your house, or, you know, some— again, some of these vacuums have cameras and can see, like, have robot vision. I can't see a good reason why you would put a microphone on a robot vacuum. But I can't tell you that there aren't any with microphones. So, um, uh, yeah, I mean, you know, a foreign government might potentially find some use for a, a house layout or information about who's in the house at a given time if, if a unique person were valuable to that government.

How about smart speakers? Alexa, all these kind of things?

I mean, smart speakers are— obviously they have the potential to listen in. Um, you know, these companies swear that they're not doing so. And most of them are American companies. And if they're— swear, if they're promising that, you know, I mean, there's some sort of enforceable consumer right there. But, you know, sometimes they get triggered accidentally, right? Certainly everything you say to it is collectible and used for training a new AI system. And of course, these devices, you know, forget corporate malfeasance, like, are loading your house up with microphones, and if somebody wants to hack that device, like, how good is the cybersecurity on it? So could, could somebody, whether it's just a criminal listening in for, for information about your finances or your banking account numbers or, or something like that, or it's a nation-state and they want to, to do something, whatever it is, recruit you as a spy, blackmail you, I don't know. Um, but certainly smart speakers and anything with a microphone is a, is a vector for that kind of, you know, that kind of hacking.

Do you have smart speakers in your house?

I don't, um, although I do have a couple of devices that like have the capability. I turn them off. But again, like, it's the same risk, right? Like, it's, it's, um, you know, like my, uh, my smart thermostat, which I love by the way, because when I forget to turn off my thermostat, I can, I can, you know, save on my energy bill when I'm on vacation. Um, but you know, that has a microphone in it. I don't use it. I've turned off the microphone. But like, could Could a, could a hacker break into it and turn it on? Uh, could a nation-state? Maybe. And, and is that a good thing?

I don't know. Retail and grocery stores tracking everything you buy through membership and loyalty cards.

Oh yeah, that's happening. And, and not just that, they're often, um, trading it or selling it with data brokers, right? Because they, you know, they get your information, they get your phone number, they get your your, you know, they get your email address, they may get your address. So yeah, that information gets packaged up and sold. And, and, and the grocery store says, hey Coke, here's a, here's a consumer who bought Coke. Hey, you know, hey Tyson's, here's someone that likes turkey. Uh, that absolutely, that's a robust data market. And, and when you sign up for those loyalty programs, you are, you're getting a discount in exchange for, for, for data collection.

That's why you need burner numbers. Home Depot scan driver's license, scans your driver's license every time you return something. What are they doing with that?

I have no idea. I assume there's some problem with returns and theft, and it's probably an anti-fraud measure. But again, collecting your license is probably the best form of identity out there, right? Like, I suppose you could have a fake ID, and generations of college students have, but Most people, when asked for their ID, you know, most adults who have nothing to hide hand that right over. And yeah, I mean, bars and retail outlets that scan it are almost certainly collecting it and saving it for some reason.

Tires on your car. I did not know this.

Yeah. So they're not collecting data per se, but they are a vector for surveillance. And of all the people you know, all my friends that read the book, and, and even some, some strangers, the one thing they came away from it was, oh, my car tires? I can be surveilled through those? And the answer is yes, because when you start up your car in the morning and you see that pressure sensor reading, right, like, oh, you have low pressure, it's a cold day, you need to go to the gas station and fill it up, that is a little radio transmitter. It's a little radio transmitter that sits inside the tire It measures the tire pressure, and it sends a radio transmission to your car's central computer. The problem is that that tire has a unique number, and that's how your computer knows to, to pair with that tire. And that tire is just screaming that number all the time as you drive down the road. It's just constantly broadcasting a signal that says, I'm Acura tire number 123456. 6, 7. And if you put up little sensors along the highway or along roadways— and there are companies that have done this— or you're the military and you want a little trigger sensor when somebody drives down a certain road and you already know their tire pressure, you can put a little sensor at the end of that road that will cue you when someone drives by.

And so, and, and this, this is a good way to identify cars even after they've swapped license plates, right? Because you swap plates, but But the tire— you're probably not going to remember to swap your tire pressure sensor. So yes, tire pressures are a vector for surveillance. Are they a serious one that you should worry about? No. But it's an example of a carelessly engineered technology that inadvertently turned into a surveillance device.

Smart lighting.

By the way, I love my smart lighting. Um, uh, I, I don't know what that's collecting, um, but it's, it's I mean, it's certainly creating a log, at least locally, and probably on some company's server somewhere, of when you're home, when you turn on the lights, if it can detect motion. I think now some of these new smart lighting systems have realized that they can, they can act as motion sensors and motion detectors, and so that, that can trigger. So that's, that's a, that's another clue to your patterns and your routines as a as a person that lives in a house, right? So when do you turn on the light? When do you turn off the light? In the old days, the light bulb didn't log that, but today a smart light bulb does log that, and now it knows your home.

You know, here's another one that I thought was interesting is, you know, your vehicle.

Yeah, so cars, connected cars, like beyond the license plate readers, um, these car companies are becoming aggressive collectors of data and I even detail in my book my attempts a few years ago to try to go buy a car without, without a data connection. Back then it was possible you could get one without a cellular chip and it wouldn't— my, my 2021 car doesn't broadcast my location to anyone. There's not even a possibility. It doesn't have the chip.

I don't know.

I haven't bought a car in a few years, but I think a lot of them just have the cell chip built in whether you turn it in or not. And of course, they all push this service. Oh, you know, roadside assistance and emergency emergency assistance, we'll give you the first year free. Well, when you sign up for that first year free, they're usually getting your location data for that whole year, right? Like, you're agreeing somewhere in those terms of service to let them collect information about where you go, how hard you brake. Sometimes they're giving it to insurance companies. In some instances, they're cooperating with law enforcement. In some instances, they're just straight up selling it to data brokers, just like data brokers are existing to phone data. They're existing to buy car data. So yeah, connected cars, it's hard to escape them these days.

Yeah, and they're selling it to insurance brokers.

Insurance, right? You, you break, you brake hard too many times, you might not even know, but your insurance company knows, and, and, and they're collecting data off the car, and all of a sudden your rate goes up.

How about health wearables?

Oh, health wearables collect tons of data, and I'm sitting here wearing an Oura Ring, and you know, I've, I've made the cost-benefit analysis that, you know, knowing how my body responds to stress and, and kind of cataloging whether I'm getting adequate sleep and nutrition is worth the privacy risk. But I can imagine this would be a tremendous benefit to an intelligence agency, right? If you were trying to recruit somebody and you were looking for a maximum moment of either— you've assessed that you should approach them when they're at their most relaxed. Well, you can tell that from this. or, or when they're at their most stressed. You can tell that from this too. So this kind of psychological and psychographic data that comes off of these things is really, really valuable. And, you know, these companies swear that they're not selling it, and I have read the privacy policy for them, but they can't swear that a law enforcement demand or a national security letter won't come in from a government agency in whatever country they're based, and they can't swear that a hacker hacker can't get access to their systems and use it for some kind of nefarious purpose.

So yes, these are privacy risks, and like everything, people have to decide whether they're worth it or not.

You know, I think, uh, you know, when it comes to the privacy disclosures and all the paperwork, well, I just— one thing I started doing is just running it through AI to summarize it, you know.

And AI is good for that, actually.

But, um, it kind of— it tells you all the It does, right?

And I will say that, you know, a lot of people think that, you know, there's sneaky stuff happening, and there is sneaky stuff happening on the internet, but, but most Western companies organized in a rule-of-law country, they will tell you somewhere vaguely in the privacy policy what they're doing. Um, they may not be super explicit about it, but it's probably in there somewhere, and they're just counting on you not reading it.

And then, you know, Now, the big topic of the day, Flock cameras. What do you know about these?

Well, it's interesting because the public is really fixated on Flock, but these have been around for ages, and private companies have been doing this for ages. And, you know, I don't know if Flock's the biggest, but they— until recently, they were not the biggest. There was— there's several other companies that do the exact same thing. There's one called Vigilant. Um, there's a company called ReCore, there's a company called Genoptic, there's a company called Axon. There's a dozen of these license plate reader companies, and they've put up cameras all over the United States and indeed all over the world, and they're collecting your location as you move around, uh, the world in your car. And, um, you know, it's, it's kind of interesting to see the privacy backlash, um, from people that are kind of waking up to, to this. And it's, you know, it's been a very interesting grassroots movement to see. But Flock is really just one company among many. And I think we're even seeing companies who have— or sorry, police departments or towns or cities that have put in Flock and then people get mad about it, they drop Flock and they just put in a different vendor because they think, oh, it's just a PR problem with Flock.

Well, the real problem is the license plate reader, right? Because the license plate reader is a system that's designed to collect the location of cars. And, you know, 1 or 2 pings of a car might not tell you an awful lot about them. Like, maybe if you put them on a— on an overpass and a— and a stolen car drives by, maybe that's a good use of it. Um, but increasingly they're everywhere and they're networked to get together, right? So these— these companies offer the service of saying, hey, little town in Tennessee or little town in Arkansas, put these cameras in, and they're gonna become part of a nationwide sharing network where all of the law enforcement agencies all around the country are gonna be able to see all the cars that pass through your little town. And, you know, there's a ton of pressure from law enforcement for these, these towns to opt into this. So what they're essentially creating is several privately owned networks of surveillance systems that all government agencies all across the country have access to and can do whatever they want with in many instances. Man, you know, I—

there's been a saying that goes— it's been going around for a long time and it makes sense to me, you know, if especially when it comes to applications, if the application is free, then you are the product.

Indeed.

I don't know if that's necessarily really even true anymore. It seems like a lot of the stuff that we're paying for—

Yeah.

They're double dipping here.

They are. And then there are certainly some things that are genuinely free that you aren't the product, right? Often created by nonprofit organizations. So Signal, the popular messaging app, is free and is, you know, a tremendously valuable privacy tool. It's an encrypted way to communicate. It's not the only encrypted way to communicate, but So while that's not a hard and fast rule, I do think there is a wisdom to it because a lot of this data collection, at least originally, was driven by the fact that people were either reluctant to pay for things online because they were afraid of, you know, giving their credit card information on the internet in the '90s, or just general consumer reluctance to pay for things, right? Why pay for something when I can get it for free? So there is wisdom to the fact that this entire norm and market that we hand over our data constantly to entities that we barely even think about all the time. That probably did come about, um, because there was some consumer reluctance to pay, um, and that was the only way to make money. Um, but I think you're right that increasingly even very expensive things that you pay for are trying to monetize you, right?

You see car companies, you know, they'll sell you a car that's very, very expensive, and then they'll say, yeah, pay us, uh, $15 a month if you want to turn the heated seats You know, so I think you're right, right? They are— they're double dipping, and they see add-ons and features and recurring subscription revenue as a way to pad the bottom line and squeeze a little bit more money out of the consumer.

I mean, do you think there's a world where they have to pay us for our privacy data?

Well, you know, that's something that a lot of people have talked about, and I just don't think at the end of the day It's the economics work out for the individual, right? Because your data might be worth a few bucks to a company, but in the aggregate it's worth lots. And, and the problem is, you know, you probably don't even want the few bucks for the hassle that it will cost. But in the aggregate, the data market is worth billions if not trillions. And so it's a hard problem to solve. You know, I have— there have been some experiments in trying to trying to do that. There are increasingly, you know, companies that are saying, you know, we're just not gonna do this, we're gonna be a subscription service, and we're not gonna collect your data. That's one possible business model. But in general, I think it's— I think it's a really hard problem to kind of return the money to the consumer. The— probably the better model, probably a better way forward, is for there just to be a more straightforward bargain between the consumer and the maker of the product. That I pay you money and you give me a service and you don't collect data from me.

Mm-hmm. I mean, no, no, no, it just seems, you know, you pay Costco $200 a year or whatever it is to get a membership and they collect everything that you ever buy and, and no discounts. And, you know, and it just all that, it's just, it does seem to be coming to a head. People are waking up to this. They're getting pissed.

Yeah, I think so. And I think you're seeing, you know, a lot of current outrage right now over this idea of individualized or surveillance pricing, right? You are seeing, you're seeing regulators being interested in it. You're seeing at least some states saying, well, you're gonna do that, at the very least you need to disclose you're charging people different prices. But yeah, this is, this is the world we're living in because there's so much data out there and there's an increasing amount amount of ability to process it. And so when you have, you know, big powerful computers and artificial intelligence and 100 data points on a consumer, you can make a judgment about, hey, this is what they're willing to pay and I'm going to try to charge them the max.

I mean, can you just go a little bit more into the surveillance pricing? Because this is new to pretty much everybody.

Yeah, I mean, well, I mean, in a way—

How exactly is it gonna work?

I mean, I don't think we know all the answers, but in a way, I mean, some of it's already here. For example, I'm a big fan of the New York Times home delivery. You know, I— your listeners may think what they will about the New York Times, but I like getting up in the morning on a Sunday morning and reading the physical newspaper over coffee and eating some eggs. But I don't like it as much as they want to charge. I don't like it as as much as the sticker price. So, you know, I'm willing to pay a certain amount, and then every few months the Times emails me and says, oh, your introductory discount on home delivery is about to end. And I go right into the website and I press cancel. And after I press cancel, a screen pops up and says, oh, would you— would you consider sticking around at the same rate for another 36 weeks? And I click yes. So, so in a way, it's just taking what's already there. And I think we've all experienced that, right? We've all tried to cancel something and cable or some subscription service, and then they throw an offer at you.

Oh, would you stay for half off? Would you stay for a quarter off? So it's an extension of that, right?

Mm-hmm.

It's an extension of the idea that, like, they're already kind of doing this. They're already offering some discounts to keep you paying for certain services. What if we could just model it on the front end, right? What if we could just— before you're even our customer, we could, we could take all the data we know about you, we could take your socioeconomic class, past. We could take how much you typically spend in a month off your credit card statement. We could take, you know, we could make some inferences about where you work based on all sorts of data points that we have on you. Maybe we just scrape LinkedIn and we know where you work. I don't know. And we can estimate how much you as a consumer might be willing to pay for that, you know, that service, or even something as petty as, you know, that produce at the grocery store. I mean, that is one possible future that we're looking at because of the amount of data that, that companies have and that we all generate every day.

I mean, how do you think it's inevitable this is going to happen?

Well, I don't think anything's inevitable, right? Like, we, um, we as voters and consumers get to make choices about this stuff, including about our technology and about what stores we're willing to patronize. So if, you know, if enough consumers don't like this stuff and they don't want to participate in an economy where they're charged different amounts of money based on you know, what kind of data companies collect on us, then I don't think we're gonna live in that future. If, however, people are willing to tolerate it, and, and some people may even willingly opt in, right? You know, some companies may, to avoid the thorny problem, say like, turn over all the information to us and you'll get tons of discounts. We may well live in that world. It all depends on what people are willing to tolerate.

Let's talk about how we can take control back a little bit. I mean, we've talked about all Not all, a lot of the ways that these companies are collecting on us. We talked about the flow of data, how it gets into the government's hands, what the marketers do with it, what the devices are, surveillance pricing, all this stuff. What are things that people can do to kind of shield themselves from the invasiveness?

Yeah, it's a hard question. If you want to live a normal life and you want to have a phone and you want to go about your day and you don't want to live in the woods and on a self-sufficient plot of land where you're, you know, collecting rainwater and using your own solar panels, then it's hard to completely opt out of data collection. I think about it as— I think about it a couple ways. One, I do think the content of our communications and the content of our important documents and the content of our emails, the stuff we— the communications and the documents we write and keep, I think a lot that that's very important to keep private. And there are plenty of ways to do that. Um, there are— I, I basically think you should encrypt your communications, your emails, your documents, um, your files as much as possible. And you can do that through a feature built into the Apple phone called Advanced Data Protection. Um, there are some, you know, there are some third-party encryption platforms out there, including ProtonMail, which has basically an encrypted email Uh, Tutanota is one. There's, there's a lot of these encrypted drive providers, um, or encrypted email providers.

There's encrypted communications platforms, um, like Signal, like the Glacier platform that you're developing and working on, um, like even WhatsApp. WhatsApp is owned by Meta. It collects a lot of information about who you are and who you talk to, but actually the communication is, is private. Meta can't see it. Um, Apple's iMessage is, is pretty well encrypted. Um, so keeping the, the content of your communications is— and the content of your files private is probably the most basic thing you can do and, and is— isn't so hard. Um, but might take a little bit of, of work. Um, second, you can be careful about your permissions, right? Like, you don't have to let every single app have your location. You don't have to let Uber and DoorDash have your location. You can type every time you want an Uber where you are, or you can drop the little pin on the map, or you can just say, you know, today I'm at this address and I want delivery. And sure, they'll store it, but it's better than giving this technical backend access to your GPS location. So turn some of that stuff off, and, and don't let every app that asks have access to your contacts and your calendar and your photo roll.

Like, they don't need all that. They— a lot of them work just fine without turning that stuff on. So So, you know, our device manufacturers have, have actually, you know, done a good job of trying to give you some control over what things you do and don't want to share. And I would advise you, whenever possible, to not check those things. Um, and, and often the apps that want them work just fine without them. Um, there's other things you can do, right? Like, there are, as you say, there are now services that offer burner phone numbers. There are services that offer privacy-preserving email accounts, fake email accounts that will funnel to your real email accounts. You don't have to give all these retailers your real email. You can give them a proxy email. You can give them a proxy phone number that when they start to spam you, you can disconnect and, and, and make go away. So, so that's a privacy protection that you can build in. You know, VPNs are controversial. I think they can be useful in some instances, but you also have to trust your VPN provider. Right? Because you're just moving the layer of trust from your telecom or your internet service provider, which is usually a large company with a lot of good lawyers, to some kind of shady overseas business that you don't know much about.

So do be careful. Like, there are reputable VPNs and there are not reputable ones, and they change all the time and they merge and they go out of business. They can be helpful for privacy, set up right and used correctly in the right circumstance, or they can be a privacy disaster.

That is one thing I learned when we were building Glacier with the VPN stuff is that you have all these foreign entities, Chinese companies, Russian companies, Israeli companies, and it's a conglomerate that owns a multitude of VPN companies that are just constantly collecting.

Right. And again, using a shady VPN might be better than connecting to the Chinese telecom network while you're traveling through China. Um, but is it really good? Is it— are they really more trustworthy than whoever your cell phone provider is? I would do some soul searching, um, because all you're doing when you're putting a VPN on your phone is moving which company can see your internet traffic. Is it your cell provider that you want to see your phone traffic, or is it this company you've never heard of that's, you know, in in India or Malaysia or wherever. So I would think carefully about it, but they can be useful in certain circumstances. And there's actually VPNs that will take cash from you and don't create linkages back to your real-world identity. That, that can be valuable depending on what you're trying to do. But yeah, I mean, it, it, it's hard, but there are some ways to, to get some balance in your What do you think about the secure DNS? I have not looked deeply into secure DNS. You know, I know there are some— so basically DNS is the, the phone book of the internet, for, for your, for your listeners.

So when you type in google.com, that's actually meaningless to the machine. What it needs to know is what IP address do I need to send you to. So do I need to send your IP address, whatever that is, that looks something something like 1.92.4.194 or something like that. Um, we're going to send you to some web address. DNS is how the computer looks up where is google.com in the numbers that I know how to route you. Um, and yes, there have been data brokers that have, um, gone in there and they've, they've said, oh, well, we can learn about where people are going on the internet based on their DNS queries. We can set up a DNS server and they'll send all their traffic, and we know that they're going to Google, or we know they're I'm going to this. Um, I, I don't know a ton about secure DNS providers. I know there, there's some— you can go in deep in your phone and set your settings to go to like 9.9.9.9, which is one based in Switzerland that says they don't log. Um, there's a few others like that. There's some secure DNS services that you kind of install on your phone.

I think that's probably a good thing. I just haven't kind of delved deep into which specific ones We're good.

How did you find out about Glacier? You knew about it way before I did.

How did I find out about Glacier? I think I was reporting on secure phones, actually, and trying to understand how the government dealt with the problem of all this commercial data sloshing around. And one thing led me into another, one vendor led me to another, and I think I found Glacier and I found the people at it as someone that was trying to solve this problem both for the private sector as well as having government clients. And at the time, I was, I was kind of thinking about the fact that privacy was becoming something of a luxury good. And, you know, if you were willing to pay the money, you could get a higher level of privacy than the average person. But it's, it's interesting to see that they've pivoted more towards the consumer market. And I think in the years since I first talked to them for this book, a lot of companies have started to see that, you know, there are— there is a market for privacy in the United States. It's not a big market. There's a market for privacy in Europe, but it is a market. And there are paying customers out there that are willing to pay a little bit more for a more secure or more private product.

And that has reshaped some of the market dynamics. And companies like Glacier and others out there have made that pivot.

I mean, I think, you know, as time goes on, it's just getting more and more important Because I mean, now privacy is affecting your negotiating power with surveillance pricing.

Totally.

So it's going to be a bigger and bigger deal. But well, Byron, I really appreciate you coming out here.

Thanks so much for having me.

Great talk. Great talk. And, uh, I hope to see you again.

Yeah, same. Hope to be back.

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