Rewiring our mind to reclaim privacy online

hey guys i’m sun i’m a privacy and a

security researcher and recently became

a youtuber

today’s talk is going to be about

privacy now we are the product uh that’s

something that you may have heard and my

research definitely confirms that that’s

true

now the interesting thing that i

discovered while preparing for today’s

talk

is we actually have been the product for

quite some time and that actually

is traceable to the early days of radio

and television

which brought me to question what does

radio

and television have in common with

facebook

and gmail for example well the answer is

quite obvious

ads both are designed to

get our attention our attention is the

product

now the question that really got me

curious is what they don’t have in

common

and the answer is facebook and gmail

are bi-directional that means that

the users are both content creators

and content consumers and that means

that

people are now sharing an increasing

amount

of very personal information on

these platforms now comparing this to

the traditional business model of tv for

example

where lady gaga will be invited as the

artist

of the super bowl while putting together

the

halftime super ball show is extremely

expensive it requires a stadium

an audience it requires essentially

millions and millions

to produce the content compare this with

the new social media business model

which by the way blows my mind well a

bunch of developers

can create an app that will be used by

billions of people and

generate billions and billions in

revenue

now looking at how you know

advertisements were actually targeted to

users in the days of television while

say

lily was watching planet earth while

lilly

was likely to be interested by anything

related to the planet perhaps animals

and that was it so advertisers would

place ads on content

compare this with social media where

facebook knows that lily

watched planet earth twice because she

shared it that lily shared a youtube

link to planet earth with a few of her

friends

charles jenny and john and that

lily attended earth day manifestation in

new york

with her friend jenny that lily is

probably roommates with john because she

actually lives in new york and they all

use the internet from the same public ip

address and that lily is in a

relationship with charlie

and charlie actually donated to

greenpeace

what does that mean for advertisers well

that means that

lily will likely vote for a specific

political party

if she’s targeted with pro-environment

content and it actually also means that

she’s gay

that blows my mind so back to this

initial idea

if something is free we are likely the

product

well what else is free uh now

preparing for this talk made me realize

that the real question is

what isn’t now uh if we think about

facebook which is free well

instagram messenger and whatsapp all of

this

is also free uh besides gmail

well you know chrome google google docs

youtube google maps waze google pay

all free and all owned by alphabet now

uh in the context of microsoft well

microsoft bing

edge skype linkedin if you’re a

developer you probably know about visual

studio code github

npm all of this stuff is free and then

there’s snapchat and tick tock whoo

now to make things more confusing

privacy conscious apps that i actually

recommend to my viewers

such as firefox duckduckgo and

signal all of those are also free

which blows my mind and clearly blows

the minds of

pretty much everyone which leads people

to just decide to trade their privacy

because well we live full lives we don’t

have time to worry about all of this

stuff

a question that i’m asked all the time

is is why should

we care why should we carry so much

information i have nothing to hide those

are all things that i hear all the time

well let’s look at tree case studies

as you may be aware edward snowden he

was a contractor for the nsa

leaked a whole bunch of documents that

revealed

that the nsa and the cia have backdoor

accesses to all of those data sets so

all of those emails that we’re sending

on gmail

i know i’m not but anyways all of those

things are being shared on facebook

all of those things or conversations

that are happening on skype all of this

stuff

is accessible by nation state

surveillance programs

and to make things worse there’s also

this

alliance alien alliance between

the united states of america and

13 other countries which forms what we

call the 14 i’s

and what they are doing is that they’re

all using their own

tapping devices to tap the internet

backbones when data is flowing between

countries and what you can see here well

that’s

a map of the trans-oceanic lines fiber

lines that are connecting

continents together that’s where the

data is flowing

and that means that there’s a few points

that can be tapped

that will intercept huge amounts of data

now if that’s not enough another person

leaked information about a scandal

that’s called a cambridge analytica

scandal and the cambridge analytica

scandal

is a way that this special

political data analytics firm

in the uk was using an app that was

installed by 50 million

americans that allowed them to get very

personal insights into how those

americans

think and therefore leading to micro

targeting

them with ads in the context of

the trump election not this one the one

before

and we thought that everything would

change at that point in time but

actually very little has that means that

all this information that we

are sharing becomes information that

political parties can use to target

us and try to manipulate us now

if that’s not enough we can have a look

at what’s happening in china so china

has deployed

huge systems of facial recognition to be

able to follow citizens around there are

cities where

if you cross this the street at a red

light

you are fined and the money is withdrawn

from your bank account so essentially

all citizens are ranked and

labeled and tracked throughout what they

do in the physical world and on the

internet and to make matters worse the

great firewall of china will actually

censor what kind of

information they can see that leads me

to say that i care about privacy because

i believe in freedom

and democracy that i am totally

uncomfortable with the fact that my

conversations

interests relationships and whereabouts

are surveilled i mean that that freaks

me out

uh so here are a few steps that you guys

can follow

if you want to reclaim some of your

privacy step

one is consciously choose apps

why is an app free there are a few

business models that can explain why

things are free

the first one is open source if the

product is developed by the community

for the community

well that explains why it’s free

other things are advertisement or

advertising

i should have said based usually that

means that there’s a lot of data mining

that’s happening unfortunately

then there are the freemium apps those

are apps that you can start using for

free but then you’re encouraged to

upgrade

and there are in-app purchases uh so

that’s how tick-tock works for example

uh and then there’s kind of more obscure

business models true partnerships so

that’s how

uh whatsapp actually earns its revenue

right now

although i mean yeah more on that in a

second

google pay and firefox if you don’t know

firefox is actually

owned by mozilla which is a non-profit

and mozilla

is mostly funded by google so google

can set google search as the default

search engine in firefox

now looking at this uh we could think

that oh if we’re not in the advertising

uh line we’re okay but the truth is a

lot of those

businesses will do a lot of data mining

as well so usually a business can have

more than one business model to make

things

again more complicated um but we need to

ask

ourselves why something is free then we

need to ask ourselves

what is the governance of that specific

project and that is pretty interesting

when we’re looking at whatsapp

versus signal both pretend to be not pre

i’m taking this back both in theory

use ntn encryption actually whatsapp

uses the signal protocol but then when

i’m looking at those two options

which on the surface may look the same

if we look at their governance

i am totally going for signal so

one is owned by you know facebook

which is run by mark zuckerberg and the

others run

signals run by moxie who’s a cypherpunk

who really believes in privacy

we need to ask ourselves who are running

those companies and why

and then we need to figure out how much

data is being collected and why and

there are things that we can do in our

smartphones or in app configurations

to decide what we’re sharing sometimes

we have no control

but at least we need to be conscious

about this and try to share as little as

possible only what’s necessary

to benefit from the product now the

next thing that we can do is learn as

much as we can about technology

so we’re just going to peek at the

rabbit hole right now because i’m

running out of time but

email is not private when you send an

email to someone that email

is stored on your email providers

servers and on the recipient email

provider servers

when on those servers it’s in clear text

so you can imagine

email being the same as sending a postal

card anyone

in between can likely read the message

another misconception is that private

mode when you’re browsing is private

private mode is not private at all from

the outside world it’s just private

between

users of the same computer another

misconception is that vpns will make

people

anonymous vpns do not make anyone

anonymous

it just moves the trent model of being

surveilled from

the internet service provider to the vpn

provider so

we need to choose vpn providers wisely

another thing that we always need to

keep in mind is that the clipboard when

we’re copy pasting stuff

that is shared among apps and that was

really uh alarming when we learned that

tiktok was essentially capturing all of

this

so i understand that all of this is a

lot

learning about this is a lot and that’s

why i’m really trying to share as much

as i can on my channel

but if you don’t have time to learn all

of this

there are a few things that you can do

first things first

please use a browser that is open

sourced and that does not

track its users such as firefox when

well configured

then using duckduckgo instead of google

or bing

is a great way to make sure that those

searches are

not surveilled and one last thing here

is using signal for messaging or phone

calls when

the subject matter is private signal

uses something called end-to-end

encryption

meaning no one can look at this content

except you

and the recipient or someone that

physically compromises

your devices so yeah

thanks for caring i think together we

can really bring change

in the technology landscape we can

rewire our minds to be comfortable with

the fact that ping for an app

makes total sense that paying for a web

service make total sense

and together we can force those

companies to change their behavior

and start putting technology to the

service of humans

and not the other way around

you