You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Tim Stenebek on Bloomberg Radio. Well, Carol, I'm reading a book right now. Actually, Jason Kelly, your former co anchor here on Bloomberg Business So he recommended it to me. He recommended it to me a couple of years ago. I'm a little behind. I bought it that I'm getting around for reading it. It's called The Avery. It's by
Dave Aggers. It takes place in a not so distant dystopian future where one single, huge tech company pretty much controls everything from social media to e commerce to search.
Wait aren't we there? Oh no, sorry, Well.
That's a good question. Here's the thing. Almost everyone lives under constant surveillance, their cameras everywhere, people broadcast their entire lives. Everybody's on their best behavior lest they be caught on camera saying the wrong thing or not recycling. Oh my what Yeah?
All right, So, given we're technologies today, it's actually not that hard of a future to imagine, and perhaps our next guest is trying to prevent the world from emerging that specific world. So we've got with us Tim Tom Keppy.
He's the author a new book containing Big Tech How to Protect our civil rights, economy, and democracy. He's also co founder of the cybersecurity firm Centrify. It's now called Delinea. It was bought by Toma Bravo back in twenty nineteen and later by TPG. He's volunteered on the Biden Harris Tech Policy Team. He did that in twenty twenty. He worked with advocacy groups for years on legislation around consumer privacy and data protection. He joins us on Zoom from
Menlo Park, California. Tom, good to have you with us. How are you.
I'm doing great, Thanks for having me on.
Well, thanks so much for joining us. So we have some a bit of time this afternoon, and we have a lot to get to. But I want to know at the specific moment that you realized that you thought that big tech needed to be contained.
Well, my last company was Centrify, and it's cybersecurity, and we saw all these hacks coming in and it really became clear that when a couple of these companies got breached, just the incredible amounts of data that was being accessed by the bad guys. It really got me to appreciate that We're now in a situation where especially little, larger tech companies are really just over collecting so much information
about us. And you know, in the past, you know, companies like Standard Oil were powerful, but they didn't know everything about us, and that's that was the Really when seeing the hacks and seeing all this data slashing around really made me say, uh uh, something's going on here.
All right, Tom, I'm going to put it out there. I'm going for a headline here. But is it like climate change or maybe like climate change, that we might just be too late, that this train has definitely left the station.
You know, I think we actually, because it's bits and bytes versus the sky and clouds and the earth rotating and trees and all that stuff, I think we can actually control it. I mean, the fundamental issue is in the US, we don't have a federal privacy law. Right. We don't have rights over our data, the right to know what's being collected about us, the right to say no and say please don't sell or share my data,
or the right to correct or right to delete. So I do think that we could really make some significant strides and be able to govern our information. And if we don't Frankly, it is going to get worse with AI because then all of a sudden, our data, and a lot of it's our personal data, kind of becomes part of this big blender of AI utilizing our data to create other things as well. And we worry about copyrights, right, what about our data? Well?
What about do we follow the lead of what's going on in Europe? And I think about the GDPR, right, the General Data Protection Regulation that's out there that really does push for privacy protections and security of personal data. Is that what we need here in the United States specifically? Is that what you're kind of pushing for.
Well, actually we've done it here in California. So I mean you're referring to Europe's privacy law and people call it the Brussels effect, but California, we've historically had the California effect. It first started with auto emissions and consumer
protection around car safety, et cetera. And then California in nineteen seventy two actually put privacy as an inalienable right into our constitution, and from a privacy and cybersecurity perspective, we were the first state to actually pass a data breach notification law, right and we are and have been
the first state with the most comprehensive privacy law. So I think California actually has a better model where it's able to balance innovation with the tech players, but also give consumers some basic rights over their data and how it's used.
Tom, you're also a seed investor in many startups right now. They include companies with names like Sakouvi, Privacy Code, Trusted, twin Ivy Technology, share Id, Sunday Security, Surf Security, Holistic AI. The list goes on the cynic and perhaps somebody would say, well, wait a second, this guy's has this agenda because he's invested in a lot of companies that want to take on the big guys. He's invested in a lot of companies that would benefit from company from having stricter data
protection laws here in the US. What would you say to that.
Well, I'm back, Maybe this is a bad analogy, but al Gore, you mentioned climate change. You know, he was talking about climate change for years and then you know, he was having difficulties trying to get things passed from a policy perspective, but so he wanted to have change done. So he started joining boards and he's on the board
of Apple, but he's also involved in climate funds. So everything that I've been talking about as it relates to privacy in the book is things that are written years ago, well before or I actually started doing any investing, and so I'm trying to put my time and effort into making changes. And what I'm doing with my investments is actually trying to empower consumers to better secure them and
protect themselves. So my investments tend to be more consumer centric and trying to help stop identity theft or help people get better control over their privacy as well. But I've been completely consistent. I have a blog that's been
out there for years. I've talked about these things. I was a full time volunteer on Proposition twenty four in California, and it wasn't only to just relatively recently that I've been complimenting and supplementing this, but I've been completely consistent in my advocacy of better cybersecurity, better privacy for you,
me and other people as well. And so yeah, that's I mean, people can say that, you know, but the record shows that I've consistently been talking about this and proposing this for years.
Well, and on what you said, if we go along with what you kind of said in akin to what we saw with al Gore, he was right in terms of the concerns about climate change, and so if we had all paid a lot more attention, maybe we wouldn't be kind of in the world we are today. If you are right about your concerns and we ignore them.
In terms of cybersecurity, where could that what's the dark scenario, the dystopian scenario of all of this data accumulate, accumulation on all of us in the hands of a few big tech companies.
Well, you know, look, historically the large tech companies their business models was advertising. And for us, we made that trade off to say, Okay, I'm gonna give you all this data and you're gonna give me these free services. And then what happened was that, you know, we started shopping for a red dress or red basketball shoes, and then all of a sudden, for the next seven weeks, every web page had that red dress or those red basket all shoes.
It was creepy tory being a journalist and like researching a company that we're gonna have on a guest that does something like men's underwear, and then we're getting it. Sorry anyway, go ahead.
That is it's creepy. I'm doing work.
I'm doing work seriously, seriously anyway.
But the problem is is that we are now in a post abortion rights America where stuff that we did before is actually illegal in some states. Or there's data like you know, there's all these issues about trans and so the information and that type of data is now actually can be used against people because before it was offered to advertisers, but it could be offered to people
to harass or discriminate against people as well. And so but even if you just step even further back, I mean, the reality is is that this data is being collected about us as adults. And yeah, maybe we can navigate around some of the rabbit holes or not, you know, disregard these ads, But what about our kids. There's no differentiation if our kids are on the keyboard versus us
on the keyboard, and I think that's fundamentally unhealthy. So yes, I think that the actors have figured out how to start weaponizing this data that historically has been used for advertising.
I want to get back to our guest, Tom Camp. He has a new book out already available containing big tech how to protect our civil rights, economy, and democracy. He's co founder of the cybersecurity company Centrify, former CEO of that company. He was also, i should point out, a volunteer on the Biden Harris Tech Policy Team back in twenty twenty and has worked with advocacy groups on legislation around consumer privacy and data protection. He's still with us on Zoom from Menlo Park, California.
You've got to scroll a lot when LinkedIn, I'll tell you that story.
We've run out of time. We can't.
Sorry, Tom, we're TK haven't met any of your investments yet, and he's a man qualified to write a.
Book like this.
So Tom, AI Artificial intelligence generative AI. We're talking about next level generation AI, something we've all been obsessed at about. Has that sped up the need to do something soon or so? In other words, is that a catalyst for concern when it comes to cybersecurity and data information and our privacy issues?
Absolutely? Yes. It's funny because there are so many people running around Silicon Valley with business plans to do more for cybersecurity as it relates to AI and so, and also as it relates to privacy. I mean there's a lot of concerns that companies will you know, employees within companies will take their sales data and say, well, what does chat GPT have to say with it? And all of a sudden they upload the data to get some nice graphs, reports, some analysis, and low and behold. Now
open AI has your entire sales pipeline. Right, same thing with customer information, right companies right. Right.
Companies have warned their employees like, don't do that, because you're sharing.
Information exactly, And so I think that, and then of course there's not only the input, but there's also the output of information. And are you going to be liable if you generate if there's content generated, and then it's based on copyright, but you're putting that as a business, you're putting that out on your own. I do have a funny story. So a family friend of ours has a daughter. She was told to write an essay in
high school. This's just passed in the spring, and she wrote a great essay about what's the best way to get into college? And she said, Hey, I'm going to move to Montana. I'm going to take the bassoon up. It was a funny essay. The teacher said, you used chat GBT to write it and so and how could she actually like and she didn't. But it was like that big debate, like is was this machine generated or human generated? I think that issue is going to come up a lot with business.
That's really interesting. And look, we're just at the beginning of this, Carol, as we've talked about a lot. Yeah, so when we think about Tom, how this is, you know, really in our lives each and every day. The book focuses on Meta, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, what they're doing individually, but also what they're doing as a group. If you were to pick one company in there that you are most concerned about, which one is it.
It's a close tie between Meta and Google. It's just because of the vast amounts of information that they collect on each and every one of us. And so Google, I did various experiments, and Google was collecting information about me on average every five minutes, and so it had a complete dossier in terms of where I was going, what I was searching. I have an Android phone. It knew exactly what apps I was accessing, It knew the notifications,
et cetera. And you know, Google had actually made some promises after Roe v. Wade was repealed, and they said, you know what, We're going to discard any reproductive rights related information about searches for abortion or visits, mapping information about visits to abortion clinics, planned parenthoods et cetera. And so I put that to the test last fall as
I was researching this book. Turns out it wasn't the case that they were still collecting this information, and that led to an article that appeared in the Guardian and then a couple of months ago, Jeffrey Fowler the Washington Post also saw the same thing as well. So you know, when when healthcare related things become you know, illegal, and the data is being collected, it just raises serious concerns and issues about how this data could be used potentially
against people. And of course we know the expression digital redlining, and with algorithms and now becoming AI, you know, how much control do we do? We have to say, wait a minute, that that out put was incorrect.
So you note and how we started technology a gift and a curse. Can we get to a point where it's no longer a curse? Can it be managed in a way where we still benefit by the amount of data that so many companies have that kind of makes some processes much easier for all of us. Like what's the balance here?
Yeah, I mean it's funny because like if you have kids and you have a car, you probably would put them in a car seat, right and you would put them in the back of the car. But that wasn't there before. So we put we put some guardrails. And so I'm not proposing that our technology environment ecosystem becomes like airline safety, but it should be like car safety that we have air bags, that we have speed limits, you know, things of that nature as well. And there's
two core fundamental facts. Fact number one is that there is no oversight or regulation in terms of the data being collected and how it's going to be used, with the exception in specific sectors based on laws such as Hip and Graham Leach Blily that were passed in the
nineties pre iPhone, pre Meta, pre Google. The second issue is is that a lot of the problems that we have are exasperated because we have now this consolidation into large monopolies, and we haven't had a significant anti trust lawsuit since Microsoft was told not to bundle Internet Explorer, and that opened up the door for Google and everyone else as well. So these companies over the last twenty years have done thousands of acquisitions and it's been green lighted,
green lighted, et cetera. And so I think we need a proper balance of some antitrust sprinkled in with some privacy laws as well. And I think that will provide the proper cars safety as opposed to airline safety, that there can be incredible innovation that can continue because look, when AT and T was broken up, the telecommunications revolution happened.
No, it's a really good point, very thoughtful. Hey, Tom really enjoyed this. Comeback soon. Tom Camp author of a book, new book it's out though, containing big tech how to protect our civil rights, economy and democracy. As we mentioned earlier, co founder and former CEO of the cybersecurity company Centrified, joining us there from Menlo Park, California.
The cover of this book hearkens back to those old Monopoly posters with big octopuses tentacles.
The artwork means something. Yeah, in a big way, this is Bloomberg