Welcome to Hat of Money. I'm Joel, and today we're talking about defending your digital life with Nathan Bartram. I know I'm not talking to a bunch of dummies, but I categorize my technologe as mid as the kids say, at best. I'm at that point in my life where my twelve year old can figure out new gadgets faster than I can. It's kind of humiliating to admit that right now. But for those of you out there who might feel like me, using tech regularly but not feeling
like a pro. Maybe you're worried about your privacy. You're worried about passwords and data as you navigate the online world that has been around for many, many years now. So me calling it the online world makes me sound old, But this episode is for you. Nathan Bartram founded the site thenewoil dot org back in twenty eighteen to help average folks feel equipped with the information they need to navigate this world of online reality with confidence. So Nate, can I call you Nate? Yeah?
Of course?
All right, thank you for joining me today.
Pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for having me.
Of course, and Nate, you have been a listener to the show. For many many years. We have emailed back and forth, and you have often offered suggestions as we've covered topics about on many of these on many of these subjects like privacy, passwords, and data so and you write about them eloquently, have been for many many years now. First question, though, what is your craftee equivalent? What do you like to suplurge on? My friend, I'm super curious
to hear. While you're saving for the future, what are you splurging on in the meantime.
Oh man, this is going to be a really boring answer, actually, but I've been thinking about this question, and I think my answer is going to be privacy and security stuff. And I know that sounds like a cop out because that's what I do with the New Oil, right, But the thing is, that's what I was doing before the New Oil, Like, that's kind of what led me to starting the New Oil is I was experimenting with all this stuff, and I wanted to play. I wanted to
share my journey and my experience. And so even if the New Oil wasn't a thing, if you know, nobody was reading it and it was just me by myself. Again, that's still what I'd be doing, is you know, different subscriptions and tools and sometimes hardware.
So okay, can you give me an example of something you've spent recently on in that category? And people might be like, all right, I never even thought to do that.
Okay, not recent but a few years ago I spent about six hundred dollars on a router, Okay, and yeah, that's a lot of money for a router. Is it?
Is it vastly superior than the ones you get from the Internet companies or that I could buy on you know, a random tech website like best buy or something.
You could probably find it on best Buy, But it
is vastly superior. And the reason I bought it is because it's compatible with an open source firmware called DDWRT, which allows you to do all kinds of things that honestly, I'm probably not even using eighty percent of what this router can do, but it unlocks all kinds of really cool privacy and security abilities, which some you can get on a typical router, but some are definitely a little more advanced in the ability to like segment the network so you can kind of like, I know, we're diving
in a little bit. But one piece of advice is one common piece of advice is to put all your your smart devices on like a guest network, so that way, if any of them get compromised, it doesn't spread to the rest of your network. You can kind of do that without having to create a guest network, So just really really advance things like that.
One of the things I appreciate about your tact and I mentioned this in the bio, is that you're kind of attempting not to speak to the techies in the space or super nerds who care about privacy at this incredibly granular level, but you're trying to speak to people like me who want to improve their privacy but probably aren't going to buy a six hundred dollars router, right, So right, that's like that's your audience. So what would
you say? I guess maybe the first question. A lot of people assume genies out of the bottle at this point. I remember that equip data breach in twenty eighteen, and there's you know, I assume I've signed up for a Facebook account. At this point, they know everything about me. What would you say to those people who are like my guess my data is public genies out of the bottle? Do I still need to care about privacy?
Biastanswer, of course, but yes, And it's funny. I actually wrote a blog post about this. It's I think it's called a why to care about privacy after so many years or something like that. And there's the practical reason in the philosophical reason, And the practical reason is that data gets old. You know, over time, you move, you change interests, you become a different person, like most of
us over our lives. We don't dramatically become different people, but we do change enough that you know, you look back on yourself ten years ago and you're like, man, I was a totally different person back then. And over time that data that they've collected about you will grow stale and grow old. The philosophical reason is the example I gave in the blog post was if you're driving somewhere that you go all the time, like a friend's house, and you're kind of on autopilot, and you realize all
of a sudden you took a wrong turn. You went left instead of right. You don't just keep going left like once you know how to do better, you're like, oh, Okay, I should change what I'm doing, And so that's a I guess that one kind of assumes that you do value your privacy. But yeah, once you realize, like, oh, there are options and I don't have to keep doing this, in my opinion, it seems a little silly to just keep going the wrong way on the road, so to speak.
Should we value our privacy and in what ways is our privacy being violated? How does that impact us? I guess because some people might say, yeah, I've heard that excuse from some folks. I've got nothing to hide, So why does it matter if they know my address, my name, my birthday, my firstborn child's name, Like, who cares?
I was really hoping you'd bring that up. So the answer is everyone does have something to hide, and what it is varies from person to person. And the example I was thinking of in my head is, especially for this audience, if you think you have nothing to hide, don't actually do this, but please send us your bank account login. Right, Yeah, yeah, because with that information, even if you don't have a lot of money, maybe you need that money to pay your groceries. So we all
do have something to hide. And the way that I define privacy. There's a lot of different ways to define it, but I define it as having that control over what you want to share and who you want to share it with. So privacy. A lot of people confuse privacy and anonymity. When they hear privacy, they think, oh, I'm going to go live in a cabin in the woods and I'm never going to have a phone and nobody's going to know who I am. But really it's just it's the same as you would it's your day job.
You know, when when you go to work on Monday, you're not going to tell your boss about the fight you had with your spouse, And that's that's privacy. You have that ability to say, I don't want this person to know this thing. Yeah, and I think we should care because a lot of the time we're not being given that choice from tech companies.
That's yeah. So no, that's true, and that's that's essentially what the business model is based on with a lot of these tech companies. Is right, when it's a free product, we are the product. And I saw the other day that what Pinterest makes three dollars a year from the average user, but Facebook makes like twenty six twenty seven dollars a year from the average US, So they would rather you not pay them and just continue to keep you engaged because they're making money off of you in
other ways. So is part of and is there any remedy to the fact that we're doing business with companies who profit in this way from us using their product without actually paying them a dime. It seems like it seems like we're making out Scott clean, right. I get Gmail, and I don't pay Google anything, and it's super helpful to me to use all of those Google assets that they provided. But what am I losing in the process?
I think in answer to your first question, I think there are ways to use a lot of the common services in ways that are less privacy invasive. So one of the really big examples I give you mentioned Facebook. You can use Facebook in the browser, even on your phone, and that browser is going to offer you a lot more protection than it would if you were using the app. Because the thing about phone apps, especially mobile apps, is
they get a lot of permission. And Google an Apple are doing a lot better about giving users more control over that, but for now, they still get a lot of permission and they can access a lot more data than you would normally expect, Like, I don't know if this is still true, but at one point the Facebook app was using the sensors on your phone, like the gyroscope to figure out if you were like on a bus or if you were walking down the street and
things like that. So things like using it in a browser, especially like a privacy protecting browser, will really mitigate a lot of that risk you mentioned, like what are you giving up by using Google It? Again, it really depends on the person and what they value, because there are a lot of really good privacy protecting services, Like a really popular one is proton Mail, and yeah, yeah, I'm
sure you've heard of that one. It's a privacy it's an encrypted email provider, and it's definitely missing some things that Google has, but it's building out as Suite and it's trying to be like a Google competitor, and it's a pretty polished service. But at the same time, there are still a lot of people who used Gmail, Like I've signed up for things that don't accept pro on Mail for some reason or another, and I have to use a Gmail or you know, you need a Gmail
account to post on YouTube and things like that. So I think that is a really good question though, actually is what are you gaining from using some of these services? Does it outweigh what you're losing in terms of privacy? And are there any ways you can mitigate that if you need that service.
Sure, trade offs are kind of the reality throughout all of life. But yeah, I mean, if it wasn't for Gmail, Google Calendar, like my life would be, I'd be on the side of the road in a ditch somewhere. It's yeah, I remember trying to get organized when I was a youngster and it just wasn't happening. And then finally Google came along and I was like, oh, okay, this actually works for my life. But yeah, you are giving things
up in the process. I'm also curious to you are, and I want to talk more about some of the products that you mentioned and just other products that some are free, some cost money, but they can help on the privacy front instead of just going with the tried and true brands that maybe you initially think of. So we'll get to some questions on that in a bit. But you talk on you're on the blog about how
privacy exists on a spectrum. We had re released an episode recent about how financial independence exists on a spectrum and for a lot of people think it's one or the other. It's like I'm not or I am not true. Well, the same thing is true with privacy, right, So it's not like I'm fully private or my goodness, I've exposed everything that people know about me. It's all public now.
So how do you think about that? And I guess the only way to get like fully private, even in today's age, it would be kind of like to never sign up for these services in the first place and then move to the backwoods of Maine, which most people aren't going to do. Plus, I hear the bugs are
horrendous in the summer. So how do you think about that spectrum and how you help people think about well, this is like a reasonable step to take, and then this is maybe unreasonable even though it does give you added layers of privacy in your life.
Well, I think that's a question that everyone has to ask for themselves. I really do believe there's no like one size fits all in privacy. I think there's certain things like best practices. Just like personal finance, there's best practices that everyone should do, you know, like putting away at least ten percent of their income and stuff like that. And with privacy, it's it's very similar, things like using
a password manager and two factor authentication whenever possible. But yeah, I mean, there's a really famous quote that I'm definitely not going to get right here, but it was a really famous computer scientist said something along the lines of no system is truly unhackable unless it's unplugged, the battery is removed, it's buried six feet underground and surrounded and led, and even then I'm not sure. And he's absolutely correct, because we see all kinds of crazy research come out,
especially this time of year. There's a really big hacker convention that just ended this past weekend, and these are the people who are always announcing like, oh, we can use the the Wi Fi waves from your router to figure out who's in the room through the wall, Like that's an actual thing. That's an actual thing. But I mean those are so high level.
Was that blows my mind?
Yeah? Yeah, but you know it's like you said, I mean, it's I'm certainly not going to go live in the woods and forsake my phone and all that kind of stuff. So it's it's it's really about people coming up with what is a realistic threat and what are the realistic defenses against it, because you can't defend against everything, it's just not possible. But I think people will find that it's actually what do they call that, like Pereto's rule
or something. You can get like eighty percent of the stuff with twenty percent of the effort.
Yeah, and then at that point the extra effort is only gonna it's going to be smaller, more incremental gains that might not be the juice, might not be worth the squeeze. You mentioned passwords, and my guess is most people listening have and most sites force you to have a reasonable password at this point in time, right, They're like, you got to have uppercase lowercase. You got to have a couple like an exclamation mark or and you know you have to. You can't just be password all in
lowercase anymore. And so even my grandma had to update her password. I'm sure it was, which is good good for her. But you mentioned password managers. Do you have suggestions on which ones might be best to use? Some of them cost money, others don't, and how much dinection do they.
Offer sure, So I do have with almost all of the tools we're going to talk about. I do actually list my recommendations on the website. And for the record, just because I don't list something on the website doesn't necessarily mean it's bad, Like I don't list dash Lane, but I would rather people use dash Lane than not use a password manager. But some of my favorites I've been using Bitwarden for years. I've got most of my
family on that one. Proton We've mentioned proton Mail. They recently rolled out their own password manager that my podcast co host loves. He uses it for all his stuff. I think there's a couple others. One password is really popular. That one costs about a dollar a year, but the first two are free, so there's actually a lot. There's a surprising amount of moves you can make in privacy
without spending money. There's a lot of things you can do that are free, like password managers, two factor switching, browsers. Those things don't cost money unless you need some of the more advanced features, which most people don't. So that's the good news.
But I'm hearing more ads for VPNs and which you allow people maybe to either watch Netflix content they otherwise wouldn't be able to that exists in other countries or something like that. Not that I'm condoning it, I don't personally do that, but how much how secure do VPNs make you and how big of a how important is that maybe in the digital ecosystem of protecting your privacy.
So on my website, I organize everything in order of most important to least important, and that's a little bit subjective. I've had some people disagree with my ordering there, but I put VPNs on the last page. They do offer you some protection, but yeah, a lot of the advertising is seriously overrated. So what I always tell people is VPNs do two things. They change your IP address and they establish a secure connection between you and the VPN server.
And so, in other words, by changing the IP address, like you said, you look like you're coming from somewhere else, So you could maybe stream Netflix in the UK or something like that, or I think a BBC iPlayer is a really common one, and that is a useful use case. But in terms of privacy, your IP address is a very small portion of how companies track you online. So it's definitely something, but I wouldn't really I think one time I compared it to like changing the pain on
your car. You've still got the same license plate, you still got the same ven, you still got all these other identifying features. So it doesn't really help that much. And in terms of security, we do sometimes see apps that are unencrypted, but for the most part. Last time I checked, Google said that somewhere around ninety five percent of the Internet is encrypted now. And that's a really complicated thing that I don't want to go too far
into because that could turn into a whole explanation. But basically, when I say encrypted, I mean between your device and their server. So when you connect to Facebook, anybody in between your phone and Facebook, they might be able to see you're connected to Facebook, but they can't really see any of the content or the messages or anything Facebook can of course, But so VPNs don't really change that.
There is a use case if you're in a place where you have a reason to believe that maybe the rauter you're using is compromised, but I personally have never seen that. Even again, there's a common example is like using it in public Wi Fi. Your connection is encrypted at your device, so it would be a fairly advanced attack for the router to be malicious like that. But if I would say, if it makes you feel better and you have the money, you certainly can get a VPN.
They do help some, but they're definitely not the panacea that advertisers make them out to be.
Yeah, those ads make it sound like the best thing since lifespread.
Oh and yeah, hacker proof anonymous and yeah.
Yeah, yeah. Okay, Well, so you published a guide on your site about staying safe while you're shopping online. And I'm curious, especially as that is one of the things that probably how the money listeners care about is like, Okay, what am I giving over when I'm shopping with a unique vendor or or with a website that I place
orders from regularly. One of the things you tell people to do, which is impossible to do online but possible to do in real life, is to use cash more often when you're buying stuff, just to anonymize those purchases. But yeah, how do you think about staying safe when shopping online? Do you have any tips in particular in regards to that.
Sure, it depends on what you're trying to stay safe from. If you're trying to and that's kind of a reoccurring theme with privacy. We call it a threat model, So if anybody goes to the website, you'll see a page about that. It's just a fancy way of saying what are you trying to protect and who are you trying
to protect it from. If your goal is to not get your credit card numbers stolen, you probably want to stick with reputable vendors, like you want to go straight to the store like Walmart or Target or I'm not a huge fan of Amazon, but there is something to be said that we all know who Amazon are or is, we can probably trust their security fairly well. Here in America, we have access to a service called privacy dot com that I'm a huge fan of. It allows you to
create virtual debit cards that lock to that vendor. So, for example, if you create one for let's say your Netflix account, it can only ever be used at Netflix. So if Netflix has a data breach, that card is useless to the people who stole it. It can't be used anywhere except Netflix.
And there are other There are banks who have created products that go alongside their credit cards too, like Capital One has one of those two that creates virtual virtual cards, so it's yeah, that's a real helpful tool, Tore. Yeah, that anonymized card is only available to be spent. You can only use it at that one vendor.
Yeah, definitely. If you live outside the US or for some reason don't want to use privacy dot Com, definitely check with your bank. Is It's not a super common feature, but it's becoming more common. I'm seeing it a lot more for sure. Yeah. There's also things like using they're called alias emails, so services like simple Login add E dot io. These basically you can create an email address that still forwards to your inbox, so you can manage it all from one place and it's really convenient. But
it really helps with like spam. If you shop online and they start spamming you, you can just turn off the email address. Or in terms of privacy, it also helps. It kind of breaks up your profile a little bit, so you're not using the same email address across multiple services and that helps protect your privacy.
That sounds nice because unsubscribing can be like a full time job these days. Oh yes, yeah, sometimes, Nate. I don't know how this happens. I guess it's cookies, but you'll visit a site you won't do a darn thing. Maybe you like literally looked at one item and you'll get an email in your inbox ten minutes later, and they'll be like, are you still shopping? You're sure you didn't want to buy that thing, And I'm like, how did how did that happen? How did you get in
my inbox? I didn't submit anything to you. It's kind of creepy.
That is interesting. I haven't heard that one. Yeah, I would say cookies would probably be the primary offender there. I'd have to do some digging. I'm not sure, but.
It's probably because I have an account there and I'm logged in and I'm looking at something that must be it. And maybe it's not fully anonymous. It's a site I've done business at before and so they know it's me coming back. But I'm sure that's not. I can't imagine how they'll be possible at a website that I've never spent a dollar at before, or never created an account at. You kind of just briefly mentioned how much you loathe Amazon, and yeah, you're kind of would love for people to
use Amazon a lot less. I think myself included from I think most people's just this need response. It's like I think I might need that thing one click, by it's there the next day or two days later. And so people have just gotten used to spending money when they otherwise would have come up with a more creative solution in years past. So what's your reason for getting people off the Amazon train?
Oh gosh, there's a lot of them, and some of them are kind of political. So I don't want to go too deep into that because I know you guys aren't really a super political podcast. But there's a just to kind of very briefly brush over this, and I do have a recent blog post about this. I republish it every time Prime Week rolls around. They have teamed up with police to give police access to ring doorbell footage, so if I'm just walking past somebody's house, police can
see me, even if I'm not on a list. I'm not suspected of anything.
You look like a threat to me, Nate. That's all I'm gonna say. I think you belong behind bars.
It's the tattoos. But yeah, there's also they're just very anti worker like workers in I believe this was in Alabama, workers tried to unionize and Amazon tried to get a camera above the ballot box to ensure election integrity and definitely not to know who voted yes and no.
Of course not.
Yeah, of course they would know. It's just they just do a lot of really shady things like that. And you could also make the argument that they're crushing out a lot of smaller businesses and making competition harder. So I think there's a lot of reasons to avoid them, just from the idea of like centralization and trying to
ensure a healthy competition. And like you said, I want to make it clear that I understand sometimes you need to buy on Amazon, like I buy things from there about two or three times a year, But like you said, what I want people to avoid is the knee jerk reaction of like, oh, I need something one click by when you know, maybe you could run down to your local store and buy it and sometimes that's even cheaper and you get it faster and yeah, so it's just
kind of challenging that instinct of going straight to Amazon. I think would benefit a lot of people.
I'm curious about the ads that we see online. They're highly tailored. Now right, Matt's talked about seeing Instagram ads online for stuff that just like you're shocked. How does it know me so well? It knows me better than like, my wife never would have bought this awesome gift for me. She doesn't know me that well. And so, yeah, when it comes to the ads we're seeing, is that all just based on places we're stopping? Is there a way that's also kind of creepy for a lot of people?
Is there a way to is it ad blockers? What's the what's the way to kind of make sure that ads aren't you know, so incredibly detailed as as they serve up, you know, before our eyeballs in a way that feels uncomfortable or maybe that we're giving way too much information.
Yeah, that's a great question. There's the answer is there's a lot of ways that they track you, and fortunately that also means there's a lot of ways you can fight back. So ad blockers are a good one. My personal favorite is called you block Origin. I do mention that one on my website, and that one blocks more than just ads, It also blocks a lot of common trackers like Google Analytics and stuff like that, which I
know is for the people who have a website. I know that's not great because that does damage your analytics, but unfortunately that's kind of the situation. I guess there's also.
Better for the individual, and that's kind of who we're speaking to you right.
Well, and I guess I will say on that note, if you're you can choose to whitelist certain sites. So if you say you're on YouTube and you're like, well, I want to support the creators, you can tell U block Origin not to work on YouTube and see the ads.
But there's also apps, especially apps with ads in them. Ads. Ironically, ads are right now, to my knowledge, like the biggest privacy invasion that are feeding its own ecosystem because they use a system called real time bidding, which again that's a whole thing, but basically, every time you see an AD, there is a within nanoseconds, there is an auction that goes on and your information is sent out to everyone
who might be interested in that ad space. So even if they don't purchase the ad, they still basically get a copy of all your data. So one of the things I tell people is just remove as many apps as you can on your phone, things that you don't use very often. And this can have, like you know,
personal finance benefits. We just talked about Amazon. If you take the Amazon app off your phone, you're not as likely to just instinctually open it and click one click by yeah, And you're also getting that privacy benefit things like Reddit. You know, Reddit is littered with ads. Taking those things off your phone will reduce the amount of data that's getting sent back to advertisers.
So it's like a big win just to take some of those apps that you're man even just think about the habitual nature of like you press your finger to the thing because you know exactly where it is on your screen. Just taking it off there, you're gonna like hit that space and you like, what's happening now, Like
there's there is something to the habitual nature. But then also to protecting your privacy, protecting your finances, that taking those apps off off the phone can be, it can it can be a serious move to help on all those fronts. All right, I want to get to more with you, Nate, and in particular, you're not a fan of smart TVs, so but I'm guessing most of the population out there has one loves it. So let's we'll throw you in the fire on that one in just
a second with the audience. We'll be right back right, We're back still talking with Nate Bartram about defending your digital life and privacy and all that stuff. And there's just a lot more to get to Nate. I'm not sure if you've read the book. One of my favorite books of like kind of on this topic was Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport.
Yes, that's a great book.
I love it so good, and I just love the way he thinks about just the way we have include technology in our lives. I think for a lot of people it's just this assumption that more technology is good and let's adopt everything that comes out and then maybe at some point we'll discard it. But he's very intentional from the get go about what he imports and what he likes, and he has never opened a social media account in his life. I don't think so. He's he's
one of those rare birds. But yeah, you're not just doing it for productivity reasons or for attention reasons, which seem to be kind of Col's main motivation. Like, Hey, I'm going to keep this digital minimalism going because I realized it's going to distract me from those other things I want to accomplish. So why do you fall into that camp?
I'm glad you brought that up, the thing I've noticed about privacy, And for the record, I will admit maybe this is a bias. Like you know they say, like when you're a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Yeah, But the more I do the privacy thing, the more I notice that there are all of these like peripheral benefits that maybe privacy isn't like central to that, but there are little things so I mean, really there's a
lot of them. Like for example, I'm thankfully i am not a visually impaired, but I'm told that advertising is chaos for like visually impaired people like screen readers, and so ad blockers can like make the screen a lot cleaner. That's like an example of a peripheral benefit for people. And I think I've noticed since getting into privacy that
it really does clear up a lot of bandwidth. You know, a lot of the flash in the pan news stories and the memes, the ones that don't really matter, that they're kind of out of the new cycle within a couple of days. I tend to miss a lot of those, and it just frees up a lot of bandwidth. I tend to miss a lot of not to sound like arrogant or anything, but just a lot of petty little drama that happens on social media. I found a lot of my interactions with people have gotten a lot more meaningful,
even if they're the same interactions. Like, you know, my sister might send me a photo of my excuse me, a photo of my nephew, and you know it's the same photo she might post on Facebook, but the fact that she took time out of her day to send it directly to me, like, really feels a lot more meaningful. Person. I feel like there's just so many peripheral benefits. There's
the peace of mind. There's just more mental bandwidth from not looking at ads, having that healthier relationship with technology. When I get frustrated, I can just turn off my computer and walk away and I'm disconnected.
And I want to say, there was now a study that just dropped, like last week or something about just how our brains have become rewired in short order from our use of social media, and it is that we all know this intuitively as individuals and as a society when you look around and you're like, what are people doing when they get a down moment? Boom the phone, right, boom, the earbuds whatever, And so yeah, I think our attention
spans truly have plummeted, and it impacts our relationships. It impacts a whole bunch of things in our lives that downstream effects are real. So with that in mind, I'm curious. I mentioned the smart TV thing. How much you hate smart TVs? Why do you hate them? What's the alternative for people who want to watch streaming content?
I don't, to be honest, I don't think I hate is a strong word.
Okay, all right, I put words in your mouth.
No, you're good, You're good. I actually I will admit I do have a smart TV because my wife enjoys streaming. I think my issue with a lot of smart devices in general is that we have so little control over them. You know, you can go into the settings. Okay, Actually, this is a really good example. I was playing around with my smart TV and I noticed that in the menu I could disagree to the terms of service. But guess what happens when I do?
They shut off the smart fe Sure, exactly.
It's not a smart TV anymore. So I can either agree to all of their terms of service wholesale full stop, nor or I can just have a dumb TV, which is great if I want a dumb TV, but I don't. There's things we use that for.
I want to say, years ago, Visio was recording people's viewing habits and they were selling the data on what people were watching.
I think a lot of people are still doing that, actually a lot of manufacturers.
So that's one of those things where again it's a trade off. It's like you better know that that's happening, because it seems like it seems like, oh, well, great, I got this product and now I can watch whatever I want to watch out my fingertips. It's super easy. But if you don't realize that part of that bargain is the fact that you are giving up the data on your viewing habits to Samsung or Visio or whoever it is, then you're not making that choice with all the data on the table exactly.
And like you were saying earlier, that's by designs. They go out of their way to hide those things, or they like to dress it up and really fancy, like if you check a privacy policy. A lot of the time they'll say, oh, we collect this data to make your experience better. Yeah, and what they really mean by that is targeted advertising. Yeah, going to Tailor that.
We're seeing it more too in the car space. Now, I'm curious how much you know or care about that, like, and that's I'm not gonna say that. This is my whole reason for driving old cars, but it makes me less inclined to upgrade my six Toyota when I realized that the new one is not only going to have more computerized parts that are more likely to break, it's gonna be harder to repair newer vehicles, and they're just
more expensive to buy and own. But then, on top of that, when you think about the privacy concerns of newer cars, the fact that they're connected to the Internet wherever they go. Yeah, that seems like a plus. So you can listen, you can stream the new Tailor Swift album when it drops, right. But then there's other there's other things that come with that with that bargain.
Yeah, there's a reporter. Her name is Kashmir Hill k A s H M I R. If you look her up, she's done several pieces, I believe for New York Times that have kind of really brought this issue to the mainstream, which I'm really grateful for. I think you guys have
actually mentioned her on one of your Friday flights. And it's Yeah, it's really tough because on the one hand, for now, that is an option you could drive an older car, which also saves you a lot of money, as you pointed out, But there's also My last car was a twenty ten, and I don't want to say what model it was, but it was a very very common model, Like I just saw one the other day,
still making these cars. And the last time I went into AutoZone and I was like, hey, I need a headlight, and they're like, oh, we don't carry that anymore for a twenty ten.
It's too old.
Yeah exactly, And I'm like, it's a headlight for a twenty ten, what do you mean?
In their defense, it was a Ferrari, Nate, we all know it.
I wish I made that kind of money, but yeah, no, it's that's the challenge we're going to face as things go forward. Is maybe right now you can find vehicles or maybe I could have ordered it online but it's going to become harder to find parts, and it's going to become more of a thing where you have to get creative or know somebody who's a mechanic. And it's unfortunately, I don't really have any good solutions in that space,
and I don't think anybody does. There's a good organization called Privacy for Cars who is doing a lot of research into this and trying to lobby for better consumer rights. But I mean, right now, it's you know, again, like I said, companies do it on purpose. They want you to dig through pages and pages illegal ease to find the email address to email them and opt out, and of course nobody has time for that, so it's it's a really difficult thing.
So what are you doing when you're signing up for something new? The terms of service, of course are I mean, it's laughable how long they are, how small the type is, and how ninety nine point nine plus percent of people quickly use the scrolly thing on their mouse to jump to the bottom and click. Okay, So but what are we signing when we say yes, when we hit accept and what is there a different tact we should take?
Good? Question? So there's a there's another website called terms of Service didn't read TSDR for short, kind of like the what's the abbreviation TLDR too. Yeah, they list a surprising number of websites and they explain the terms of service in plain English and like bullet points. I will be honest, I think some of the stuff that they cover is a little bit pedantic, but I do appreciate that they give you that level of information and that'll kind of tell you and some of it is kind
of common. Like I'm not saying this makes it right, but a lot of websites, like Instagram, for example, when you sign up for Instagram, they basically say we can use your photos for anything. So if you see one of your photos and an Instagram ad, you don't get royalties because you sign that away with the terms of service. So that's a really good website for maybe helping to vet some of the terms of service and understand what
you're signing away. In terms of alternatives, I mean, there's a few options there in there's a really good website called Alternative two Alternative two dot net, and it is exactly what it says, Like you can type in Instagram and it'll give you all the different alternatives to Instagram, and you can filter it by Android, iPhone, if it's free, if it's paid, all kinds of things, and they have
all kinds of websites and services. So I would say maybe start with that, because it really depends what you're talking about with these different services. But yeah, there's honestly there usually is a good alternative out there in my experience.
Okay, are you Apple or Android? I know, at least in the marketing, Apple seems to be better on the privacy front. How true is that? And which one do you prefer?
So I'm cheating. I use Android, but I'm using a custom version of Android that has had all the googly parts removed or as many as possible. I should say so Apple. If we're talking about normal Android, like the kind you would buy over the counter, versus Apple, I would make the argument that Apple is more private and secure. But I also make the argument on my website that there are a lot of things you can do, like changing the settings in the phone, replacing the stock apps
with more privacy respecting apps. And I think if you do all of that and you practice, I call it good Internet hygiene. Like again, we talked about not keeping every app on your phone, being careful what links you click, the kind of basic stuff. I think between all of that, the difference is really minimal at the end of the day. And so I think depending on how you use it.
I mean, if you get an IF and you download every sketchy app from the app store and you never change the settings, like, I'm pretty sure I can make an Android much more private than that. Sure, but depending on how you use it, I think they can both be I think they're both a good choice.
Apple seems to do a better job of prompting you to ask you questions about whether or not you want to share certain information on the rag with certain apps. But you're right, it's all about settings the apps that you're using, and you can make either one of those phones incredibly intrusive, allowing people access to all sorts of data that you didn't intend to, depending on how you use it. What about web browsers. We've already talked about
email providers and proton mail being a good option. What about web browsers, and like Brave is typically recommended as one of those browsers, it's better for people who care about their privacy and then yeah, how much information are we giving away if we're using one of the stock or one of the more well known browsers.
So Chrome is definitely the worst. I'm sorry all the Google fans out there. Chrome is missing a lot of basic privacy protections that other browsers have already implemented because it's run by an ad company. I've also heard that it uses a lot of device resources, like some of the hardware memory and stuff like that. Brave is my typical recommendation for most people because it's based on the same trying to figure out how to put this in a not super techy way. So the basic code of
Chrome is open source. Anybody can use it and make their own version of Chrome, and that's basically what Brave did. But they've added on all kinds of really cool on by default privacy preserving features that the average person would never even know is there. It also includes an ad blocker and a tractor blocker by default, which is based on you Block Origin that I mentioned earlier. So Brave, I think for most people it's going to feel like Chrome. It's going to be able to use all the same
extensions as Chrome. It's just going to work right out of the box. You don't need to mess with it a whole bunch. There is like a built in like cryptocurrency wallet that you can disable in the setting. So I just I do want to be upfront about that there is some stuff that most people don't have a use for. The other one that's commonly recommended is Firefox,
and Firefox is just it's great as well. The only thing I would give with that is that when you do have to do a little bit more tinkering to get the same level of protection, like you have to go manually add you block origin and it's based on a different set of source codes. So there it's rare. But you may find a couple of extensions that aren't really compatible. But either of those I think are going to be a huge step up from something like Chrome or Safari.
Even Okay, I was thinking search engines like Google became the de facto a word for doing a search for a reason, yes, and yet there were other there were other alternatives, Duck duck go being like what it seems like is the best for privacy. But now I'm thinking with ai op ai that you know, going to chatch ebt has become more common for especially younger folks, instead
of using traditional search engines. So how do you think about your security when doing search on the web, whether it's with an AI tool or with a service like Duck Duck go o or Google.
So there are a number of privacy preserving search engines, which again I do list those on my website. I think they're under the miscellaneous habits section. There's a few different search engines because like Duck Duck go for example, they're technically really just a proxy of Bing. They're not building their own search engine, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. There's a couple other start Page does the same thing
with Google. There are some providers like Brave. Brave has their own search engine now and they're actually doing their own indexing, so you're not using for the most part, you're not using Google or BING or anything. There's another one called Cogi. I think I'm pronouncing that wrong. It's Kagi. I think they give you like one hundred free queries a month, but otherwise it's a paid service. And a lot of those same providers actually are starting to offer
alternatives to AI. So Brave has an AI summary in the search engine. They also have in the Brave browser their own AI called Leo, which you can use same thing. The free version has like a limited number of queries, but there is a paid version if you get a lot of value out of that, and it's kind of proxying your queries back to mistroll or chat GPT or whoever. Duck Duck Go also has one called Duck Ai Cogi has.
I don't know if they have the actual LLM, but they do have the search summary like I just mentioned, and I think you can even disable that one if you want to. So yeah, there's actually and again on that note, I did actually, I think a couple of weeks ago, I added another section to the bottom of that same page where the search engines are about privacy preserving AI. So okay, okay, there's plenty of options out there's a growing number of options out there for this kind of stuff.
Well, it seems like Brave is a good solution that kind of encompasses a few different places where your privacy is at risk, and with Brave it seems like a one stop solution for at least a few parts of that. I'm curious, what about protecting our credit? And Matt and I we've talked about credit freezes on the show and how the credit lock products are in fear and they cost money and it's just a waste of your time and money to do that. Credit freeze, fortunately now federally
is available to everyone or free. So what's your take on credit freeze is is that good enough? Do we need additional services on the front? What are your thoughts?
So? Yeah, I smile every time you guys mentioned that because I agree one hundred percent. Credit freezes are the way to go. They're free in America. There's no point in paying. I know it's relatively cheap, it's like one hundred bucks a year or something, but there's no need to waste that money on something like LifeLock or whatever. If you want to add a little extra protection, there's a oh gosh, what are they call it? Fraud alerts? Is that what they call?
Yeah?
Yeah, So the only drawback with fraud alerts is they do need to be renewed every year. I know you probably know this, but for listeners, they do need to be renewed every year, So set yourself a little reminder in your calendar. But the nice thing is you only need to play them with one agency and then they kind of pass it around to the others, so that the way I describe it, and these do work. I
actually have a quick story about this. I call it two FA for your credit, two factor authentication because even if you unfreeze your credit, two stories now that I think about it. So, a few years ago, we went to buy a car. We unfroze my credit. We went to the dealership and while I was sitting in I know, I took out a loan. I know that's not great.
But while I was sitting in the dealership, my phone rang and when I answered it, they were like, hey, this is so and so from you know, experience or whoever. We're just making sure this is a legitimate credit pull. And I was like, yeah, yeah, I'm sitting in the dealership right now, like please do it. I really appreciate the call. So, and then about a year or two ago, I had the exact opposite where I was at work and my phone rang and I picked it up and
they're like, hey, somebody's trying to unfreeze your credit. And I'm like, Nope, not me, don't do that. So it's really effective. I highly recommend that.
It's less like lockdown protectionary, which is what the credit freeze is, but it's more like a head's up which can help prevent you getting into trouble.
With also, so exactly, Yeah, it's super awesome.
Okay, love it. I'm curious you mentioned crypto recently, the crypto wallet and the Brave browser. What are your thoughts on crypto and is that, especially as crypto becomes, you know, more mainstream, is that a way to protect yourself when let's say you're considering it not just as And that's what makes crypto so hard to talk about sometimes, is like it's a speculative asset, but it's also a potential way to buy thinks. So it just depends on what
websites accepted, and it's is becoming more common. So what are your thoughts on that as a privacy mechanism Using cryptocurrency to facilitate some mirror transactions as.
A privacy mechanism. I think the only real comment I have is I want people to know that bitcoin is not anonymous. Uh that's you. You typically hear those words together like the anonymous cryptocurrency bitcoin. Bitcoin by default does
not have a name attached to the wallet. However, Most people buy bitcoin through an exchange such as coinbase or crypto dot com, and when you do that, you have to you have to submit ID for the whole anti money laundering they call them KYC or Know your Customer Laws. And once you do that, bitcoin is very easily traced. So once you buy bitcoin that is attached to you and they can very there's a coup called chain analysis.
This is their whole job. They can chase trace where all that bitcoin goes and where you spend it, and it's it can be anonymized, but it's incredibly difficult to do. There are other cryptocurrencies like minarow or z cash that are privacy by default or more privacy respecting. Minaro is my personal favorite. The thing I like about Minaro specifically
is that it's also a lot faster. I've tried to buy things with a bitcoin before, and I end up sitting there for like, you know, twenty minutes waiting for the transaction to go through, whereas with Minaro, it's like, you know, five or ten. I actually just renewed one of my VPN subscriptions with Minaro, kind of just to see how to do it. I don't know Honestly, it's
something I don't really have strong opinions about. I think it's something that if you're interested in it and you're willing to dive into it, I don't have any issues with it. Definitely be aware that it is not anonymous, like I just said, and don't I wouldn't recommend going all in on cryptocurrency by any means, but I think if it's something you want to dabble in, I think it's a really cool technology and it certainly fun.
I guess all right, a few more questions to get to with you, Nate, and I want to specifically kind of get back to that spectrum question and talk about maybe low hanging fruit that maybe the first things that people should tackle on this privacy list. We'll talk about that right after this. We're back with Nate Bartram talking about your digital life. And Nate, I mentioned low hanging fruit just when you're talking, and we talked about the
spectrum thing, and hey, there's trade offs. But if you're like younger sister came to you now, I don't even know if you have one, but she's like eighteen and she's in she's going to college, and she's like from the get go, like, what what are like the three to five things I should be doing that are going to have the most bang for my book? Talking about the eighty twenty what is that twenty percent of things
that's going to have the eighty percent impact? What few things would you put on that to do list?
I think first and foremost would be passwords. I think it's something that most of us agree, like, ah, use the same password everywhere or you know, we know we can do better.
And is that also, by the way, because if one password gets hacked and you're using that password on one hundred websites, that, like, your whole digital life could be upended.
So yes, actually there is an attack. It's called credential stuffing, which is where the attackers get your username and password and they just plug it into every website and see where you have an account, So they'll check Amazon, they'll check Netflix, they'll check Gmail if it's a Gmail username,
And this does happen. In twenty nineteen, Facebook was caught storing passwords in plaintext, which is basically like your password in a readable format was stored on their servers, which should never ever, ever, ever happen ever, but especially not for a company as big as Facebook, Like, I can't stress that enough. Yeah, we've had a number of serious data breaches happen because of credential stuffing. And one of the examples I like to give people is your email.
If I can get into your email, I can issue password resets all day, and I can get into everything else.
On that front. Then is there you talked about two factor authentication just a little bit when it comes to banks and investment sites, how important is that? And is the email the best way to go? Or are there now? With certain phones? Right? That's like it only the app will only open if with facial recognition, So what's the best way to go about that?
I think so the one you want to try to avoid is the text message where they text you a code. If at all possible, you should try to avoid that. But if that's all they offer, then I mean, it's better than nothing. When it comes to the phones, I would argue that it really depends because, for example, right now we're seeing this thing called passkeys, which I'm sure you've heard about, which I do highly recommend, But right
now there's the issue of portability. It's really hard to export your pass keys, and so Let's say you guys are listening to this and you say, Okay, cool, I want to go get a password manager. If you have all your pass keys in your Android phone or your iPhone, it might be possible. I'm not sure. I haven't checked in while, but I know when they first came out there were no plans to be able to export your passkeys and move them to another password manager. So now
you're locked into that phone. So if you decide one day, well I think I'm gonna switch to whatever the other phone is, Android or iPhone, you may have to like disable all those passkeys and recreate them all over again. Okay, but that depends. If your bank is doing it through their app, you probably won't have that problem. But if it's like based on your phone, that's something to consider.
But at the same time, if you know that you're always going to be an iPhone person, then I mean that's a pretty good level of security I would ark.
Okay, going back to that list for your sister. Sorry I diverted us a little bit. Now you're get what else would you say? So passwords?
So password managers, and closely related to that is the two factor you mentioned going to the website settings or the app settings and seeing if they offer two factor Definitely switching browsers I mentioned, like switching to Brave or something like that. And the thing about a lot of these privacy tools is there's things that they seem like a lot of work, but they're not so, like, for example, switching to Brave when you download Brave and you install,
and this is true of Firefox as well. For the record, when you're setting it up, it asks you, hey, do you want to import all your bookmarks and your history and your all that stuff from your old browser. So it's really not that hard to switch. It just sounds like it's hard. But then there's things like switching to a password manager. Ideally, when you make that switch, you should also be upgrading your passwords to be unique and secure, and so that might take weeks or months to kind
of go through those. So there's there's kind of a sliding scale there of how difficult some of these things are. But password managers, browsers, I think we mentioned removing apps off your phone, checking the settings, making sure that the settings are you know, you've got the two factor enabled, you're not, your profiles not public, or something real quick
actually Venmo. I think you guys have mentioned this on Friday flight, but Venmo by default has all your transactions public, which may not be a huge deal, but also maybe it's weird. Yeah, it's just definitely weird.
When I go in there, like why is this social media for who we're sending money to? Like this makes that makes no sense?
And I yeah, and people put little inside jokes on the memo and just yeah.
So like I don't want people saying that about me exactly.
So just checking and knowing what are your options and what data is being shared and can you do anything about it? I think those would probably be my main things. But then there's also things we mentioned, email aliasing, encrypted email, all that kind of stuff that's all on the website for sure.
Is there anything else specifically on the personal finance fronts? You're a personal finance nerd, you also are a data and privacy nerd those things and sorry to refer to you as a nerd. I include myself in that category.
But with those things overlap, is there anything specifically in the personal finance space where because you're talking to an audience who probably overlaps with us at least on one of those things, right, What are the biggest privacy moves to make when it comes to protecting our money.
We already mentioned freezing your credit I think that's probably the biggest thing for most people, especially the fraudler is an extra layer of protection that takes a couple of minutes. Definitely, the mass credit card thing or paying in cash whenever possible. And and I think there's also something to be said for just because I know that kind of contradicts some of the advice that you guys give about like using
credit cards. And I think credit cards are a good way to go to because of the protections you've mentioned and the fact that like if somebody maxes out your credit card, you still have your debit account, you know, as opposed to if somebody maxes out your debit card, you're up a creek.
Yeah, I mean, there are just fewer federal protections if someone abuses your debit card than if they abuse your credit card exactly.
But I think, yeah, there's a lot of Like I said, there's a lot of peripheral things that overlap, like the ads and the ad blocking and the tractor blocking really helps with reducing targeted ads, and something we actually haven't mentioned that viewers should definitely look up when they get
a minute. Is this concept of surveillance pricing, which I'm not sure how prevalent it is, but I know for sure Target is doing it where basically they will use your data to try and tailor the price to you, and of course that means they're going to try and
get the most amount out of you. And one example they that I read a story about I believe from the markup is if you go to a Target parking lot and you check their website, the price on the item is going to be a little bit higher than if you checked it at home, because their reasoning is you're already in the parking lot, You're probably not going to drive somewhere else, so they may as well charge you a little bit more.
Interesting. So yeah, that's when it comes to them, Hey, is your location data sharing with that app on or not? And this really is a new dynamic pricing has been around for a while, but even that, it's like, Hey, Nate and Joel get offered the same price when we're looking at a flight to Phoenix on Tuesday at ten am, but it might change for both of us Tuesday at
eight PM so, but that's dynamic pricing. So now there's all this talk of yeah, more surveillance pricing where it's tailored to your search habits and specific information that retailers know about you, which opens up another can of worms. And I think that probably makes some of this privacy stuff even more important as we move forward into a world where our data is being used against us, It's being wielded in new ways that we hadn't even suspected.
Yeah, just a lot of the privacy stuff can be used to help cut down on that data that they can then use for this kind of surveillance pricing, or even just a lot of financial decisions now or not just taking into account your credit score, but a lot of other data as well. There's another story that I list on my website where I believe it was American Express lowered somebody's credit limit because he shops at Walmart
a lot. And typically people who shop at Walmart are not always great about repaying their loans, which is ridiculous, right, because it's like you would shop at Walmart to save money. They're inexpensive. Yeah, so it's almost like penalizing people for having, you know, thrifty habits and.
It's based on too much surveillance.
Yeah, exactly so, but yeah, I mean as far as the staples, I think, like I said, the password managers, freezing credit, those are things that will come in immediately helpful. Real quick story. I bought a concert ticket one time and then about six months later, I got the email that They're like, oh no, we had a data breach, and I'm like, well, I used a privacy dot com card, so I'll just go show off that card now. I don't care if my data was stolen.
Yeah. Yeah, So just a simple way to protect yourself on the front end so that you're not dealing with cleaning up the mess on the back end, which is time in annoyance for sure. So Nate, thanks so much for joining joining us today on the show where where can have a money crowd find out more about you and what you're up to. Yeah.
So, like you mentioned, my website is thenewoil dot org like data is the New Oil. That's where the phrase comes from. The website is kind of the main focus. I do some blogging. I do a weekly current events podcast called Surveillance Report. If anybody you know it's podcast, So if anybody wants to listen to that, but definitely check it out. If anybody has any questions, shoot me an email. I try to respond to them as best I can, and especially if you see any room for
improvement on the website. Like I don't claim to be perfect, so if something isn't making sense or you have any questions, that that means there's room for improvement, and I'm definitely open to that feedback.
Awesome, Nate, thanks so much for joining me today, man, I appreciate it.
Yeah, thank you for having me all right.
Always nice for a novice like me to learn more about a subject that I don't feel well versed in, and I think Nate did a good job covering a lot of helpful news you can use information about how
to protect your privacy online. I think my big takeaway from that conversation was kind of really what we're talking about at the end, and I haven't really known how to think about in some ways, some of the AI persuaded pricing and the surveillance pricing that seems to be becoming more common, and then when companies are accused of it, they run away with their hands up saying no, no, no, that's not what we were doing. What are you talking about.
I'm referring to Delta specifically in this case where they're like AI pricing. No, we're not doing that. But I think the tools at the disposal of companies to surveil us and then use that data against us when it comes to what they charge us for things is becoming
more pervasive and it's just improving. So when it comes to protecting our data, I think the stakes are only ramping up, not just as far as like scams people breaking into our accounts if we don't have enough protections, but in as far as literally what we pay for things. So I think it's becoming more important to at least do the twenty percent that's going to give the eighty percent impact some of the things that Nate mentioned today.
And I think he's wise to say you don't have to because it's gonna be hard to persuade people that's go one hundred percent all in privacy to the max. But I think it should be fairly easy to persuade us to just change our browser, which can have a big impact, or just use a password protector like a couple of these things can have high impact, and it's kind of one of those things where if you're being chased by a lion and your friends next to you, you don't have to outrun the line, you have to
outrun your best friend. And sorry, Matt if that means you get mauled by the lion in this scenario. But I think it's similar to that right where we don't have to be a million percent buttoned up on privacy.
But if we can do a few of these things, not only will it help make us more secure, I think it'll help save us money by being less just influenced by technology in general, less enamored with our screens but that digital minimalism kind of thing, But at the same time will also just be more secure than the average person out there, which means we're less likely to experience the brunt of the full time or part time job that can exist if our privacy is breached. So
I hope this episode was helpful to you. Please share it with a friend if you think it would be helpful to them, and thanks, as always for listening. There's more money saving information up on the site at howtomoney dot com. Until next time, best Friend out
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