TechStuff Classic: The Evils of Data Tracking

joined the show for this discussion. Keep in mind, you know this was done back in the issues with data tracking have only gotten worse since then. It has not improved in any stretch except for the various agencies that are tracking data, whether those are corporations or governments. So um, fun times, but enjoy this classic episode. I got to chance to be a guest host on a show you host called code Breaker. Yes, And on code Breaker when

we talked, I made a reference to Shakespeare. Yes. Now my question for you is are you ever confused with the seventeenth century British playwright Ben Johnson? Oh man, all the time opens, all the time embarrassing. Yeah, I know I've been. You know, I have been to Stratford upon Avon. I have done that whole thing and and and I used to you know, I never get confused for that

Ben Johnson. But in the past, at least people made jokes about steroids because of the other Ben Johnson, Nadian Runner, and I used to have a T shirt that said I'm not on steroids, but thanks for asking, which was a kind of inside joke among my friends, but it was you know, I've never been no, I've never been that poetic, I've never been that good at sonnets. So usually I'm not not confused. It's really funny because I'm

in in an upcoming episode of tech Stuff. I'm going to have my friend i As actar from c net on and his his Twitter handle is at i as, so he gets a lot of hip hop and rap questions. So yeah, it's like me not so much. I'm okay

with that. But the reason I have been on today is because we're doing something kind of a complimentary episode to the Codebreaker episode I was on, which was all about data tracking and data mining, and to kind of talk about what that is, what it's used for, what is the best case scenario, like what why do we want it? And what are some really really good reasons why we may not want it. Uh, despite the fact

that at this point it's here to stay. I think a spoiler alert, data tracking is not going away, right until the sort of posted a post apocalyptic world descents, until we're all in um fallout for world or whatever it is, or or we reach singularity and we're sharing the same consciousness anyway, right, yeah, and then it doesn't matter who buys what. There's no such thing as an individual at that point. So until then we're stuck with it.

So data tracking and data mining these are terms that kind of relate to another buzz term that you've probably heard over and over again, which is big data. Um. And the reason why we're even talking about this at all is because information has value, but it's hard to pin down exactly what the value is because it may be very different from one person to another, or between the individual whose data it is and some other organization or a chain of organizations, and the whole thing gets

really messy. And uh, yeah, we'll be talking about information and information about information like metadata. I mean this it becomes a rabbit hole that you can easily get lost in as you start to try and unravel everything and figure out, Okay, well, what's the heart of this story. And to be fair, data treking is something that's been going on for ages. It's not new. It's just that the Internet and the tools we use today allow us to generate, gather, and sift through more information than we've

ever been able to do before. It's kind of a catch all phrase, right, Jonathan. It's it's this kind of catch all phrase for for computers in software to build a really comprehensive um data profile about you in some ways, but it's something that credit card companies and banks and advertisers have endeavored to do for decades exactly. I mean, and this can be done for very simple, quote unquote

innocent reasons. Like one of the examples I like to say is you might have a shop and you in your shop, you sell ice cream, and you pay attention to see which flavors of ice cream sell the best, and that informs you of which flavors of ice cream you need to stock up on. You are tracking the data of sales. In this case, you're not necessarily looking

at individuals. You don't care who it is that buys the vanilla, but if everyone's buying vanilla, you want to make sure you have more vanilla than the other flavors that aren't selling as well. So that's one that's like the very simplest version of data tracking there where you know you've scrubbed the identity of the individuals. That's not

even that doesn't even come up. It's not important. But it can go all the way to the other extreme, where you want to create targeted advertising that is going to appeal to each specific person that visits a particular site or uses a particular service, and the whole point of that is to attempt to get them to buy something or to enroll in something. It's it's the goal of all advertising. It's to get you to act in

a certain way. And the idea is that, well, if we can narrow the target down to the most likely candidates, will get a better return on our efforts. And this is theoretically good for the user, right Jonathan. Theoretically it's it's sort of like, we want to give you the thing that you really want, and we want to give it to you in the most efficient way and in the most sort of sympatico way with with what you

are interested in doing already. Um, but it can sort of like data tracting to me means so many things, Jonathan, right. It means your online browsing behavior, or the things you choose to buy, the platforms, the software you use, the things you download, your name, age, race, sexual orientation, when you're sick, what what you're sick with, your eating habits, your television watching habits, your fears, hope streams right when

you're awake, when you're asleep. I mean, like, we we're talking about a world now where where we we want these wearables. They can give us real time data feedback on how we are doing throughout the day. Maybe you are an extreme type a personality and you are trying to schedule your day so that when you're hitting those peak moments of productivity, that's when you're tackling the most important tasks to you, and you're wearing wearables, you're getting

that feedback and you're understanding all this stuff. That data may also be going to other places and there may not be any use for it right now. Like right now, as you're generating that data, that's fine, no one's looking at it. But down the road that might not be the case for various reasons, some of which are terrifying. But but you know you were talking about the different types of data. There are actually three kind of broad categories we can classify the data that we are creating

that that various entities are really interested in. There's there's volunteered data, and that's the stuff we share, right that's when we go on facebooks exactly, that's my tweets, your tweets, your your YouTube's, your facebooks, your Pinterests, it's it's the stuff where we are participating in the conversation and generating that information. We're not just doing that for the people that we are trying to impress, or our friends or sometimes our enemies if we want to rub their noses

and stuff because they think they're so big. But that's that's the stuff that we are actively sharing. Then there's the observed data. That's the stuff that companies and other entities can can figure out about us just by watching our behavior. So this would be kind of the stuff we buy. The browsing habits we have where we log in from. Like, if you are doing most of your browsing on a mobile device, you better bet their their companies out there that want to know that. They want

to know that you access stuff on your phone. More than you do on a laptop or desktop. That's important information. And then there's the inferred data, and that's the stuff that companies guests is relevant to you based upon the information they gather from the other two types of sources. And it's it's this collection that's important. And you know I mentioned about value and how value is different for

different people. So the Telegraph did a survey UH in which they asked people what they felt their personal information was worth to them personally, like, what is your identity worth to you? Uh? Based upon the kind of information to get shared around these entities? Can you make a ballpark guess? I'll tell you this. It's it's it's less than ten thousand dollars, but it's more than five dollars. Man, man, I'm gonna go with I'm gonna go with twenty bucks

or no, no, no no, wait, wait, hundred bucks. You know it's probably because we share so much ben that we value it so little. But the average person five thousand dollars, Oh well, that's good that that makes and that makes the average person a lot smarter than me. Well, to be fair, it was three thousand, two pounds sterling. But I did the conversion fair enough, well done, Yeah and uh.

And they also mentioned the fact that, um that while they were doing this, they they found that there was a disparity that that women in the survey tended to answer more frequently that their personal information was priceless, that there was no price you could put on it, that they would feel comfortable selling it okay, and men were

less likely to do that. They also said an interesting data point, if you will, Yeah, I also mentioned that older people were less likely to want to sell their information than younger people, which kind of young younger people are just giving it away. Yeah they are, I mean they you know, we're seeing that more and more with the the the very cavalier behavior of certain executives like Zuckerberg, who have said that privacy is dead. No, privacy is

no longer a thing. That seems to be kind of the message that younger generations have not only absorbed, but adopted at least to some extent. Say you and I s old kajers. So we claim, yeah, no, if your generation X or older, you're like, get your dirty, gruvy hands off my personal information, you damn millennial right so now here. So that's how much the person values their personal information in the thousands of dollars range. Okay, I know what you're gonna do next, Right, You're gonna give

me the average company's value on our data. What's going to happen? That is exactly what's gonna happen. So here's the deal. Your personal information to a company at best, like at its peak for average amount of information. I'm not talking about very specialized stuff like if you were talking about that wearable example. I was saying earlier that would that would be worth more because it's more comprehensive data. But you're average stuff like you're the stuff you might

find on a Facebook profile page. It is worth point zero zero five dollars. So half a cent is how much your data is work at the peak average is closer to point zero zero zero five dollars. To know that, I'm, you know, a boring, middle aged white guy who's probably going to see the Star Wars movie. Probably, I mean I would have paid you for definitely, Okay, I mean it's seven days away, dude, It is seven days away

as we record. That can so so at any rate? Yeah, exactly, Like the companies like, that's how much your information is worth to them. So to you, it's in the thousands of dollars. To them, it doesn't even equal a penny for the but in the aggregate, right, it's gonna be worth so much more. Well, exactly because because when a company is buying information, they're not buying one person's information. They're buying bundles of thousands upon thousands of people's information.

Then it's that company's job to either sell that information off to someone else. These are data brokers. This is all they do. That's that's their job. That's their business. They buy and sell info. They don't make stuff, they don't provide any services. They aggregate data and sell it

off to other people. This is a fascinating part of this whole thing to me, Jonathan, because it's like they're these companies are really I mean, they're they're kind of like in the shadows, you know, they're they're they're like companies with like weird names that that that have you know, data centers in in in the middle of nowhere, and

they're really hard to find. And you you know, I mean you and I probably both remember the days of like do not call me at home, you know, getting getting that phone call from marketers the pre do not call list days, right, And we don't really have a do not call list for data yet. Right. We have some tools, but we don't really have that. And I feel like we're in this kind of um, I don't

know gold rush on data exactly. We don't have We don't have the power to say here is what you can use my data to do, and here is what you cannot use my data to do. Uh. You know, if you're lucky you will be or if you're very um you know, careful and you're and you're paying really close attention, then you might use services where you're looking at the user agreement and looking to see do they have a policy? Do they do they specifically state they

will not share your information with third parties. Um, you know you can find some of those, but honestly, that's not the way bus this works. For most of these companies. You are the product, right, like like Google when the service is free. Yep, you're the one product. That's that's what Google, your Google's product, your Facebook product, you are

what they are selling to other other interested parties. And uh, even if you look at ones that say that, oh, don't worry, we scrub all the identifiable stuff from your day. Animize your data if you will. Yeah, that, Um, that don't work so good, Ben, it doesn't work very good. There have been studies about this in the last few years, right, I think there was a study that came out of the UK that suggested, um that really in order to identify a person, um, you really only needed like one

or two pieces of information about them. Right. Do you remember that study that came out in the last I don't know year or so. It was like, I remember that one. And there's one that Latania Sweeney Harvard she did one or she proved that with three points of data, which was gender, birth date, and ZIP code, she could identify of US residents. So so nearly of all people living in the United States she could identify just with

those three pieces of information. That One of the things I like to stress to people is your name, which you try to protect when you are when you think you're being anonymous on the Internet and you use a handle, so you're not using your name like I use my name everywhere as my handle. That's just but most of the time, but a lot of people like, no, I'm going to use an anonymous handle. Your name is the

least important thing about you. I hate to break it to you that because honestly, most of these companies don't care. Just like I was saying, the shop owner with the ice cream doesn't care who you are. Most of these companies don't really care who you are. They care about

what you do. Yeah, and it's really interesting too, Like Google, for instance, leverages large amounts of money and even some of their best algorithmic computing power to make sure that advertisers and marketers, for instance, don't engage in dishonest practices or break Google's own rules about tracking data. And even

for Google, this is becoming like a herculean task. We I talked to in for Cobreaker, I talked to some people at Columbia's, some Columbia grad students who are studying this, and it's really interesting to see what gets pulled from even like emails that you might send in Gmail, for instance. Yeah, yeah, this is this is kind of um, kind of terrifying.

Also if you if you think about because you think of email as being this this uh, private means of communication that you know, just as you wouldn't expect someone else to read your snail mail. That would be a violation of trust to find out that stuff is popping up based on things that you've typed. Like if you've written an email recently and then something that is related to that email starts seemingly to pop up in places you weren't expecting, you might think at first that that's

a weird coincidence. But if this happens a few times, like, Okay, this is not a coincidence. What is going on? Yeah, it's really interesting. And I think that's something, Jonathan, that so many people can relate to, right, this idea of like, oh I looked at those shoes once, or I looked at uh, you know, whatever, the whatever item that you might buy online once and that advertisement follows you around forever. Right, Yeah, you had that great moment and codebreaker in fact, about

the sandals. Yes, the sandals that followed Molly around. Every time I logged into Facebook for a straight week, they would pop up. And I was so scared because I was like, oh my god, I'm gonna be sitting next to my boyfriend and I'm gonna log onto Facebook and these sandals are gonna come up, and it's gonna reopen the wound. And he's gonna know that I was sending them to people asking for an opinion. Did you change

your behavior when you were hanging out with him? Yeah, Like if we were loafing around, I would open so many tabs and none of them would be Facebook. This is a really funny story. What does it make you think about? It made me wish that I could go back to the days where Facebook was just showing me things that I wanted to buy and not things that I wanted to run away from. That's that's such a I mean, I've seen the same sort of stuff, and I've seen advertisements that it's odd, like things that do

not interest me at all. They're just completely off base and I can't It's one of those things where I think, well, maybe now, it's just that the system hasn't gathered enough information about me to get a good feel, right, so I'm seeing stuff. It's like, this is the shotgun approach. I'm throwing everything I can and hopefully stuff will work. We'll be back to talk more about the evils of

data tracking after these messages. Systems like Facebook, for example, where you can actually go in to an ad and say I am not interested in this, you know, then maybe you'll end up getting a different selection of stuff, but sometimes you'll just get different versions of the same thing. You already said, that's not that's not me man. I appreciate the muscles on this dude, but I Am not going to be that guy. So I'm into I'm into my little pony. But I I think I've outgrown it.

I look my collection, My collection can only be so complete. That's you know, there's you gotta draw the line after like series five, I gotta say I'm done. I have no more shelf space. Um yeah, this is this is one of those those amazing stories, like the story about the sandals. Just just one of those things that has happened to pretty much anyone who has been active online over the last couple of years. And it's probably one of those stories I would imagine that people start to share,

not realizing that this is something that other people have experienced. Yeah, yeah, right, it is. It feels like a very personal experience, but it's something that seems to happen to everyone, and it was interesting to see. Relatively recently, Facebook, I believe um made it easier for people to control how much of their ex girlfriend or boyfriend or significant others information surfaced on their own timeline. Did you see that story that

came out relatively recently. He was interesting this idea that like, you know, you know, even the tech companies they're really really good at data tracking at this point, are still trying to figure out when it goes wrong and how to help the user in some cases, um make it

a more kind of custom experience, right. And and we should also stress that that the overwhelming majority of companies out there do not want it to go wrong, because that's that's counterproductive to what the end end goal is, at least for the person that actually bought the advertisement and the person who owns the place where that ad is being shown in the case of targeted advertising, at least like they don't want that to go badly. But in other cases, you know, they don't want to go

badly either, that that's counterproductive. But it is possible for this to go wrong even if everyone is trying to use it to to people's benefit. And on Codebreaker, you had a heartbreaking story about about a father who shared some information not not knowing, not even realizing that that information was somehow going to make its way into a database and then came back to haunt him. Yeah, this guy Mike Say, and and this is happened a few

years back. He you know, unfortunately, um, his his one of his children, his daughter died in a car accident. And he went to buy some uh you know, he went to buy some some actually some some um some stuff for photos, like he was putting together some photo albums, and he went to buy some frames for those photos. And the place that he called to do that, um, he just in passing mentioned uh that his daughter had died in this car accident. And the person that he

was talking to actually took down that information. And it's still not clear how it how all of this happened, but apparently they took down the information and that information ended up getting sold to a data broker that's sold the information from the company he originally called to Office Max, and then Office Max sent a letter to him. Um there was addressed to owner of the house or Mike Say daughter died in a car accident. Um. And that's

when it goes really really wrong, right. The picture frames that was was buying with through my children. In the bottom it had Ashley's name and her birth and death date and that she loved them, and you know what I mean, that's how she the conversation came about that what is this for? And she took you know, the information that would go on the bottom and put that, you know, on whatever to get it stamp. But they had nothing to it. Didn't say killed in car crashing

out of that. That was all in her own. And this is a totally separate company from Office Max. And somehow Office Max got the information. They bought the information from a data group, so that information was sold from things remembered to a data group that collects data and then taken and sold to Office Max in an Office Max used without looking at it. What an an emotional uh punch to the gut to see something like that. And and honestly, you know, I mean, you know, Office

Max did not intend that. There's no sane reason anyone would do that. So it's clearly an epic mistake that that could result in true emotional trauma, even if it's just a momentary thing. You don't want any person to experience that kind of thing. And uh, it was a pure accident, I imagine based upon way back in the day, I used to work for consultants and when when I worked for consultants, one of the things I had to do was arranged giant mailing lists and print out tons

and tons and tons of mailing labels. And so you're you're working with these big spreadsheets there possibly thousands of names long. So I'm guessing what happened was you had the data entered into some sort of spreadsheet, and probably the spreadsheet was converted at least once, and in that conversion, a tab that had been or you know, a cell that had just been labeled miscellaneous got put into address instead of miscellanys or title or something along those lines.

And that's when it went from one point where it was a piece of data, which, as as Mike said, like why do people even need to know this? No one needs to know this. This is this is not a relevant piece of information. It should never have gone into a database. But for that to then accidentally get transposed into a cell that is going to show up on a mailing label is incredibly it feels incredibly callous, yeah,

and invasive. And it also, you know, it reminds you that, I mean, it reminds us all that the way we view ourselves isn't always the way we're viewed by the world, right, and and and and that's an interesting aspect of this too, This idea that basically a data profile of most users on the Internet is being slowly put together over time, and and you might be we all might be really curious to know, um or disappointed to know um, what that data profile looks like from the other side. Now,

then let me ask you this. I'm going to paint a picture for you of a dystopia. Okay, that's that's sadly not difficult to imagine based on our current events. All Right, so I'm sure you heard. I mean, I'm absolutely certain you heard about the app people p E E p l E. Right, Yes, this was the one that was supposed to be the yelp for people where you would be able to rate other human beings and so then other human beings could see your rating and

could see ratings of other people. And it just seemed like it was going to lead to fallout. For that's what literally an idea, an idea whose time should have never come exactly. Now, let's take that same basic concept, but instead of you rating people, imagine that you get to look up what that person's data profile is worth compared to your own because guess what you could do that you could build something where you start to look at the the robustness of a data profile, at least

for a certain give and set of transactions. Because keep in mind, there are a lot of data brokers out there, and your profile in one data broker's database may be very different from another because it may be less or more complete or from totally different sources than the other one. But that would be a weird world where you say, wow, my life is worth this much to a potential marketer, and my friends life is worth twice as much. What am I doing wrong in my life where I'm worth less?

I mean, it's this isies are looking at us. Yeah, and it is scary. I mean, I think it's also fair to say that this is as scary as it is to imagine that it is. It does also have some connection to reality. I mean, when you go into a bank and apply for a loan um, you're also being sort of sized up right and over time, Um, you know, we've we've we've seen some actually some really of big problems arise from how banks look at people

and look at people's ability to pay things back. And how credit card companies do this, how your net worth is calculated, how you're um, you know, your your likelihood of paying a loan back is calculated. And but at the same time, over time, there have been some safeguards put in against discrimination, right, and a lot of people have actually talked about this idea of data discrimination over time and how um we really need to think about as we go forward and as more and more data

gets collected on on on users over time. I mean, people that were born you know, in the last ten years are going to have a very different life on the internet than even you or I have had, right, I mean I wasn't on the internet until I was

a teenager. So it's interesting to think about it. And it's also you know, you would you would hope some people are talking about this idea of like, you know, if you all are perceived to be a a person of a certain race, a certain education level, tax bracket like that the tax bracket, then you might actually see a web that is different from the web that someone else with a different perceived data profile would see. Yeah, this is this is like a dark twisted version of

what the semantic web is supposed to be. The semantic web is supposed to learn about you and then respond to what you want, so that you don't have to play the game of the web search or the web browser. You just say what you want and it returns exactly what you want, possibly from multiple sources, so you're not even going to a web page in the semantic web necessarily. It may be that it's pulling things from various sources and presenting you kind of a united view. That's one

realization of what those semantic web would look like. This this is similar to that, but a very dark version where it's not responding to what you want, it's responding to what the other side wants based upon what they think they can get out of you. Yeah, and that's a really scary thing. I mean, there's also some potential good from that can come from this, right, Um, And and you know, other people are talking about this idea of you know, a time at which maybe people actually

start to you know, big data is more valuable. Big data, you know, it's all perceived to be more valuable to companies and marketers and and and and certain organizations in the aggregate. Right, So what if we actually reached a

time where, um, not. I won't say like data gets unionized necessarily, but like, what if you reach the time where users actually banded together and did collective bargating on behalf of their data in order to say, hey, Okay, my data maybe only half of a penny value, but when I get together with this large group of other users that i'm that I'm aligned with, it's actually worth

a lot more. And I want to align myself with this large group and then sell that um and actually gain some agency in that way and gain maybe some some money. You're you're like creating a brand new career a data agent, like agent. Yeah, agent, they're like Dave Walkers really wouldn't if you want to go the vampire route, Yeah,

that's that. That's I I honestly had never considered that, but that is a really compelling idea, especially when you think even if you go on a route where you're like, all right, we're not doing this to make money, We're doing this so that we're only opting into the things that we agree with that we find acceptable. One of the other things about data tracking that I think is problematic is that sure, uh, you might be getting stuff that's reacting to your behavior but a lot of that

is going to be based on guesswork. So for example, if I have posted a lot about hiking, it maybe that I get a lot of advertisements for outdoor supply stores like camping gear, that kind of stuff. And it may be that that doesn't fully overlap with my interests. That's not terrible or whatever, but it also could mean that I start to have a narrower selection of things presented to me, which in one way is good, but

it also means it takes away the possibility of discovery. Yeah, this is a huge I mean, this is a really interesting idea and a really interesting topic, right. I mean, Amazon is is kind of thinking about, I think trying to do this. I mean, there there are companies that would would love to be able to basically when you go to their homepage they basically say, or not that we would ever necessarily do that in the future, but you you, whatever, you you engage with their platform, they

would say, here's the three products you can choose from today. Yeah, right, right, And that does, as you say, really reduce this idea of discovery. And this is you know, this happens in the media world to write this idea of like UM and in the social media world, this idea of UM being able to curate so in such a you know, a focused way to the individual user also makes it so that user doesn't I don't know, read the New York Times and learn anything about what goes on outside

of their own interest. Here it becomes it becomes like the ultimate echo chamber, where where you know you're you're you're stuck there seeing the same stuff and maybe you don't even realize that we're we're heading to like this is almost a Terry Gilliam film what we're describing at this right Like we're heading to Brazil right now, let's head let's say I'm ready for that movie. I mean, I don't want to be in the reality that it depicts. I don't want to be I don't want it to

be reality. But I would totally watch that movie. Yeah, me too. When we're talking big data, when we're talking about all the information that's going out there, and we mentioned the fact that companies are buying profiles in the tens or hundreds of thousands or more, here's why. Let me give you a few statistics on how much information is hitting the Internet on a per minute basis. This is based off of research that was conducted by a data company called Domo, and this was published in August

of two thousand fifteen. So keep in mind these numbers are already old. But every single minute Amazon receives four thousand three unique visitors. Well, we're going to pause the data tracking conversation for another quick break. So Amazon is one of those companies that's really good at doing this focused data tracking that you know, this is where you buy a product and it says, hey, people who bought this product also bought these other things, and then you think, oh, right, right,

I should get that. It's like it's like the perfect impulse by shelf and it's customized for every single purchase. Right, I do need batteries and dog biscuits. How did you know? Well, there's there's there's there's this other level two, uh that that people are starting to imagine when you think about companies like nest Um, and you think about smart televisions

that actually interact with your refrigerator. And one of the most convincing sort of imagined scenarios that was ever presented to me in recent years was this idea that essentially, over time, your refrigerator learns that you go for ice cream. You go in for that vanilla ice cream, Um, right around eight pm, and um, it tells your television that.

And then in the world of streaming that you know, more and more people are doing on their actual television instead of having it connected to a you know, a cable channel. Um, you actually get at eight forty five, you get an advertisement for ice cream, which reminds you to go and eat some ice cream, and then you end up eating more ice cream, and then you end up buying This is the world where the appliances are working against you. Yes, they're not telling you they eat

a kale set, or maybe they are. We Yeah, that's also possible, Like if you have if you have this thing where you're going out and buying kale salads and then you're watching a lot of you know, food type stuff, and your you might end up getting, Hey, here's a quick recipe, and here are the fourteen ingredients you don't have that you need to go to Whole Foods and buy. Um. Yeah,

it's a world. I host a show. I host another show called forward Thinking, and in that show, it's it's an optimistic view of the future and I have often looked at this side from the optimist side, and it is similar to what you were saying about every single person's Web experience could be unique to them based upon these factors. Uh. And and there's a way of doing that where it is not kind of the scary, oppressive

type of way. But I I talk about how with the Internet of things and with this connectivity of different appliances, it's not that far of a stretch to imagine not just the Web, your experience of reality could get to a point where a lot of it is catered specifically to you. Yeah, and there could be a lot of good things that come out of that, right, um and

and and and I totally believe in that possibility. I mean, like like we like you said, I think so, um so thoughtfully when you came in and and and uh talked about this stuff with me on Codebreaker, was was basically this idea that look, it's um, I'm not going to pull out the quote so eloquently as you did, but look, this technology can it's us that makes it good or bad. Right we we we have the power theoretically to to make all of this stuff and make

data tracking work for us. As users and work for us as organizations and companies. I mean, I think a lot about the possibility of data tracking being really good in the future where our climate is changing, um and and the fact that we really understand and on a global level, a lot more about our climate than we did even thirty years ago thanks to an increased level of data tracking, right, And that is an important point to make, Ben, is that data tracking does not necessarily

mean it's about just people. Although people are an important factor when you're looking even at climate change, because you want to see, well, how is this affecting actual human beings as well as the environment in general. You need to know the whole picture. But data tracking is really it's it's agnostic as far as what the data actually represents.

Like we're talking about data about everything, you know, anything that you can imagine that can be quantified in the form of data that is being tracked by someone for some reason. Some of those reasons are good, some of those reasons are way not good. Yeah, But but it's

not all just about people. And it's interesting too to think about I wonder what you think about this, But it's interesting too to think about just how I think a lot of it feels out of control at this point for the user, it feels like we don't fully understand it. We don't fully understand how it's being used.

Um and what data about us is being tracked as users and UM and you know, government, I mean, the FTC in the past few years has become much more involved in this idea of helping consumers protect themselves against you know, abusive forms of data traction um if you will, um and and there are a lot of qui and and and also it's fair to say that I think a lot of tech companies have endeavored to put not only in terms of service agreements, but in the actual

tools that they give to the user when they manage their own accounts, as you know, to put the power in the user's hands to control this. But you know, let's be honest, right, I mean, you and I don't necessarily read all of the terms of services. You're telling me. You don't read every end user license agreement. You don't. You can't recite the is you know. It's it's tough. It's tough. I can't remember the last time, honestly, I cannot remember the last time I actually read a LA

because who who has time for that? I want to use your shiny new toy. I don't care that I've given up all my privacy. And if as long as I get to play with the shiny new toy, if my b B eight remote control droid is secretly telling Disney exactly how to make me buy more BB eight remote control droids, so be it. Um, it all comes back to Star Wars. Well, I mean, you know, the force is strong in my family. My father has it,

I have it, my sister has it. So uh, you know this is this has been a great conversation, great talk about this topic. And uh you know again, if you guys have it checked out Codebreaker, you definitely need to remedy that immediately. It is a phenomenal series that covers various topics. And this is your first season, right, This is our first season, Jonathan, and we're looking forward to having you back on for our second season which

is coming soon. Um. But but yeah, it's been a lot of fun and and it was it was great fun to talk to you on Codebreaker and um and have you be a part of the show, and we hope you'll you'll keep listening. Absolutely, and guys, you also have to know this thing about code breaker, because it's a gimmick that's so good. I was mad at myself for never thinking about it. This is it was brilliant.

You you produced, You had all of the shows produced and ready to go, and you hid codes in the episodes and if you're able to break the code, you can listen to the next episode before it publishes. Yes, well we should start, you know, I mean, you know I'm ready to have we embedded a secret code in this episode. John. You know, I like to say yes just to drive people crazy, but I'm not gonna do that. I was just so proud of myself for for breaking the the Morse code in the You did an episode

about internet porn, which is an incredible episode. Probably not safe for you to listen to on speakers if you have, not safe for work or for little ones, obviously for for obvious reasons. But it's a real honest look at what is not only a big industry online but legitimately it can make or break certain types of on the edge technologies like if you wonder why Blu ray one over h D, d v D. It's one of the big reasons I mean you know, it's it's crazy to

think about that. If you wonder why the a v N conference overlapped with c ES for so many years. This is why it's an incredible episode. And I managed to actually break the code and I was probably a little more proud of myself than I should have been. Well, now you should, I mean you should be proud. It's Morris code. It's it's it's not used, um, you know, very very widely anymore by by at least most people.

But it's, uh, it's always a good thing to know. Yeah, it turns out, you know, once you once you commit that scouts stuff to memory and have and have a web page opened up that tells you what the dots and dashes being because I didn't remember. But but it's still it's it's a it's a great way to engage the listeners on top of this interesting take you have on the different topics. So I just make sure you go and check that out. Ben, Thank you so much

for agreeing to be part of this. This was I think a really fun, kind of complimentary piece to your Codebreaker episode, which again, uh, I really enjoyed you guys. Let me listen to it before I was even I recorded the final segment on that episode and I got to listen to everything up to that point, and I was just I was like, are you sure you want me? You're bat and clean up man, you are our close up. We love glad, We're glad I could could be of service. It was an honor so well, it was great to

have you. It was great to have you on and when we're big fans of tech stuff, so we're like, um, it was thank you so much for for having me and for for talking to me about this stuff. And I think, I don't know, man, I you know, I end up feeling you know, I think so many of us end up heeling lost right about when it when

it comes to data tracking. And my only hope is that is that I mean not to say that they're should be an app for that, but you know, I'm my only hope is that we will at some point reach a reach a stage where it's easier for the user to to really have control over what they're sharing and and and also users are more more educated about what they're sharing. Um. And I think I think we're all, you know, we're all a little bit on the hook for for not being more educated about what we're sharing.

But we're also you know, we also need better tools to understand how we are sharing our data and how it's being trapped and we and we definitely need to hold government accountable for making sure they create and foster departments that are specialized in informing other bodies of government about these things, keeping up to date, because as we know, I mean, we're we're still seeing an era where the people who are in positions of power often they have

limited to no experience with a lot of the things that are affecting us on a daily basis. Oh man, those those those uh the Supreme Court transcripts. Man, it's a sad world. So if we're gonna like, we can't wait until the millennials are in the Supreme Court for one thing, I'm gonna be dead by then. So I

would like to see things improve before that. But that's that's one of those real challenges is that we have a different population and positions of power who they may have every desire to help us make sure that these things are being used in a responsible way, a non predatory and an ethical way, but they have, you know, to them, it's it's like if you were to present me with a page written in Greek, I would have no idea what to do with that. So what technology

moves faster than policy? Right? Always has and and and and and I think it's it's as true with data tracking as anything else. And it's just, um, it's a reality that we all have to deal with. But it's it's it's something that hopefully will will change over time. And it's not not not before, not before a lot of stuff happens that many people may regret. So it's it's always good to be thinking about it. Yeah. Absolutely, That wraps up the classic episode of the evils of

data tracking. Big thanks again to Ben Johnson from Two Bells and fifteen joining the show. That was a pleasure. Hope we can sometimes get them back on the show. And yeah, that's it for this classic episode of tech Stuff. If you have suggestions, you can always reach out to me either through the I Heart Radio app, using a little microphone on the tech stuff page, to leave me a voicemail, or to send me a message on Twitter. The handle for the show is tech Stuff H s

W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production For more podcasts from My heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H