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Well, that's interesting. You mentioned artificial intelligence, So there is a way of utilizing using AI without jeopardizing or risking your privacy.
Yeah, so the common approach to AI in its current manifestation, right, the current manifestation of AI are these large language models like chat GPT that people are familiar with. We're not at the terminator level or anything like this, and I understand and fully appreciate people's skepticism about it. In fact, that's what we talk about. But yes, if you're using
chat GPT. Well, the company Open AI a few months ago they hired the former director of the NSA on their board of directors, So Richard, that kind of tells you what they think about your privacy. So it's a total black box with a lot of these big tech companies. You don't know where your data is going. You can just assume that it's being collected, right, And they also do a lot of censorship so that you can't ask certain questions, you can't generate certain images on the art
based AIS. And so we have you know, part of part of our course is showing you how you can install these, download these on your own computer, the open source versions, and you can use them without even connecting to the internet. So it's a really cool way of making use and understanding these tools, which are pretty useful. Even if you just want to understand how they work. It's certainly possible to do that. And you know, of course that is our at the end of the day,
we're not about feeding big tech at all. We're about self sufficiency, self hosting, open source stuff. And yeah, that's that's kind of our model when it comes to not just AI, but everything.
That we do.
So, how do you protect your privacy in the let's call it the digital age, And what do you suggest for other people? Like, let's start with I mean, you're online, you're a podcaster, you have a website, so you have a digital footprint. Walk us through I don't know, four or five really important steps we can make to safeguard our privacy in the digital age.
Yeah, so number one, don't be a podcaster, but don't worry on too late. I'm jumping on that grenade for everyone else. So that's fine. But what I typically tell people Richard to start with is just start being aware of some of the systems around you start being aware of when somebody's asking for an email address or your ID, or the moments where you give away data all the time, your name, your photograph, and then start to find tricks of getting around it.
Right.
So, like you go to the airport and they say, here, step in front of the facial recognition, Well, just ask them, is this mandatory? Oftentimes it's not. You go to a website, do you really have to create an account? Well? Maybe not, right, you go to the dentist, you really have to fill out the iPad with all of your name and all of your information if you're paying cash, No, you certainly don't.
And so it just starts with an awareness of all the data that you're giving out, and then you will find a way to get around it.
Right.
So that's just kind of the mindset I would encourage everybody to get and learn a password manager. And what a password manager is going to do is it's going to train you to every time you create an account, you're going to put all of your information into that password manager, and the password manager is kind of the way that you protect that data and it simply helps you to organize your digital life in a better way.
So all those logins that you have, that you have your browser remembering and things like this, put those all into a password manager. I like to key pass XC that's one that I like. But and so you just start to organize your digital life a little bit more.
You start to be aware of how many accounts you have, and then you know it can start to teach you, Hey, I can I can use the service with that, Like I can use YouTube without being logged in, right, I can use a lot of these other services without being logged in. I don't have to give my real name, my real information whenever somebody's just asking for it. So that would be something I think everybody should be moving
to private messengers. And the big one is signal. So that's an easy one to recommend, is to instead of using regular text messages, even instead of using something like WhatsApp, move to signal as your default method of communication. And then in addition to that, I would say people can consider a VPN. A VPN is a virtual private network and this basically is able to hide your internet traffic from your internet service provider, who otherwise can see the
websites that you visit. So this is a really useful tool to get that basic Internet based privacy. I like mold that and IVP, So those are ones that I would I would typically recommend. But if you take those those few steps, you're you're certainly moving in the right direction. And you know, after that, some of the steps become more extreme, but that definitely gives you a good baseline of privacy.
But then when you go out into the world, out under the street and there are now there are red light cameras and and uh, surveillance camera like London in England, I can't remember how many. It's just a ridiculous number of surveillance cameras. You'd think it was you were living in you know, Beijing, Communists China. I mean, it's inescapable, isn't it that you're going to be surveilled.
Yeah, especially in London. The UK seems to have taken George Orwell's books as inspiration and not as warning. I'm not sure how that happened exactly, but you're right, I mean, and some places are worse than others. So you know, during during the COVID era, it was possible to and acceptable to walk around with a mask on Now these days, a lot of these. A lot of these these cities have returned to the anti mask laws that have been there historically, so you know, when you're walking around, maybe
you can't escape some of it. So you can, you know, choose where you live. You don't have to live necessarily.
In the UK.
If you're a British citizen, you don't have to live in London. You can choose, you know, what part of London that you live in. You can certainly make us think about these things to your local government and all the rest. And there are various maps and resources where you can see where, for example, license plate cameras are. I interviewed a guy recently on my show who has a website called the Flock and this kind of just points out where all these license plate readers are. So yeah,
I mean that that's hard to escape from. That's kind of the worst example we could imagine of these public cameras. There's not a whole lot you can do. But in other aspects of your life you certainly can carve out a nice encrypted slice of private Internet for yourself.
And what about the advent of digital IDs? And I know that in the European Union they're really pushing these I think they've already arrived. In other words, they've created the digital ID wallet. Now they have to figure out what's going to go in there. Some say it's inevitable, it's going to be worldwide. How do we push back against that or can we?
Yeah, I don't think we have to consider any of these things to be inevitable. Certainly we should be pushing back against these. You know, however, you think a lot of people would go about this by voting, by making again a stink about it in your local government, by voting with your feet and moving to places where this stuff does not exist. You know, I know a lot of people who choose maybe option C, which is they're
building systems outside of the system. So I know a lot of people who don't have any bank accounts, actually Richard, who for the last ten years have been living on bitcoin and maybe something like minaro Manaro being a privacy cryptocurrency. And you know, it's funny because I'm in these groups of people and they're like, yeah, I can't pay for this because I don't have any coat money, right, So I'm like, okay, So there are ways to get around
the system. There There always will be that's the hacker mindset, and it's not as difficult as you think. And these are things that we talk about on our escapee technocracy dot com tutorials. It's certainly possible to do that. There's always an escape patch, and you can use all of these, all of the digital things against the system. So the hacker mindset is that we, you know, the cipherpunks are the ones who really created a lot of these tools. So we're the masters here, and we can choose to
have our own alternative, parallel systems. And it's happening right now.
Do you own a smartphone?
So I own a lot of things, mostly for testing. I don't really use a smartphone, and I know people who don't. And one of the good things about something like Signal the private messenger I mentioned is that you don't. I believe you do need a smartphone to uh to kind of be the default account for you. But after that you can have conversations on your computer. Right we're having a conversation right now on our computer. We don't
really need a phone to do these things. A phone, in my view, is simply an emergency device for when you're away from home, and I treat it in that way, and I really don't rely on the phone for much of anything, and I don't really think that most people need to if they're if they're being honest about it.
What about social media.
For business purposes, yes, for personal aspects of my life, no, you can certainly be disconnected as a result. But that's simply what I've chosen. I take the extreme route. And my excuse Richard of course, say hey, this is you know, market research or you know, I'm not I'm not on social weirdo. You know, this is this is my brand for the regular saying people. Though, I would say, you know, if you don't want to give up social media, just
start to be cautious and aware of the things you post. Right, Maybe you don't need to post everything about your personal life. Maybe you don't need to install it on your phone where you're going to become addicted and where it's going to start tracking your geolocation and other sorts of things, so you know you can have these you know, some people, for example, they like Instagram. That's how they connect with their friends and family. And I understand that, and you know,
maybe you could move that over to signal. I think you probably could, but even if you had your your Instagram app on your phone, not the end of the world, right, Go in the privacy settings, play around with some of those, kind of be aware that all the data that you're posting there is going to be sucked up by big tech. It is in some cases most cases public information, and it's going to be used to train AI. So you know there are consequences, So just be a little bit
more selective about what you post. But you know, I think you can certainly be social without social media, so consider that as well.
In all honesty, I think I've been kind of lackadaisical because you know I have I've been in radio and podcasting for a very long time, and so I've got a very large, messy digital footprint. How can I I mean, is it too late? Can I go back and I don't know, to start pairing that down reduce my digital footprint?
Absolutely? Yes, it's never too late to make yourself out of what you've been made into. As the philosopher John Paul Start said, this is certainly true. So a lot of people take the it's too late for me approach, and I don't think that's at all the case. And it's not the case because there's all the all of the next things that you might Richard. You can stop those, right, you can stop piling on. And it's not as if
there's this one system that you're feeding, right. These are all individual systems that don't necessarily aren't necessarily connected to the other. So for people who feel discouraged, as I said that, you know, the the organization of your digital life is a key. And so for me, when I'm looking at my computer, I log into my computer, I have a very organized desktop. I put all my things in folders on my you know, on my desktop. I try not to rely on cloud storage things like this.
And so that doesn't mean you want to back up your stuff right or you'll lose it. But I try to just start with the organization. I think that's the key. Have all of your your your folders, your files, and then with your password manager, you have all of your accounts and just start drotting down as you think about it. Okay, I have an account. Here, here's the information I gave
to them. And as you go about that, you're going to find that once you have all of your accounts kind of written down onto this password manager, you're going to say, hey, I didn't realize I still have this account. Why don't I go in and purge this account, delete the data, maybe give some fogus data can be useful sometimes,
and just delete this account entirely. Let me go into my email and just start unsubscribing from all these newsletters and you know, kind of have this cleansing, cleansing pursing ritual. And once you start from there, you start having your private messengers on your app like signal you're going to stop giving out data that you previously were giving. So yeah, I don't think it's too late. And you know, we're
all we're all starting from somewhere. I was using a lot of these things when I started my journey as well, So just start where you are, don't you know, don't give into defeatism, and uh, you know, you don't have to give up to too much convenience to live this kind of lifestyle. I take the extreme route, and I still get to participate in all of the you know, the things that I want to participate in for the most part. So it's not some gloomy future. It's actually
quite refreshing to wake up in the morning. Know that I'm on an operating system that isn't surveying me. Right, I'm using Linux, and I'm using programs and apps that are not surveying me. I'm not selling my data. I'm all in control of my data. It's really a peaceful kind of lifestyle once you start taking these steps.
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