I get a team. Welcome to the Bloody You Project. David Gillespie. Tiffany and Koku's still as zen as fuck. She just got back from India. She trained today in the gym. It was like having the Dalai Lama on the bench press. It was just so bloody. It was just so calm. Everyone was just swamming around, no aggression. Probably not the right analogy the Dealai Lama. But are you still floating on cloud nine?
I am?
I am, And every time I'm in the car, I'm ringing people to tell him I love them.
It's so wow.
I don't know what's going on.
Have you hunger Lesbo and told him yet?
Michael?
Fuck?
I haven't got Michael either, so yes, I'd tell you what. There must be a long list.
Bloody rubbish. You got to hug at the gym.
I did get a hug at the gym. I'm like, what's happening? Are you? Have you got a terminal disease? What is wrong? Are you unwell? Tiff doesn't tifts a little bit like my dad. She doesn't just hand out hugs, right, So yeah, yeah, yeah, if you and I ever meet in person, there will be no hugging. There's zero chance of I might just wrap you up in my big strong arms and make you hug me. I might just spoon you from behind without your consent.
Oh dear, that sounds awful.
Big spoon, little spoon, day, little spoon again. Craig, how are you, mate?
Yeah? Good. I don't know what earth we're going to talk about today. I hope you've got some ideas well.
I know exactly what we're going to talk about because you put up a very interesting article and it's something quite different for us on the show, and that is you were talking about technology and cars. I'm going to really look at what you put up today, if you'll find this interesting. I found this interesting, and also I it doesn't surprise me, and I've been worried. Not massive. I don't fucking lose sleep over it, but I've been
thinking about this stuff for a while. And so the title of Dave's article that he put up Dave's article is Hey, Siri, am I being spied on the car? That knows too much? I just want to read the first paragraph because I love it, or the first sentence or two. Henry Ford would be horrified his model T once a symbol of freedom has morphed into a rolling surveillance device, tracking our every mood and move, and EA's
dropping on our conversations. Turn up the airk on Jeeves, you say in the car like a dutiful servant, obligeres take me to my favorite bar, you demand, and the car with the wisdom of a pub quiz champion who's been rifling through your bins blots the quickest route or route depending on how you go with that word. It's all it is happening, isn't it, mister Gillespie.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean it started with the things they in our houses and tell us they're there to help us. You know, the you know, the Alexa or whatever they're called. You know, the things you can talk to and the little Google devices. And it's always amazed me that people are happy putting those things in their house because, by definition, by design, they're there for you. They're listening to everything
that happens in your house. And honestly, just like one of the people that commented on the article, I've had people say to me, I know it doesn't listen all the time. It only listens when I say hey Google or hey Cereal, or whatever it is. Well, that's rubbish. How can it possibly do that. It has to be listening all the time, or else it wouldn't know that you'd said that. And if it's listening all the time, what is it doing with the data that it's collecting.
I'm not at all reassured that there's any kind of privacy for the data that's being collected. You know, as I said that in that piece, you know they give you a privacy agreement that's ten thousand words of legal speak. You know that reads like kling on. It's it's really difficult to be able to stand their hand on heart and say, I know what is happening with what it is recording? And most people would say, what do you
mean it's recording? Well, of course it's recording. It's got to learn your voice, it's got to understand what you're saying, and of course it's recording. And there's no assurances as far as I can tell, that any of that is private. And when you transfer that into a car where now in a home it might be a little bit more obvious. Right in a home for those who think about it
a bit. Obviously it's a recording device. But in a car, you might not think that anything is recording you, even though a lot of things are voice activated in modern cars. This study of choices that came out today, which is what prompted me to write that article, to me, I thought was pretty shocking stuff. I mean, not only are they recording your voice and passing it on to third parties to train ais whatever that means, you know, and who are these third parties and where are they located?
You know, when Choice sent requests for that kind of information to the car companies, they've got nada. But then you look at say something like Tesla, and it's not just recording your voice, it's recording video. This thing is monitoring you, recording video and sending it back to base.
Hang on, So it's recording video of you in the car.
Yeah.
Oh that makes it think twice about everything you've done.
In a car, doesn't it. Hell, I'm very worried about something she's been doing.
I tell you what, I'm glad. I'm glad they didn't put them in Ford Escorts in the eighties. I would have been fart.
I would have been stuffed if they had them in the Gemini, I tell you. But do you know what.
It's interesting. So I bought a car about three months ago now, and nah, no, it's not a it's not a fancy car. Right, it's not a fancy car. It's just a regular car. But they when I bought it, there's this when you start it, it says, do you want to install this thing that gives you all of this other shit that goes directly to I don't know, hunni HQ order. It's just a high UNDI what is it? No, bloody, It'll come to me at a moment anyway, A wagon thing, right, I should know the name of it, Santa Fe.
Right.
So, but it's got this thing that you plug into that gives you all of these other things. But you've got to sign up for this thing and consent for this thing. And I said to the guy, but what what is that? It just gives you better this and better that and access to that. Like, I don't know, though, what am I consenting to?
Oh?
I know, we've all got them. I'm like, yeah, cool, yeah, And so.
You should read that the study that Choice put out because he and I and Kia are two of the worst offenders. So they're both owned they're both owned by the same company, and they could not provide any guarantees about what was going on with the data Dolle collecting. And they were collecting a lot of data. So it's not just your voice, and it's not just vision, which to me is scary enough. It's also data about how you're driving. So it's data about whether you're speeding, it's
data about how you accelerate, how you break. All that kind of stuff is being transmitted continuously. So it isn't a big lead to think that we aren't too far away from the point where the police don't need to do anything other than get a warrant against the car company to find out whether you've been speeding where your car could be bringing charges against you in traffic court. So it's that kind of thing that is fair enough if you know about it. But as you just described,
how do you know about it? You asked the question, which is probably one step more than most people do, and you didn't get an answer.
No. It was all very vague. I don't think they were trying to be evasive. I don't think they knew. No, I don't think they actually truly know. I mean, I know this is digressing. We'll come back to cars. But the other morning, I had a meeting with some friends of mine and we're talking about Creatine, which is just a supplement. You know, Jan and Ien Tiff, the lovely old couple, old and young, in their mid eighties and fucking amazing. Anyway, I was talking to them about Creatine.
I got home and then I start getting all these ads for Creatine on my phone. And not only that, I said to them, well, I'm sponsored by Max's, so I use Max's Creatine, right, and you know, so whatever, right, so that I know that that works and this is not a paid advertisement, right, but it works for me, so because they said anyway, then I started getting ads for Max's Creatine. I didn't look it up. I didn't
do a search. I was just talking about it and my phone was in proximity, and then it started sending me all these ads. How bloody weird is that?
It's not weird at all. And this is coming back to the point we started from, which is these devices are listening all the time because they have to because if you suddenly inserted into that conversation, Hey Google or hey Siri, it would have to respond to you. So it's got to be listening to every word you say, and they do not guarantee at all that they A aren't recording and b aren't selling that data. And the example you're giving proves it. They are definitely recording it,
and they are definitely selling it. And who are they selling it to. They're selling it into ad networks that present those pages to you. And so in the first few microseconds of you opening a web page, it's gone trolling through the ad network and the ad marketplace that your conversation has been sold to and finding you relevant ads.
Yes, well, what about the idea that you know with some of these very very high tech cars, like even some of the BYD, which is the Japanese the Chinese competitor to Tesla, which some of the Chinese cars that are coming out now. I know ten years ago Chinese cars in Australia were fucking terrible build quality and blah blah blah, but the ones coming out now are very very close to you know, Japanese production and build quality
and all of that, if not the same. So BYD have this fully electric competitor to the Tesla Model three and so on. But these are essentially computers with wheels, like they're fully electric. You can. Tesla have this thing where they can increase the power in your car with an update, Like you don't have to take it. You don't have to take it to a mechanic and get a blower or a fucking a turbo put on it.
Like they literally change. I don't understand this, but they do some kind of diagnostic adjustment or something, and now your car puts out more power. Like what about the remote maybe not remote possibility that one day I'm driving my computer on wheels and it hijacks the car.
Yeah, or it takes you to the creatine store. It's heard you having a conversation. You might have mentioned that you're running low on your favorite creatine and on your way home, it decides to take a little detour and pop your into grab some huh.
So is there a is there an antidote? Is there a strategy? Is there something that we should start to Even the Alexa thing, I hadn't I'd thought about that, but not in that detail. Tift, you have one of them.
I do have an Alexa, was not plugged in. I've got a Google Home though.
What do you use that? Like, how do you use that.
To set my alarm so I don't have to look at the phone, and to control the bedroom lamp so that I don't have to get out of bed and turn it off.
Yeah, and you just audio. The only little price you're paying for that is everything you do being recorded by a world supercomputer.
Not much happening in my bedroom, David.
But if there ever is, they're going to know about it.
Gee wow, wow, Wow. I feel like you just opened the door that you should keep shut there, Tip, I think you want to keep that whole zen thing going on.
But it is that's just between you and Google. You really shouldn't be discussing it on a podcast.
Yeah, you're going to start getting inundated with dating sites.
There's probably already one on your phone right now to if you probably want to check it.
Oh no, that's yeah. There's something to be said for old tech and low tech and low tech cars.
I think now the interesting thing is unrelated. But there was a story last week. I don't know if you caught it, Craig, but the United States is at the moment seriously considering banning Japanese cars, all Japanese cars after a certain years certain models unless they can guarantee that they are not communicating information. Sorry not did I say Japanese. I mean Chinese cars that are not communicating with China. So unless the manufactur can guarantee but there's no continuous
communication with China, they are not permitted to sell the car. Now, the Chinese car makers have come back and said, well, that's impossible. That makes all of our products essentially non functional. They need to be communicating in real time all the time, and we need to work something out. But the US government is starting to take a bit of a hard line on this sort of thing, particularly when it comes to China. And I'm not suggesting that as a solution,
because there are undoubtedly benefits to all of this. You know, is it such a bad thing that we're heading towards a future where cars are not driven so much as they just drive us automatically, they take care of all that stuff, and where a car where you actually had to navigate and drive yourself would be seen by you know, future generations the way we might look at our horse
and buggy, you know, interesting collector's item. But what do you mean you drive the car, You get in the car, it takes you where you need to go, and it knows where you need to go, and it handles all that messy driving around stuff all on its own. And we're rapidly accelerating towards that, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. But in the meantime, what we've got to do is make sure that we're building in the privacy
protection that we need to have. I mean, we haven't bothered with the Internet, which is why you're getting ads for creatine when you have a conversation in a cafe. But we've got to start paying attention to this stuff. These devices are listening all the time. We've got to know that and agree to it. And our governments need to catch up on that.
The American government they put one hundred percent tariff on Chinese cars or one hundred percent tax, so they really don't want China in there. But my and like I said, my car is not fancy. It's nice. It's not a million dollar car. But I can get out of my car. I can get out of my car in the driveway and it puts itself away in the garage, it drives forward.
Oh glad, it's not fancy, fancy at all. You can't get out of my car in the driveway. You know what it does. It's in the driveway.
It's fuck and you know what else it does. It I mean, obviously you're not meant to do this, but it steers itself. So if I'm going around a bend and I take my hands off, I take my hands off the wheel. Not that I would do this because it would be illegal, but allegedly, if I take my hands off the wheel, Let's say, if I was driving to Ron and Mary's. But I wouldn't do it because it's illegal, But if I did, it drives around the corner for you.
Sometimes.
Well I was going to say every time this far, but better be incriminating. Allegedly allegedly, but after a while, allegedly it starts beeping at you and says, put your fucking hands on the wheel, you idiot. But yeah, I mean, we're just talking about a Korean car that's you know, not allegedly not that fancy, but yeah, cars.
But according to choice, if you had you know, I know this hasn't happened. You know, you're talking hypotheticals here, but if you had, for example, done what you just described.
Which I definitely haven't, If I had then.
The manufacturer would know about it.
Well, oh, my sphincter just snapshot boops. Oh there you go. That's a good thing. I haven't done that.
It seems like you might need incognito mode for your car.
Oh dear, but really, I mean, like you said, I actually highlighted that thing. You said. You go, this is in David's article. Read the article, and then read the choice article. Everyone, if you feel fucking compelled, of course, don't do what I say you wrote. Of course, there's always the opt out option, but very deep within a ten thousand word user agreement written in the legal equivalent of cling on. I laughed at that, but I thought
half the audience won't know what cling on. Do you know what klingon is?
Tiff, you're glad rap.
Exactly.
That's my audience.
Yeah, that's that's I thought.
Impressed if yeah, I've totally missed it.
Yeah, I know what klingon is, But I thought probably seventy percent of the readers won't know what klingon is.
So clean on LinkedIn, I mean most people on LinkedIn probably know what star Trek is.
Well, so that's the language that they speak on Star Trek. Oh clear, the cling on. Yeah, the cling on people do, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.
Interesting interesting factoid for you. Do you know that the more people speak cling on than Swedish?
I know that Sheldon on The Big Bang does. All right, so this might be a brief episode. So what's the potential strategy here for us who don't want to be controlled by the overlords without our knowledge?
Well, the first step, I mean you don't you don't get to tell you Elon Musk what he does and doesn't do with his technology and probably needed as the Australian government. But what you can do is just be aware of it. Understand that if there is any kind of device near you, it is listening to what you're saying, it is recording everything you do, and there's a better than even chance that it's also visually recording what you're doing. Now,
you know, there's plenty of evidence. Now no one's owning up to this, but there's plenty of evidence to suggest that advertisers do access cameras, for example, in phones, to check imovement to see whether you're actually interested in what you're looking at or not. So the just be aware that this tech can't be one hundred percent trusted, and it often amazes me how much people don't think about it. So, for example, we all love using the navigation on our phones.
I mean, you get lost the entire time if you didn't, But very few people think about what's involved in providing that navigation, which is that it has to know where you start, where you go, where you stop along the way, how long it takes you to get there, how fast you travel to get there. It has to know all of that to do its job. Where are the guarantees
that none of that is being recorded. There's certainly nothing like that in the end user agreements that say anything about the fact that they are that they won't record information about your trip. We are not very far from a place where police forces start requiring that information. You could imagine how valuable information about where you've been and
when would be to a law enforcement authority. It's bad enough that it's being used to sell your handbags, but when it goes to someone who's actually got the power to put you in jail, that's a different kettle of fish altogether.
Yeah, you know, yesterday I was driving to the gym and I was going up a street near my house. It's quite just a long sloke about a three k straight road, And as I was driving, I didn't have the navigation turned on, but it's just there on the screen, and it you know, when something's busy, the road turns red right so or like you can see a head there's red on the road, which means it's busy, or
orange it's busy ish, but red it's really busy. Anyway, I was sitting stopped at a kid's pedestrian crossing, and there was about ten cars in front of me, and I was just sitting there and the only part of the road that was red was where I was sitting right now in real time. I'm like, how does this possibly know in real time that I am sitting stopped behind ten cars waiting for some kids that are crossing.
I mean, because it's transmitting your position information. Every car on the road, Every car on the road has a phone in it, at least one phone. All those phones are constantly if they have location services turned on, transmitting their location information to Google's servers. So that's how they do that traffic. That's how it's so accurate, that's how it's so nuanced, because they know where every car is and how fast it is going, and they are recording that.
And that's the interesting part about this. If people see the end result, which is I get a nice map that shows me how to go, but don't think about what has to happen. How much information do they have to have about you in order to do this. There's an interesting experiment that was done a few years ago by a chap who wanted to really mess with Google on this. What he did was he got a little you know, the little trailer of those things you buy from Bunnings with the people.
I know this story, I know this story, but tell it though, filled it.
With mobile phones, and then and then went and parked it on a bridge that he didn't want traffic to go over. Google thought there's a massive traffic jam on that bridge, and all of its maps showed it that way.
So of course all the uba drivers are avoiding it because they get their maps from Google, and all the other traffics avoiding it because everyone has the same thing turned on that you did, and so the road's gone red and so they're going a different way, or even they're letting Google do that automatically, which of course it can do, which is suggest a different route because that one is all clogged up. So that's an example of how much data is being collected about you in real
time without you even being aware of it. And so what I say is the first step, probably the only step you or I can take here is be aware of it. Understand don't be surprised when you get offered creating because you talked about it your phone, he's listening and recording it.
Do you, if you put on your lawyer's hat for a moment, do you think that it's going to be that the police will start to use that data? Because I mean, I would understand there. I would understand them wanting to do that, because it would, at the very least, it would seem to be able to provide some valuable information in certain contexts.
It crosses a line, a really important line, and that's the one I mentioned before, which is it's all well and good. A company who wants to sell you something knowing all this information about you. Well, I want to say, all well and good. It's not that horrible, except the one in Tift's house recording everything that goes on there.
But it's.
Still just a commercial arrangement. And even if you haven't opted into it. You'll become aware of it. In the worst case scenario here is that you get presented, you know, with a box of creatine. When you transfer that over to authority that has the power to prosecute and jail you, then that's a very different thing altogether. And our legal system quite honestly, isn't built for this, hasn't anticipated this
at all. Yes, And at the moment, there's kind of a wall there where the private companies who we are trusting not to do anything bad with all that information they know about us, are we're also trusting not to ever release that information to a law enforcement authority if they ask for it. It's a big line in trust, I've got to say. And it's an area where we really need to start thinking about it because it's going to bite.
Yeah. Yeah, Oh my god. I wonder what the future holds well, TI, if we're being spied on, we're being tracked, we're being monitored, and I don't think we have the level of freedom that we thought we do.
But on the upside, Tiff can turn off her lights without getting out of bed, yes, and.
I can get creatine heads.
That's right, mate.
We appreciate you going tiff. Were you going to say something?
I was sad I didn't have to put up with this ship on the Humalayas there.
No, Well, someone was tracking you because you had your phone.
Yeah, you had your phone. Someone new you were there. In fact, I'll bet if you go and look up your phone's history of your geographic location, which you're supposed to be able to do, it'll have every place.
You went, So you're not that Dalai lama after all.
No, no, all right mate
Thank you nowhere I see you