Protecting Your Digital Soul at TEDxCU
I am afraid that someone is stealing my digital soul. In this talk for TEDxCU I reveal how we conspire with modern advertising to create a digital soul, how our souls are at risk of falling prey to government surveillance, and what we can do to protect them.
My name is Peter Genuardi, and I’m scared.
I’m scared that someone knows who I am, who I know and what I do, and it’s these things that are limiting my freedom. Now if you’re like me, you probably use things online like Facebook and Gmail. You probably have an Android phone. Some of you probably have nice iPhones. These things that power our digital economy, they create for us what I call our digital soul. Tonight, we’re going to talk a little bit about what that digital soul is. I’m going to tell you how to protect yours.
Our digital souls have been created by a massive shift in advertising in the last 15 years. This shift, when I talk about advertising, I’m talking about three big groups. First, I’m talking about the people who make these tools. Second, I’m talking about the people who buy and sell our information that are generated by these tools, and third, I’m talking about the people who pay for us to use these tools by virtue of paying these companies to show us advertising. We can’t get mad at them. They’re giving us something for free.
Our digital souls, between those three groups, include all kinds of intimate information about ourselves. Like I said before, I’m afraid because people know who I am, so my name, address and telephone number. They know who I know: so they know my friends on social networks. They know who I call on the telephone. They also know what I do. These companies are tracking all of my behavior across the internet. They know where I go, when I turn my phone on, when I turn it off.
Our digital souls at the end of the day though, they really make commerce work, so advertisers get to make a really efficient spend. They get to put their ads in front of a highly relevant audience, and we get these great free tools and we get to see really relevant ads, way more relevant than ads that we’ve seen in the past. [00:02:00]
Let’s talk about this. For thousands of years, philosophers have tried to tell us about the existence of a soul, the spiritual soul that is. I’m here today to tell you that even though no one has actually calculated the value of your spiritual soul, today I can actually calculate my value to each of these companies. It’s pretty simple. We just take the amount of revenue that they make to buy the average daily number of users and you get a pretty good idea of what you’re worth to any of these companies and their advertisers.
If I want something that is a network for 38 year old reggae loving fly fisherman, I’ve got that. It’s called Facebook. How many of you are on Facebook this evening? Yes, I think that one is on right now. What I really want you to ask yourself are are these things worth it? Is it worth baring your digital soul? For me, for a long time, it absolutely was. I didn’t mind sharing information about myself, pictures of my kids. All those things out there, just to get this really great network.
What I want to talk about though is that our souls are really at risk. I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t concerned, so I’m going to tell you some bad news. I’ll brighten it up with some good news at the end, I promise, so bear with me for a second here. Let me share, before we go a little bit further, why I’m qualified to talk about this. I should probably come clean before you think that I’m some kind of just consumer privacy nut.
The truth is I’ve worked in the digital advertising industry for just about 20 years. I’ve worked for startups that try to gather all of your public information and make sense of it for advertisers. I’ve used that information to sell you cigarettes, fried chicken, but for the majority of my career, I’ve worked with big non-profit organizations to help nice people like you donate to causes that protect the wolves, rescue victims of sex trafficking and stand up for marriage equality.
I would say that I’m probably in the top couple of percent of folks to tell you what’s really going on. I’m not blowing smoke. This is the truth. Let me tell you why I think our digital souls are at risk. [00:04:00] We’ve managed to do in 15 years what law enforcement agencies have been unable to do for centuries. By clicking accept and continue, we share tons of amazingly intimate information with these providers, these tools you see on the screen.
What that does is it creates a very limited small number of targets for members of law enforcement to actually go and procure the information about our digital souls. There are three ways that they can get our information. Let’s talk through them for a second.
The first of course is to get a warrant, so basically, this is for all of you Law & Order fans, when someone comes to a judge and says, “We suspect Peter of a crime. Here’s the information we want. Here’s where we want it from.” The judge signs the warrant. The police officers take it to the company. The company gives the law enforcement officers the information. They notify Peter that his information has been taken. That’s fine. That’s how the Fourth Amendment’s supposed to work.
In the months following September 11th, Congress passed the Patriot Act. The Patriot Act creates a second way for law enforcement to get our information, and that’s basically by virtue of getting it through a secret warrant. A secret warrant means that the previous scenario works except that the person that is asked for the information, such as Facebook, cannot tell anyone that that information has been asked for, completely secret. They would actually be prosecuted if they shared that information with you.
That’s not the scariest part. We’ve actually found out recently that the government is stealing this information from these companies. This information has been brought to us by Edward Snowden. You may have heard of him. He is an NSA contractor, who over the last 2 years, along with a large group of journalists, has released information about what the NSA is doing.
I’m going to give you a couple of examples just to really make it real for you. You saw this slide. I actually had this up here before. These are all of the tools that many of us in the room use. [00:06:00] The NSA has developed a way to actually go in through the backdoor and capture information as it transfers from these companies, serves to servers, and collect that information. Anything you do on Facebook, the contents of your email, anything that you watch on YouTube, they can just walk in and take it.
Second thing is actually the bulk collection of all of our telephone records. I talked about the Patriot Act earlier. A specific section of the Patriot Act, called Section 215, allows the government to collect any tangible assets they need to prevent or solve a crime. The NSA and the FBI have used this information or this statement to capture, in cooperation with our telephone providers, billions of records on millions of Americans.
I know it wouldn’t be such a big deal. President Obama’s actually said publicly that it’s not a big deal because people are only getting our telephone numbers, the time we called, who we called and how long that call lasted. It doesn’t make any big deal if they don’t know what you talked about. Well, it has come to light in the last 2 months that the NSA and British intelligence have hacked into Gemalto. Gemalto is a company that makes billions of SIM chips that power most of the phones on the market today.
Between those last two things, they can capture and find our telephone calls. They can actually decrypt and analyze the contents of those calls. For someone who was at one time on 13 social networks, uses three different Gmail accounts, a Yahoo! Mail account, Android phone, I’ve never had an iPhone, you can see why this freaks me out. Let’s just take a step back here, because maybe I’m a little bit batty, I don’t know. I’m an expert in digital advertising. I’m not an expert in law enforcement.
Let’s give the NSA the benefit of the doubt and pretend that they’re using this information, they’re using these tools as they say, to simply spy on foreign actors who mean to do the USA harm. That maybe true, but what is undeniable is that they’ve created this massive apparatus to spy on millions and millions of people. It’s what one former NSA analyst, [00:08:00] William Binney has called a turnkey or authoritarian state.
It’s kind of bad news. I’m not going to lie. I’ve brought you all pretty far down but I promise you I’d tell you how to protect your digital soul. What I want to do is just walk through a couple of things that you can do to protect yourself.
Foolproof way number 1, move to a cave. Unplug, don’t use your credit card. Never, ever think of using a phone. You’ll be totally safe. Now I know none of you are going to go home and cancel your Facebook account after we present tonight, so let’s move on to some more. Number 1, think twice about what you post online. This picture of me with my infant child here went viral and there are probably thousands of copies of it on the Internet. Not a big deal, but if you’re doing anything that you think is sensitive, you might want to be careful. Some people would argue with me. They would say, “We don’t need to be careful just because law enforcement is building this apparatus. If we do that, they’ve won.”
I’m somewhere in the middle but I would just say be careful.
Second, I really recommend that you choose soul-friendly networks. Find those networks that aren’t crushing your digital soul. This company called Ello is building a new social network. They’ve raised millions and millions of dollars, and the number one thing I like about it is that they’ve made all of their investors sign a commitment that they would not pressure their company to make money off of advertising or by selling consumer data.
Take a look, I think it’s worth it. The other thing you can do is limit how much of your soul you expose. I use a tool called Ghostery. It plugs into my browsers. What it does is it prevents my information from going to the advertisers. The worst part of it, I just see slightly less relevant ads but it really protects my digital soul. I think you should try it too. The other thing you can do is to make sure that what you’re doing online is hard to understand for anybody who might intercept that information.
A tool called HTTPS Everywhere will actually make sure that every piece of information that you ask for between your browser and the server that holds the website that you’re looking at is encrypted. Even if someone like the NSA or the FBI were able to capture it, they wouldn’t be able to make [00:10:00] any sense out of it.
When you go home, just to make sure, before you even install this, take a look at the web pages you view. If they start with HTTP and there’s no S, anybody could capture that information and make sense out of it. I suggest checking this out to make sure that your web content and the information you exchange with web service is encrypted.
The other thing you can do, if you do any kind of research that’s sensitive and all of you know what sensitive means to you, is use a tool like Tor. Not only does it encrypt the information, it takes the information that you’re asking for through your browser and routes it around the world randomly through a wide series of servers. Again, seems like overkill and it’s not for everyone but it’s a great tool if what you do is something you would consider sensitive.
Finally, if I leave you with nothing else tonight, I want you to see this date, June 1, 2015. It’s coming up in about 6 weeks here. This is the date that Section 215 of the Patriot Act will expire. It’s likely that the folks in Washington will actually renew this, but it’s important, and we have an awesome opportunity to make our voices heard, if you care about this at all, to make sure that surveillance of innocent Americans like you and me stops.
I encourage you to check out this site, it’s called fight215.org. It’s made by the nice people at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They’re a great organization helping us participate in this process. There, you’ll learn what you can do to get in touch with your legislators and the President.
Finally, I now I’ve pitched a lot of gloom and doom but I seriously have hope. I have hope that millions of Americans will stand up and tell advertisers that we want them to respect our digital souls. I have hope that millions of Americans will stand up and tell their legislators that mass surveillance is not okay, and when we do, we will preserve the freedom we’ve always had.