"If you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide." That's not what privacy is about.
you may not be doing anything wrong today, but regimes come and go. And social norms change. You don't know who'll be in power tomorrow, and that data is forever. It is not going anywhere. It is in silos that is permanently stored in permanent bases all over the world that is just being maintained by people who love collecting data. So I would be really careful thinking that just because you're safe today that you're going to be safe tomorrow.
Find Tom's show notes for "Episode 2342: Naomi Brockwell on Protecting Your Privacy."
His guest is Naomi Brockwell. Find her on YouTube. And on Twitter.
If you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide." That's not what privacy is about.
As someone who believes in a free society, we should not be normalizing surveillance. If you look at any dystopian sci-fi film, it always centers around the government having access to all of your activities. In every historical authority, in every authoritarian government that we can point to throughout history, they've always had surveillance as a main tool for control. So you do not want to normalize a society where the government knows every single that's going on. The other thing is that we're all feeding this permanent treasure trove of information about us and that data is forever.
Now, you may not be doing anything wrong today, but regimes come and go. And social norms change. You don't know who'll be in power tomorrow, and that data is forever. It is not going anywhere. It is in silos that is permanently stored in permanent bases all over the world that is just being maintained by people who love collecting data. So I would be really careful thinking that just because you're safe today that you're going to be safe tomorrow. And I would also say about that argument that I'm not doing anything wrong kind of flies in the face of what half the people in the world are facing. Not everyone is lucky enough to live in a semi-free country. Some people around the world are literally fighting for their lives, and privacy is the only tool that is keeping them safe. If they cannot have private communications with people, if they cannot find a way to mask their transactions, they are going to be persecuted. And that happens in so many countries, countries where the black market doesn't just reverse it, drugs or whatever else is on there; maybe it applies to medicine maybe it applies to clothing, maybe you've had too much of your food quota and you're trying to feed your family so we have to realize that norms across the world vary so dramatically and so this idea, when people are snarky about privacy "Ugh, you know, it's just something for bad people. Why do you want to hide your conversations? Why do you want tm hide your money? Encryption is just a tool for drug dealers or money launderers," or whatever else, it really is a very privileged position that they're talking from, right, because this is a tool for freedom for so many people across the globe. CryptoChat is a tool for freedom. Tor is a tool for freedom. Private money is a tool for freedom that is keeping people alive. And even if it weren't, I think it's the individual's right to keep their lives private. That's what the 4th Amendment was made for: it was to stop unreasonable searches and seizures. And for some reason that 4th Amendment never carried over into our digital lives. For some reason the government is like "Well, we're not allowed to look through your belongings without a warrant, and all of that, if it's physical, but your digital life, yeah, let's just take all of that, let's collect all of that, and rifle through it whenever we want. And if you want it protected, we'll try and get a backdoor into it." Like it's a complete perversion of the balance power we're meant to have, and I think it's so sad when people have this knee jerk response of "If I'm not doing anything wrong." Well that's not really what privacy is about. It's not about doing something wrong. It's about the right to selectively reveal to the world what you want to reveal and I think that we all should have the right to make that choice, which data we want to release, what information we want known about us. And if the government wants more than that, they can get a warrant.
7:45. Search engines. Google is synonymous with lack of privacy.. They're actively sharing your data to the CIA.
9:15. We're in the age of machine learning, data points like how long you hovered over a search result before scrolling past it actually get collected. Your mouse movement, you know, whether you're about to click things. Did you know that if you type into the Google search bar and you don't even press enter . . . let's say like, ah, I want to type in Tom Woods, and I type in "Tom Woods . . . and I say, nah," those key strokes were already captured and sent to Google, so it doesn't matter that you didn't send it. They already have that information. And I think that people don't realize how good Google is about taking all of these abstract data points and putting them together in a way that humans can't really find patterns in these things but computers absolutely can because they have way more computational power. So Google is taking all these data points and is painting an incredible picture of who we all are. And I think it was the Irish Civil Liberties Association . . . they put out a report where they got hold of . . . basically, the database of all the identifiers that Google uses. So, that we all know that Google is a search engine, it's a browser, but really it's an advertising company. It's the largest advertising company in the world. And what they're doing everytime you load a page, there's a couple of seconds where there's some empty boxes or maybe it's milliseconds and suddenly they're filled with things that are trying to capture your attention--articles, or things to purchase, or whatever. And what's happening behind the scenes is that Google has said, "Okay, everyone Naomi has just opened her browser and gone to this page, we have these boxes to fill. These are all of the things we know about her. Who wants to buy it?" And so what they're essentially doing is taking everything they know about me and just blasting it to the thousands of approved buyers in their real-time bidding system. And you can think, who are these people collecting this data? They don't even have to bid on the ad space to collect it. They can just be sitting there passively collecting this data. And those companies are not just ad companies, they're data brokers. They're government agencies. And those people are collecting that data that are passing it into thousands more. Sowe have no control over whose hands this data falls into, and that's a pretty scary prospect. So I would just be really mindful of all of the ways that we're leaving digital exhaust. You know you mentioned Google as a search engine but there are more private alternatives. If you even wanted Google search results, you could use something like StartPage, which is a more private front end for the Google search engine. So basically, you can look at proxy sites. You don't have to look at the real websites, your IP address isn't collected, all of these things can really add up and really dramatically decrease the amount of data that companies like Google are collecting about you. And it's not just Google. I mean there are people who think that the private and the public are so distinct, and "Why do I care if Google has my information, do they just want to sell me a pair of shoes?" Actually, it's a lot more insidious than that. I think a lot of people are thinking about this in a pre-Internet world. And what's that world look like? Well, that was a world where private companies had very limited insight into our lives, very limited amount if data that they collected. And governments had very limited ability to collect that data, too, from private companies. What is the situation now? Private companies are collecting every single thing about us and the government has a free-for-all. There is no 4th Amendment protecting any of this data due to things like the 3rd party doctrine that basically says that if you hand your data over you use the infrastructure of the internet which relies on 3rd parties for everything. YOU HAVE NO REASONABLE EXPECTATION OF PRIVACY. So they can basically get every single thing about you. So I don't think there's this straight forward private public divide because at the end of the day Google is collecting all this information and all these companies are collecting all this information and they're basically amassing it into giant treasure troves of data that governments can subpoena, that they can break into it, they can get back doors into it, and as we learned through the Snowden revelations that there are programs like Prism programs where they're just getting direct access to the servers of a lot of these companies. So I think we need to step away from this divide and just realize how bad the situation has gotten in the digital age that things are so blurry that you do as a conscientious citizen who wants the right to privacy, who wants the right to freedom in their life that we should really be mindful to how much data we're giving to everyone knowing that that data is not protected at all. And there are so many ways that we can start to protect our data. Like I said, StartPage is one. Brave Search is another.
14:18. A story in her book about Tank Man from that famous photograph of a man standing in front of a tank on Tiananmen Square in 1989. And one day he disappeared from major search engines. Can you explain what happened there and what the significance of that is?
On Tiananmen Square Massacre, this came up.
TIANANMEN 1989: WHAT REALLY HAPPENED
— Thomas Hon Wing Polin (@thonwingp) June 3, 2023
1/8 This is a post that needs to be repeated every year — until the biggest of the West’s Big Lies against China is properly buried. pic.twitter.com/G1fL5htaPD
14:42. Search engines we often think of as just a privacy violation, but search engines are our portal into the internet at large. They're in charge of indexing all if the pages, getting these little spiders that crawl all over the internet that collect all of the URLs and basically put them into this index that is searchable. That also means they have control over what they can show us and it's been shown that there is a lot of censorship of this information. And people should really be mindful of the things that they're being shown are the things that these companies WANT to show them. It's like Google, Microsoft, for example, I think it was two years ago now on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. And Tank Man, that famous image that we all know, the day after the massacre there are ranks rolling down the street, and this anonymous man, I don't think we ever learn his identity, just decides to stand in front of them holding grocery bags. And it's this amazing image of revolution and fighting against authoritarian control. Of course, it's banned in China. They don't want anyone to know about Tiananmen Square. They don't want anyone to know about this image. But what was very suspicious was in the United States, in the Western world, on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, suddenly, if you were to look up in a search engine, such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo, I think there were, I can't off the top if my head which search engines they'd applied to but there were a bunch of them but Bing immediately comes to mind. But you wouldn't fund any result about Tank Man. Now this is an incredibly famous, famous picture. You type that in your search engine and you would get zero results. What's going on there? What other things are we not being shown? And how do we get around that? And I think it was Bing who came out soon after and said "Oh, this is a big mistake. It was just a bug. It was fixed now." So it did come back online. So it wasn't like China completely infiltrated the Western world and was able to censor. Obvious from this was that they were able to force these companies to censor these things and were successful. And it makes you think what other things are they censoring? What are some of the things that the U.S. government is censoring? The EU, what do they not want us to see? Tweak the algorithms. Brave search allows you to search for what kind of materials would you like to be shown. Left-wing or right-wing? Would you like to be getting better sources from PBS? Only sources from PBS? You can set parameters where you affect the algorithm. All we're getting with MSM searches is complete opaqueness when it comes to the results. They all say no, we're neutral and we just build some information but generally, we're showing you all the things on the internet. Just not true. We don't know what they're showing us is just completely opaque there's no way to verify that that we're actually being shown the correct things there are so many things that go on it's not just censorship it's also what is being shown first and how is this influencing people's conception of the world. They did some experiments with autofill and it was influencing people in certain directions.
18:32. So if you look up Naomi Brockwell, all you get is "Naomi Brockwell is . . . a terrible person . . . is lazy . . . is ugly . . . is really bad," you'd start to get an impression of who Naomi Brockwell is. If you looked up Naomi Brockwell and the autofill reads "Naomi Brockwell is intelligent . . . is the best . . . is amazing . . . conquering the world of privacy . . . helping people," completely different picture. They did experiments in the last election where they looked
