Motley Fool Money - Intel: 3rd in a Two-Horse Race

Episode Date: December 2, 2024

Under Pat Gelsinger, Intel fell behind rivals and was late to the game in AI and its foundry business. Is the outgoing CEO to blame?   (00:14) Tim Beyers and Dylan Lewis discuss: - Intel CEO Pat Gel...singer stepping down, why “GPU” is the key focus of his time at the helm of the company.  - The multi-year planning cycle that goes into chipmaking, and why we may wind up praising Gelsinger’s investment in the foundry business several years from now.  - How Fastly will have one fewer name to compete with in the content delivery network market, but why it might spell trouble for the business long-term. (20:30) What’s your data worth? Ricky Mulvey talks with Dave Hatter, a Cybersecurity Consultant at Intrust IT, about the “surveillance capitalism model” and where your digital data winds up. Get a two week free trial of 1Password at www.1password.com/MOTLEYFOOL Companies discussed: INTC, NVDA, AMD, ASML, TSM, FSLY, AKAM, GOOG, GOOGL, META, OTCMKTS: EXPGY Host: Dylan Lewis Guests: Tim Beyers, Dave Hatter, Ricky Mulvey Producer: Ricky Mulvey Engineers: Rick Engdahl Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 This episode is brought to you by Indeed. Stop waiting around for the perfect candidate. Instead, use Indeed sponsored jobs to find the right people with the right skills fast. It's a simple way to make sure your listing is the first candidate C. According to Indeed data, sponsor jobs have four times more applicants than non-sponsored jobs. So go build your dream team today with Indeed. Get a $75 sponsor job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply.
Starting point is 00:00:28 The mess at intel gets messier. Motleyful money starts now. I'm Dylan Lewis and I'm joined over the airwaves by Motleyful analyst Tim Byers. Tim, thanks for joining me. First day back from the Thanksgiving holiday. Yeah, good to be back. Non-caffeinated today, it's a hot chocolate day, but it's this season, so why not? I would say sugar has its own punch to it, right?
Starting point is 00:01:00 You have some hot cocoa over there. You're getting yourself ready for the holidays. We are back to work today from the holiday break. Over at Intel, CEO Pat Gelsinger, getting ready to step aside. And the chief executive announced that he will be stepping down, ending what I think was probably a pretty disappointing run for a lot of Intel shareholders. And a lot of people who, Tim, were looking for this tech giant to really rebound and become a major player in the chip game again. Yeah. I'm a little sad because Pat Gelsinger is eminently qualified
Starting point is 00:01:35 to be CEO of Intel. He is, in some ways, an Intel life. Now, I did leave the company for a period of time, but he has a very long history. He has a technical background. He has lots of semiconductor engineering credentials, and he was coming back with the promise of reestablishing Intel as, if not a dominant player, a highly performing player in the chip market, particularly in the server market. And that did not happen, Dylan. I mean, over the course of his tenure, AMD has grown its share in the data center,
Starting point is 00:02:17 and Nvidia has absolutely exploded its share. And if you wanted to sum up the Intel problem in one word, it would actually be an acronym, and it would be this, GPU. It would be graphics processing units because AMD has them. they're nowhere near where Nvidia is and Nvidia is dominant in them. And GPUs have been crucial over the development of high-performance computing, particularly in the data center over the past several years. And Intel is a, I mean, they are a competitor in the server space.
Starting point is 00:02:57 It's not like they aren't. They've always been. But they used to be dominant, Dylan. and Gelsinger didn't get them back to where they had been, and he really hadn't gotten them close. And so it's been one of those, maybe like, what could have been type of stories? I want to rewind the clock to early 2021 when he took the CEO role.
Starting point is 00:03:23 I went and found the press release that Intel put out when they announced he'd be stepping into that chief executive position. Here's what they said that they were expecting from him. strong execution on Intel strategy to build on its product leadership and take advantage of the significant opportunities ahead as it continues to transform from a CPU to a multi-architecture XPU company. Tim, we've had three years now to see this play out. There are a lot of things that have gone on in those three years that were outside of management's control, but focusing specifically on what the board was looking for them to do. What do you think about the job that he did?
Starting point is 00:03:59 So I think you have to say two things can be true here. Intel does have more chipsets, more designs outside of its purely traditional X-86 CPU chipsets. It does have that. They are starting to compete in some other areas. But have they been successful? Not really. They are still largely driven by the... this CPU business or what they call the client business.
Starting point is 00:04:34 And to be honest here, you know, the client computing group, so this is just, these are Q3 numbers here. In the data center business, that revenue was up, you know, 9%. The client business was down 7%. But just as a total of all products, so 12.2 billion during the quarter, 7.3 billion of that is the client computing group. It is overwhelmingly, Dylan, the dominant piece of the business. So I think if you're measuring what the board asked for, one way to measure it isn't just the number of products, but like, could you diversify the revenue?
Starting point is 00:05:12 Could you get us a bigger share of the data center? And I think the answer to that is largely no, even though I think you can fairly concede that Intel is still very much a player in the data center. But it is largely a two-horse race for dominance between Nvidia and AMD and Intel is lagging in third at best. That lagging position has put them in a tough spot, both in the marketplace and when it comes to their own financials. You look at their business year-over-year under the Gelsinger regime, year-over-year revenue declines in 22 and 23 gross profit, less than half of what it was when he took over. he inherited a company making $20 billion in net income and in free cash flow in 2020. Now that business is in the red. There are the natural shifts that happen as a business gets out there and as new tailwinds
Starting point is 00:06:12 kind of take over an industry. How much of this do you feel like really sits at his feet versus the very difficult job of moving a humongous ship like Intel and course correcting as the market changes? Yeah, you can't put it all on Pat Gelsinger. And there's a simple reason for that is that semiconductors is not just a cyclical business, Dylan. It is a roadmap business. So you have chip designs that are sort of scheduled like five, six years out.
Starting point is 00:06:45 So in some ways, Gelsinger comes in and he is executing on a roadmap that had been established years, years before he even got them. So you can't put it all at his feet. In three years is nowhere near enough time. And by the way, in the middle of this, I know we're going to talk about it, the foundry business, you know, becomes a much bigger part of the story. That's right in the middle of his reign. So, no, this is not all at his feet, but you only get a certain amount of time. And you do need to figure out how to make your existing product designs more attractive to get what are called design wins. You want to get real design wins in the most advanced servers that are going into
Starting point is 00:07:34 the most advanced data centers. And they just weren't doing that. They were really getting out competed by AMD and Nvidia in that part of the business. But I do want to park just for a second on Foundry, and we can follow up on this. Those numbers that you cited, It is true that they've gone from highly profitable to now they are struggling for any kind of profit. The cash flow is not what it once was. They're investing. They've had to invest. They've had to invest in new areas of growth in the number one area they're investing in his foundry.
Starting point is 00:08:08 And that is incredibly expensive. And it's going to take a long period of time. I do give Gelsinger credit for recognizing that we have to. be in this business. We have to be in this business and we have to use third-party tools. For a long time, Intel ate all of its own cooking in building chips, in placing chips in machines. It was a highly vertically integrated business. And the industry moved on to a company you probably have heard of, Taiwan Semiconductor and some of their own advanced equipment that they were using from like ASML in the Netherlands for, you know, extreme ultraviolet lithography. And so the industry
Starting point is 00:08:57 standard of value chain for creating the most advanced chipsets was sort of evolving outside of Intel. And Intel wasn't leaning into that. Gelsinger deserves credit for saying like, look, we do, we have to stop eating just all of our own cooking and we have to look to where the industry is moving and making moves to take advantage of where things we haven't invented could benefit us and our customers. So I think what you said before about turning the Titanic is right. This is like turning the Titanic. You really are. You're turning a ship that is massive just in terms of what it is. And it was headed for an iceberg. And it probably has kind of grazed the iceberg, but we're not going to know if it's going to get to safe
Starting point is 00:09:54 shores for a while. And unfortunately, Gelsinger is not going to get to see whether or not it happens, except as an outsider. Well, next up at the wheel will be co-CEOs in the interim, David Zinzer, the CFO of the company, and MJ Holt House, the general manager of their client computing group. And as you noted, you don't just get to set the agenda. You inherit. the roadmap that had been set out before you. And back in September, Gelsinger had laid out the plan for Intel, building on the momentum of Foundry, creating a more competitive cost structure, delivering savings, refocusing on the strong X-86 franchise and building out their AI strategy. Do you still feel like that is the agenda for Intel, or are you expecting a major course correction from the interim
Starting point is 00:10:44 CEOs that we see? I wouldn't be surprised if there is some big shift of dollars towards making bigger investments in GPUs. But I would be surprised if a lot of that changes, they do need to get, they really need to double down and get better with the X-86 architecture because X-86 is everywhere and so much software is built on X-86. And remember, they're not doing X-86 alone. AMD is a big proponent of X-86. So together they are, they sort of started a consortium that has a lot of the major computer makers involved in this, Dylan, to improve how X86 works in systems, you know, how you encode for, you know, X86. And so that'll be interesting.
Starting point is 00:11:34 We'll see if something comes of that to make better X86 chips. But I do think we'll see more of that. But the big one is going to be Foundry. neither of these two is going to back off the foundry business. That is going to be the major area of investment because it's been absolutely nowhere in delivering for Intel as a company. It will be, Gelsinger set it up as we are going to make this an independent subsidiary of Intel. That's going to happen, no matter who comes in. That's going to happen because it must happen. If you want to compete to manufacture chips, you must be an independent provider.
Starting point is 00:12:14 So Intel is doing that. They're going to make the chip foundry an independent provider. And they are investing heavily to create the most advanced manufacturing processes they can create inside those factories. What they call it is 18A, in other words, manufacturing at 1.8 nanometers, which is, for perspective, really, really, really, really, really, really small, really small, really small. So that's like super advanced chip sets. But they just don't have the customers there yet.
Starting point is 00:12:45 But they do have a signature customer in AWS. So they've got a signature customer. They've got these investments. That is a bet that they just need to see that out. So yeah, I do like that we're going to see the CFO here because there's going to be a lot of smart capital allocation required. That's going to be step one to get. on the right path here in the post-Gelsinger era.
Starting point is 00:13:11 All right, we're going to stay in the lane of tech, and I'm thrilled that we have a tech two for here with you on the show today, Tim. Shares of Fastly up over 20 percent in the past week, largely on the news that competitor EGio has filed for bankruptcy, which leaves Fastly and competitor Akamai as two of the main players in the content delivery network space. This is not exactly a market I am super familiar with, But, Tim, I know that this is a company you follow relatively closely. So what do you make of this news with a competitor going away and maybe there being a little bit more of that pie for Fastly? I mean, it had to happen.
Starting point is 00:13:51 I really know nothing about Edgeo, but this is a bare knuckles, low margin. It's a terrible business. I mean, it really is, Dylan. Let's be honest. We can be real here, right? Like, this is a terrible business. Fastly, when I had made an initial recommendation of this, it wasn't because this business was great, the core business. It's that they were moving to another business that was higher margin where it looked like they had an advantage. And I was wrong about that. I was stone cold wrong about that. And so they've been, they've really been struggling since. So seeing the market shrink because it's a bad, low margin market is, yeah, That's objectively good for Fastly.
Starting point is 00:14:38 It's good for Akamai. Where does this leave them? I mean, it probably leaves them picking up scraps that are low margin scraps, but maybe gives them a slight edge in pricing power because there are fewer providers now. Like one way to get pricing power is your competitors go away and leave you as, you know, the sole supplier. They won't be. Akamai is a huge company.
Starting point is 00:15:02 But it does give them a little bit of an advantage. to just explain what content delivery is. So a content delivery network is the road network. It's the super highway above the streets. If the streets is the core internet, the super highway is the content delivery network. You get places faster because you get on the on ramp and boom, off you go. No more stoplights, right? That's what a content delivery network is. And Fastly is very good at this. They don't have many of these super highway networks, but they have enough, and they do have some good customers who have been with them for a while. But you might imagine that super highways and toll roads are like, that's great. If you can get people on the toll roads, you just
Starting point is 00:15:48 can't charge very much for the toll roads. So it's a low margin business. So what you want to do is have stops or ways to take it at like special tunnels or through which. that people can get a pay a lot extra to go through. That's what Fastly was trying to do with what's called Edge Computing. They haven't got there yet. Akamai is kind of a specialist in these super highways. They do some other things as well. They're a big company.
Starting point is 00:16:15 They're growing slower. It's the first company I recommended in Motley Fool Rule Breakers. I'm sad to say I gave up on it way too soon. The first recommendation was a winner. The second one wasn't. And I don't own it anymore. But it's the first real, winter I had at the fool, Dylan, so I'm glad to see they're still around.
Starting point is 00:16:34 You know, Tim, having just driven from Washington, D.C. to New Jersey for the holidays, I will contend that there is a business in super fast highway tolls, maybe just not digital ones. I was paying plenty to make that trip, but as you note, it's a much lower margin business on the digital side. I think one interesting wrinkle for me with this is I understand some of the enthusiasm for Fastly shareholders here. But Akamai secured EGEO contracts in content delivery and in cybersecurity as part of the bankruptcy court proceedings.
Starting point is 00:17:11 They also have some licensing rights related to some of the company's patents as well. And so it feels like perhaps the short-term competitive environment for Fastly gets a little bit easier, but they are now going up against a even stronger competitor who, as you noted before, much larger than they are, and I think have a little bit more of a diversified business as well. They do. They've been competing against Akamai for years, and just their network design is different, and they would argue better. Akamai would argue not better, but you could choose, if you're a tech, you could choose which one is better. One is, you know, Akamai really started by just putting servers everywhere. There was an internet service provider.
Starting point is 00:17:57 They just flooded the market everywhere with servers. Fastly said, well, you know what we'll do. We'll just go to the fastest points and we'll put our equipment there. And so if we're at the fastest peering points, we can do, we don't need to be everywhere if we're at the fastest points. So we're good. So it's just a different network design. It'll be interesting to see.
Starting point is 00:18:24 I think for a lot of this, Dylan, when you're talking about moving content quickly, which is largely I mean, the way Akamai started, just for perspective, here it was, hey, you know what? We want to show streamed movies. And in order to show stream movies, we should have copies of those movies close to where people are going to click the play button. And so that's really what it was. just creating copies like throughout the world. So whenever somebody like in Des Moines clicks play, the server that is, you know, like five miles away is going to be the one that serves that content.
Starting point is 00:19:07 That's the idea here. And that's kind of a commodity business now. But you're not wrong. We'll see how this plays out. It's maybe a more friendly market, but it's still a commodity market. So to wrap us here, I came to you with two kind of tech underdog stories with Intel and with Fastly today. Are either of them interesting for you as potential turnarounds? Intel for sure is absolutely interesting to me. Fastly, if they ever find their way into really building a highly competitive edge computing product, I will get interested again. I still own shares.
Starting point is 00:19:50 I haven't sold yet. But Intel with that foundry business, I haven't done a firm valuation. So take this through the grain of salt here, Dylan. But just eyeballing it, I think most investors would agree that if you buy Intel today, you're getting the foundry business for close to free because it doesn't do anything yet. So if it ever does do something, then there's real value there. but it's value that Intel has to build. So it's highly speculative, but it's at minimum an interesting speculation because they're not going anywhere.
Starting point is 00:20:32 Coming up, we're sticking with tech. What's your data worth? Ricky Mulvey talks with Dave Hatter, a cybersecurity consultant at Intrust IT, about the surveillance capitalism model where your digital data winds up and which companies take better care of your privacy than others. These days, I'm all about quality over quantity. Especially in my closet. If it's not well-made and versatile, it's just not worth it. That's honestly what I love Quince.
Starting point is 00:21:07 The fabrics feel elevated, the cuts are thoughtful, and the pricing actually makes sense. Quince makes high-quality wardrobe staples using premium fabrics like 100% European linen, silk and organic cotton poplin. They work directly with safe ethical factories and cut off the middlemen, so you aren't paying for brand markups or fancy stores, just quality clothing. Everything they make is built to hold up season after season and is consistently rated 4.5 to 5.5 to 5.5. stars by thousands of real people like me who wear their clothes every day. The Quince, Mongolian Kashmir Kroonek sweater may be the most comfortable one that I own. It's light, soft, and it was a lot more affordable than you think quality cashmere would be. Stop waiting to build the wardrobe you actually
Starting point is 00:21:46 want. Right now, go to Quince.com slash Motley for free shipping and 365-day returns. That's a full year to wear it and love it, and you will. Now available in Canada, too. Don't keep settling for clothes that don't last. Go to QINC-E.com slash Motley for free shipping and 365-day returns. Wentz.com slash Motley. Dave Hatter, is a cybersecurity consultant for interest IT, and someone who is concerned about the amount of data that big tech is harvesting from him, me, and you.
Starting point is 00:22:15 Is that a fair description for you, Dave? That is an excellent description, Ricky. I'm very concerned about it. There was a quiet story last month that you sent over to me, and I think it's interesting to talk about. This is from cyber news reporting that there is a bug in Google's pixel-9 phone. it's new phone, that makes it say basically that users cannot say no to Google's surveillance.
Starting point is 00:22:37 And the researchers found, quote, the pixel device continuously sends personally identifiable information, including the email address, phone number, and location, to various Google endpoints, including device management, policy enforcement, and face grouping, end quote. So the phone is sending this stuff about every 15 minutes. Why is this a big deal? I got Google Maps on my phone. It knows where I'm at. Yeah, Ricky. So first off, understand that I've been into business for more than 30 years, spent most of it as a software engineer and have built some of these types of systems myself. And my big issue with all of this is not so much that it's happening. It's that the average user, A, does not give informed consent. Let's face it, you know as well as I do. People don't read the 80 pages of privacy in terms of service and all that stuff. They just click yes because they want to use their devices. So if everyone had a complete and full understanding of what they were signing up for,
Starting point is 00:23:28 and chose to do it anyway, I'd be a lot less concerned about it. And then the second part of that, why you as a person should be concerned is, since you probably don't really understand what they're collecting, how often they're collecting it, who they're sharing it with, how it's being monetized for their benefit at your expense potentially. It's the downstream impacts of how this could be used against you. There are all kinds of, quote, AI companies out there now who buy and sell this data from data brokers, plug it into their algorithms and then claim to be able to do things like
Starting point is 00:23:56 look at your data and determine would you, be a good renter, would you be a good employee, would you be a good insurance risk? So there are companies out there using this data that's being collected about you in ways that you don't know. There's no transparency or visibility into it. So when you get denied for a credit application, or you get denied for a job or for an apartment you want to rent, you won't even know why. At least with a credit score, you have some visibility into it or some transparency. You can dispute things on your credit record. Here, you have no visibility. And as we get more and more technology in our lives as everything becomes software-driven and software's embedded into it.
Starting point is 00:24:35 And there's enormous value in collecting this data. Of course, there's only going to be more of it, which creates an ever larger and more detailed and granular profile of you that people can use. So those are the fundamental reasons why I care about this. We've gone from a phone taking an email address and phone number to dark credit scores, Dave. In a baseline, I mean, I think Google would say that they need it for, what is it? Is it car crashes?
Starting point is 00:25:00 We can track if you've been in a horrible accident. They always have legitimate reasons. And I'm not even disputing that some of the services that require your location data aren't legitimate and provide value. If you've been in a car crash and your phone can report that, could it save your life or the lives of your family? Yeah, possibly. So again, I'm not necessarily against these things per se.
Starting point is 00:25:20 It's the fact that people don't really understand what they're signing up for. You know, I always encourage people check out like Mozilla's privacy not included. Mozilla makes the web Firefox browser. They have a website called Privacy Not Included, where they dig into the privacy aspects of software and services and such. And I think if most people took a look at that, the expose they did last year on modern cars. And the unbelievable amount of information, any new model car is collecting about you. Stuff that has nothing to do, I get that there are sensors in cars and that they provide value to you because they make the car operate better or whatever. But almost every major car manufacturer is collecting all the information.
Starting point is 00:25:57 out of your infotainment center, you connect up your phone, they got all that. They're collecting all kinds of stuff about you. And again, do you really understand what's being collected? Do you really understand that they're potentially listening to the conversations you're having in the car? No. And that's my problem. It's the lack of transparency. It's the fact that people are not giving informed consent to this incredibly detailed ingrained or data
Starting point is 00:26:20 collection. And smart TVs are also kind of similar where they're watching to see when you tune out and when you tune back in sometimes. You mentioned data brokers. How is Google monetizing this data? So when you look at a company like Alphabet, the parent company of Google or meta, the parent company of Facebook, and you look at where most of the revenue comes from, which is all public because they're public and traded companies, what you're going to find is the vast majority of their revenue comes from basically collecting your data and then using it to provide services to you or selling that data. So for example, you know, think about it. Other than pixel phones and the Android
Starting point is 00:26:54 operating system, what can you buy from Google? Almost nothing. Now, I mean, you know, you can pay for some of their services if you want to move out of the freemium model into higher tiered stuff, Google workspace and that sort of thing. But generally speaking, the free stuff is a surveillance capitalism model. You're not paying with money. You're paying with data. You are their product, not their customer. Again, I'm not necessarily against that. It's the tradeoff that people don't understand. So they collect enormous amounts of data about you. The more of their services you use, the more data they collect. Again, same thing for meta. What can you buy for meta? Almost nothing, right? I mean, you can pay to advertise on their services, but mostly you use their free products.
Starting point is 00:27:33 They collect your data. They use that to sell you ads and they sell that data, potentially to data brokers and other similar services, you know, and obviously generate billions of dollars a year primarily from your data. And I think at least in the case of Facebook meta specifically, people understand that tradeoff. They go on Instagram and they see their friends' photos. And then there's also an understanding that that comes with sponsored content and ads as well, especially YouTube. I'm watching a video. I know that it's tracking the videos that I'm watching and serving me up ads probably based on my interests. And in fact, it asks me, is this ad relevant to you? And I always say no, but it's pretty clear that that's going on. I understand the tradeoff that I'm making.
Starting point is 00:28:14 I know you got a bone to pick with alphabet and Google, but is Apple any different? So we talked about the Google pixel phone collecting all this data, and Apple has made part of their branding. We're all about privacy. We're putting user privacy at the center. It has a better reputation, but you're deeper into this world than I am. Do you think that reputation around privacy is well-earned? I think it's partially well-earned, and here's why. Yes, Apple is collecting your data. Same for Microsoft, right? But if you look at, of all the big tech companies that are out there, they all have their issues, I'm not a fan of any of them to a large extent. But when you look at a company like Apple, for example, or Microsoft, their business model is different, right? Apple is in the hardware and
Starting point is 00:28:53 software business primarily. Now, again, I'm not going to pretend like they're not collecting your data, Ricky. They certainly have the capability, and I'm sure they are. But at the moment, their business model is not fundamentally driven by your data. They're selling you hardware and software. You know, Microsoft, more software-based, yes, they're collecting your data. Could they turn around and sell it at some future point? Would my opinion on Apple and Microsoft change, potentially depending on that, yes. But at the moment, and again, there's some privacy washing going on on both of their parts as well. But generally speaking, I would, I feel strongly, and I feel safe to say that Apple is a much more privacy-friendly company, primarily because their business model is different.
Starting point is 00:29:34 They're not incentivized to collect and sell your data to generate all their revenue. They're selling you products. And they've, I mean, they've been doing this for a few decades now, protected data well so far. So I'll hope the Lindy effect stays in action. The longer they protect data, the longer that they will. Tim Cook's done a pretty good job there. You mentioned data brokers, and I want to make it clear for listeners who don't know. So we've talked about Google and how they're monetizing it at that end. I think people are less familiar with data brokers. One of them is Experian, which is also in the credit reporting business that has something like you mentioned, where you can see your credit score and they track that and sell that to different lenders and things.
Starting point is 00:30:12 But how else are these data brokers making money? Who are they selling my personal information to? Well, in my mind, data brokers are a big part of the problem that we have with privacy and security today. So let me connect up a dot and then come back and try to answer your question specifically. Just in the last couple of months, we've seen some gigantic data breaches, companies like National Public Data and MC Square. These are background check companies that are buying your data, you're giving your data, up when you go through a background check and think about this for a second, Rick. If you've gone through a background check process, and I'm sure everyone that's watching this has at some point for a job
Starting point is 00:30:51 or something, think of the incredibly sensitive information that you're given up, places you've lived, places you work, to your family members, right? Lots of sensitive information. And then when they buy and sell this data with other companies and build ever larger, ever more granular profiles about you, not only does that data have intrinsic value to people that want to sell you things or people that want to persuade you, it has really enormous value to bad guys because if your data gets leaked, whether it's stolen or inadvertently leaked or whatever, and now I have all of this sensitive data about you, it makes it really easy to impersonate you from an identity theft standpoint and or to impersonate an agency or organization you've worked with in the past to send very realistic and very authentic phishing emails, texts, etc. So one of the reasons why this data broker thing and this data collection troubles me so much is once it's out there,
Starting point is 00:31:45 23 and me, they're not a data broker, but a lot of people gave up their DNA data. They're potentially going to go out of business. What's going to happen to the data? You can't get new DNA, right, Ricky? You know, what's going to happen to that data when they go out of business? So when you think about these sometimes shadowy third-party companies that many people have never heard of, buying and selling data between each other, selling it to a third-party company, that have some end use in mind, whether it's advertising to you or whatever it is,
Starting point is 00:32:11 then they go out of business, they sell it to someone else, even if you sign up for something. And you have fully informed consent and you understand what you've bargained for. When that company goes out of business, what happens to your data? So there's this shadowy network of hundreds of companies around the country. And because there's no national privacy law at this point, you know, many of them, while they may be impacted by the 18 states that have some sort of privacy law, It's a real patchwork quilt of varying regulations and varying, you know, penalties. To a large extent, it's like the Wild West out there.
Starting point is 00:32:44 They can do whatever they want with this data. It's hard for you to know what they have. It's hard for you to get it erased. It's hard for you to, you know, make changes to it if it's incorrect. And as more and more of that moves around from one company to another about you, again, it could be incorrect. You can't see it. You don't know.
Starting point is 00:33:02 You don't know that you're potentially being penalized as a result of data. that might not even be correct. So there's, again, I know a lot of this probably sounds crazy to many people, but when you look at the totality of the incredible amounts of information and very detailed granular of things like going back to Google Maps, you know, if you turn that on on your phone, it basically, if you can go into your Google history and look at the map and you'll find like every place you've been for a long time.
Starting point is 00:33:28 You know, there's all kinds of different ways this stuff can be used against you. Listeners, this is the first and a two-part conversation with Dave Hatter. We'll play the second part later this week. As always, people on the program may have interests in the stocks they talk about, and the Motley Fool may have four more recommendations for or against, so don't buy or sell anything based solely on what you hear. All personal finance content follows the Motley Fool's editorial standards. It is not approved by advertisers. The Motley Fool only picks products that I personally recommend a friends like you. As always, thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow.

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.