Tech Brew Ride Home - NBC News' Jacob Ward On Data Vs. Privacy

Episode Date: February 16, 2019

Remember that first weekend longread from yesterday, from NBC’s Tech Correspondent Jacob Ward? As I said, it triggered some things that I’ve been thinking about for a while. About data and data harvesting and data capitalism. So, I reached out to Jacob to delve further, and I’m glad I did. Super provocative deeper dive into the ideas of THIS piece: Why data, not privacy, is the real danger (NBC News) Sponsors: Capterra.com/ride LinkedIn.com/ride Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to a bonus weekend episode of the Tech Memeer at Home. As always, I'm your host, Brian McCullough. Remember that first weekend long read from yesterday, from NBC's tech correspondent Jacob Ward.

As I said yesterday, it triggered some things that I've been thinking about for a while now that I'm still formulating feces and opinions on about data and data harvesting and data capitalism in general. So I reached out to Jacob to delve further, and I'm glad I did. This is a super provocative, deeper dive into the ideas of his piece. But first, I wonder if we could just start with the basics. The title of your piece, which caught my eye this week, which maybe you didn't write, but it's why data, not privacy, is the real danger. And you didn't write, possibly an editor wrote that.

But let's just start with what the basic thesis of this is, why data, not privacy is the real danger? Sure. You know, for about, I'd say four years now, I've been working on various topics connected to where human perception and human experience diverges from sort of bigger problems. So I did a documentary for PBS that's going to come out later this year

called Hacking Your Mind, and it's all about basically how the systems that we used to make decisions in our lives were given to us by evolution and developed over time to spot really short-term, you know, right in front of us kind of threats, snakes and fires and the rest of it. And that makes it really hard for human beings to see bigger dangers and sort of systemic problems. So in my work at NBC and other places, you know, over and over again, you'll see that the biggest stories that people get into around personal privacy have to do with these very specific, short-term, tangible kind of invasions of our privacy. So this big FaceTime bug came out,

right, where people could listen in on your phone conversations, you know, and activate your microphone, activate your camera without knowing about it. And everyone could sort of get that, you know, and felt it in this way. And I wanted to say to people, that's not the problem. Like one weirdo listening to your phone conversation is not actually as much of a danger to you as the larger systemic collection of your data. And the misunderstanding that I think human beings tend to have about that stuff allows the companies that collect all this data and are in fact having more influence on our lives than they would if they were actually listened to us with headphones on, it allows them to hide behind the idea that they are quote unquote protecting our privacy

when our data is in danger. So I want to draw a distinction between those two ideas. Yeah, I just literally use this as an analogy today where if I'm at home at night and all of a sudden I look up and there's a face looking back at me in the window, like that's a visceral, like you're saying, almost. You get that. Yeah, right.

Right. That's that sort of instinctual invasion of privacy sort of thing. But what your piece sort of gets at, and I'm going to quote a piece in a second, here, but is this larger issue that it's not even your phone listening in on you as the problem. It's this universe of data points. Like big data is this collection of everything, and it can be pieced together in ways that, like, I don't need to know to actually hear the words you're saying to be able to learn everything about you. That's exactly right. I mean, we like to think that

the, you know, the only way they could really understand who I am and what I'm about to do next is if they were following me around and listening to my phone conversations. But here's the thing that I've sort of bumped into in the last four years, and for me has really been a life-changing realization, is no one is unique. You and I like to imagine, right, that our interests and our life story and our world perspective makes us totally unique and unpredictable,

and that, therefore, we are free of any kind of, you know, prediction work that marketers might try to do it on us. And so it's bound up in our prime, It's bound up in our perceptual difficulties like we've been talking about. But the thing is, it turns out that we are not, that for every person like me, so, you know, I don't know, I'm just pulling like random characteristics about myself. You know, I'm into World War II and World War I history. I'm into, you know, rap music.

I'm into, you know, these various things. I think to myself, well, there's no one else like me. It turns out that if you collect enough data about me over time and enough data on everybody else over time, you'll find that there are patterns to people, who like World War II stuff and rap music that allows you to predict what they're going to do next. And that is the business that Facebook

and other platforms are in. They collect these sort of online simulations of you and your interests that are so predictive, they don't need to know your name. They don't need to know where you live or what you're talking about at any given moment to be able to predict

what you are probably going to be talking about next. Well, that's the exact reason we're having this conversation because that's a similar thing. theory that I've been that's been percolating on the podcast a lot recently. The idea isn't that they're watching what I, Brian, am doing or buying or saying, although sometimes they are. I mean, legitimately they are. But what they are watching is A. Brian. The term I use over and over again is given enough data points, we are all finely sliced and diced, just like buckets of

profiles. I think you use the term avatar in your piece. Right. Like big data is all about slicing and dicing us into these even finer grained categories than, I mean, age, income, sex, zip code. That's, that's, that's, that's, you know, 20th century stuff. Yeah, that's easy. Yeah. It's nothing. Right. But it's, it's every single little, you know, move of your mouse, uh, uh, what time you turn your lights off at night. Um, I can never find the piece where I originally heard this. But, um, I, I think that, uh, some company determined that, like, um, hunts ketchup. is preferred by conservative voters. And Heinz ketchup is preferred by liberal voters. So like if you know which brand of ketchup I buy and that I tend to go to this website and that like you only need like four or five data points and then you can know exactly who I am, even though you might not know my name. I mean, that's exactly right. Right. There was research that came out as starting in 2017 and it's getting stronger and stronger that's shown that by what they call,

I think it's called temporal tracking of your clicks and swipes in an app, literally just watching how you move through an app and pause and move around. It's almost like a fingerprint. It's not a, yeah, it's a fingerprint, and it can predict things about your personality. Are you optimistic? Are you aggressive or not? They can characterize five different traits in your personality based on just watching how you click and swipe.

So there was this scandal recently, you know, where I can't remember who was a tech crunch. I think broken news that these companies were like Air Canada's apps and so forth, we're watching everything that you do on it. Now, it's not really news to me that that's true. But what was news to me when I went into the, to talk to research about it, was you can figure out all kinds of things about who I am, not just like a fingerprint, but personality traits about me. And once they've matched your personality traits to your World War II interests,

to your rap music, to the rest of it, your zip code and the rest of it, they've got you, man. They know exactly what you're going to do next. Well, okay, so this leads me to, I want to quote this line that you wrote and then actually push back on it a little bit. You said that in the future, the handing away of anonymous data to companies is going to give them so much insight into human behavior that the systems built on that data may sweep all of us up without our conscious participation in the process. That's the key is that I don't think, first of all, in the future, I think that that's now. And the key here that I think is that you don't even have to participate. in the process, right? Because it's it's the point, well, okay, I can end this by deleting

my Facebook account, but no, you can't because it like literally everything you do, your credit card records combined with, you know, what, you know, Amazon just bought ERO. And so in theory, they can keep track of what website you, add that to your buying habits. And like, right, like, there's no way to opt out. People are people that want to change this to fix this or whatever. and regulate and create loss, that presupposes that there is an opt-out option, and I'm not sure that there is. That's right. No, I think you're absolutely correct about that. I, you know, I try to keep the door open in my thinking about this stuff to the possibility that there, you know, that we still have some, some choice in life, or at least that someone could think from a regulatory perspective

about choice in life. But I think you're exactly right. There is a sort of, there's a very insidious trend here of feel you know there's the illusion of choice and all of these kinds of businesses certainly social media platforms the rest of it are built on giving you the feeling that

you individually you Brian are experiencing this as only you Brian can that you are you know this is tailor made for you and you know personalize and you're going to love it well all of that means that you you feel as if you are exercising human initiative. You feel as if you're autonomous in this world. But in fact, like you say, you couldn't opt out if you tried, right? I mean, you know, so I got off Facebook. I decided

not to make any kind of like big announcement about it unlike so many other people. But, but I just sort of got off Facebook because I just felt like I was the time to do so. And it has been a real problem, I have to say. It has really messed up my time as a journalist. It's really a challenge. Like that platform was really useful in a lot of different ways. You know, know, right now, if I wanted to stop using an iPhone, I'd be in real trouble. Like, I couldn't even log into my work email without the RSA token that they give me on my phone. You know what I mean? Like, these kinds of larger structural systems become, sort of get baked into society in a way that is very difficult to disconnect from. And at the same time, the companies that purvey this stuff

like to say, well, we're just doing what consumers have asked for. But that's not really the case. It is the creation of a need and the creation of a structure of need that we are not going to be able to opt out of in a future. Let me, let me pull on this more with one more analogy because the idea that I'm trying to get at here is that you don't even have to participate in the system to be already ensnared in the matrix and you can't get out of it. So, you know, you've heard the stories of like crimes being able to be solved by DNA tests because they find the records in like 23 and me and things like that. So I did a segment this week about how something like 20 million people have already submitted

their DNA to the 23 and me is an ancestry.coms of the world. And that's enough data points that right now, if the companies gave access to the databases, you can identify anyone in the United States or North America, even if you yourself have never submitted your own DNA, but enough people in the general population have. So that's the perfect analogy. So check this out. I'll take you one step further on this. So I wrote a piece with the New York Times Magazine this past summer about exactly this,

but the next step of it, which is that through enough of that 23 and Me anonymized data and countries that collect huge amounts of DNA data like Iceland and Estonia, there are now economists and geneticists working together to predict outcomes on human behavior, predict human social outcomes like how far you're going to go in college based on your anonymous genetic data. This is exactly the same thing you're talking about. And it's what we've been talking about here, right, where it turns out none of us are unique. We obey these broader group patterns, and those patterns are predictive. Well, they're beginning to use those to predict the degree, you know, your chances of graduating from college based on your DNA.

And just because you, you know, and whether or not you participated in that study, they can now port that mechanism over to you. and to other people like you and do those same kinds of predictions. So we're getting into a world. And again, nobody ever asked you and me, hey, would you like to be evaluated by your DNA in the future? You're not getting asked that question. It's just becoming part of the research and then it's getting capitalized on and becoming part of business

and eventually it'll become part of politics that this kind of stuff becomes predictive in a way that you and I can't escape. Yeah, and I guess what I'm trying to explore here is like, On the one hand, the argument has been from some people, well, this is inevitable. It's like trying to hold back the tides. Like, you can't fight this. And what I think I'm coming to the conclusion of is that's not even, like, if we're

going to have a debate about this, we should start from the point of it's already too late. Like we're describing. So then, go ahead. I was going to say, you know, for me, I don't feel like it's too late. I just feel like we need to re, sort of rebuild the language by which we discuss this stuff. Up until now, and let's just go, you know, getting away from genetics, and I'm not sure how to solve that problem, but getting back to this question of your attention and your decision making and the influences that come at you through social media and the rest of these

platforms that these companies build, I think that the way that people have talked about human attention and human choice up until now has been to talk about it as if it is, as if it either doesn't really exist as a commodity, or as if we, you and I have sort of endless amounts of it and endless autonomy and control. And I think instead we need to start thinking of it as an extractive resource like oil from the ground. And that if as a company you are pulling people's attention out of them

and shaping their choices, you should be in some way, I think, required to, to monitor the degree to what you're doing that. And in some cases, even Facebook, who for whom this is not good business, has begun to say, you know what, people are spending a little too much time on Facebook and they're getting too fired up on Facebook. They can sense that there is something going wrong with the commodity of attention and decision-making. And I just think we need to start thinking of it as a finite and valuable commodity,

even though we can't identify its value in our personal lives, even though it feels ephemeral in our individual perception. We need to begin thinking, you know what? When you combine my experience today with Facebook, you know, with 2.3 billion other people's experience on Facebook, wow, it really had an effect on society today. And so we need to be thinking about how we shape that effect, regulate that effect, perhaps, you know, something like that. We just haven't, we don't have the language yet. I think we're talking about what this stuff trades in, which is my attention and my freedom. this is probably an unfair way to end because you know but do you it's in the interest of trying to end on some sort of like a positive more positive note

do you have any just off the top of your head or have you been thinking about like any simple or common sense sort of because if we're talking about passing regulations and laws and things like this to try to not change things maybe you can't hold back the tide but at least channel the way things are going into a more positive direction like What do you think would be simple, common sense things we could do? Well, the thing that I'm trying to do, so I'm writing a book right now called Black Box, and it's about AI and how AI is shaping human decision-making. And in the process of interviewing the people that look at this, so I was just talking to somebody yesterday who built one of the original pieces of AI that shaped the recommendation algorithms in YouTube.

And, you know, people like that, when you talk to them, and this is a person who had a real crisis of conscience about it, he realized I'm having a... negative effect on people. He experienced that even personally. He would meet people and realized that they'd gone down the rabbit hole that he had essentially built. And to hear that guy talk, you realize, wow, you know, he's really realizing that this isn't just a design problem. It's like a social human problem. And for me, I'm meeting more and more people, and I'm trying in my book to do this as well, who are trying to bridge social science, political science, behavioral economics, and the creation of these

engineered systems and not just in the way that we used to do it where you would use behavioral economics to try to make them even more addictive or whatever or make it irresistible marketing or whatever they were doing with it in the past. But saying instead, you know what, here are the effects that academics have studied over time. And this is what's amazing is we're in this incredible revolutionary time when it comes to social science. The more that I see engineers and social scientists getting together and connecting with each other, I'm right now at a fellowship at Stanford called the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences, and you see this all day long. People getting together and saying, wow, I've built this system that has really changed people's behavior.

And then the behavioral people saying, wow, your system is plugging right into this thing that I study. Those people, I think, getting together is really the future. Because we could get to a world, I think, where we can start to engineer not just endless attention grabbing, which is what we're doing right now, but balance and education and, you know, unconsciously teaching our children to tolerate different types of things. of people. I mean, we can do all kinds of things that, you know, we know we are smart enough to do all kinds of things with this stuff and maybe even make money doing good things about this stuff. But, you know, there's a smarter way to do this. I think right now we're just in a kind of a primitive phase of this. We're going to get more sophisticated. I think we're going to get better at.