Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg

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Hi, I'm Karis Swisher, the editor at Large of Recode. You may know me as the champion of DuckDuckGoose and all other preschool games, but in my spare time, I talk tech, and you're listening to Recode Decode from the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today, we're gonna play a live interview every single conducted in New York with Gabe Weinberg, the CEO of the privacy focus search engine, DuckDuckGo. This interview was recorded live at the Made by We Space in New York City, which is an event space in the Flatiron District owned by WeWork.

Let's go there now to hear my interview with Gabe Weinberg. We're gonna very quickly bring up Gabe, come on up, Gabe Weinberg, he's from DuckDuckGo, we're gonna talk about the awfulness of Google now. This is Gabe from the founder and CEO of DuckDuckGo, this is another search engine, you do have a choice in this world, whether you know it or not. All right, so Gabe, we were just talking about inequity and wealth and stuff like that.

Let's talk about inequity of information, because that's really what's happened. We have given over control of our information to one company, really, in this world. And I'm gonna tell one quick story for you, so you get a sense of it. I was walking in the early days of Google with Larry or Sergey, I often can't tell them apart, and there was a room full of televisions like a Circuit City, and I looked in and it was recorded, they were all on, all these dozens of televisions, and I said, what are you doing?

And I think it was Larry, said, we're recording all of television. And I was like, why? And he said, so we can figure out a way to search it. And I said, have you gotten the copyright from those people to do that?

Have you actually reached out? And he said, why should we do that? Why do we need to do that? And I said, well, because if you have recorded it, then you'll have it recorded, then you'll have the search for it, and then nobody else can do it, and then you'll dominate it.

And he was like, uh-huh. And I was like, that's wrong to do that. And he was like, okay, and we moved on. And it was a really interesting moment for me that they really were super interested in owning every piece of information on the planet.

It was a revelatory moment for me. Talk about what we have now. Talk a little bit about Dr. Go first about what you're trying to do, because you have been a search engine for how long?

11 years. Right. So talk about what you do precisely and how it contrasts with Google. Yeah, so Dr.

Go is a general internet privacy company at this point, and we help you essentially escape the creepiness and tracking on the internet. We've been running this, non-tracking search engine, not turning it to Google for 11 years. We're doing about a billion searches a month. It's about 1% market turn in the US now, fourth largest search engine.

And then we also operate a mobile browser that, in browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox, that block trackers across the internet. So as you're expressing Google and Facebook are the largest purveyors of these trackers, but we block hundreds of tracks and hundreds of companies. And then we also enable more encryption on the internet. So when you go to a website, you know, there's a HDP, HTTPS version, sometimes sites have the unencrypted version and the encryption version, but they send you to the unencrypted version.

And so we force you to go to the crypto version. And so we force you to go to the crypto version, which helps your ISP is not from tracking you. So it's all one download that just helps you escape tracking on the internet. So why did you decide to do this?

Because a while ago, everyone was welcoming this idea of convenience. I think Marguerite Bestieger said that to me as we've traded convenience for something better. And she was talking about search engines she uses in Europe that are different. And Google's convenient.

Google has mail. Google has maps. Google has this. And I'm using that because you're in the search business.

Why did you decide to do this in the first place? Well, I have a tech policy background, so my graduate degree is tech policy for MIT. And I originally got into the search, actually, because I was interested in search. But immediately after launching it, I started getting privacy questions.

This was a little force note in still 2008. And so I did my own investigation and found two really interesting things. One, searches are essentially the most private thing on the internet. You just type in all your deepest, darkest, secret, search, right?

Absolutely. And the second thing is you don't need to actually track people to make money in search. So Google still, to this day, and there's been congressional testimony, actually, the period that I was at, the representative from Google said this, they still make most of their money off the same way to go make some money, contextual advertising. Nothing to do with following you around.

It's keywords on the search page. So you type in car, you get a car at. And you could do that without tracking anybody. And so what I realized pretty quickly is that's a better user experience.

And just made the decision not to track people. At the beginning of that, that wasn't the main differentiator because we weren't as aware of all the privacy harms. But as time has gone on, just become the main driver for people to adopt. So talk about contextual advertising, because this is just a basic business, as you type whatever.

And a lot of ways, if you think about Google or what you are, search is sort of a database of human intentions. Yes, it's a big history of advertising. And I think it helps to explain the current market. And so it used to be the case, as you're saying, and the internet started all the way up until the mid 2000s.

This contextual advertising was basically all advertising. So on search, it's just the context of the page. But it was also the case on publisher sites. I'm sure you remember, like sites you sell their own ads, they would put advertising based on the content of the article.

And then the mid 2000s, it switched to behavioral advertising, which is creepy ads, the ones that kind of follow around the internet. And two companies dominate that because they have all the data on people, Google and Facebook. But there's been no real proof that that is really better. And it's arguably way worse for publishers who then have seeded all sorts of money to Facebook and test Facebook.

So talk about that shift to behavior advertising, because when you did it, I mean, years ago at Google, also there used to be a ticker that used to run across when you entered Google about what people were searching for that moment. And they stripped it of dirty stuff, which was quite a bit apparently. But you would see things like horses, jam, French. And you'd be like, what the fuck is that person searching for?

I would sit there. And I'm like, I don't even understand that query. Talk about how it shifted from that to the idea of behavioral. Why go there?

What happened was you had publishers selling the biggest inventory, so the top of the page banner advertising. And then they still wanted to make some more money. So they had seeded the bottom of the page to ad networks they didn't want to sell. And Google's was the biggest.

It was AdSense. It's not a company that actually acquired. Called DoubleClid. Before that.

Before that. Before that. And then they acquired DoubleClid. And so slowly, publisher has kind of seeded some of their page over to it.

And then Google ended up having all this behavioral data. So if you search for something, you could then follow people around with that search. And those advertising became more lucrative. And then slowly publishers seeded most of their page over to this behavioral advertising.

However, my proposition is innovation and contextual advertising hasn't happened in the last 10 years. And it may be just as lucrative. So you can imagine videos, articles, similarly parsing out what the real content of it is, and putting ads just based on that, not based on you. And there's been a little evidence of this after GDPR.

New York Times, for example, got rid of all the behavioral advertising in Europe. And increase in revenue. Not partly that's because they just were the middleman. But partly that's because it actually is used for advertising.

Like you write an article on airplanes and you have an airplane ad. So why the shift then to behavioral? Because they just decided to do it? Yeah.

Strategic for their companies. Because if you think about their position, they're the ones with the data monopolies. And so if they are going to run a network, they should run it based on behavioral. Because they want to compete with them on that.

The real reason why that's enabled is because there's been no real regulation in tech that would have prevented it. No, there's zero regulation. Right. There's the one from 230.

But that's it. Right. I'm talking about 230. Do people know who would section 230 is?

Well, those who don't, it's the communications agency act, which I wrote about for the Washington Post 109 years ago, was an act that they put through, most of which was stripped out. Most of the act was deemed, it was started by people who were worried about dirty stuff on the internet, essentially. And within the communications agency act was section 230, which gave internet companies broad immunity from anything that happened on their platform. And it was designed so that these companies would be able to grow and not be sued to death, essentially.

And their businesses wouldn't, would be able to. They were small businesses at the time. And it continues to protect big companies like Google and Facebook, YouTube. And when you mention the idea of, now there's been some eking away at 230 around sex trafficking and some other things.

But essentially, if you mention the idea of removing 230 internet companies, they start immediately vomiting on their shoes, because it would mean they would be subject to legal attacks, which would be unprecedented, presumably, correct? Yeah. I think it's the specter of any regulation, right? Right.

But the idea that there would be no regulation on digital forever is ridiculous. Every other area of technology has regulation to pull back some of these externalities. So I think it's inevitable, just a matter of what it looks like and when. All right.

So they move to behavioral advertising. I want to get to that legislation a second, because you were proposing your own legislation, correct? They get this behavioral information. Talk a little bit about what it does, because people are very unclear about what happens when this occurs.

I mean, essentially, these trackers exist across the web. So when you go to a website like we could, then there are trackers hiding behind it. So you think you're just interacting with the site you're on. But really, there are companies like Google and Facebook and many others slurping up your information into browsing history.

And so through these various mechanisms, they're getting purchase history, location history, browsing history, search history. And when you add all that together. And made more important by mobile. Yeah.

And so you get a really robust profile of you. And then when you go to now a website that has advertising for one of these networks, there's a real time bidding against you as a person. And there's an auction to sell you an ad based on all this creepy information. You didn't even realize people captured.

And I think that's what people are finally starting to realize. And they've been going on the idea that they were just interacting with this website. But once they find out that all these tracking is going on, they become insensitive. Do you think people are actually mad?

Yeah. Explain that to me. Because a lot of the tech companies say they don't care about this. They don't care about privacy.

I just interviewed Scott McNealy recently. He was a famous one. He's famous for saying privacy is dead. No.

You have no privacy. Get over it. You have no privacy is dead. Get over it.

I mean, so we track this like do national surveys very closely. And it's increased again and again and again of people. Once they understand what's going on, they want to take action. And so there is a setting, which is part of the legislation that our legislation is based off of called Do Not Track.

So in your browser, in most browsers, if you delve into the settings, into the privacy settings, there's something that says Do Not Track. And our measurements, and it's not just us, because Gizmodo measured their sites, between 10% and 25% depending on what you look at, people have enabled that setting. So they've actually kind of, people are like, no one ever goes into settings and what's the privacy? It's not true.

Literally, tens of millions of Americans have gone into their browser settings and checked this thing. And so people do care. And that has just climbed up and up and up as the knowledge of the tracking is going on. Because before you knew about it, you were okay with it, because you didn't realize it was so invasive.

But as after Cambridge Analytica and all the stories about the tracking, that number keeps going up and up and up. So one of the things a lot of people do bring up with me still though is, well, I don't really care. I don't have much to hide. I don't know what doesn't matter.

I get that all the time. Like, who cares if they know if I went to Best Buy and then bought up, like whatever I bought? Talk to why that might be not the best way to think about it. Yeah, there's kind of two answers to that.

One is philosophical in that privacy is a fundamental human right. And so you don't need to care or hide anything to exercise your right. So you wouldn't say that for speech, because you have nothing to say. It doesn't mean you should have right to be a speech.

So that's kind of on the philosophical side. On the harm side, there are some that people don't realize. So a lot of people really don't like to be that's fine around. Some people seem to be fine with that.

At a more deeper level, there's this thing called the filter bubble, which is that recommendation algorithms and in particular search results are tailored to you. And that means that you're not seeing what everyone else is seeing. And that actually distorts the democracy. And that's a real harm to individual people and society.

And then there's just the general identity theft and data breaches, which is happening over and over again, which is one of the main drivers for adopting stuff like that. So talk, you've submitted legislation that you would like someone. Model legislation, yeah. That you would like someone to submit to Congress.

Explain what you want to do. Yeah, so this is in the landscape of all the privacy legislation. And I would love to hear the new ones of it. Now, just to understand, we do not have a national privacy bill in this country at all.

Other countries do. And much more stringent, like GDPR in Europe. But we don't have one. We have one in California that's about to come online.

But the lobbyists are trying to defang it rather substantively. There are 10 others in states across the country. I don't know where they're. There are certain states that are doing that they can use.

Anna has one. There's all kinds of states. Vermont has a data broker law. I don't know.

Let's hope Alabama doesn't have one. But go ahead. Sorry, but Jesus Christ. All right.

But there's too much of a patchwork of them, correct, across the country. The idea. There's not a national bill. There's no national bill.

We really should have a national bill like GDPR. But one of the problems with GDPR is how it's operationalized is a lot of consent dialogues. And that's called notice and consent. And people just end up clicking the consent.

And so what we think of better mechanism is this thing that's talking about earlier, this do not track setting in the browser. That tends to mean people have already put on. And the fact that consumers have already adopted it, and it's in the browser, it's just an amazing legislative opportunity. Just give a beef.

And it's actually a better mechanism for privacy laws. Because once you have this setting in it works, you don't have to deal with all the pop-ups anymore. You just set it once. And then sites can't track you.

Should it be set from the beginning as do not track? This is a debate whether it should be default on or default off. I would love it to be default out of it. But I'd be happy if it was opt in as well.

Because I think people will. People keep tripping here. This is the second trip. Hello.

Sorry. OK. It was the same guy. OK.

It's the same guy tripping. All right. Now he's just talking with me. All right, go ahead.

Sorry. No worries. I think people will opt in. It's Google.

Yeah. Yeah. I think people will opt in if they have the opportunity. And they can opt out of this tracking.

And so what we're hoping is there's kind of two things. One, as you said, California's getting defanged. The California bill. As that happens, the pressure for a federal bill is going down this year.

Because if it's all defanged, there's no pressure to pass something that preamps it. And so one thing that, but still all the people in the country really want something passed. And so one option here is this would be a much simpler thing to pass. Just give a do not track mandate for no tracking for that setting.

Much easier than comprehensive legislation. The other thing is that any comprehensive legislation that gets passed do not track and be the mechanism. So we're hoping that it gets added to any larger bill as the mechanism to help people opt out. So why do people have to opt out?

Why do they have to opt into it, I guess? Opt into it? Because you don't have to opt into clean water. You don't have to opt into.

I think I'd like my water cleaner dirty. It's kind of crazy the stuff that consumers have to do in order to protect themselves compared to almost any other thing they use. You don't, again, opt in. I'd like the tires that don't fall off.

Opt in. I'd like the food that isn't tainted, please. Why is that mentality around? I think the mentality is around because of the lobbying that would distort the advertising business model.

And I would love it to be opt in by default. But in a realistic way, I think if it was operationalized as a way to opt out, I think that would be effective. Because as you said before, the other argument is some people don't care. And that gives people really the choice.

That they just could leave it there. Yeah. We're going to take a quick break now. But we back after this with Gabe Weinberg, the CEO of DuckDuckGo.

This week on Network In Shell, I'm joined by Tanksen Atra, the meme king with over 15 million followers across Tanks Good News, influencers in the wild, and his personal account. Tank is breaking down what the meme economy really is, how much a single sponsored post pays, why major brands are throwing serious money at jokes and how meme culture think preparation age, starter packs, and a perfectly timed screenshot is actually reshaping how we think about money and value. Get ready for a conversation that'll change the leaves, scroll, make you rethink what going viral is really worth, and prove that sometimes the most serious money moves are wrapped in the silliest of jokes. Listen, wherever you get your podcasts, or watch YouTube.com slash your rich BFF.

How is it operating against a site like Google, or a big site where you're 1%? How do you do that? It's been interesting. We try to educate people about privacy and that they're alternative.

So our main issue is just not everybody knows about us. There's 20% of people that we think would be interested in switching to DuckDuckGo. But it's hard to convey all these privacy concepts. I'll give you an example.

We've been talking about the filter bubble for years. In 2012, we ran a study on Google that we think influenced the 2012 election. That's how long it was. But nobody, we had to speak for 10 minutes to explain what the filter bubble was back then.

But after 2016, in the last two years, now we can talk about the filter bubble, just name it, and people know what it is generally. How many people know what the filter bubble is? I'm just curious. Explain the filter bubble?

Well, that's the idea. Well, that's why that percentage is very high. So I like that. But it's the idea that for search, in particular, as an example, when you search, you expect to get the results, right?

If you search for gun control or abortion, you expect we search at the same time right here, you expect to get the same thing. But that's actually not what we found when we did the demo. Yes, it could be different search results. Yeah, and people don't realize that.

And so in addition, we found that it varies a lot by location. And so if you take that to the extreme, let's say that voting districts are getting different results for candidates or issues, it can skew the polarization of that district very easily over time, because people who are undecided are actually searching for these topics. And people generally click on the first link. And if you're controlling that first link in that district, that's what people are going to learn about.

So what would you, Ananda, just talking about the idea of people that shouldn't have this kind of power, having this kind of power? How do you look at it? Because it is a group of maybe 1,000 people making these decisions in Silicon Valley, pretty much, if that many. And recently, I did an interview with Tristan Harris, and he was talking about, he called it, the climate change of culture is what we're going to be going.

And the only positive part about it is there are only 1,000 people whose minds you have to change on this. How do you look at that small amount of people making decisions for the entire world, really? And what can we do about that? Yeah, I look at it structurally.

And I think that on the consumer side that we've talked about, there needs to be a way to opt out, which would lower the power, right? On the kind of structural business side, at the core of this problem, at least the one we were talking about here, is data monopolies, right? It's the collection of data profiles. And there are ways to split those up.

So some people are talking about stream measures, which I'd be afraid of the spinning off companies. But there are other ways to do it, such as not allowing data to be shared between different business units. So if you're on Instagram, or browsing something, that data cannot be shared and used on Facebook, or what? Which was precisely the reason Facebook bought that company.

Yeah. Right. And that's why it should have been rejected in the first place. But at this point, one thing you can do is legislate.

And it was part of our proposal, is that if you go to that site, you can't share data back to the other sites. And so that would effectively add more competition and less power in these decisions. Except they sit next to each other. They happen to on that same ridiculous campus.

They share the same kombucha stand. So it's hard to. That's why the argument for separating them more strictly is pretty solid. What about opening up their data that they have collected, both companies, for example?

Because essentially we're talking about Facebook and Google pretty much. And Amazon's just starting to get into that business, the advertising business. It's two companies right now, correct? Yeah.

And so it's a very important way to offer ability, which is what that is. It may help in the social network space. It's less important in a search space. Because as I was saying earlier, you actually don't need these profiles to do because search results.

They're really using search to do ads on YouTube and Gmail and all these other places. And so it could help in social networks to help someone start a social network and be able to switch all your friends a little quicker. But it probably wouldn't solve Google's problem. There hasn't been a major social network started since 2011, which is amazing if you think about that.

And there's a reason, because why do it? And for the rest of it, I think it's just Snapchat, correct. And he's the chief product officer for Facebook right now, as far as I can tell. Because they steal all his ideas.

So how do you then shift that? How do you stop that? Just separating them? Which of the ways you think should happen?

I really think you have to get to core this data monopoly. That's the key. And I think part of the problem actually has been that market definition, because people think of it as search, market, social network, market. It's what you saw in Congress, too.

But it really is a digital advertising market. That's where the domination is. And so you have to change the digital advertising market. You can do that by putting more Chinese walls between companies.

You can do that by doing something like Do Not Track, which would force companies to be more contextual. And so all of a sudden, you'd be steering the industry back to the contextual from behavioral. Because 25% of people now would advertise on contextual. Behavioral would be outlawed for them.

And so that would just break up the competitive advantage, basically, of the data profiles. And do you think that's even possible? Because the idea is adding more with AI is adding more and more behavioral data in order to track you. And in countries like China and other places, they're using that behavioral data very, they're using a lot of it, including facial recognition.

The companies here, I think, are just dying to get into facial recognition and know the controversies around it. So it doesn't seem like backing away from behavioral. They seem to be doubling down in behavioral. That's why I believe you need to have a regulation.

And to your point, you can look at China as an example. And so not only should you push things back to contextual, but you probably should have some lines, right lines, that you can't cross in behavioral. You saw San Francisco ban it the other day. This week, San Francisco ban facial recognition software being used in the city.

Is that correct or? That's right. For government. For government.

Another good example, which you can talk about that much, is political advertising on Facebook. So there's a lot of people. So it's talked about it. Well, not this part.

There's this disclosure. But arguably, there should be a ban on behavioral advertising to some level of people. Just link it for political advertising. To some level of people, what do you mean?

So like 1,000 people or 10,000, you pick your cutoff and then say you cannot target ads at a population less than that amount. Because what's happening now is the behavioral advertising is targeting you, right, or a very small amount of people. And it's using its manipulative in two ways. You can manipulate the targeting.

So I can select just the three or five people that I think would like to totally be triggered by this. And you can also do AB testing and change words and images to get the perfect manipulation. Tristan Harris says a better word for this. Everybody says with the brain stem.

Yes. That goes down the ground stem. And that kind of stuff should be probably outlawed, especially for political advertising. To individualized.

Yeah. And not just individual, probably at some threshold. That's significantly high. Like they make the argument, oh, this is just like TV.

Artists' lagers are going to be like TV. Well, you can't target. Well, you might be able to eventually, which also be a lot. But in TV, you weren't targeting down to the individual person.

Right. You're targeting great groups of people. You also couldn't just put ads up the way they do on Facebook. Right.

And you do all this testing. You can't test a thousand ads. So do you think our regulators are up to this task? You're writing your own legislation.

I'm assuming you're running your company at the same time. You're not a legislator. That's true. So how do you look at our legislators?

Is there more strength on elsewhere in the world? Or in this country, let's talk just about this country, because I think most people saw the Facebook hearings. And Mark looked great in that hearing. And he's not the most articulate of people.

It's largely because most legislators looked so bad and looked so ignorant. And so when you say Mark looked so good, it was because it was such a low, low bar that it was hard not to. I think they could have put a ham sandwich there and it would have looked pretty good. But that's that.

I do have talked to legislators who are quite smart. There's a lot of them in Washington, especially in the regulatory agencies and elsewhere. What's the problem from a regulatory? Is it the money these companies are throwing at lobbyists at them?

Or is it just a lack of will? Or is it ignorance? How does that change? Right.

So we have to answer your first question. There are very smart people there. And just like running a company, they hire staff. And there's lots of senators who've hired really good tech staff.

And there's a handful, maybe five to 10. And they're trying to write some legislation. So I don't think you need the whole Senate writing it, for example. And so I'm actually pretty encouraged on that regard, the level of thought that's been going into some of these proposals.

I think that writing something like GDPR is complicated. It did take Europe. Europe was doing it for 20 years. I mean, that was an update of a 1995 law.

And then they took five years to update it, basically. And so we're just getting started this year. So there is some amount of time that it will take. That's one reason we proposed this legislation.

Because you could do this right now. This is an easy thing you could do. Some solving a lot of it all at once is difficult. I prefer to do it a little bit in piecemeal, as opposed to just one thing and then be done.

That's the other thing I don't really like about our government system is we pass something and then we don't touch for 20 years, which is what happened to the CDA. It would be better if we passed something every year or two and kind of leaked it. So what do you imagine of the many different things that are happening? Like right now, their FTC is considering finding Facebook $5 billion, which I call the parking ticket.

Yes, I agree with you. Thank you. And correct. Need another zero.

Two zeros, actually. I decided. That would do it. Two zeros.

Yes, that would do it. But the concept is finding them, taxing them is another way. Regulatory guardrails is another way. And break up antitrust action for presumably break up and then not letting them buy anything.

Of those things, what do you imagine is the most effective right now? I think not letting them buy things would be good. Anything that gets at, if you're talking about Google and Facebook and the digital advertising market, anything that gets at the data monopoly would be good. Of those, breaking up could do it.

Chinese wall could do it. Do you know how track could do it? All those would do something. And how much time do you imagine it will take?

There is a tech lash going on right now. And it's largely because of the 2016 election and the idea that the Russians were customers of these companies. Would you imagine that will continue or do you think it's going to speed her out in the next then? How dangerous is it for the next elections that these continue to be issues?

Do you think these companies have finally come to Jesus and said, oh, dear, we've made some errors here? I think you're seeing that because all of their announcements have just been centered around privacy. So they're feeling this is a real thing at this point. Maybe it's coming to me, at least I'll say in that.

But everybody else is now embracing at least the word privacy, whether they mean it or not. I think you're going to see the tech lash continue until people think there's some meaningful change. I worry about the breakup because that takes a really long time historically. And some of these other things can be done much quicker.

And so I'm hoping that something will get done quicker. I'm a little saddened by what's happening in California because I think that's slowing things down. But what I haven't heard anyone talk about, which is interesting, is that got started by ballot measure for people that don't know. Everything in California gets started by a ballot measure.

One person did that. There's nothing to stop somebody from doing it again. It gets watered down. Someone put on something else.

Yeah. We're putting the same thing again. I think it's totally watered down. Just do the same thing.

And yet we don't have privacy in place. We're going to take another break now. We'll be back after this with Gabe Weinberg, the CEO of DuckDuckGo. Talk to us very quickly just a few more minutes.

What can people do right now? Besides using DuckDuckGo, what are some of the things they should be doing to protect themselves online, and things that they don't realize they're being tracked? Besides, please, please don't buy one of their internet home devices. Yeah.

That would be good. Yeah. My son goes around and unplugs them all. Yeah, they don't work.

So it makes lovely paperweights. Facebook is an interesting challenge. I mean, I haven't been to Facebook for a long time. And there's plenty of studies that show that's healthy choice.

But there aren't great alternatives to it. And so that one, I think you should leave. And a lot of people have. Just leave it.

Just leave it. Yeah. For Google, there are actually alternatives in every category. So we're in search.

But there's alternatives in email. There's alternatives in proton mail. It's a big one. We use Fastmail.gov in Docs.

There's things like Zoho. They're not all super private like us. But they're often paid, but cheap alternatives that live privacy first. And so I would leave the services.

Because the idea that their alternatives don't exist is just nonsense. Well, although it's inconvenient, because they all work together on your phones or whatever you have. They all seamlessly work together. You know, I've been out for a long time, but it's totally productive.

I mean, you just click on a different app on your phone. They're on your home screen. You go into a different one. OK.

What else do people do to protect themselves? So in the devices themselves, there's a bunch of privacy settings that actually matter. And we have a blog at spreadpipes.com with device tips that we just education wrote it all up. And there are things like you can turn off the ad tracking on Apple.

For instance, you can use encryption. And you could basically encrypt your Apple's by default. But you can do your laptop. These are things that take like an hour.

But you run through the checklist, and then you're a lot more private. So encrypting your laptop, encrypting your phone, or having a phone. Encrypting everything, changing, like basically, doing all the opt-outs you can do, which we have a list, and you can run through the settings, and then switching off these services, kind of voting with your feet. What about mapping?

So we use Apple Maps for our surfinals. You should switch bad maps. They have gotten a lot better. Oh, sure.

I would give them a try. All right. OK. Because they're terrible maps.

It's hard not to use a Google Map because they're so good. I would do a matry. OK. All right.

Anything else? Any other things? Those are the top ones. Because I don't want to scare people that it's difficult.

It really is you spend a few minutes on this, and you can be out. I think people think it's such a gargantuan thing to leave these companies. I don't think that's actually true. And what about cameras and audio?

Just so you know, when I was visiting Facebook, I knew his mark had his camera covered. He had his audio covered. He had everything covered. Yeah, absolutely.

When people can play privacy security a lot, but I totally agree. So on security side, you should definitely have a webcam cover. And use two-factor authentication. You know the thing that texts you all the time.

You should use that for all services. So most services that you have, your email is most important. But you can set up this two-factor authentication. Much better.

Because most of the hacks that have happened on the identity theft is all been from phishing on your email. And you click on some type of password. And two-factor authentication is just another layer that prevents that from happening. All right.

And when you get into things like facial recognition and other issues, as people start to use VR and AR and things like that, what would you advise people? Facial recognition is hard. There are ways to actually change where things and change your face so you don't capture by the cameras. But I think that.

Wear things and change your face. You can like, I forget what it was. It's called a mask. But go ahead.

More minor things. I forget what it was. But you can put aluminum foil or something that freaks things out. OK.

I think the problem with facial is you're going to need laws. It was some of the stuff. And so San Francisco is great starting the trend there. OK.

Not to use it. And companies, not to use it. You're going to need that one is going to be solved at a more societal level. Do you think people realize how much facial recognition is used in this country?

No, not at all. There was a privacy project at New York Times. So you're aware there was a really interesting story like two weeks ago where they took camera. You took camera.

That was part of the project. We were part of that story. No, that's the project. So they took webcam live webcam footage that was just on a camera.

And just put it up on Amazon with facial recognition off the shelf stuff. And then we're able to identify a bunch of different people. And then call them up. And it was like I saw you walking here.

It took $100 and like three hours. Right. Well, exactly. And they also were using things much more seriously in workplaces to watch your face as you work.

And also to decide whether to hire you based on your facial expressions. And what they're trying to do right now, from what I understand, is track some of the new software. We'll track your face and expressions during an interview. And then match it to their top performers who's faces they were also tracking.

And therefore, don't hire you if you're not one of their top performers' facial expressions. It's crazy. It is another area just bias in algorithms in general. But this is to your earlier point is that, I guess a central point of regulation is there's been a regulation for 20 years.

So there's just a dearth of regulation. And you're not going to solve it in one shot. And so this bias in algorithms probably needs to be a separate bill, right? AI in general, this area, facial recognition.

We need to tackle these problems separately. But there are the biggest problems. And so we should be doing it year after year. I worry that there's going to be a check box that we pass something and that's going to be done.

We're going to have to keep the pressure on. Do you ever imagine, and I'll get to questions from the audience, that will ever escape the enormous power of something like Google? Because what it's become is that it is the answer machine for everything, really, even though you have 1%. They have 90% everywhere.

Yeah, I do. I think if we have these structural changes, I think you could see the market open up. We are a small company, right? And so we're all 65 people.

And so we're like, well, how do you compete? And I mentioned earlier, we use Apple Maps, right? And we can debate how good they are. But in each of these verticals, there are actually really good answers.

So Yelp for restaurants, which we use, we use Wikipedia just like Google does for. Yelp is getting crushed by Google. Exactly. And so, but it's not like their answers aren't good, right?

And so if the market opened up a bit, these companies could thrive more. And we use them and put together good search results, just based on all these other companies. And so I think that the idea that there are this magic AI that no one can be with, I think, is false, because if you look around in all these categories, there actually are good alternatives. But giving them the amount of money they have, the amount of money they make.

And the fact that consumers like them, like using them, I think one of the issues around all these tech companies is Amazon is so great about delivery, even though they're ruining the lives of retailers across the country. I'm sorry about that. Or causing people to have job, or their contractors treated badly within the stores. But gosh, they delivered my iced tea really quickly and it's delicious.

Or Google, they're a horrible monopoly. And yet, wow, they were fast. Don't give me that answer if so and so is alive anymore, whatever it is. Yeah, no.

I always search people if they're dead or not. Facebook, trust in Facebook, has precipitously dropped in the past year. And so I don't think it's inevitable that trust is always at high levels, even if people like. Right.

Trust in Facebook has dropped, usage has not. Yes, well, that's because there has not been a great alternative, right? People don't necessarily believe or want to believe the healthiness of quitting. But trust itself has eroded.

And so I think trust could have eroded in these other companies as well. And last, you were worried about who runs these companies at some point? Because one of my worries has always been, many years ago, I wrote a story about Google trying to take over Yahoo's search. I think I've talked about this before.

And it was going to get them 90% of the market at this point. Yahoo was still a substantively large search business. And Microsoft was the third one. And I was very much, I start by they can't have 90% wise in our government stepping in to do something about it.

It's a ridiculous amount of market share. And so a line I wrote was, at least Microsoft knew they were thugs. Google pretends they're all happy with their funny balls and their crazy eating habits and their weird clothes and stuff like that. But they're still as adorable as they are.

They're still just as evil as Microsoft was. And so I was making that point. And I think it was Eric Schmidt who called me up and said, that's really mean. That you say we're thugs.

And I said, well, I think you're worse than thugs. Because you don't know you're thugs. And you are thugs. And he was like, we're not thugs.

We're really good people. We're really good people. And I said, I get that. But I can't imagine a world where you have a company of this much power over information.

What if someone, of course, it's like three clicks to Hitler. But that's what I said. It was like, what if Hitler ran Google? What if someone who wasn't so nice, right?

And it was like, well, they don't. And I was like, what if they do? And they said, but if they don't. And so are you worried about the concentration of power in the hands of, again, a very small amount of people?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I worry that you're basically saying they intend good, right? And it's like the road to hell is made with good intentions. And I believe we did this little trouble study that they did influence the 2012 election.

Now a lot of people on the left like the outcome. And what we found, by the way, was when you searched for stuff, we found this thing called magic keywords, where if you search for something, and you search for something subsequent, you would get extra results inserted based on the previous search. And so Obama was a magic keyword. So if you search for Obama and then gun control, you get three gun control results in the results.

Romney was not a magic keyword. And so all these people. No, he was not a magic keyword. And so all these people searched for Romney and Obama, and there were tens of millions of extra bomb results inserted across the country for that entire run for the election.

And we don't know what that changed. But I presume it actually did change a lot. Because people were searching just random issues that they wanted to hear about. They were just getting a bomb stick on it, not a ramie stick.

And do you believe that was purposeful? No, I don't. I think it's totally unintentional. It was a result of the algorithm.

And they were questioned on it. And they were basically like, oops. And kind of the answer was, when we created these magic keywords, Romney was less popular at the time, it was a year before. And that just happened.

But it was probably a tiny change that no one even knew about that had a big impact. OK, questions from the audience? Lots of them. OK, so start here.

A question about how this conversation could or should change once it moves from the digital world. So a lot of times when we talk about privacy, especially tonight, we're talking about digital first problems or problems that are because of digital first companies. But specifically the advertising example. Now we're seeing adjustable advertising on TV, where you can be just as targeted as you are online on your TV screen.

And that can change depending on who they think are in the room at that time. And streaming. Yeah, streaming. All of it.