 Likeable science. I'm Jay Fidel. I'm the guest host and Ethan Allen is the host guest. Right. And we're going to talk to each other as we often do in likeable science. And I'm not sure that I can say that the science we're going to talk about here is all that likeable either. Well, people obviously like it. They like it. People have gotten cell phones. Why did they like it? It's about cell phones if we didn't mention that. We're talking about cell phones. We're talking about the latest and greatest and maybe the most worrisome aspects of cell phones. So why are people so dependent? Why do they like cell phones? I'm not sure, but think about how fast. I mean, it literally has been in something like 15 years. They have swept the world. It's not just they swept the U.S. or the U.S. and Europe or the U.S. and Europe and developed parts of the world. But in Africa now, in remote tribes in South America, people have cell phones and they can be in touch with the worldwide web and talk to other people all around the world. I suspect it's in part because it is that connection, which is very odd because everyone talks now about how we're so siloed and isolated, but that ability to connect into a big knowledge source, a big information source, and to reach out and literally call anyone, anywhere, anytime. It's empowerment. It's extending your will. Right. Extending your powers of inquiry. Right. But at the same time, what we're going to talk about here is the downside is do you know how much information you are giving away with that cell phone? How much information you are putting back out to the companies who provide you with the service, built your phone in the first place, or are sending your messages around? And the answer is you're giving them a whole lot of information. To your point about how it is worldwide, it is everywhere. I mean, I don't think we realized, or Steve Jobs realized 10 or 15 years ago when he came out with this terrifically disruptive technology that it would be in such demand in everywhere, ubiquitous in the world today, everywhere, every country, even undeveloped countries, poor countries, remote countries, everyone has a cell phone. Yeah, I don't know what the market penetration is precisely, but I'm sure it set new records. You look at television and refrigerators, it took 50 or 100 years to reach 50% market penetration. Yeah. And it's been that way for a while. It's not just this year or last. I don't know why, but it comes to mind about the movie Black Hawk Down. Black Hawk Down, the Americans were trying to rescue Americans that had been lost in some town in Somalia. And of course, the terrorists or the revolutionaries who were there were going to get them. And so they had to communicate where the Black Hawk helicopter was, where it was flying, the path. And then they had these five-year-old kids on the ground with cell phones. Now, that happened 20 years ago, right? With cell phones, and they were communicating over the distance exactly where the helicopters were going. I'm saying, you know what, these five or six-year-old kids with a cell phone, it's really a weapon that they should have this. And it's way beyond that now. Information is power, yeah. Information is power. So, I mean, I was telling you before the show the other day I had been looking for flowers for a particular occasion and going to a couple different sites where I could order online flowers. And now, yesterday and today, wherever I am, on my Facebook or LinkedIn or anything, the ads are all showing up for exactly the same flower arrangements that I was looking at, the very same arrangements. You know, I mean, even the ones I didn't buy, I mean, I looked at for a little bit. Two questions there. One is, how did it get to all those other apparently unrelated, you know, websites and the like? And secondly, how did it get there so quickly, right? Yeah. Yeah. Who is sitting here watching this and tracking that and saying, ah, Ethan is interested in these particular kinds of flowers. And so we're going to pull that link, and now we're going to stick it on this other site. Almost immediate. Yeah. I mean, of course, it's all done. This happens to me, too. There are people involved in that. If it happens to you and it happens to me, it probably happens to everybody. If I, you know, go poking around in Amazon for something or any of those big sellers, 10 minutes later, it's on my email, it's on other websites. It's just like they know who I am. They work together. They start getting messages about it. This is some huge conspiracy. They all know who I am. This is very scary. Yeah. Because that's just, you know, merchandising. But there's so many other things that they could have that they don't tell me they have. Right. And this was the thing the other day that you pointed out, this article about that Facebook apparently had co-opted an Amazon, an Apple internal application that was supposed to just be for Apple staff to use and actually figure out how people were using their phones and what they were doing and all this. And Facebook gave or got a hold of that, encouraged people to let them use it and they tracked everything they were doing on their phones, on the tablets, where they were going, how much time they were spending, what they were doing, their huge amount of data that they didn't exactly realize. Well, I'm sure people did realize. I'm sure they had to sign an accept button, you know, click an accept button somewhere that allowed Facebook to do this. Apple, by the by, turned around and essentially disabled that app and with that app, all of Facebook's other internal user apps got disabled and sat there for two days not being able to track all their people. It's okay with me. A nice little slap on the wrist. Yeah, really scary. And this has been going around for a while. I mean, I remember, this has to be ten years ago when it was this little article about the iPhone, at the time it was only a few years old, the iPhone had a file that some hacker found which had many, many thousands of lines of data in it identifying where you have been. So it was reading GPS and it was saying, making it sort of a track of where you had been from moment to moment. Seconds to seconds, you know, all around town, it knew where you'd been and you didn't have any access to this file. Right. And when they went and asked Apple, do you have access to this file and everybody's phone, they said, they didn't answer, they stole one. So of course they do. It's just too inviting. Yeah, yeah. It's too easy. It's just like they want to know where you surf on the web, what sites you're spending your time on, because the more time you're spending on those sites, it's indicating more interest, right? And that's, you're liable to be spending money there, if they're commercial sites, certainly. Yeah, so, you know, question, how much do we care? And there's two levels of that. How much do I personally care? I think most people, I don't know how you would answer this, but I don't care if you know where I am. I don't care if you know all the things I do on my phone. I don't care. I'm not into espionage. I don't have a lot of secrets. What you see is what you get, kind of guy. But, you know, there are people who don't want to be known, who don't want their personal information to be, where do you fit, Ethan? Yeah, I mean, rather like you, I don't particularly care too much. I'm not doing stuff that I feel a deep need to hide. But there is a whole thing. If, let us say, a government, or a government, or decides that they don't want people who have, you know, been participating in a particular demonstration, they didn't like that. With that location tracker, they can say, oh, Jay Fidel was at that demonstration, you know? Or say, well, I've gotten you on video anyhow, so they could identify that way. But, you know, that's the thing. Now, there are so many ways to track you. It is so hard to, you know, get back to Walden Pond, you know, where you are truly alone. Even if you do somehow get back to Walden Pond, you know, there are satellites and drones. Watching you anyway. Yeah, right. You cannot escape. Yeah. Well, so, you know, the other, so the one is the person or the individual reaction to the, you know, the notion that they're, you know, getting data on everything you do, everything you communicate through the phone, all your email, your message traffic, your phone calls, and your location. That's a lot of stuff, including purchases that you make. I mean, a lot of people do their computing on their phones. Right. And that's especially so in third world developing countries, because they don't have a computer. They only have the phone, and these apps let them do what you and I might choose to do on a laptop. But, you know, what concerns me is the second level of this. The second is the macro level. You have concerns, maybe, or I have concerns, not that much, but my concern is that the whole country, okay, is giving data to these corporations, which are consolidating it, getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. And the data is being consolidated in the process. And it's hard to say that you can stop that from getting into the hands of people who would use it against you. Right. Okay, and the question then is so, do I care if the data of the country is getting into the hands of people who I didn't, you know, we collectively did not approve as recipients of that data? And if they're benign, it's okay. And if there are no sanctions, it's going to just be on a shelf. And I think a lot of people think that way. It's going to be a shelf. They're going to look at it. It's just a lot of zillions of bytes of data. Who cares? But it's not that simple. In the 21st century, as there is in China, and China is a lesson for us all. It's not going to end in China. There are sanctions. So if you do stuff that crosses the line, that violates some norms, some rules, some imagined problem that the Chinese have or any country has, then there are sanctions. You may lose on your social quotient. You may not be able to make a loan or take a train or take a plane or get a passport or who knows what. And the sanctions are not necessarily known. So we are learning that there can be sanctions that arise out of nowhere. And these sanctions are based on data that you thought was totally innocuous. You, meaning the whole community, was totally innocuous. And somebody is using it, getting it, that you don't know who. And then using it and then applying sanctions against you by using it. You ever feel like you're trapped in a steel cage? It's getting to feel that way, especially in China, but probably here, too, after a while. And so I feel that we cannot, even if you and I don't care much, that they know our stuff. We have to think of this on a national scale. The thing it is, 300 million people are giving them this stuff. Exactly. It's like the analogy about the frog in the water, right? Frog's in the water, the water gets a little warmer, that's fine, a little warmer, that's fine, a little warmer, that's fine, but at some point you've got to boil the frog right in the hand. That's too late. So, I mean, in your notes for this program, you pointed out the Fourth Amendment. Can we visit that for a moment and get some direction there on what the Fourth Amendment tells us about privacy? Sure. So the Fourth Amendment says, the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated and no warrants shall issue but upon probable cause supported by oath or affirmation and particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized. Now that does not really relate to hackers. If you had a way to hack my system, that's not a violation of the Fourth Amendment because the Fourth Amendment is talking about government. It's restricting, limiting government from doing these things and courts and government agencies and executives. But you can argue that hacker was violating your right to be secure in your person. Okay. But you will agree with me it's government. Right. It was more derived or built, I believe, to hack people against them. Here we have 300 million people and all of the data is going through these very few cell phone companies, very few providers, you know, and that one of them or a number of them decide they're going to capitulate to government pressure, whether that's a Fourth Amendment search, a warrant or one of those new, you know, warrantless searches they got since 9-11 and it goes to the government and it goes to the government in zillions of bytes. Okay. And now the government has it from the whole country and the government is not limited to what it can do with that and the government can look at us all as potential terrorists and look at us all as China does, you know, with social quotients and whether we're going to have the benefit of this, that or the other. No, again, and you're, of course, the attorney, but one can imagine attorney is coming back out of government that tried to do that and quoting the Fourth Amendment to them and sort of saying you have unreasonably violated my rights to be secure in my person, you know. How would that work? Well, I mean, I would say that our privacy has probably been violated many, many, many, many times and the government has that information and there was no search warrant, right? Right, and that's, if they try to do, to act upon that, I suspect some attorney could argue, hey, you did not have a search warrant, therefore that evidence you have of this misbehavior has to be thrown out because it was an unreasonable search. You may not even know that it happened or the sanctions are being applied and that you're being targeted and identified and you're a person of interest and who knows what will happen to you. Yeah, as these multiple data sources begin to get into these larger and larger conglomerate databases where they can find more and more information about who you're calling, where you've been, what you bought, when you bought, who you talked to, what you said. Yeah, and suppose Homeland Security is listening in on conversations by immigrants of questionable documentation. Right. You know, are they going to be able to raise this issue? They have the money, you know, to contest action taken by Homeland Security about their immigration status, which Homeland Security got by virtue of one of these warrantless searches. You know, really hard and they don't have any money to fight about it. They're not even sure what happened. And so the query, I don't know the answer, are there organizations around that are protecting us in this? Is the ACLU actively involved in protecting us? Because frankly, I think our privacy, our constitutional right to privacy is being undermined as we speak. Yeah, I mean, the ACLU certainly claims on their website to be concerned about this. Of course, all their stuff is probably being closely monitored by the government, too. Anyone who they're contacting or who contacts them, probably goes on some list somewhere. Well, it's scary. When I get scared, I usually take a break. Let's take a quick break and come back and press more on this interesting subject. Hi, I'm Rusty Komori, host of Beyond the Lines on Think Tech Hawaii. My show is based on my book, also titled Beyond the Lines, and it's about creating a superior culture of excellence, leadership, and finding greatness. I interview guests who are successful in business, sports, and life, which is sure to inspire you in finding your greatness. Join me every Monday as we go Beyond the Lines at 11 a.m. Aloha. Hey, Aloha, my name is Andrew Lanning. I'm the host of Security Matters Hawaii, airing every Wednesday here on Think Tech Hawaii, live from the studios. I'll bring you guests, I'll bring you information about the things in security that matter to keeping you safe, your co-workers safe, your family safe, to keep our community safe. We want to teach you about those things in our industry that may be a little outside of your experience, so please join me because Security Matters, Aloha. Okay, well, we got pretty paranoid about that. About, you know, the fact that information, not only from one phone, but from hundreds of millions of phones are going back, and I think that's going to be more the case going forward because there are so many phones and so many governments who see this as an opportunity to do their thing, and their thing may not be constitutional. The Constitution is in jeopardy anyway these days under this administration. Okay, so the question is the platform permits this. The platform is absolutely brilliant and getting more and more brilliant. You got phones that are absolutely the best imaginable phone. Every time a new Samsung comes out and says this is the best phone I ever, every time I say that and it's true, I guess it's the same with the iPhone. And then it gets software and apps, you know, Steve Jobs' idea about apps, that was a terrific idea that was as equally disruptive as the phone itself. Right, but then these apps either go wrong or somebody misuses them, right? So the one that came up the other day the teenager discovered, the parent of a teenager discovered, was that it was possible to, on FaceTime to listen in to somebody when they weren't on FaceTime with you, basically. This is like the Amazon Echo, isn't it? Right, yeah. They can listen in, they do listen in. They do listen in, record this. Think about what you're saying as it were. Decide what information you want. You know, I have a friend of mine who is fairly high up in the Defense Department in his career. He simply says he would no more have Alexa in his home than he would be screaming obscenities out a window. Because everything you do then is libel. That thing is hearing it, whether it's one or off, right? Who knows when it's off switches off? Is it really off? Yeah, and I think people are somewhat naive about it, you know, so if you have I don't know, 10 million Alexa's out there, Echo's out there people think that well, there's so much information going, there's so many conversations and eavesdroppings happening all at the same moment they're never going to actually listen to mine. They have no way to identify mine they're wrong. They're wrong about that. I mean, in the same way that my hovering over some pictures of flowers for a few seconds some algorithm picked that up and knew what I was doing and was feeding me back that information because it thinks I'm interested that they have very sophisticated algorithms to pick up whatever information they want on sort of using artificial intelligence machine language. Yeah, listening for your voice, electronic signatures of your device or searching a particular area physically, there are so many ways to get at it So, okay, the basic phone it's the phone but the basic phone is not that important a lot of people don't make calls anymore they make messaging I've seen that around me I don't do it myself but everything is a message or an email and all these functions you can have on your phone and then you have FaceTime kind of stuff and Skype and Zoom every communication possibility is all there on your phone It's all digitized in essentially the same language Somebody could latch into that get all of that, everything you ever said and did on that phone and you know what, I think it's going to be more of the same Those programs can be more sophisticated every time you look Yeah, they couldn't really capture some of that data Now, the power to capture this is increasingly great storage has become cheaper and cheaper and cheaper basically so yes, people can afford to store the gazillions of terabytes of information now and there are algorithms to sort through that to find what information the secret wishes in that huge haystack more memory, more storage you have access to the cloud these phones are attached to the cloud everything is going back and forth up and down from the cloud and you have faster processors so they can do more and more and more now that leads to greater functionality for you but greater functionality for you is greater exposure for you and your life is an open book this is a classic it's that classic two-edged sword it's got these real pluses for us because your phone knows what you want to do when you say call Ralph, your phone knows who Ralph is and calls Ralph for you so you become dependent I told you that I was separated from my phone yesterday for 45 minutes I was getting a nervous breakdown already I wasn't with my phone I had no particular need for my phone but I didn't have it and the possession of the phone the availability of the phone meant everything to me and I didn't realize how dependent I am other people even much more so than me by the way I agree I've had that same very unnerved feeling recently when you step out and realize you're just walking to the corner store a block away but where's my phone it's not affordable feel very unprotected, empty vulnerable somehow without it everything is on there, access to your whole life access to your finances access to your friends it's in your home locked up, that's all fine but still you don't have it with you you don't have access to that the loss is catastrophic you're cut off from that channel from the world identifying points in your life so the greater the dependency it feeds on itself the greater the dependency the greater I use the dependency I provide information to it it becomes my alter ego and the greater the exposure that someone else whether it's a hacker or a government agency or a private company that sells it to other private companies or government agencies will take and use that against me no way to run, no way to hide so now I have to ask you my big question what do we do yeah what do you do you try to figure out reasonably good passwords we'll give you a little thumb level of protection you try not to be sort of stupid and lay out your information in really easily accessible ways type your social security number and stick that in a standard email and send it off to somebody you realize that there are people trying to get information all the time and you just before the show we're dealing with a fraud alert which turned out to be legitimate but sometimes those fraud alerts are actually the people who are fishing for the information there aren't a lot of people out there trying to do that for you yeah exactly I've been getting bunches of calls these days from the social security administration talking about my benefits will be suspended and they aren't from the social security administration they're from fraudsters trying to tap into my social security yeah and don't lose your phone do not lose your phone and I like to talk about gizmos that help you not lose your phone but there was this terrorist in California he was involved in some kind of terror action him and his wife and the FBI got his phone and they tried to crack it but they were afraid they tried to try to test password X number of times it would demolish all the data on there and the FBI went to Apple asked to Apple if they would help crack the phone and Apple said no that's a violation of privacy we're not going to open that's a slippery slope so the FBI went to Israel to take on you guys in Israel and they cracked the phone the reason I tell you the whole story is that you can crack a phone you can make all the passwords you want on access to the phone the data is in there somewhere and some clever person who understands the technology well enough can get at it and so it's just as if you were using the phone they could use the phone to me I don't want to get everybody nervous about this but don't lose your phone it's not a good idea to lose your phone but there are apps and programs and techniques I suppose where this is one of my favorites where if you're more than X feet away from your phone you have to have some kind of radio chip on you but if you're more than X feet away from your phone it makes a beeping sound tells you where it's like the car key in the parking lot where you press the lock or unlock button and it lights up so the same the phone or something tells you that you've been separated do not leave it in the restaurant we've used the fly my iPhone feature a couple of different times and it just found the phone in the apartment or it dropped down behind a chair or something but that's very it's powerful to have that and the reverse would be good have your phone get separation anxiety from you it feels you're leaving it behind so what about trusting it there's this thing this morning on National Public Radio about trusting Amazon one guy said you expect me to trust a mega corporation forget about what kind of improper use of the term trust but the reality is that Amazon has created so many things that make us trust them they have the public trust if they say something is going to arrive on Tuesday by the way we have something coming to the studio today I hope it's outside if they say it's going to come on Tuesday and then we begin to trust them little things like that and most people will say I never had a bad experience with Amazon well they're working at that they're trying to make us trust them and so you have the huge mega corporations that do have our trust by hundreds of millions of people they have our trust should we trust them with our data we already are the question is how much should we trust them with our data I think that's going to be a personal decision for everyone how deeply are you going to trust these networks that you deal with and people sometimes I don't think are as aware as they should be about how that information what information is going out how it's being transmitted where it's going, where it might go how about the I don't care approach I'm not going to worry about this I'm just going to live my life me and my phone together and we're not going to worry about it and if anybody gets it we'll move on just the other thing I want to talk about in this same privacy is the use of the genomic databases now to find suspects persons of interest, law enforcement which is a whole other privacy whole other catching criminals now with DNA even when the criminals themselves haven't given them any DNA but other distant relatives have and again a very power in some place in the cloud it's all there together and a government agency a series of agencies that are cooperating they can find your DNA and your social security number and everything you ever did and that's kind of scary I'll be interested to see if people try to bring legal challenges against some of those it's a very interesting area and what it means is we all I got the wrapper on this now that we're out of time the big thing we need to do is protect the Constitution in general because once government can have a free access to this kind of data about us that's going to be a new world and we really have to protect ourselves and we have to protect the Constitution so that we are not simply an open book scary but important yes, very much so so we have to vote for the right candidate take the right positions at the ballot box absolutely, it's critical we need to inform the electorate absolutely great to talk to you as always always fun