 So I'm Clint Finley, right for Wired. There's a bunch of my info there. This is gonna be actually based on an article I did for Wired a few months ago, and you can find that article with the Bitly link down there. So a lot of you probably have, well, so this is gonna be about bots, but it's not about the election bots and that sort of thing. I've written a little bit about that. I probably will write more about it in the future, but that's not what I'm really talking about today. This is gonna start off talking more about e-commerce, which I hope to tie back into the themes of Cyborg Camp a little bit as we go on. So you're probably at least vaguely aware that companies like Amazon and Walmart monitor each other's pricing data and use that to adjust their own prices up or down. So diapers.com accused Amazon of having, essentially driven them out of business so they could acquire them by using that method of just constantly undercutting diapers.com by just monitoring the prices. So I should also disclose here, Amazon and Walmart would not talk to me for this article or this talk, so when I use them, it's just purely hypothetically. Companies like Amazon and Walmart, let's say, and those are the examples that I'll use. So the kind of crazy thing here though is they wanna monitor each other's prices, right? But they wanna stop each other from monitoring each other's prices. So it ends up being the sort of spy versus spy game where Walmart, hypothetically, wants to go out and find out what Amazon is charging for a tube of toothpaste. Amazon likewise wants to do that, but they don't want Walmart to get involved. They don't want Walmart to do any of this. So they try to block Walmart from seeing their prices. So the first way that this ties into Cyborg Camp is that they try to block bots in general from accessing their websites. And so one of the ways to do that that you've probably all seen is the recapture where you have this checkbox for I'm not a robot and you're like, isn't that exactly what a robot would say? But the way that works is they're looking at your mouse movements on your desktop or on your phone, accelerometer and gyroscope movements to see like, is this the way a human moves a mouse? Is this the way a human hits their phone? Like does the phone move a little bit when they hit that button? So the thing that surprised me though as I was researching this article, I found out that some companies like Akamai are actually doing that same sort of surveillance even when we're not faced with a capture. They're watching to see if you're human. So we're kind of constantly secretly being surveilled to see if we're humans or replicants or not. Which I found super weird and kind of cool but also kind of creepy that this is happening constantly. So that's just one part of how companies try to keep bots off of their networks though. Because it's a lot more complicated than that. Because they don't want to outright ban all bots. Because that would mean like Google couldn't index their site. Sometimes e-commerce companies want to participate in different price comparison sites. So they do want some bots to be able to get in. So one of the things they do is they look at IP addresses. So if Amazon sees that the traffic is coming from a Walmart corporate IP address, they'll just block that. So they'll also look and see, is that coming from their own cloud service or like Microsoft Azure or Digital Ocean or all these different cloud companies because they know, it's probably not a human because humans don't live in the cloud. That's a bot. So they can block or throttle kind of access based on that. So that leads to the next step in the spy versus spy activity where companies try to essentially present themselves from IP addresses that are actual regular everyday residential IP addresses. So there's this company called Luminati because that doesn't sound ominous at all. And they partner with apps and offer us like this alternative to seeing ads in an app. You can agree to show, let them use some of your resources. What they're using your resources for is to let these bots like scrape websites mostly. And Luminati wouldn't talk to me about who their customers were. But I found one of their customers is a company called Compterra. And Compterra was like pretty open about who some of their customers are. So like Nine West, the shoe company uses them. But also it's like product companies like Acer and Panasonic. And a lot of what they're using this for is it's very understandable why they would want to do some of this stuff. It's not just grabbing prices from competitors. Somebody like Acer wants to see how their products are being presented on an e-commerce site. Like are their prices being lower than what their agreement is supposed to be? What photos are used? What descriptions are used? So there's a lot of good reasons to be doing scraping. And lots of good reasons to try to get past these bot gatekeepers. So I don't think that these companies are evil or anything like that. And I mean faced with this choice between ads and kind of letting these bots use my phone a little bit, I thought really hard about this a lot. And I think yeah, I would totally do this. But the thing is if you look at this, it's not really telling you what you're actually consenting to if you agree to let them use your resources. That's all it says here is I agree to let them use my idle resources. They're not saying, you're not saying I agree to let you run bots on my phone that go out and scrape all these web pages. It's, and I think that's what gets me about all of this is that we're being constantly surveilled regarding our humanity. We're being sort of, I say we, I've never seen this come up on any app. So this is just like on Luminati's website, like their example app there. But this app has like, I think like a million downloads or something in the Android store. So, I mean, it's definitely out there. But it bugs me because this is, there's this whole notion of consent and technology that it overlaps a lot with consent in what I know Amber doesn't like to call real life, but what I did, okay. So there's been a few articles over the past few years and these actually predate the whole Me Too movement that draw a link between the often tenuous amount of consent in the personal lives of, in the technology industry as we've seen with numerous sexual harassment and other sexual misconduct cases in the industry. And this general sense that users can just be, that companies can just do whatever they want to users. We have the terms of service agreements that we just have to agree to or not agree to and buried within them are all of these things that we don't really understand that we're agreeing to. There's this notion called enthusiastic consent in, I'll sound like an anthropologist here, in human sexuality or the idea is that it's not just that somebody is saying yes to a particular activity, they are saying, that they are not being coerced into saying yes, that they are really actually wanting to say yes to this and that they know what they're saying yes to. In technology, within the industry at least, this is just so incredibly often not the case. And so that's what I wanted to leave people with is for technologists to really be thinking about this both as a user, what are you actually consenting to? And as designers of technology, how can you take a more active stand in towards making sure that people actually understand what they're getting into with this stuff? So do I have any more time or if so I can do questions but I don't know who's got the stopwatch. We have room for one question if someone wants to ask a question. All right, I guess it was really understandable. Okay, all right, thanks everybody.