Your Phone is a SPY! Andrew Bustamante

So let me start by teaching you what the CIA teaches us. There's a continuum called the security continuum on one end of that continuum is security, right? On the other end of that continuum is convenience. And then in the middle is imagine a wire with a bead on it, right? The more you push that bead towards secure, the more it pushes away from convenience. So for anybody who has ever had their wife locked them out of the house, you know what it's like to be very secure and very inconvenient. Well, similarly, the closer you go to convenience, the further you are from security. So when you talk about glasses or the internet of things is really what we're talking about, right? The internet of things, the, the smartwatches, the glasses that are smart, anything that Bluetooth send to your phone, whether that's your car or whether that's your ear pods, like a, just a color controlled light for the podcast. And it's like, what's, what's your wifi password. And it's like, they download this app from China. I'm like, why am I doing that? Like for the $20 light. Forget about it. Well, the, the thing is you're doing it because you can now just press a button on your phone, set up the whole studio and the whole studio is on. And that convenience comes at a cost of security. So everything lands on that spectrum. So what I would say is this, if you are somebody who is trying to live a secure life, you need to make a series of decisions that are very intentional that make your life less convenient. And you need to accept the lack of convenience and plenty of people do that. Remember when our grandparents used to put money under their mattress, very inconvenient, but very, very secure. Right. Or like my grandmother who used to lock the door with the deadbolt, lock the door with a switch and then stick a rubber wedge under the door too. Right. Why did she learn to do that? Because her money was under her mattress. But that's, that's the world they lived in. We have been cultivated by a different world. And frankly, our children have been cultivated by a different world even still. Yeah. So most children, most people under the age of 21 do not understand the risk of their phone. Even the people who are listening right now who are 23 and 25 and they're like, I understand the security implications of my phone. No, you do not. You do not. You do not understand the implications that exist from your call records that Verizon sells to the federal government. And Verizon also sells to the Chinese. You do not understand the implications of your Google maps or your Apple maps or your, Waze maps that are recorded and saved and turned into a avatar data that's then used for advertising purposes. You don't understand the term ad tech. I would be shocked if the average person actually knows what the term ad tech is and understands how ad tech uses geographical fences to be able to identify IP and ISMI data so that they can, they can create tailored experiences based on where you're standing. People do not understand the implications of just their one smart phone. I have a, yeah, I've had an incredible experience where my copy editor for my first book, Allegra Houston, shout out to Allegra and the best copywriter in the world, a copy editor. And she she wrote a book herself and you know, she was my editor. She asked me to read it. I was honored. So I took a picture of it and then you know and then like a few minutes later I got an ad on Amazon to buy that very book and I'm like, I didn't authorize this, you know, to use access to my photos. It wasn't like on Facebook. It was like on my photos. Uh, so yeah, no, people I think have almost no idea. But should you assume everything is, is fair game then basically do we have the right to, you know, to privacy or does David, a past guest, David Brin wrote the book, uh, transparent society kind of advocates, no, we should just be radically candid and tell everything to everybody and not expect secrets, but also demand that of the government as well. So it's, again, this is, this is a double edged sword. Uh, if you want to, if you want to live the most secure life possible, you need to understand you have no right to privacy. You don't, you have no, you have no right to privacy because you are giving that right away. When you log in to Google, you give the right away. When you let Apple take your face and use it to unlock your phone, you give that right away. You, you have a federal right to remain private and the federal government will protect that, right? They will not violate the federal law to invade upon your privacy because they don't have to. They can follow corporate law and buy all the data they want about you from Google or Amazon or Apple or Facebook. And that's a graph and that's how they work, right? Remember how we were saying earlier that your patents are safe when the federal government use them for national security and military reasons. That's what they do. They use your tax dollars to buy your private data from companies that you give permission to collect your private data. Nothing in this world is free. Every free app comes with a cost, but the cost is a violation to your privacy. So if you want to be the most secure person possible, you need to do two things simultaneously. One recognize that nothing is private. You have no right or expectation to privacy because everything about the world around you that is convenient is there because it is, it is being paid for with your privacy. And then the second thing you need to do is start putting things, putting practices in place that stop the flow of new private data. For example, data brokers are constantly looking for new private data. Today you are a certain age, 52 tomorrow, tomorrow you will be a day older. You will have created all this new data between today and tomorrow. You'll create a new podcast episode. You'll drive somewhere new. You'll buy something new. You'll talk to someone new. You'll post something new. You've just created whatever that is. 58 megs megabytes of new information. That new information is what they now call the newest natural resource, right? What you create and what I create every day is like gold or oil or silver. It's a natural resource that somebody else can take, refine, sell and make money off of. So if you want to keep, if you want to maximize your security, accept that you have no privacy now and then put things in place that stop people from getting tomorrow's natural resources from you. That means use VPNs, use block data brokers. Uh, stop giving permissions away on your phone. Buy a second phone. Okay. I, I'm a huge fan of people having two phones, one phone that they use for personal events, one phone that they use for non-personal and the non-personal, you have a separate account that you log into. Like if it's a, I use Android. Create then he, then sponsored by Apple. Tim, look me up, create a Google account. That's just for your secondary phone. We call it at CIA. We call that a misattributable phone. It means it can still be attributed to something, but it can't be attributed to you because my personal phone, which I use with my wife and my children and everything else exists on this side of the table where the misattributable phone exists on this side of the table. Fun fact, thanks to ad tech, those two phones, if they're literally on the same table at the same time, stay tuned next time for more fascinating, deep dives into cutting edge science with me, Brian Keating, the chancellor's distinguished professor of physics at UC San Diego. And click here for my top content on the true search for aliens that still endures to this day.