Discord Wants Your ID!

Do I need to hit go live or

you can...

Welcome back to This Week in Privacy,

our weekly series where we discuss the

latest updates with what we've been

working on within the Privacy Guides

community and this week's top stories in

the data privacy and cybersecurity space,

including Discord's new age verification

push.

Both Google and Amazon doorbells are in

the mainstream headlines and a reminder

about DHS social media surveillance.

I'm Jordan and this week I'm joined by

Nate.

Hello.

Privacy Guides is a nonprofit which

researches and shares privacy related

information and facilitates a community on

our forum and matrix where people can ask

questions and get advice about staying

private online and preserving their

digital rights.

Now let's get straight into the biggest

news in privacy and security from the past

week.

Alrighty.

Thank you so much, Jordan.

Our first story this week,

we're going to talk about Discord's new

age verification push.

A lot of you guys may have already

seen this.

This has really been making waves online,

or at least in a lot of the

spaces I'm in, which includes Discord.

So maybe this is a bit of a

sampling bias,

but this has definitely been in the

headlines.

So earlier this week,

discord announced um i mean really that's

that's it they announced that moving

forward all accounts are by default going

to be treated as teen accounts which means

that you will be severely limited in

certain function functionality excuse me

um i have read so so many articles

this week so let me try and see

if i can

see if this one mentions, um,

what the restrictions are on a teenage

account.

I mean,

obviously there's things like if an,

if a server is marked as like.

Um,

which I don't know how obvious this is

to some of you guys, but like,

I'm in like a true crime server,

for example.

So that would be plus,

so it's not just porn.

It could be anything.

And there's also like certain messages

won't go through by default and they get

filtered and stuff like that.

I'm not seeing it here.

But anyways, yeah,

it basically just restricts your account

by default.

However, you can age verify.

There's kind of a lot to this story

and I'm having a hard time putting things

in the proper order here.

But

So it's,

let's just go ahead and say this.

Some people have accused Discord of

backpedaling because they started,

there was another article that came out

about midweek where Discord basically

emphasized that

You don't necessarily have to submit ID

because they're going to try and verify

your age automatically.

That was part of the initial announcement.

So personally,

I don't know if I would call that

backpedaling,

but I get where you're coming from that

like they definitely put more emphasis on

that in the middle of the week when

this got met with a lot of pushback.

They were like, no, guys, relax.

They said most people won't have to verify

their IDs.

Um, so let me,

let me talk about that part real quick.

Um, by default,

discord is going to try to guess your

age using account metadata.

So that would be things like how long

you've had the account,

what sort of games you play,

what time of day you're generally active

and stuff like that.

If they get it wrong is when you

will have to verify ID.

or if they can't determine your age.

Or I guess more accurately,

you won't have to,

you'll just get reverted to a teen

account.

And if you're fine with that,

then you're fine with that.

But depending on what kind of servers

you're in, again, that may get you booted.

So this is where things start to get

dicey, as you can imagine.

So this article we've chosen here from Ars

Technica,

I chose this one specifically not because

of the headline,

but because this one also has a really

deep dive into Discord's verification

system and how it's supposed to work.

Apparently...

There's two ways of doing it.

One of them is a biometric scan,

which they claim will be totally on

device.

It'll never leave your device.

It's like a video selfie.

And then if your phone determines that you

are eighteen,

it just sends a yes or no back

to the server.

And as you can imagine,

this is going to affect younger users most

and people who look young, because I mean,

I obviously look way above eighteen,

but I feel like I've told this story

somewhere before.

When I was in college in my English

class,

I sat behind a girl that I swear

to God,

I thought she was like twenty and

apparently she was forty.

So some people just don't look their age

and especially when you get younger and

it's like, OK,

the line between seventeen and eighteen is

literally a day.

So how's Discord supposed to guess that

accurately?

I guess I'm getting ahead of myself.

But anyways,

so you can do the face scan,

which if they are to be believed,

stays on your device.

It just sends a yes or no back

to the server.

If the face scan doesn't work,

then you have to submit ID,

which they say is deleted as soon as

possible.

But they don't really give guarantees on

what that is.

They just say like,

we promise we delete it as soon as

we're done.

That might be immediately.

That might be a couple days.

It's really hard to know.

And for those of you who missed it,

I just do really quick want to address

the headline for audio listeners.

The headline of this article we chose is

Discord faces backlash over age checks

after data breach exposed to seventy

thousand IDs.

That happened last year.

I want to say late last year,

but it may have been early last year.

Oh, no, no, no.

In October, our senior security editor,

Dan Gooden, joined others,

warning the best advice is to assume they

have had their data stolen.

So I think that was late last year.

Anyways,

I did a second look into that story

in preparation for this one,

and I think that was also the result

of –

What's the word I'm looking for?

The UK's Online Safety Act.

Discord already did this once over in the

UK.

Those seventy thousand IDs were part of

the appeals process.

That's what I'm looking for.

That's that's where these came from is

people who were submitting appeals,

submitted their ID.

And I'm assuming because they had so many

IDs to go through and there was such

a backlog that required them to, you know,

they stuck had a backlog of IDs,

a stack of IDs.

That's what I was looking for.

Yeah,

that was also with a different provider.

I don't know that that really matters.

This whole breakdown here from Ars

Technica is really interesting because

it's almost like a Matryoshka doll of

different companies.

Like they say that they're going through

KID,

but then KID passes it on to somebody

else.

Where did it go?

Privately.

KID does not receive personal data from

Discord when performing age insurance.

And then it's – yeah, it was weird.

It's like every – again,

ours has this really good write-up here

where like when you look at one company's

privacy policy,

they say that they work with this other

company who works with another company.

And it's – I don't know.

It's really weird.

But eventually it does lead back to this

company in the EU who says that they

employed a double-blind implementation

where basically they never know what your

account is.

They're just verifying your age.

Yeah.

And there's something wrong with the CSS

here that some of this text is black

on my screen for some reason,

so it blends in with the background.

But yeah, it's a whole thing.

I think that kind of sums up the

facts of the story.

This has faced immense backlash.

I've already seen one script floating

around that I don't know if it works

or not,

but it claims that it basically sends the

yes check back to KID and verifies you

now.

We don't know if Discord is going to

invalidate that by the time March rolls

around,

because I think this is supposed to take

place in March.

Some of the servers I'm in,

we've definitely been having discussions

about other platforms.

And, oh, man.

I think, unfortunately,

the best platform – and I'll say why

I say unfortunately in a second.

I think, unfortunately,

the best platform we have right now is

Matrix.

And I mean nothing against the Matrix

people,

but it's – and they even admit it.

They have their own blog post.

I'll see if I can pull it up

while I'm talking here.

But they have their own blog post where

they're kind of welcoming people who are

joining Matrix and Element for the first

time.

And they admit that they're like,

we're not really a drop-in replacement

right now because they've been so busy

prioritizing.

They have a lot of public service

contracts in –

europe and that's what's been paying the

bills to hire more developers which i

totally get but that also means that they

haven't really had the time to um to

dedicate towards man i'm really not

finding this blog right now i tried

element and matrix i'll find it later but

they haven't had the time to really

prioritize uh some of the things that you

would expect if you're coming from discord

for the first time things like custom

emojis things like uh streaming games

voice chat i think some servers support

voice chat but not all of them so

And they also admit in their blog post

that they are also, as a UK entity,

trying to figure out the best way to

implement age verification to comply with

UK law.

They do mention that in their blog post

that some servers may still have to do

that depending on where they're located.

Yeah,

I guess I think that's kind of all

I've got at the moment regarding this.

Matrix is not perfect,

but the thing it has going for it,

I guess,

is to kind of finish that thought is

it is fully open source.

There is end to end encryption available,

especially in DMs.

They're one on one are default.

They can be turned on in rooms if

you feel you need that for some reason.

It can be decentralized.

You can host your own server.

So, I mean,

it's definitely a step up from a privacy

perspective.

It's just,

I think it would be a tough sell

to get a lot of longtime Discord users

onto Matrix because of the feature set

that it's missing.

But I've, again,

I'm in some servers where we've been

looking into some other stuff and like all

of the other things that I see or

I have seen personally that are like,

that look really good,

that look like they might actually be a

good replacement from an end user

perspective,

it's just repeating the cycle.

They're all like,

they just raised nine million dollars in

VC funding, or they're closed source,

they're this, they're that, and it's like,

cool, so in five years,

we're gonna be right back here where we

started.

I think that's kind of all I've got

for now.

Jordan,

did you have any thoughts on this story?

Yeah.

So I think the first thing I want

to talk about here is, I guess,

the privacy concerns with this,

because I've seen some people saying that,

you know, it's not,

they're not requiring ID from everybody.

So that's okay.

Right.

But I think one issue with that idea,

right, is the way these like age,

basically they use some sort of age

estimation technology,

which is like

based on a data set of what people

look like at a certain age, right?

And it's kind of been like a long

studied thing where we've been able to

find out that these age estimation tools

are not very good at estimating different

types of people.

Like for example, it's people of color

who are women,

like there's been like studies that have

been done on that.

And it doesn't,

it doesn't estimate age correctly for

those people.

And, you know, the least,

the more of a minority you are,

the less chance it is to be correct.

Right.

So it's,

it's kind of problematic in that way.

And also these platforms have to

basically, you know,

you have to show your face and submit

a biometric scan, which,

These platforms say that that scan is not

saved or used to...

you know, improve their services.

But I think at a certain point we're

seeing, you know, all these people,

like I remember last year when people were

facing the discord age estimation

technology,

a lot of people were using death stranding

like photo mode to bypass it.

But I think that when,

when they have a lot of these,

you know,

people using video games and stuff like

that,

we're going to find that a lot of

these people,

companies are going to have to start you

know actually saving some of that because

there'll be people bypassing it with that

technology so they need to be able to

control that right um so I think the

problem is still there even if you say

you know not everyone will have to um

I think

It's also important to mention that this

was only to access, like,

not safe for work channels and servers.

So I don't think your access to the

entirety of Discord would be restricted.

You just wouldn't be able to access not

safe for work channels,

which I think that's another debate.

Like,

what exactly is classified as not safe for

work?

Because, you know,

I think that could be...

deemed different for a lot of people.

And, you know,

Discord could decide to set a server to

not say for work,

which could allow which could kind of

force people to verify their ID.

So Discord is in sort of like a

very centralized position, right?

Where

like Nate talked about,

matrix is a decentralized alternative

where if the default matrix.org home

server decided to implement age

verification,

then you would actually have the choice to

switch to a different home server which

wasn't applying the same restrictions,

right?

So

I think Matrix is definitely a step in

the right direction,

but I think it's very much missing a

lot of the key features that Discord has.

And, you know,

a lot of people who use Discord rely

on all the time.

Like, you know, people do...

like they watch movies together on Discord

or they want to screen share to their

friends or be in a massive group call.

And as far as I know,

a lot of those features in Matrix are

not as mature or very patchy or not

really applied in the same way that

Discord does it.

So

I think a lot of people are going

to be kind of unhappy with matrix as

a replacement to discord, um,

which I think is just highlighting another

issue where I think we need more diversity

between platforms.

Like I think it would be better if

we had, uh,

you know,

more alternatives to Discord that actually

took privacy concerns seriously,

because Discord is like always not really

been a platform that has cared about data

privacy.

And we can kind of tell now that

that's never really been a priority

because they're fine with pushing forward

with all these age checks, right?

So I don't know, it's kind of,

an unfortunate situation to be in for a

lot of people because, you know,

some people rely on these channels and

servers and it's going to basically mean

either give up your ID or

miss out on that entire community,

which for some people is just not

possible.

So I do think this is sort of

very coercive.

It's sort of forcing people into giving up

biometric scans of their faces.

And even then,

your biometric scan of your face may not

actually approve you.

So you might actually have to upload ID

as well.

So overall,

I think this is a very bad move

from a lot of companies that are trying

to push this now.

It's only going to be a matter of

time.

Like last year,

we saw the breach with seventy thousand

IDs from Discord.

And I think it's only a matter of

time before these KID companies get

compromised in some way.

It's a treasure trove of data for hackers

to go after because they are dealing with

such sensitive information.

Um, so I think it's, I dunno,

I'm really annoyed by this.

I think more people should be talking

about it.

Um,

I did put together some posts on social

media,

kind of pushing people towards

alternatives for their communities.

Um,

so I don't know if anyone saw that,

but, um, I think it's,

it's also a problem, uh,

with a lot of these, you know,

community setups where you need to

basically

advocate for these platforms in the

entirety of the community,

because if not everyone moves,

then you basically,

you're not going to be able to use

the platform.

So, you know,

it's kind of a frustrating space to be

in right now.

But yeah, what do you think, Nate?

Yeah, for sure.

In regards to your post, actually,

that was included in the newsletter this

week,

So if you all are subscribed to the

newsletter,

you definitely got a direct link to that

on Mastodon.

And I also included a link to our

social media tab on the website for other

platforms that people could share it at.

But I just had a couple of quick

thoughts.

So you're right about in terms of what

servers are defined as and up.

In some cases, users can pick that.

When you make the server,

you can check if it's eighteen and up

or not.

But Discord does also have a mechanism to

automatically determine that the server is

eighteen and up.

So on the one hand, it's like, well,

it's only eighteen up if people choose to

make it that.

But on the other hand,

Discord does have like an automated way.

So you're definitely...

You make a really good point there where

that could turn into a problem later.

This is the same issue we've cited with

things like on-device scanning of photos,

right?

Sure,

right now it could be used for totally

legitimate things like detecting CSAM and

abuse,

but what happens when an authoritarian

government gets their hands on it and

says, oh,

now we want to identify people who were

at a protest and stuff like that.

So it could potentially be a slippery

slope for sure.

Um, real quick,

I did actually go and find the

restrictions for teen accounts.

Where did that go?

Um, so there's content filters.

We talked about that with the servers, um,

or no, no, no, uh,

sensitive content will be blurred by

default and you will need to be eight

quote unquote age assured in order to

unblur sensitive content or turn off the

setting.

Age gate spaces,

we already talked about that.

Channel servers and app commands.

Direct messages from people a user may not

know are routed to a separate inbox by

default,

and access to modify this setting is

limited to age-assured users.

People will receive warning prompts for

friend requests from users they may not

know,

and only age-assured adults may speak

onstage in servers.

I don't even know what onstage is,

but yeah.

And then, yeah, real quick,

I also found you sent me that Matrix

blog post, thank you.

And some of the things they say that

they're missing is they're missing things

like game streaming, push to talk,

voice channels, custom emojis,

extensible presence,

richer hierarchical moderation, et cetera.

And not to make this like a Matrix

hate session,

but I think to me personally,

I ran my own community a couple of

years ago and that was by a wide

margin.

The biggest thing that I struggled with

was that

The moderation tools in matrix are

honestly to call them bare bones as being

generous because it's the things you would

expect on any given platform.

Like you can ban a user from the

room,

you can create moderators and you can set

moderator permissions.

And that's about it.

And then, and I mean, to be fair,

I would argue discord's built in

moderation tools are also absolute trash,

but discord also has a lot of third

party bots that are really good.

At least some of them are really good.

And again,

I'm not trying to crap on the matrix

people, but like the matrix bots,

and I'm told,

I don't know if this has changed because

I haven't really been active on matrix in

a long time,

but at the time that I was struggling

with matrix,

I was told that the bot makers were

really hindered by the APIs they could get

from matrix.

So for example,

On Discord,

there are bots that will automatically

kick somebody out if their account is

under a certain age.

Like if the account was made less than

a week ago or two weeks ago,

automatically boot it,

which is a great way to get rid

of spammers because most of them just make

a new account and join.

At the time that I was active on

Matrix,

the bot makers couldn't access that

information.

So they're like,

we don't know how old an account is.

We can't tell the bot to boot anybody

who's under a certain age, which is...

I don't know.

And that's another concern of mine

because...

that was the big complaint with mastodon

at least as i remember it when elon

bought twitter and everybody was leaving

twitter and i remember a lot of people

saying like oh there's not any good

moderation tools on mastodon a lot of

minority people don't feel safe there

I don't know how Twitter was not worse

than that.

No, it was blue sky.

Everybody was going to blue sky because

apparently blue sky had moderation tools.

I don't know.

But anyways, it's like,

I feel like it's the same thing with

matrix.

Like if there are not these tools to

keep your users and your community safe,

nobody's going to stick around there.

Like I,

I got my brother on matrix for a

while and he left after a while because

he's like, yeah,

I got tired of seeing people spam rooms

with CSAM.

like the yeah all right um anyways it's

just not a good landscape unfortunately i

think um oh and then there was sorry

real quick there's one last thing i do

want to mention jonah raised our raised a

point in the chat earlier this week that

some people think this is about discord

getting ready for ipo because discord is

getting ready to go public and

I mean, this totally tracks in my book.

Some people think that this is Discord

trying to verify how many actual humans

they have on their platform.

Because if they can show like, hey,

ninety percent of our users are real

people and we verified them and we know

that that makes their company that much

more valuable.

So I just want to make sure we

we presented that argument.

Or that point.

Yeah, I don't know.

I think a lot of people that have

been using like I was one of the

original people who was like using Discord

back in, I think, twenty fifteen.

And I feel like back then it was

a much better platform than it is now,

even though it had a lot less features,

which is kind of unfortunate because I

think since about, you know,

twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen,

they've started adding all these like

obviously they have to try and make money.

This isn't like they've been dumping money

into keeping this chat service alive,

keeping it freemium.

I think it's kind of inevitable,

inevitable that they're going to

make it like really crap and add a

bunch of annoying uh paid stuff um so

i mean it definitely makes sense that

they're trying to verify everyone's a real

person um but i think one one thing

we should definitely uh check in here is

we we did get quite a few comments

just while we were discussing stuff here

so um i think i want to cover

this one here from blind goose on twitter

um

I think Apple and Google need to work

on a digital ID where they verify your

ID card, store it on your phone.

They can with permission share just your

age or more identifiable information if

needed.

When applying for a credit card,

the storage can be a hundred percent on

device,

meaning not even Apple or Google servers

have that data.

I mean, I think that would be.

I mean,

that would be the ideal situation for a

digital ID,

but I think there's other issues with

digital ID systems.

Like, for instance,

we've already seen this a little bit,

but a lot of websites that are being

restricted aren't actually technically not

safe for work or not safe for children.

So it's

it's,

it's gotta be done in a way that

I mean,

I would prefer if it didn't exist because

you know,

there's also that fact that there'll be

Apple and Google is kind of becoming the,

uh, what do you call it?

Um,

the people who decide gatekeepers yeah the

people who decide if you're actually able

to access something um and i think that's

probably not the greatest outcome um we

should be trying to push for things to

be freely available um same thing with the

discord communities you know um so

I think it would be good if it

was the only option,

but it isn't the only option.

There's also the option of not having age

verification.

So maybe we should do that instead.

But that's my thought on it.

And did you see any other questions here

that we should probably quickly cover?

Yeah,

there's one other I want to – or

two, but one of them is really quick.

And real quick,

I just want to say I agree with

you.

Like this is one of the things that

frustrates me so much about age

verification is we could have – we

absolutely have the technical ability to

have solutions.

that are much more privacy respecting,

like what discord is proposing here,

where like everything stays on device and

all they get is a yes or no

token.

And I'm not saying face scan.

And like you said,

there's definitely other problems with age

verification, but it's like,

this is just one more piece of the

puzzle.

It's like,

why do we always have to go for

the worst possible solution?

But, um,

Real quick,

I wanted to point out Anonymous Thirty

Five pointed out, he said,

so they have a mechanism for when an

adult is put in an underage category.

But what happens when Discord accidentally

makes a child overage, which is.

I think a really good point that I

haven't heard before,

and I don't know if it's necessarily like

a big part of this argument,

but I certainly think it's a really good

point.

Like what happens when they mess up in

a.

Sixteen year old gets access to porn

servers now.

And yeah, that's, that's not great.

And then the last thing I wanted to

highlight is one of our YouTube users

says,

are there any alternatives to discord?

I mean,

unfortunately I do still think that matrix

is the best alternative we have.

And I know I feel a little bad

because we've sat here and talked about

all the things that matrix is missing,

but you know,

you mentioned that you used to use discord

back when it was still a lot more

bare bones.

And yeah,

I think I saw a similar statement from

somebody else.

I can't find it now.

But I think the issue is that there's

this concept in psychology called the

hedonic treadmill where basically if you

make any amount of money,

like say you make decent money and then

you get a raise and now you can

afford a nicer car or a nicer home

or whatever.

it's really hard to take that pay cut

and downsize.

Like you could do it,

obviously it's possible,

but it's very difficult.

And especially for people to do it

willingly.

And I think that's what's so hard is

it's really hard for people to,

now that they've had all these really nice

features like these custom emojis these

you know fancy profiles that they can deck

out with nitro and stuff like that i

think it's just gonna make it that much

harder for people to scale back to

something a little bit more bare bones

purely in the name of like and especially

in some servers where it's like well i

still have to turn over my id anyways

and you know when they're dealing with

potential encryption key issues which

I am still having to this day.

I opened a matrix today for the first

time in a long time and half the

messages are encrypted because of key

issues and, you know, things like that.

It's just, it's,

I'm not saying that there aren't people

who wouldn't be willing to do it.

I'm just saying,

I think it's a really tough sell and

I think that's unfortunate.

Yeah, I mean, personally,

I think no one's really talked about this

so far,

but I find Signal works perfectly fine as

like a replacement for Discord.

You can do group voice chats,

group video calls.

I guess it is a benefit of a

centralized service because, you know,

There's only one server.

There's not like a bunch of

interoperability issues.

So it could be worth trying SignalOut,

especially now because you don't have to

share your phone number with people.

So you can kind of do it anonymously.

So I think that would be also a

good alternative to try.

But I think...

Yeah,

there's not a lot of good alternatives

that do everything because Discord is sort

of one of those applications where

everything is just...

it just has all the features,

but I would also, uh,

issue a plea to people,

please stop putting everything behind a

discord server.

Please use a website, use something.

I don't want to have to sign up

for discord.

Like there's so many communities where

they decide for whatever reason,

that's their only community is going to be

on discord.

They're going to store all the information

in a discord server.

Um,

I think that's ridiculous.

It's not accessible for everybody because

you need a Discord account.

And it's also just a bad way of

displaying information.

Like who thought that putting things in

chat channels and then just like,

you know,

having to scroll around and search for

messages is a good idea.

Like we have forums for that.

We have websites for that, like wikis.

So it's really frustrating that there's a

whole bunch of information that

is kind of inaccessible to people that

don't have discord.

And I really hope that after this whole

saga,

a lot of people are going to start,

you know,

moving things to platforms where there's

no central authority that just decides,

Oh no, your server's now,

so no children allowed.

Um,

and it could be for something completely

benign.

So, um,

I don't know.

I just,

I'm just really frustrated with how many

communities rely so heavily on Discord and

they don't seem to want to move to

any other platform.

And yeah,

I've kind of just been trying to avoid

getting Discord,

but there's so many communities that I

want to access because there's information

in there that I need that I can't

access otherwise.

So anyway,

that's just me ranting a little bit.

I just need to say that regarding your

first point,

I totally agree with you because I'm...

I'll cut it short.

But anyways,

I've been in big servers where...

they just move too fast and I can't

keep up with them.

And like,

I'm literally in one server just for the

little name tag.

I'm not,

I never even go in there because there's

tens of thousands of users.

And every time I check,

there's a conversation going on and I

don't know what's going on and I don't

know anybody in there.

I know that makes it a feedback loop,

but my point being like, yeah, if you're,

it drives me insane when they're like, Oh,

our support channel, our,

our primary support channel is discord.

And it's like,

Why?

Like,

what if I join and I can't get

help because there's ten thousand other

people chatting and nobody sees my

question?

And I know some of them have like

a little ticket system that you can open

things, but it's just yeah,

I'm not I'm not a fan of that

either.

To me, it feels like a very sloppy.

It's almost like Reddit,

like no offense to Reddit,

some offense to Reddit.

But when when somebody like a company is

like, oh, our, you know,

Reddit is where you follow us or open

support ticket.

It's just like that's not a support

channel, man.

That's just lazy.

So I'm with you.

I don't like that either.

Yeah,

there's been so many times and I've been

like, oh, I'll join this.

I guess I have to make a Discord

account.

I know,

I'll just use like a burner phone number

and a burner email and then I sign

into the server and then I get booted

instantly because there's an age policy.

You can't have an account that was just

created.

It's just really annoying to deal with

anyone that has their only community on

Discord.

And I think now is the best time

to diversify.

Just have another community.

You don't have to get rid of the

old one.

You can open another one somewhere else.

You can start a wiki

as well as a Discord.

You can start a discourse forum as well

as a Discord.

Just have another option because if

Discord does go to crap,

then at least you have another option for

communicating.

So, anyway.

Totally.

It is what it is.

All right.

I believe you've got the next story here

about Google.

Yes.

So this next story comes from Ars

Technica.

Upgraded Google safety tools can now find

and remove more of your personal info.

The results about new tool is getting an

upgrade.

So this is actually a tool that we

suggest to use at Privacy Guides because

it does enable you to basically enter your

personal information and have Google

periodically check Google search results

for information that appears about you.

And this is kind of useful because if

there's things like your address,

your phone number,

your email address showing up in Google

searches, that could be a safety issue.

So

That is why we do recommend, you know,

if you don't have any other option,

if you don't want to do it like

manually all the time,

it is something that we do recommend to

do because, you know,

it's going to be able to find that

information and alert you if it's actually

found.

So this is basically an upgrade to that.

So Google's had that feature for a while,

but now it's actually getting an extra

layer of functionality

So with today's upgrade,

Results About You gains the ability to

find and remove pages that include ID

numbers, like your passport,

driver's license, and social security.

And you can access the option to add

these to Google's ongoing scans from the

settings in Results About You.

Just click the ID numbers section to

enable detection.

Naturally,

Google has to know what it's looking for

to remove it.

So you need to provide at least part

of those numbers.

Google asks for the full driver's license

number,

which is fine as it's not as sensitive.

And for your passport and SSN,

you only need the last four digits,

which is good enough for Google to find

the full numbers on web pages.

So this is kind of good to see

that there's more safety tools being built

into Google search because a lot of times,

you know,

things can get indexed that we don't want

to.

It's good to have control over having

those listings removed because like I said

before,

it can be a safety issue for some

people.

But I do think in this case,

you are trusting Google with that

information.

And I don't think there's,

I think Google is not exactly the most

trustworthy company and it will definitely

depend on the level of safety that you

care about, right?

So if you're being targeted constantly and

this is like quite a big threat to

you,

then maybe you would be more likely to

enroll in this program.

So for instance,

you're like a public figure or something

and you probably do want to get notified

every time something pops up because you

don't want that listed.

That could definitely make sense.

If you're just an everyday person,

I think just periodically searching your

name, your address, your phone number,

that sort of thing is probably enough for

most people.

But I think this is definitely an

interesting thing here.

I guess having a look at the rest

of this here,

it looks like there's a tool that

identifies explicit images as well as

deepfakes.

um so that is also another thing that

you know a lot of people uh you

know deal with um i think this is

also kind of uh aimed towards people who

work in the sex work industry you know

they probably don't want information uh

associated with their work associated with

their real name that's definitely

something that some people would prefer

not to have um so that is

something that can remove some of that

content or, you know,

at least blur the content.

So that's another thing that they added as

well.

So it's definitely an interesting update.

And I think in general, this is,

a good thing,

even if it's coming from like the worst

company ever.

I think this is going to protect a

lot of people from a lot of issues

that, you know, certain public figures,

you know,

people work in the sex work industry.

I think that's definitely going to be

beneficial as well as just public figures

as well.

So yeah,

that's kind of my initial thoughts on this

story.

Yeah,

I will say I don't know if it's

just aimed at sex workers.

I don't know how actually prevalent it is.

I haven't seen any specific numbers,

but I know for a for media has

covered several stories about just normal

women who have been targeted by deep fakes

and they've covered.

I've lost track of how many,

and I say just normal women in the

sense of like, they're not famous,

they're not sex workers.

They just have the quote unquote crime of

being attractive.

And, you know,

they've been covering stories about tons

of,

they call them nudify apps where you can

feed it a picture and the AI will

generate what she might look like naked.

Um, they've covered tons of like, uh,

Oh man, I just,

it just slipped out of my head.

But, um,

Yeah,

they've covered tons of stories like that.

And so unfortunately – and again,

I haven't seen any statistics,

and I'm not trying to sound like I'm

downplaying it.

I'm just trying to give an honest level

read.

I don't know if this is like a

huge epidemic or if those are just a

handful of stories that are really

unfortunate.

But either way,

I think this is an actual problem that

doesn't just affect sex workers.

It could affect anybody, but –

I think you still do make a really

good point of, you know,

that's trusting Google with a lot of data.

And I do want to point out that

Google has really good security.

Google has never, to my knowledge,

had a major data breach.

But you're still trusting them not to use

that data for advertising, for tracking,

for all the other things that Google's

multi-billion dollar empire is built on.

So yeah, it's definitely a...

It's definitely one of those cost benefit

analysis things where you have to ask

yourself,

do I think this is enough of a

problem that I should go ahead and sign

up for this?

Or like you said,

would it be better if I handled this

myself, if I did an occasional search,

set myself reminders in my calendar or

whatever?

Because yeah,

that is a lot of sensitive information to

be handing over to Google for sure.

No,

that's a good point you brought up about

some of those apps like the nudify apps.

I think that's very much a problem,

especially with minors.

A lot of this stuff is, you know,

happening in high schools.

It's, you know,

using these apps on people who are under

the age of eighteen,

publishing this information online to kind

of embarrass people.

It's...

It's pretty bad.

And I think that is another good use

case here.

I guess I kind of missed that when

I was looking over it the first time.

So I think that's also kind of another

benefit of this as well.

But I think, you know, it's...

At the end of the day,

this is not a tool for everybody.

It's a tool for a very specific group

of people.

And I think if you...

are in that group of people,

then this would make sense.

Um, but if it's, you know,

I think a lot of people in our

community are just not going to trust any

big tech company, but, uh,

and especially now, because, you know,

we've seen a lot of this, uh,

for instance,

might talk about this next week,

but Google handing over, you know,

data to law enforcement without, you know,

proper oversight,

just handing it over and giving them all

this information doesn't seem like a

particularly good idea in that case.

So it's kind of hard to, you know,

justify

pushing this unless you're in a very

specific situation.

Um, I think like Nate said,

just doing a Google search of your

information every now and then is

definitely gonna be a better way to,

you know, protect your information.

But I think this is also a tool

that is applicable for some people.

Um,

so I think it's important that we covered

it.

Um,

but I guess moving on to our next

story here also from Google,

Nate, what are we talking about next?

All right.

Our next story is about how Google

recovered deleted footage from a doorbell

camera, which raises a lot of questions.

So for anyone who doesn't really follow

the news super closely,

there is a woman named Nancy Guthrie.

I don't know if I'm pronouncing that name

right.

I've only read it in articles.

I haven't seen any videos.

And she is a mother of three,

one of whom is a journalist for –

I believe it's NBC.

And she was reported missing,

she being Nancy, not the journalist.

She was reported missing on February

first,

and her family called in a welfare check.

She's from Arizona if I remember

correctly.

And the police showed up and said that

they had reason to believe that she was

taken.

She didn't just wander off or anything.

And –

Initially, the police said – okay,

so a real quick piece of context here.

Google Nest cameras,

which are kind of like Google's competitor

to Ring,

which we will also talk about here in

a little bit.

Google's Nest cameras, by default,

if you just buy the camera itself and

you don't buy the service,

according to this article,

they save three hours of quote-unquote

event history, which for the record,

this is coming from Ars Technica,

not like Google's actual documentation,

so I apologize if –

This is wrong,

but this is what Ars Technica says.

Events are anything that, like,

triggers the doorbell.

So it wouldn't be three continuous hours

of history.

It would be any time in the last

three hours that, say, you know,

somebody dropped something off at your

door, delivery was made,

somebody knocked on your door, whatever.

If you pay ten dollars a month,

you get thirty days of events.

Twenty dollars gets sixty days of events

plus ten days of full video.

Which, I gotta be honest,

is a pretty good deal.

But, anyways.

So they, uh...

The reason this matters is because Nancy

Guthrie had a ring doorbell, or excuse me,

a Nest doorbell.

And initially investigators, to be fair,

not Google,

but investigators said there's no footage

because she wasn't paying for the service.

And then suddenly, what is this,

the thirteenth?

Three days ago on February tenth,

Suddenly,

the police came forward and said,

actually, here's some footage.

Does anybody know this man?

And again, I've only seen screenshots,

even though it's here in the footage.

I was very busy all day.

I couldn't watch videos.

But excuse me.

They say the first video shows the person

approaching the door and noticing the

doorbell camera.

They place their hand over the lens and

appear to pull on the mounting bracket.

but the cameras have a small security

screw that makes it difficult to remove

them without causing damage.

I don't know why he cared about causing

damage if he's kidnapping somebody,

but whatever.

In the second video,

the individual seems to try to drape a

plant over the camera to block its view.

Both videos are short,

which is what you would expect from an

event as identified by the Google Home

system.

So they say the video was apparently,

quote unquote,

recovered from residual data located in

backend systems.

And Ars Technica says it's unclear how

long such data is retained or how easy

it is for Google to access it.

Some reports claim that it took several

days for Google to recover the data.

So this story raises a lot of questions.

I think there's a lot of ways you

could look at it.

And I'm not necessarily saying one is

right or wrong, because honestly,

I don't really know how I feel about

this.

I think on the one hand, there is,

I think most of our more technical viewers

know this, but in case you guys didn't,

when you click delete on something on a

computer, it typically doesn't delete it.

It basically tells the computer,

You can write over this if you want.

It's kind of like if you guys have

ever worked at a job where...

It's like a dumpster.

Let's put it that way.

It's like if you're driving through a

neighborhood and somebody has put a couch

or a table on the corner...

It's not necessarily gone yet,

but they don't want it.

You can take it if you want.

It's kind of like that.

And so just because something is deleted

in a system doesn't necessarily mean it's

fully gone.

Now, the longer it's been,

the more likely that it has been written

over by something else and it is actually

gone.

But usually,

especially if it's right away,

usually you can pull back most or all

of the data.

So it's really hard to tell exactly what's

going on here.

And I do want to acknowledge we could

do the conspiracies...

I don't mean to be rude,

but we could do the conspiracy theory

thing where they say, no,

they had it the whole time.

They're just pretending this is a story.

You might be right.

I'm going to acknowledge that.

You might be right.

We don't know.

It's also equally possible that they just

have literal warehouses around the world

full of servers,

and they got lucky and dug through and

found some stuff.

I don't know.

I really don't know.

I mean,

I don't know how many nests there are.

I don't know how much server storage there

is.

It seems like a bit of a stretch

to me that within a week it wouldn't

all be overwritten if she wasn't paying

It is weird.

I will admit that.

But I guess I'm just saying this isn't

necessarily a smoking gun,

but it certainly is weird.

And I think one of the reasons we're

talking about this is because this is a

big story that everybody's been talking

about.

But also,

I think this is a good reminder that

everything I just said,

when you hit delete,

something isn't necessarily gone right

away.

And that's why it's really important to

think about things like these days,

everybody's mostly switched over to solid

states.

And solid states, it used to be that

When you would delete something,

the common advice was to use a file

shredder, which would basically,

like I talked about,

it would mark it for deletion,

and then it would overwrite it a couple

times to make sure it was really gone.

But with solid states,

I guess you could do that,

but you shouldn't because it really

reduces the lifespan of the device.

And instead,

we rely on things like full disk

encryption.

If somebody stormed in right now and took

my computer and it died,

they wouldn't be able to get back into

it without decrypting it.

And that functionally serves the same

purpose.

But I guess to kind of bring it

back around, when you upload anything,

anything that's cloud connected like this,

even if they say like,

we're not gonna keep this stuff,

let's just go ahead and assume Google was

being honest here.

It was still there.

You know, they can't,

them saying we're not going to keep it

is not the same as them saying we're

going to delete it.

It's them saying like,

if it gets overwritten,

it gets overwritten.

We don't care that you're not paying for

that service and it could still be there.

And in this case,

hopefully it will help find this woman

safe and sound, you know,

but there's a lot of other cases where

it could be a bad thing and it

could recover something that you wanted to

stay gone.

So yeah,

it's just really important to keep that

kind of stuff in mind, I think.

I think those were my thoughts.

Did you have any other takeaways from the

story, Jordan?

Yeah,

so I think this is sort of a

confirmation of something that we've been

assuming but not knowing for quite a while

google doesn't really delete things they

have data for a long time they don't

actually abide by a lot of the policies

they have i mean i just think that

when it's a company as large as google

just think about the absolute amount of

data that they have

I think it's almost impossible to,

you know,

they probably got data centers in

basically every city in a lot of these

major countries.

And it's this whole interconnected network

where all this information is just like

zooming around the internet.

I think it's really hard for them to

delete a lot of things.

And I think the same thing goes for

this, right?

You know,

maybe that footage was saved and it was

saved and backed up across, you know,

six continents or something,

because obviously Google doesn't want to

lose that data because people rely on the

security camera footage.

So I think in this case,

it could have been that the storage of

this video clip could have been in a

backup or, you know,

across a lot of

data centers.

And I think all it took really was

for a high profile case.

They're obviously not going to do this

for, you know, your average person.

But I think because this was such a

high profile case,

I'm not entirely sure who this person is.

So maybe they're not that high profile,

but they seem to be.

And

I think it just shows that Google does

have the ability to bring back data that

is allegedly deleted.

So it brings up more questions about data

retention,

like how long is Google really keeping

things for?

When they say that your information is

deleted, how true are they being?

And I would argue probably not very true.

It's probably stuck in backups.

It's probably stuck in

you know,

whole systems like training LLMs,

all sorts of things that, you know,

we don't have control over.

So I'm not really surprised that they were

able to recover this footage.

I think this is kind of pretty standard

stuff.

Um, I'm not sure why people were, uh,

I guess so outraged.

I think this is pretty standard for a

company to have, you know,

backups lasting quite a long time.

Um, and you know,

they're not going to immediately delete

the footage.

Um,

So I think it is possible for them

to dig up footage in very extreme

circumstances like this.

So I don't know.

I am not particularly surprised by this

story in particular.

Yeah, that's fair.

I don't know.

I'm...

Yeah.

I don't,

I don't know if I'm surprised or not.

I think,

I think when I first heard this story,

I was kind of like, Oh, that's crazy.

But I wasn't just like, what?

Oh my God, that's crazy.

I was just like, Whoa.

So yeah, it's yeah.

I don't think I have much to add.

I just, I,

I really agree with your point about once

they have that data, you,

you lose control over it functionally one

way or another, you know,

like

for better or worse again even if like

let's assume just for the sake of argument

let's assume total good faith on google's

end what if they do have a data

breach someday they finally get got and

you know who knows what'll get leaked

that's yeah they could use it for ai

they could use it for anything so it's

just really important to keep that in mind

with anything you do online i think yeah

and i think this brings forward actually

another thing that we should probably talk

about is

The reason why Google had this footage in

the first place was because the camera was

not end to end encrypted.

So I think this is kind of an

important note.

Google is kind of known for being really

not very like not applying a lot of

these uh practices where you know

companies like ring i mean ring has other

problems we're gonna we're gonna talk

about that later um but uh companies like

ring uh apple you know they allow you

to at least enable that encryption so you

know if it was incriminating information

or just private you know you don't really

want recordings of yourself

doing who knows what outside your house or

inside your house, you know,

available to a massive corporation,

which could get breached.

So I think it's important to,

if you do have, you know,

a camera system,

maybe think about something local,

maybe think about something that employs

end-to-end encryption.

I know a pretty easy option for a

lot of people who have Apple devices is

Apple's HomeKit Secure Video, which is,

has end-to-end encryption.

And there's other local alternatives as

well, setting up like an NPR.

A lot of people in the comments of

this article were talking about,

this is why I only use local surveillance

systems.

But I think there's also issues with that

as well,

because

you know a lot of people don't own

the house or apartment that they live in

they can't just go around drilling holes

and things and like putting cables

everywhere that's just unrealistic um so

you know i think it's not always going

to be a perfect solution there's no

perfect solution to everybody so that's

why i think you should think about this

but i think you know you're putting google

you're trusting Google with like the

privacy of your home.

I think we need to question why you're

doing that.

You should probably consider moving to

something that offers a high level of

security,

such as Apple HomeKit secure video or some

other local alternative.

I know maybe Jonah would have something to

add on this.

I feel like he's kind of into that

whole like

home assistant, self-hosted stuff,

but unfortunately he's not here this week,

but that's okay.

I guess I would throw it over to

you, Nate.

Do you have any experience with these sort

of like security systems?

I don't because I am in that boat

you talked about where I'm one of those

people who rents.

And so I can't really,

and thankfully some places I've lived

actually do have policies against outdoor

cameras like Ring,

which I think is super awesome.

But

Not all of them do.

And yeah, it's actually my last apartment.

I remember they had like a ring or

a nest up in the corner and it

was facing the only in and out for

the building and it pissed me off so

much.

But yeah, it's really...

I wish I had more... Hold on,

let me check.

I swear I saw somebody post talking about

one the other day.

I'm checking a group chat I'm in, but...

All right.

While you're doing that,

I think it's also important to note that

when you're installing all these security

systems, like Nate was saying,

you can invade other people's privacy too.

It's important that I think some people

get caught up on

I'm just protecting my privacy.

You know, I don't care about other people.

It's like,

no other people recording other people

without their consent is wrong.

It's, it's not right.

It's invading their privacy.

So, you know,

especially with these camera systems,

I think it's important to remember that if

you install a doorbell like this,

that's pointing out towards the street and

recording everybody as they enter their

houses and walk past,

it's kind of creepy and

And it's definitely something we're going

to talk about later.

So definitely stay tuned for that.

But Nate,

did you end up finding that post you're

looking for?

I did.

I'm not going to say who it came

from because I did not ask permission.

This is off the cuff,

but it is somebody who is very

knowledgeable and knows what they're

talking about.

They said that if you need,

what was it?

Wise, W-Y-Z-E.

They say they recommend it.

He did specify for mainstream people.

um so this is not like the most

private solution but he said that it does

accept sd cards and you do need to

download their app to like set it up

initially but once you set it up you

can tell it like not to send anything

to the cloud and only record an sd

card um so make sure you mount it

somewhere where they can't just like tear

it off the wall and take it and

then he said that in the past he's

recommended zosi for um

Oh,

he said that's a bigger setup with

multiple cameras that sends wirelessly to

a local DVR or hard drive,

like you see in convenience stores or gas

stations.

So that might not be realistic for some

people, but yeah.

One more thing that I remembered while you

were talking,

you mentioned that ring does have an end

to end encryption.

I think you have to enable it.

I don't think it's enabled by default,

but they do offer it.

You mentioned Apple usually does better.

I actually learned recently that Google,

um,

Google's in browser password manager is

like the only one that's not encrypted by

default, Google Chrome.

So like Safari is, Firefox is,

I should hope Brave is,

but like Google Chrome is the only browser

where like you can save passwords in the

browser,

but you still have to take that extra

step to go in and encrypt the password

manager

which is completely insane and just backs

up what you were saying about the fact

that like Google is a little bit sketchy,

which is so weird because just a minute

ago I was like,

they have some of the best security except

when they don't.

It's just so insane.

So yeah, be mindful of that.

Google is not always as trustworthy as

they should be for a company of their

size.

Yeah,

I think it's definitely an unfortunate

thing, but I think they do have,

just like I was saying before,

their infrastructure is quite modern.

It's quite a large space.

operation so obviously they they do have

some security policies to protect things

um so it's kind of stupid that they

don't have internet encryption on

passwords by default that's like a thing

you have to enable like they can access

all your browsing data like your your

bookmarks and all that you have to enable

encryption on that um

But with that being said,

let's dive into the site updates this

week.

And before we dive into a story about

how Reddit is being monitored by the DHS,

let's give some quick updates about what

we've been working on at Privacy Guides

this week.

So throwing it over to you, Nate,

what have you been working on this week?

Yeah,

it's been a lot of behind the scenes

stuff.

I'm working on a script for,

oh my gosh, I should know this,

private email.

And yeah,

so that's what's next in the pipeline for

me.

That's been my main focus.

And then we have private browsing and the

intermediate smartphone security are both

ready for members.

We're just coordinating with

infrastructure.

I know we keep saying this every week,

but

We're really having some serious issues

with PeerTube.

And I think Jonah is doing his best

to take care of that.

But yeah,

as soon as we get that worked out,

we're going to push those out to members

and then shortly thereafter to the public.

So that is what I have been up

to.

And I believe you have been up to

some stuff as well.

Yes,

so this week I've been working on a

video that Nate put together.

It was a video about private...

messaging so that's another one to look

out for we're kind of covering off these

base topics just to have you know

resources for everyone to access and i was

also working on doing some social posts

this week because i feel like we've been

kind of uh slouching a bit on that

and we haven't been doing it as much

as we should and there's a whole bunch

of important issues going on that we need

to talk about so um i decided to

put together something uh about discord

And, you know,

alternatives to Discord and such.

So if you want to check that out,

that's available on most of our social

feeds that are text-based as well as

photo-based.

Some of them might need to wait a

little bit to go out.

But, yeah,

Nate's showing it here on Mastodon.

So that's kind of what I've been working

on.

I also put together another post for

Valentine's Day and...

It was kind of a funny one.

Look out for it tomorrow.

Hopefully that does well and people think

it's a good idea.

But I just want to remind people that

All of this is made possible by our

supporters and you can sign up for a

membership or donate at privacyguides.org

or you can also pick up some cool

swag at shop.privacyguides.org and you can

see in the background,

Nate's got a poster there and a bottle

and we've got all these products you can

get if you wanna support us and also

get something in return.

And now finally,

let's talk about Ring's new search party

tool.

dystopian ring search party feature sparks

public backlash so this is an article here

from nine to five mac and i should

uh preface this by saying there was a

an ad at the super bowl which i

think is like an american football event

for anyone not from america um

And basically it's the ad focused around,

you know,

utilizing everybody's ring doorbells and

ring cameras to basically find and help

lost dogs.

And it was basically a thirty second ad

promoting this new feature.

And of course,

this is kind of a massive concern from

a privacy perspective, obviously, because,

you know,

a company that's basically has all these

cameras everywhere and they're using it

to, you know,

identify something and track that thing.

That could be used for some really

dystopian stuff, obviously.

So that is kind of concerning.

So,

here's just kind of explaining how this

works.

The search party feature for dogs works by

allowing owners of lost dogs to send a

photo and description to other nearby ring

doorbell users when the camera thinks it

has spotted a dog matching the

description.

It alerts the homeowner.

If they confirm that it looks like the

right dog,

it puts them in touch with the owner

of the pet.

The company has now rolled out the feature

to non-Ring camera owners via the Ring

app, going all in on promoting it.

including with a whole Super Bowl ad,

which as far as I understand,

Super Bowl is kind of like a really

high profile event that would have

probably costed like tens of millions of

dollars.

So they're definitely kind of going all in

on this.

And this is also another concern because

in the US there's been a lot of

nationwide protests against ICE

operations,

which is

quite concerning and there's also people

who are kind of concerned that this could

be used to coordinate ICE operations to

deport and arrest people so

Just quoting from, uh,

four or four media here at Sunday's

Superbowl ring advertised search party,

acute horrifyingly dystopian feature

nominally designed to turn all of the ring

cameras into a neighborhood dragnet that

uses AI to look for a lost dog.

It does not take an imagination of any

sort to envision this being tweet to work

against suspected criminals,

undocumented migrants, or other, uh,

or others deemed suspicious by people in

the neighborhood.

Many of these use cases are how ring

has been used by people on its dystopian

neighbors app for years.

The neighbors app itself.

I haven't heard of this before.

So just quoting what the article says,

the neighbors app quickly got a reputation

for racist sharing reports of supposedly

suspicious looking people whose skin color

was the only thing they had in common.

so yeah this is kind of concerning uh

it goes through you know a lot of

the other uh social media backlash and

such um in this article and i think

this is kind of highlighting uh an issue

that i talked about before where you know

your privacy is important but also the

privacy of other people you know creating

a dragnet surveillance network is

Just to find dogs seems like a pretty

unequal exchange,

especially because this technology can be

used for kind of nefarious purposes,

like by ICE to, you know,

round up people, follow protesters,

all sorts of stuff like that.

I think it kind of goes against a

lot of things that...

you would expect in public.

You would expect in public that your

location isn't going to be tracked.

And in this case,

it's basically using cameras to use facial

recognition to identify dogs.

But you can see how that could be

used against people, right?

I think this is sort of a thing

that we've talked about a little bit in

other countries.

They have a lot of these facial

recognition

networks that are run by governments,

that identify people and track their

movements across the country.

And I think this is basically just doing

the same thing, but with a, oh,

it's cute.

Oh, it's a dog searching tool.

It's the same thing.

It's going to be a slope where they

do this feature now,

and then in a year's time,

they're using it to track protesters.

They're using it to track

immigrants.

They're using it to track, I don't know,

the next choice of who they're wanting to

follow.

So yeah,

I think this is extremely dystopian.

And I think most people need to kind

of look past the advertising and marketing

and look at what the real issue with

this technology is,

because it is quite concerning.

Yeah,

just to touch on a few things you

said.

Yes, the Super Bowl is,

you would think a religion here in the

US.

People lose their minds for it.

I say that as somebody who,

if sports vanished tomorrow,

the only reason I would notice is because

everybody else around me would be having a

meltdown.

But putting aside my hipsterism, yeah,

it's a huge deal.

And so for them to run this ad

was probably, I don't know,

about tens of millions.

I mean, maybe tens of millions,

but definitely millions for sure.

To run that thirty second ad is pretty

wild.

Um, I think I'm really happy.

What I,

what I picked up on in this story

is this has been like a nationwide outcry.

Like the, the article says like,

in addition to the four Oh four article

that you wrote or you, you read about,

um,

A Senator Ed Markey tweeted and said,

what this ad doesn't show,

Ring also rolled out facial recognition

for humans.

I wrote to them months ago about this.

Their answer,

they won't ask for your consent.

This definitely isn't about dogs.

It's about mass surveillance.

And then they said a quick search on

X shows this to be the prevailing view.

So I know that's like a very specific

slice of the internet,

but I'm very happy to see because so

many of the times I'm a little bit,

I'm a little bit annoyed and I'm going

to try not to be like,

I don't know.

It's not old man yells at clouds,

but something hipster, I guess.

I don't know.

I'm a little bit annoyed that I feel

like we as privacy advocates are

constantly trying to raise an alarm about

like, hey, guys, this is bad.

And people are like,

you need to calm down.

You're overreacting.

This isn't a big deal.

And then like three years later,

something happens and everybody is like,

oh, this is bad.

And it's like, yeah,

I've been saying that for years and you

told me I was overreacting.

And, you know, um, we didn't include it,

but I've,

I've been sharing around tonight, uh,

a story from meta where they're

reintroducing their, um,

their Ray-Ban glasses,

but they're including facial recognition.

And there's a quote here.

I can dig it up real quick.

Not to go too far off topic,

but this is from Meta's Reality Labs.

This is from the actual company that made

the glasses.

They said,

we will launch during a dynamic political

environment where many civil society

groups that we would expect to attack us

would have their resources focused on

other concerns.

And that is like the most cartoon villain

thing I've ever heard.

It's like I almost think it sounds like

it should be in the onion for them

to just say the quiet part out loud

where it's like, oh,

this is the perfect time to do something

downright evil because all of our enemies

are busy with other things.

And it's just it's you know,

and I bring that up because like I've

been sharing it around and everybody I'm

showing it to is just like,

that's ridiculous.

That's crazy.

I can't believe that.

And it's like, yeah, they're.

Like,

I've been trying to tell you guys that.

And I'm not trying to do the, like,

I told you so thing.

It's just like, I wish people had cared,

you know,

five years ago or ten years ago with

Cambridge Analytica when all this stuff

started coming out.

And, like, you know, I don't know.

Maybe we couldn't have stopped it because,

like, I don't want to sound defeatist,

but, you know,

Shoshana Zuboff in Age of Surveillance

Capitalism, she talks about how, like,

this is their playbook is they'll do

something.

And when people get mad,

they pull back a little bit.

But then they kind of just, like –

take a different direction to get around

the obstacle.

And they still end up doing it anyways,

which is why we can't really trust a

lot of big tech companies.

But I don't know.

It's just, it's,

it's frustrating to see things that you're

trying to raise the alarm about.

And sometimes it feels like people don't

take it seriously.

And I'm glad.

where I'm going with this is I'm really

glad to see that people are taking this

seriously,

that everybody is sitting up and it's not

just us for a change.

That's like, you know, this could be bad.

It's like, everybody is just kind of like,

okay, nope, this is too far.

You crossed a line.

This is creepy.

I don't want it.

And I guess I'm just going to say,

I hope that,

I hope that we're finally entering an age

where things will be different.

Because again,

I mentioned that typically tech will pull

back just enough until people calm down

and then they'll go do it anyways.

And I really hope that we're entering a

world where the internet has been around

long enough and the tech companies have

been around long enough that we're kind of

wising up to it and we're not going

to let them do that.

I hope.

I don't know.

We'll see.

But I really hope that's where we're

headed.

So.

Yeah,

those were my thoughts on that story.

Yeah,

I think I largely agree with what you're

saying.

I think it's also I'm seeing some comments

here in the chat.

So just kind of going over some of

these.

Someone said it's fail X on tour.

This is a bit of a political question,

but it's exploitative nature.

Do you think that other camera systems

could adopt rings infrastructure in the

future?

and i think it definitely could be uh

i think if it's successful and you know

i i unfortunately a lot of times these

awful things end up being pushed through

like saying it's like a boil you're

boiling the frog people just like you're

just slowly boiling them people just give

up with uh with trying to push back

against things because they're just

constantly trying to push things through

So I think if it's if it's a

success for Ring, I think, you know,

this feature could be rolled out to other

security cameras.

But I still think, you know,

it would be

I mean,

I'm not really sure what the percentage

is,

but I bet that there is a very

large percent of people,

at least in America,

I haven't seen too many ring doorbells and

things in Australia.

I think they're less popular,

like Amazon in general is less popular.

So I think in the US that there's

just a...

a lot of those cameras everywhere.

So I think it is pretty powerful being

able to have so many cameras everywhere

and to always have the ability to, like,

hook into them.

So, you know, I think...

If you have a Ring camera, I mean,

the best time to get rid of it

was yesterday.

And the second best time is today.

So try and work something out because I

think it's not great for the privacy of

other people.

And it seems like this is just going

to get pushed through.

They've already dumped so much money into

it.

They're not going to just start changing

direction on it.

doing this facial recognition or dog

recognition.

But well, that's how they're marketing it.

But we all know it's going to eventually

get rolled out to humans.

Do you see any other questions here you

think we should touch on?

I actually do want to touch on,

because you said that,

this next question from, or not question,

but a statement from Anonymous.

You said, basically,

if the market dislikes this,

no one will follow suit, which is true.

I don't want to get into free market

and all that,

but I just want to point out,

kind of related to what you said,

I think so much, and it's,

no single snowflake believes it is

responsible for the avalanche.

I don't know who said that, but like,

It's so easy to look at these things.

Like you were saying,

like ring doorbells are so ubiquitous here

in the US and so many people have

them and they bring a benefit.

I'm not going to lie.

Like, yes,

obviously they bring a benefit or else

people wouldn't be buying them.

And I get it.

But it's so easy for people to sit

here and think like, well,

what can I do?

You know,

like I get something out of it.

If I throw away my doorbell,

like you said,

they're just going to do it anyways.

It doesn't matter.

And it's like, yes, I hear you.

And I know it sounds hard, but

But if enough people do it,

it makes a difference.

Something like, what is it?

Like,

sixty percent of the people in the U.S.

are vote that are eligible to vote.

So almost half of the U.S.

doesn't vote.

And that's high turnout, by the way.

Really bad.

And so just think about if those other

forty percent of people voted.

What would – like maybe the political

situation wouldn't change.

Maybe it would.

Who knows?

But that's forty percent of the people

that could potentially change the vote

because every single one of them is like,

oh, my vote doesn't matter.

I'm sorry.

I know I'm being a little political,

kind of, sort of, not really.

But my point being is like we're at

a point – and I hate to say

this because it sounds defeatist.

We're at a point where the privacy

situation in the world is so bad.

that doing almost anything moves the

needle.

And I try to tell people that when

I talk to like mainstream users and they

just feel like, oh, well,

my data's already out there.

What does it matter?

They already know everything about me.

And it's like, yeah, that's the point.

The bar is so freaking low that doing

literally anything,

switching to Brave or Firefox, shoot,

putting uBlock Origin in Chrome,

as bad as Chrome is,

just putting uBlock Origin in there,

tweaking a few settings,

taking some apps off your phone.

Like most people are literally doing

nothing

Doing literally anything will move the

needle.

And so where I'm going with that is

like,

if you're one of those people or you

know one of those people who's like, well,

I genuinely get value out of my Ring

doorbell and I feel like throwing it away

won't make a difference.

Turn on the end-to-end encryption because

at least then Ring can't access your

footage without your permission.

And at least then you're like cutting off

this whole search party feature.

And it sends, like Anonymous was saying,

if enough people do it,

it sends that message of like,

I want control over my data.

And if enough people start sending that

message,

the market will start to pivot that way.

I mean, look at Apple.

Apple ran a whole campaign advertising

privacy.

And you could argue that they're not

private enough.

That's fine.

I accept that.

But the point is like they knew that

that's something that matters to people

and they want to start pivoting in that

direction.

And so like, yeah,

it's every little bit helps.

That's what I'm getting at is like every

little thing,

whether it's throwing the camera away

entirely,

whether it's canceling the subscription,

whether it's turning on the encryption,

like anything to send the message of,

I don't like this.

And, and I want privacy respected.

I think on a mass scale,

if enough people do that,

it will add up.

It will create an avalanche.

So yeah, that's,

that's my opinion on that one.

Yeah, that's definitely a good, uh,

A good thing to promote here.

I think, yeah,

more people will need to make changes.

Like, yeah,

it's not only going to be one person

that changes things,

but I guess we can also move on

here to kind of a spooky story here

about Reddit.

So here we have the Homeland Security

spying on Reddit users.

So do you want to take this one,

Nate?

uh yeah it is my turn isn't it

all right so um i think this will

be potentially a quick story because um i

think we've seen stories like this in the

past or maybe it's just me in my

past work i know we've definitely i've

definitely covered stories like this but

um this story is a really interesting

write-up and it focuses on you know common

journalistic technique is like you tell

one person's story and you use that to

kind of extrapolate to a larger trend

larger trend.

And so, uh,

that's what this person did here.

They talk about Homeland security is

spying on Reddit users.

And this one is really interesting.

So specifically there's a Reddit user

called budget chicken, two, four, two,

five.

I love randomly generated names.

They're so fun.

Um,

at least I hope that's a randomly

generated name.

Uh, if not,

I really want to hear the story behind

it, but anyways, uh,

so this actually happened in January.

This is very recent.

And this is an internal report that was

leaked to this reporter.

And it talks about how Homeland Security

officials in Texas were monitoring this

user,

who as far as we know is not

a narco-trafficker, a gang member,

or a terrorist.

The report centers on Budget Chicken's

call for a protest near a Border Patrol

facility in Edinburgh, Texas,

which I lived in Texas for ten years

and I don't even know where that is.

I just want to point that out.

Maybe I'm the idiot,

but it's not like it's Dallas.

It sounds to me like at best it's

a suburb of a major city.

So...

The report acknowledges that anti-ice

protests throughout Texas have been quote

unquote generally lawful,

and there's no evidence of any threat

posed by this user's call.

Any protest whatsoever near the border

facility is said to warrant continuous or

continued monitoring.

And then there's a screenshot of the

actual report here.

Uh,

to quote directly from the bulletin at

this time,

there's no specific reporting of planned

violence,

targeting DHS personnel or facilities

linked to this protest call.

However,

any demonstration in proximity to a U S

border patrol Rio Grande Valley facility

may present operational safety and

reputational risks that weren't continued

monitoring the, um,

I'll actually just read it cause it's real

short.

So there's a screenshot here for audio

listeners of a,

a Reddit post from this budget chicken guy

in our slash Rio Grande Valley,

Rio Grande.

I,

Again, lived in Texas for ten years.

They pronounce everything wrong,

so sorry if I pronounce it wrong.

He says, join me in protest against ICE.

He says, in light of today's events,

I'm rallying people to support our rights

and freedoms, not just for ourselves,

but for our neighbors, family,

and community.

We need volunteers to be witnesses and to

spread awareness.

The more we are silent,

the faster it will come to us.

I will be at the intersection of the

border patrol station around six.

Please come support.

That's the whole post.

So...

Where exactly is it?

Well, okay,

here's where he starts tying it into a

bigger thing.

He said,

there's a section that gives a sense of

the sheer volume of data Homeland Security

collects to generate a big picture view of

what's going on in the country.

One specific priority asks what group or

individuals are responsible for or are

associated with border violence and what

are the intended impact to Customs and

Border Patrol personnel and operations.

They say that they are tracking three

particular social media trends,

which is social media-driven mobilization,

symbolic targeting of government

facilities,

and a statewide baseline of mobilization

potential.

At the risk of being a little biased,

I want to point out none of those

said anything about violence.

Mobilization is literally just like

getting people out.

So like social media-driven mobilization,

so like posting online like that guy just

did, like, hey, I'm going to go protest.

Everybody come with me.

Like didn't say anything about violence,

just people coming to protest.

In other words,

the government is building a sociological

profile of political discontent.

The bulletin notes that these protests are

perception-driven,

meaning they are motivated by general

concerns about rights rather than specific

incidents.

Excuse me.

I haven't had enough water today.

So…

It's to determine the threat posed by

budget chicken two, four, two,

five analysts.

Didn't just look at the protest call.

They scored the user's entire digital

footprint.

The bulletin notes that chicken quote

frequently participates in various

community discussions.

For example, in our slash Texans,

they compared the team to the Cleveland

Browns in our slash movies.

They discussed the film, almost famous,

never seen it personally.

Our slash Stephen King shares his book

collection.

And I don't know if I can curse

and not get us demonetized.

I've cursed before.

So r slash fuck I'm old reminiscing about

the nineteen seventies television

production logos.

And here's.

Okay,

I'll go ahead and say right here that

up until this point, I was like,

this is really invasive and I'm not

condoning it.

But I completely understand they need to

like know what's going on.

They need to keep an eye on threats.

And just because this dude hasn't said

anything doesn't mean he's not going to do

anything.

So I understand the like, hey,

let's just keep an eye out on this.

This is the part where they lost me.

It is recommended that all agents wear

their ballistic armor, utilize long arms,

and if possible, work in groups.

Personal opinion,