Katherine Druckman (14s): Thanks for joining us again for reality. 2.0, I am Katherine Druckman. Doc Searls is here as usual, but today we also have a special guest Rob Shavell of DeleteMe fame. You may have heard of their service. I'll let him actually tell you more about it, but, but it's actually pretty cool. And he's not even paying me to say that. So, so before we get started, though, I wanted to remind everyone that we have a website, please check us out at reality2cast.com, you can find supplementary info, you can sign up for our newsletter. You can even send us money. So, I mean, that would be cool. So with, with that, I will turn it over to Doc and Rob, and I'm hoping Rob, you can, you can introduce yourself a little bit more than I just did. Katherine Druckman (1m 1s): And give us a little bit of background on who you are and what you do and how delete me came about. Rob Shavell (1m 7s): Sure. Well, I should first say if we haven't sent money into the podcast, we should, and I hope you accept cryptocurrency. Doc Searls (1m 17s): We accept all kinds of, I accept. I accept. Thanks and gratitude. All forms of compliments on up. Katherine Druckman (1m 24s): Compliments will work. Yeah. Yeah. Although we do have some supporters through Kofi and Patreon and various other means and we appreciate them greatly. So thank you. You know who you are. Rob Shavell (1m 37s): Well, we need to be, we need to be one of those folks. So it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you guys for having me. We've been big fans of, of yourself and the podcast and really happy to be here and yeah, delete me. And the parent company is his name is aprons. Really? I think we've been around for 10 years. And then I think by, by simply length of time, that makes us one of the, you know, older companies in the, in the privacy area. And we've, you know, in the, in the past 10 years, you know, I had the pleasure of an and I guess, perspective to witness a lot of the changes going on in online privacy. Rob Shavell (2m 30s): And, and so we're excited to be here and to talk about, you know, what's, what's happened in the past and hopefully what will happen in the future. And just, just to briefly touch on what Katherine said, delete me is with these one of our services. And it's sadly not deleteme.com, but joindeleteme.com because the entrepreneur that owns deleteme.com won't sell it to me. But that aside it is a service that you sign up for. And then we remove, we go out remove finding your information, wherever it is at tons of different data brokers and showing you where we found it and then removing it on your behalf. Rob Shavell (3m 14s): So that is the essence of, of the service that DeleteMe provides. Doc Searls (3m 19s): So I have to say, I now recall, I don't know if you were at the meeting or not, but I met with the founders like 10 years ago in Arlington mass at a coffee shop. Rob Shavell (3m 31s): That was their doc . Doc Searls (3m 34s): That is the deal. Just put us together. I biked up there cause I lived about 15 houses away on the bike trail and that was our local coffee shop. It was a great, great meeting. And I'm so glad you, you already had blur at that point. I think that was one of the things you had and this credit card kind of thing. And, and you're one of the many companies sort of in this space, most of which, if not all of which are now gone, are they not, I don't know who is still within. It is still, Rob Shavell (4m 6s): You know, it's funny, there's been a lot of failed attempts to, to deliver privacy services to people and make them and make money doing. And, and, and it's been a tough in sometimes in some cases it's been a tough, you know, tough place place to start a business at the same time. I, I think, you know, it's been really fascinating for those of us that have survived in, in the privacy sphere and trying to create a business that both protects people's privacy and makes money doing things the right way. You know, ethical capitalism is 1, 1, 1 term for it. Rob Shavell (4m 49s): It's been really fascinating to be in that area and to watch now what we see today in 2021, a lot of new startups, new entrepreneurs, fresh, smart, talented people come into the space because the privacy problem is more interesting, more acute, more near and dear to people today than it was 10 years ago. And that is, that is really fun decision. Katherine Druckman (5m 17s): And it's encouraging. Do you find that Apple's marketing kind of indirectly benefits you Rob Shavell (5m 21s): Hundred percent? You know, seeing Apple's billboard saying, you know, in every city in the country and God knows what they're showing, you know, outside of the us is showing billboard saying, you know, I phones that's privacy and, and taking a stand against some of Facebook's marketing practices and so forth. I think it's tremendously helpful to the industry as a whole. Doc Searls (5m 46s): Let's tell us about, delete me. And then I want to hear a bit more about how you guys have done the broken field running necessary as, as privacy went from near, too front and center, but delete me in particular as kind of a more, really pretty targeted. Rob Shavell (6m 4s): Yeah. So I think, I think when we started the company again, Facebook was, this is so long ago and Facebook was still a privately held corporation that wasn't even accessible to everyone. It was still being Facebook was still widening its, its audience from universities to friends, to friends of friends. And you know, frankly, most of us can't even remember that time because it feels so strange that there was a time to think about a time where you couldn't even create a Facebook account. Rob Shavell (6m 44s): If you weren't in the right group. If I didn't Doc Searls (6m 46s): Have a university ID, I know it had to have a university email address. Rob Shavell (6m 53s): Yeah, that's exactly right Doc. So, so it was so far back when we started and we, and we said to ourselves and you know, I started the company with two much smarter MIT engineers and, and I'm, you know, sort of the dumb business guy. And they said, look, you know, there's social networking and sharing all this data in the clouds. Isn't what it's all cracked up to be. In fact, there's a lot of problems with it and there's a lot of toxic behaviors that are endemic in the industry. And it would be nice if consumers could have a, a set of technologies that were easier to use it, give them a choice about whether, you know, they shared their data or not with, with, especially in this social and cloud based sort of digital economy that we're moving into. Rob Shavell (7m 45s): And so we proceeded to build a set of solutions to try to help consumers get and give them choice in, in regards to what they shared and what they didn't share. And, and lo and behold, as we did that, and that was blur, as you mentioned, doc, we, we talked about that when we met many years ago and the idea was behind that product, which you can still go find on a website and it's doing great is, Hey, if you, if you are asked to share data and you click into a form that says, Hey, give us your email address, give us your phone number, give us your credit card. Rob Shavell (8m 28s): Shouldn't you have a choice, you know, shouldn't you be able to use the service, but not giving them your real phone number, not giving them your real credit card, not giving them your real email address, but still be able to use the service and then receive messages from, you know, the service and, and, and, and still be able to charge by somethings you kind of thing. So we, we basically created a password manager that also allows you to choose whether you share information with each a website and you're interacting with or not. And that's the product called blur. And you know, the interesting thing about that was people came to us. Our customers came to us and said, Hey, that's great guys. Rob Shavell (9m 10s): It's great that I can now mask. And we call it Afro call of the pandemic. We call it match information. So you can share a mass email desk is not your real email or a masked phone number or a max credit card. And people came to us and they said, that's great that we can mask our information like we do with our faces now in COVID. But my information is already out there. There's all these data brokers that have my address and they have my phone number and they have my email. What do I do about that? And so we created a service called delete me, which tries to, to in some, in some way, shape or form, take care of that problem. And, and delete me works by you come to join, delete med.com. Rob Shavell (9m 52s): You sign up, you, you tell us what your basic personal information is. And then we go out and search for it, find where it's, where it's being sold at, at, you know, a growing list of data brokers. And then we go actually do the work for you to submit all of the opt-out requests to remove your information from those databases. And so everything we've done and, and, and, and what delete me is today is a result of our customers telling us, Hey, this is, this is a problem that we have. And, and, and, and we don't necessarily want to solve it ourselves. Katherine Druckman (10m 31s): So I understand the motivation that people might have from the privacy angle, but what about security and safety and, and, you know, what sort of threats does this head off in terms of scams or protecting people against maybe criminal activity? I mean, can it, I assume it kind of helps them. Rob Shavell (10m 50s): Yeah, it's a great question. You know, it's, it's, it's one that we didn't really think about until recently, because we came at the problem from a very privacy centric angle, you know, and, and, and somewhat myopically. We didn't, we didn't look at this data broker industry, which has sprung up as the internet has sprung up as a, as a problem that was bigger than , but it is if you narrowly define privacy. And, and now we have both individual customers signing up and visit and, and many, many businesses signing up because there are much bigger concerns related to data brokers, collection of profile information about each of us and things like doxxing harassment and network security, because lo and behold, a lot of this information that the data brokers have such as our parents, our mother's maiden name, or our parents and relatives addresses and ages and dates of birth are often used as passwords and second factor authentication, key mechanisms and so on and so forth. Rob Shavell (12m 6s): So there's a, there's a definitive relationship between the information. These data brokers, brokers are willing to sell to anyone at a relatively cheap price and the ability for a company or a user to secure their network, their password, and the resistance to phishing scams, which can be made increasingly a realistic. If it seems like the company reaching out to you is legitimate because they have your personal information. Yeah. That's a really good point. Katherine Druckman (12m 45s): So just as an aside, I wanted to let you know that, that the friend that is a fan of yours just wrote me and said how much they love you and that y'all are doing God's internet work for leaving such things. Anyway, I thought you could enjoy that compliment just now. Yeah. So how does, I mean, I apologies for anyone listening if this starts to sound like a little infomercially I totally don't mean it. I just am legitimately a fan and I have a lot of questions. So bear with me. How does the, the masking the credit card thing differ from something like, you know, apple and a new apple CR credit card does a similar thing, or it doesn't mask it exactly, but it's easy to sort of like spin up a new number. Rob Shavell (13m 28s): Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so it's a, it's a technical question and it's a good one. And, and w you know, we, we are complimentary of apple for spending lots of advertising money, promoting privacy and putting their technology efforts, including their latest developer conference, which happened, I think less than a month ago, very in terms of a focus on privacy. So apple is walking the walk in many instances, and one of them, as you asked that Catherine's apple day, and what they did with apple pay is they, they use w technology, which doesn't really need to be talked about in fancy terms, but it's called tokenization. Rob Shavell (14m 23s): And what they do is they take your credit card number and they turn it into a, you know, a long string of numbers and letters, which becomes a token that, that then get is an identifier. Then it's passed around to the store that you pay, that you swipe your iPhone, apple pay, or, you know, touch, or, you know, what's the word, put your phone near the, the payment terminal at the cafe that you're at or whatever. And they, they, they turn your, your actual card number into a random, unique identifier and the rest of the bank. Rob Shavell (15m 5s): And the network used to process your payment and in effect, they never get your, your real credit card number. So that idea of tokenization is never reveal that, that credit card number to the rest of the merchants and banks and other entities that you may not think about when you make a payment. And so that's what apple did there. And that is a part of every apple pay transaction. What's different about what, what, what blurs maps cards do is we provide that functionality no matter what transactions you do, and it doesn't require using you using apple pay. Rob Shavell (15m 53s): It doesn't require the store or the restaurant you're at to accept apple pay. You can go ahead and pay like you normally do. And we create you a new credit card number for a specific value on the fly. But the principle behind it is the same, which is stop giving out this personal information, like your, your personal credit card numbers to so many different third parties. Because as we've seen, nobody is immune from data breaches. And so the solution is to stop sharing the real, private, personal information that we all, you know, th th that represents our identities and share versions of that, that can, that can still perform the, you know, the functions that we want. Rob Shavell (16m 49s): We, we can still transact. We can still shop. We can still sign up for websites without revealing all of that stuff, because frankly, they don't need to know it. They can still have a good business without having all of our personal information. Doc Searls (17m 4s): So let me ask what happens if, if apple or Microsoft, or for that matter, Google decides that they want to eat your business. In other words, say, okay, well, we could do all that. We can do all that for you. You know, we'll, we'll w where I'm going with this is, there's a principle at work here, and the principal is need to know what do you really need to know? What does the other party really need to know? And, and the truth is in most cases, they need to know pretty close to nothing, right? I mean, you walk into a store, they don't need to know what's in your wallet in order for you to buy a cupcake. You know, you, you walk in, you could make up a name in, you know, I know guys, they, Mike, you know, who will make up another name? Doc Searls (17m 49s): My real name is David. I'm called doc, because there are too many Davids in the world. You know, you make up a name and, and you walk out, it's kind of a burger thing. Right. But the difference with what you're doing is that these aren't burner things. Cause there's, there's a, there's a track there that the individual can, can follow back. But, but I'm wondering what happens when, when the need to know becomes a big enough deal that the bigs are going to want to be in that business. They could buy you. I mean, that's one thing they could do, but I'm wondering Rob Shavell (18m 21s): It's a great, it's a great question, Doug. And, and I think the, the, we, the answer that I would, I would give you is we hope that they do because you're 110% right. On the principle. The principle is what we need to pay attention to, not the particular company or the technology. The principle is one that gives people back control of their information. And it is, you know, it is a principle about a need to know, what do you really need to know? And frankly, if you trust a brand or a third party, and they offer you a great benefit, they may, you may share a lot of personal details with them. Rob Shavell (19m 11s): That's okay. We're not, anti-business, we're not, anti-capitalist I run more profit companies. I appreciate the ability for companies to make money. And I know there are all different kinds of ways to do that, that I, the, the principle that matters to us. And I think that, that we would welcome. And I think apple is frankly, at the forefront of this is where the user has a real choice. And, and, and, and, and that is something we hope to see adopted as a more widespread backers. And there's no way we can do it alone. There's no way to small startups that are competitors to us with full of smart people can do it. Rob Shavell (19m 55s): It has to be done at an industry-wide level. And, and, and folks like apple, and some of the security companies that have reached out to us and said, Hey, we understand it now. And this has happened, frankly, guys, in, in Alaska only in the last 12 months, some of the big consumer security companies that said, Hey, Hey guys, can we do some kind of partnership? Because we understand finally, the message you've been telling us for 10 years, which is, it's not about protecting the PC from, from viruses anymore. It's about protecting the user and their personal information. So I do think, you know, this is w we see evidence that, that the idea and the principle as you put it is being considered seriously for broad adoption and it's, and it's not just apple, but it needs to happen broadly. Rob Shavell (20m 51s): And, and, and no one startup and no one company can be the, the key player in something that's so important to restore some equilibrium on the internet, in a sort of in, in what's become a complete wild west surveillance economy. So Katherine Druckman (21m 8s): Something that doc said earlier that need to know, I think is, is significant here. And, and I think also just backing up a little bit from that COVID, you know, th this the last year and a half of our lives has brought a lot of issues to the forefront. One of those is this idea of identity, identity verification with regard to vaccine status. This is something that we kind of talked about offline a little bit. So I wondered if you could talk to us a little bit about your thoughts on that and, and this idea of being able to verify, is it a good idea? And could it be verified with, with sharing as little information as possible? Like, like doc says, if that's all the information you're looking for, why should you share anything other than status? Katherine Druckman (21m 51s): Yes or no, instead of, because I think we all believe that if there were some sort of vaccine app, like other countries are using, or some sort of vaccine passport, you're not really just sharing your vaccine status, they're sucking up all your personal information as well, which is problematic. So, so I wonder if you could talk about that a little, well, Rob Shavell (22m 13s): It's a great question. And, and, you know, we, we, we've done some, some survey research on our own about it. And, but I think that the, the broader it brings to light the broader question, which is, well, gee, once, once you share the information, who's treating it as a need to know who's receiving it. And, and is there sippy and also treating it as it on a need to know basis. And I think, unfortunately my experience with other organizations and software developers is if it works and that's the sad reality of, of, of, of, of the pressure on software developers. Rob Shavell (22m 60s): So it is structurally opposite to building in privacy concerns to, to a set of API APIs. It is structurally opposed to the principles of need to know, because as soon as automation works, as soon as software works, they ship it and they don't care in Mo in almost all cases, I would go so far as saying, you know, even within the boundaries of compliance frameworks that has teeth, some teeth like HIPAA, there's still a culture of, Hey, if it works, but to do it. Rob Shavell (23m 41s): And that's, that's been the software industry's mantra for 30, 40 years, it's hard to change, you know, th that kind of culture. And, and, and, and to draw a line between that and your question, I would say that when we share new kinds of data, like whether we're vaccinated or not in an app, or, or otherwise, even on a piece of paper, to a TSA agent, which we were talking about in the very beginning of this conversation, that information is going into a database. And the people that designed that database and other custodians of it are not necessarily good stewards of a need to know basis kind of, kind of information set of principles. Rob Shavell (24m 22s): So I, I am concerned about it. Doc Searls (24m 24s): So, so in, in the movie, finding Nemo, there's a great scene where Bruce, the shark is at, at this AA kind of thing, where he's trying to win, you know, go cold Turkey on his appetite for blood, but then he smells some blood and goes crazy. And, and, you know, as, as he said, you know, fish, art, food, you know, or something like that, I forget what he says. This is a little chat Fisher, friends, that food, right. And it's sort of that way with users, right? With, with these companies, because it's not just that there are these software development imperatives, there is on, especially something happened in the last 10 years, a little longer than that really goes back to the arts, but something I never expected back in the last millennium, which is that marketing would become terribly powerful marketing was this very secondary opera thing. Doc Searls (25m 14s): It was usually, you know, you know, somebody who just got out of school and, you know, and, and, but now it's like, there's a see that, you know, the chief marketing officer, the COO and the imperative there is you want as much data as possible. We're going to, we're going to get all we can. And so I'm wondering too, it's easily. I mean, this isn't just commentary on my part. I mean, it's, it seems to be there, there need to be designed principles that say, no, no, you know, it's very hard to reconcile, need to know, which is basically, you need to know shit. You need to know very little about these people. And in fact, if you find out too much, it turns into radon gas. It, it turns into the, you know, the, the silent killer, because suddenly you're, you're liable. Doc Searls (25m 57s): You're a target for, for attack. You know, you're all of this stuff. There's a, there's a day that goes by that some company that doesn't have its pants pulled down because their, their bad practices exposed thousands or millions of people to all kinds of stuff. So I'm wondering where, where a buy and who's a buy-in or not IB. And I forget which let's say buying, yeah. The company plays in this thing. I mean, and to what extent, even your individuation to negotiate with these companies and say, Hey guys, you know, your, your users, don't not only don't want this. You really don't need this stuff. And what we're doing is actually good for you. Rob Shavell (26m 39s): Great observation. Great question. You know, our R D our design principle has been no negotiation. You guys, you know, you guys are gonna get the information that our, our customers choose to give you, and whether it's a real email address or, you know, a burner one, or what we call a mask one. So be it, you know, you're going to have to work with that. And, and, and frankly, that I think has worked in the sense that the, the other, the counterparty, the marketing department, and so on, doesn't have to change any of their practices, and yet the user gets control. So, for example, if you've given out, if you've shopped at a site where you've registered your account and then shopped with massive information that you generate from blur, and that site then has a data breach and, and sends out a data breach notification under the notification laws saying, Hey, sorry, we lost your data. Rob Shavell (27m 42s): You know, it's on the dark web now. Sorry about that. What, what your recourse, you know, as a typical individual might be, if you gave them, you know, the normal information, your real personal information might be to just advocate for some form of identity protection that they compensate you for. Something like that. Your recourse with, with blur mask credentials is you literally go to your dashboard. You turn them off, you literally turn them off. It can be there's one button. There can be no more emails sent to that email that could be no more credit card charges on that credit card. Rob Shavell (28m 24s): It can be no more phone calls that phone now. So it really actually does work in, in, in the real world under that scenario. So, you know, I'm, I'm quite pessimistic in terms of the industry, changing its practices without larger brands leading the way, and giving consumers easy to use choices for the protection and, and to align with the principle of, do you need to know, and frankly, correlated to that. Do I want you to know Doc Searls (29m 5s): and we have one company so far doing that. That's really big. Rob Shavell (29m 10s): Yeah. Yeah. I would. I would sadly say that's true, but I do think that there's others on the horizon that are going to be fast followers. Doc Searls (29m 22s): If you went to any guesses on those, I would say Microsoft should be one of them only because yeah, anybody who's paying a company like apple, apple doesn't have users, they have customers, you know, and the customers pay well for what they get. And so, so surprised that apple is working for those people, because those people are paying them, you know, whereas, well, Facebook has users, Google has users for the most part, Rob Shavell (29m 46s): You know, they're advertising, they're advertising companies. As you know, you might be as, as, you know, as blunt as that and an apple, it has not been one and is not one today. And that gives them the, the degrees of freedom to do these kinds of things. And you're absolutely right. You know, I think Microsoft is, is, you know, is it's one of the big companies that is not classically an advertising company, their revenue streams come from all kinds of things from, you know, cloud services to computers, surface computers, to the big, the big elephant licenses that the cat that we all pay for windows while you guys are Linux people. Rob Shavell (30m 32s): So you don't pay it, but Doc Searls (30m 35s): Have a little windows on the middle. I notice on the, on the underside, Rob Shavell (30m 39s): You know, laptop Doc Searls (30m 43s): And it still has a bunch of windows stuff on it. Right. Katherine Druckman (30m 45s): It's a good thing. Mostly a Mac user these days. Although I do still have a, have a Linux machine that I use, Rob Shavell (30m 52s): You know, I, I got, gotta dig on apple a little bit, just personally, like I own Mac books for 10 years. And I, I just feel like the quality has decreased. And I went back to one of these Lenovo yoga windows machines where you can, you know, write right, you know, right on it with a, a stylist and also use it like a regular computer. And it's been an easy transition for me. And, you know, whether it's Unix underneath or a windows underneath it, hasn't, it hasn't mattered that much to me. But, but anyway, like I, I do think Microsoft should be one of the companies that, that leads the fast follow movement behind Microsoft and Frank, sorry, behind the apple. Rob Shavell (31m 38s): And frankly, that's always been their position. They've always looked at apple for 20 years at apple apple doing, maybe we should do it. Maybe we should copy it. Doc Searls (31m 56s): Go ahead. Well, just a quick one are. So if somebody looks at law enforcement and you may not be able to answer this, I don't know. But I mean, if law enforcement wants suspects of bad person is, or as a suspect is, is using your surface to hide their tracks. I would imagine they're coming to you and saying, help us out here. Or maybe they're more muscular than that. W w what's your, what do you have to say about that? That you can say if, and I may be projecting a little too much nasty. Rob Shavell (32m 30s): No, it's a fair question. And my answer is very simple. We comply with subpoena requests and, you know, I say that for two reasons, it's true. None of us want to go to jail. So we, we comply with us to be in our class and we do get them. And the other is we don't want, and I, you know, I hate to say this, but like, we don't want you, if you are a, as a customer, if you're engaging in criminal behavior, if you're, and, and there's gray areas, you know, if you're, you're a dissident from a political regime in another country, and that country's government gives us some form of their subpoena requests, but we're not going to honor it. Rob Shavell (33m 22s): You know, if there's no proof that, that they've done something that we would consider under our nation's laws criminal. And we see no reason, honor, it's just a breach of their ability to be a free citizen of the world. But in terms of criminal activity engaged under the rubric of our services in the United States, we would comply with those services and we don't want you to be comfortable. Katherine Druckman (33m 47s): What information do you have to share with them in that case? I mean, I, you, you must have personal information on your Rob Shavell (33m 53s): Arm. I mean, the bait, we don't have anything more than a typical service would have, but we have a, you know, a lot of some forms of interactions that we purge regularly, but, you know, you know, like, like IP addresses are stand in our system for X months and so forth. And frankly, we have to store a credit card transactions for longer than that because of us financial regulations and so forth. So there were like, there's some log activity and, and like, frankly, the, the VPN vendors who will go out there and represent that like, like, like on their website, when you sign up that you're totally immune to anything, because there are no logs, there's no trace of your behavior after you sign up for them, frankly, bullshitting the, the, the customer anyway. Rob Shavell (34m 50s): So we don't take that approach. We try to be more realistic and transparent about. 4 (34m 55s): Okay, interesting. Okay. Rob Shavell (34m 59s): That said, that said, I think if you want like a super high degree of anonymity, there are there alternative services that you can piece together to get the same kind of functionality that they, you know, we, as a company and blur as a product provide that may be higher that may give me may value a higher levels of, of anonymity. We are not trying to be that brand that gives you, you know, the ultimate level of, of anonymity. And I talk a lot about that. And I, and I say to both our customers and our internal team, the following, I say, look, privacy, reasonable privacy is actually fairly easy to achieve. Rob Shavell (35m 50s): Despite what other people might tell you. You can do a few things in your browser with your email address and so forth, and you use the lead me and so on, and you actually can get a lot of like a ton more privacy. Then, then, then your neighbor and, and you can tremendously reduce the profile. That's, that's a digital footprint, that's out there a value. And I think people that have really good knowledge of this, like Edward Snowden would agree. He's been quoted as saying, Hey, ad-blockers work, you know, this, that, and the other thing. And, and, and, and I would agree with the moving up a notch to, Hey, can I become anonymous on the internet? Rob Shavell (36m 31s): Can I go do research on anything I want and express any view I want and transact on, you know, for, for any kind of drug that I want and be assured that that's going to be completely anonymous. That is of very difficult and very expensive proposition. And frankly it was before the internet. And that's why we have the archetypes of, of detective and BI. It's always been hard to achieve anonymity, but the good news for the majority of people on the web today is it's not so hard to achieve a better lower digital footprint. Katherine Druckman (37m 12s): So I I've said a few times, I, you know, on various episodes. So, you know, I, like, I basically say that this, the internet is not to be melodramatic, but I say the internet is becoming a scarier and scarier place. Right. And it's, I feel as though most people even, you know, aside from nerds, but even nerds included like me, we have to increasingly become almost security experts to protect ourselves. Now, there are services, you provide a service, there are other services, VPN, you know, whatnot that might help the average consumer to protect themselves at a basic level. But I'm wondering if you could speak to that, like both to the nerd audience and the DIY geeks like us. Katherine Druckman (37m 56s): And also as doc might say, the muggles who might need a little bit more assistance and don't have this same level of technical skill, what are the things that, that both groups should be, should be looking out for the most and what are the easiest things we can do to kind of, wow. Yeah. Rob Shavell (38m 15s): I mean, I get that question almost every podcast, every interview, and it's a good one. And, and I, you know, and I think too, too infrequently, we miss talking about the, the onslaught of AI as a, as a backdrop to this conversation because what's, you know, not to be a fearmonger, but one when, when we unleashed increasingly powerful algorithms in the cloud to analyze patterns, data, and we provide, you know, more and more data, whether it's consensual or not. I think that convergence of those two things is very Trump and, and it is not showing signs of slowing down. Rob Shavell (39m 1s): I think that is a, that's just a factual statement. So, so I think it is concerning like algorithmic discrimination. The, you know, decisions are increasingly going to be made by algorithms, not by people. And they're going to be increasingly made on data. We have non not explicitly consensually agreed to provide to those algorithms. And, and, and certainly we're never going to know we're literally never a decision is going to be made, and we're never gonna know, but did we, did we get access to a certain, you know, job opportunity, healthcare opportunity, you know, insurance, this area, housing things that are very important to people wise are going to be shaped by algorithms and never , you know, it's sort of like a, you know, if idea of a false door, you don't know what you don't know. Rob Shavell (40m 2s): Like you don't know if there was an opportunity that was maybe possible for you. If you had to share it, all this data, and you were just looking at it as a number, a simple number, but now all of a sudden you've been put into a bucket by an algorithm and you never, you never saw that opportunity in the first place. So I think it's hard to talk about this stuff and, and make people, you know, sort of viscerally aware of it. But I, I think it is very concerning, you know, looking, looking forward, you know, five years, hence, and, and then to the crux of your question, what can people do about it, whether they're CIY geeks or every day netizens, I think, you know, largely I say two things, you know, one do the basics, you know, use an ad blocker. Rob Shavell (40m 56s): If you browse track a blocker, as we call it, don't share, you know, all the, you know, use a password manager, generate unique passwords, you know, all the, the, the few basic things that, that everyone I think should be educated, you know, it uses the web today on are actually good things to do and secure your, your key accounts with, to FAA kind of things, whether it's your, you know, a text to your phone or, you know, an authenticator app or, you know, or whatever. Rob Shavell (41m 37s): The other thing that I'd say, which is a little bit less non-obvious is don't, don't join one of the few clubs on the internet and gives that club all of your, and you use that club for everything that you do. And by club, I mean, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, et cetera. So, in other words, if you, if you use a cloud storage account, don't make that the same as your web email account provide. And don't make that the same as, you know, you know, your, your, your, your streaming media company, because what these companies want. Rob Shavell (42m 24s): And I I'm referring to them as clubs is they want you to do everything inside of their bubble. And the more you do that, even if they offer you a deal, Hey, you know, TV streaming TV for you is only, you know, $20 a month. Then you go over, you know, to, to Netflix or Hulu, it's, it's $40 a month. Hey, it seems like a great deal. It's not a great deal because they're using your data combined with other data they have about you to, to inform both a very detailed, personal profile and to train their algorithms. Rob Shavell (43m 4s): So Katherine Druckman (43m 5s): Something that you, you said earlier made me kind of want to take this in the direction of facial recognition. That's something that I always think of, you know, people, people, my age are showing, they're sharing pictures of their kids nonstop on, on, on online. And that's something like I don't have any, if I did, I would never put a picture of them online ever, especially not now with, you know, facial recognition becoming such a hot topic. I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about that. Rob Shavell (43m 30s): Yeah. It brings me to a topic that we haven't touched on this conversation, which is the role of government and legislation. And I do think where facial recognition is concerned, the government needs to play a key role because we cannot just let that kind of a technology be used in the same unfettered, free, free to test it out in any way, shape or form a way that we've allowed the data brokers on, on, on the internet to progress over the last 10 or 20 years. Rob Shavell (44m 12s): So, w w what I, the point I was making is what happened with the data broker industry as the web industry developed, is that they were allowed to do anything they wanted. And if you go back to the 1970s, that was never the case back then. So when, when the credit bureaus started, the names were all familiar with, when we check on credit scores, Experian, Equifax, TransUnion, they were actually regulated companies under, under a congressional law called the FCRA. And that law is what allows consumers today to kind of demand their free credit report once a year from any of these companies. Rob Shavell (44m 58s): And what's happened in the interim is that we've had such a laissez Faire approach to data and to the internet and to quote innovation that we've created thousands of experience in Equifax's and trans unions in the form of these data brokers that are completely unregulated. And my, my, my parallel of the point I'd like to make about that is we cannot let that happen. That seam thing happened with facial recognition, because if we do, every time we go outside our house, everything about us is going to be tracked, known, put in some kind of database without our explicit knowledge, consent, you know, whatever, and we're going to be living in it or Willy and world like, like when I visited mainland China. Rob Shavell (45m 52s): Yeah. Doc Searls (45m 55s): It is that my, my concern with federal regulation, and I say this as somebody who is very enthused about the, the GDPR, not about the CCPA in California for the GDPR, for sure. And I expected a lot out of that. And what we got instead was a functionally zero enforcement and a much worse web experience where we have to go through a cookie gauntlet to the front of it. And where the, if you look up GDPR compliance, nothing is about our relief from bad acting, 220 million websites. Doc Searls (46m 38s): According to Google are busy selling ways to a bay, the letter of the GDPR, well, completely screwing its spirit. And so there's that. And there's also what an S four ref CC chairman told a small group of us a while back when we were talking about net neutrality, he said, he said, so here's, here's the problem. I've spoken to everybody in Congress at one time or another. And there are two things that almost to a person they don't understand. None of them, one is economics and the other is technology now, good luck. And, and I sort of feel like that's, that's an inherent problem. And mostly when we get regulation that protects yesterday from last Thursday, and then we're, we're stuck with her for the next thousand years. Doc Searls (47m 20s): I mean, for example, with, because we never figured out what to do with podcasts, they way back when the DMC came along in the late nineties, actually October of 1998, nobody wonders why, well, why do we have no music on podcasts? We never worked that out. We only have talked podcasts, you know, the Spotify guys of the world and the apples and others worked out there, you know, compulsory license agreements, whatever it was that they cooked up with the record industry, cause they're gigantic and they could do it, but otherwise we never did it with podcasting. And maybe that there's may even be a good thing because it helped podcasting grow, but it was nothing intentional involved there. But you, you look at Google and Facebook alone, for example, they have many dozens of data centers this or AWS as well, you know, that have the size of nuclear power plants. Doc Searls (48m 9s): And there are no white coated federal regulators walking around those plants, checking for compliance, you know, like you can do with a nuclear power plant. You know, you can't do that. There's no way of knowing exactly what's going on inside those companies. You can't, they're not even monitorable in a, in a, in a serious way. So I, I don't know what to do with that. I mean, personally, I would like to see really enlightened regulation. And I think it's a no brainer. It's a somewhat of a brainer again, you've just brained. It really well. That facial recognition is, is the Ice-Nine of this. You know, it's the Andromeda strain of, of, of dystopia. You know, it's, it's the one thing we don't want loosen the world, or all of a sudden the world changes too much to go back. Doc Searls (48m 53s): And that's kind of what we're facing with facial recognition. If, if, if my watch can, can, you know, go past anybody who goes by and I'm paying somebody for, tell me all the faces I'm seeing and what their, where they came from, this is conceivable it's totally conceivable and, and it's, and it would be, but it, but it'd be wrong also for only law enforcement to have that, which is kind of the Chinese approach, which is don't worry, as long as we were, as long as your government is the only one that knows this stuff. You know, it's, it's, it's interesting. Rob Shavell (49m 24s): The Chinese, the Chinese approach is terrible, terrible approach. It's antithetical to American values and democracy, and it should be called out. And frankly, the, the company that we were just, you know, talking about. So, so glowingly apple has done a very poor job in doing that because their business interests are so tied to China, but without getting into . And it's where they do almost all their manufacturing and on and on. But the, the, I think, I think I'm no, you know, I'm an entrepreneur by definition, most entrepreneurs, if you survey them, don't think government is a highly efficient vehicle for getting things done in life. Rob Shavell (50m 18s): So I am in that group of entrepreneurs that would concur. And when you look back at your comment about a GDPR so forth, I would nod my head to most of them, what I would say, two things, one, you know, things at the societal level take a long time, a frustratingly long time. And, you know, as I get older, I, I have to put up, take off my entrepreneur hat and put on my politician slash historian hat. And, and remember that. And secondly, simplicity is, is a really important paradigm. Rob Shavell (51m 1s): And in the case of facial recognition and potentially other technologies that are of the Andromeda strain ilk, so to speak, I think we should just have a very, very simple policy ban them, ban them for, for federal government use police use and, and industry. And, and, and I'm an advocate of, of banning facial recognition across the board in the United States. Because if you try to gild the Lily and, and figure out how to encourage facial recognition innovation, while yet protecting society and all this other stuff, I think you end up with another GDPR. Rob Shavell (51m 43s): Yeah. Yeah. Doc Searls (51m 47s): I mean, it, it, it, it really, I mean, I, it's so easy to imagine where that can go. So Catherine, you're smiling then Katherine Druckman (51m 56s): Dig on JD para muse with me a little bit, but that's all, I, I don't know if I'm excessively cynical about it or just reasonably cynical, but I, I guess I share your, both of your thoughts that I think entrepreneurs and technologists are a better hope than, than regulation, but, you know, I don't know. I mean, that's, those are, those are also the people that got us into this mess. Rob Shavell (52m 22s): Well, and Catherine, to that point, I, you know, I don't want to be too, too negative and certainly not too cynical. I mean, we operate our company. We're doubling every year. We're growing like crazy right now because consumers and businesses are telling us what you're doing as value. And you can help us solve our privacy issues. And we don't need legislation in order to do that. And we are, you know, every time somebody pays us, we know we're solving a problem and then gives us a good rating and score and feedback and everything else we know we're solving a problem. So I do think there's a huge potential for a marketplace to develop here. Rob Shavell (53m 4s): And, and, and that's, you know, that's, that's very in line with American values, you know, markets solve problems. And so, and, and, you know, and back to some of my original comments, we are seeing, we've been in this space for 10 years. Very few companies have, and the, of talented new entrepreneurial is both Mo both money and talent and energy in this, in this privacy sector has never been at this level. I it's just a fact. Rob Shavell (53m 44s): And it's, it's, it is awesome to see I've been an investor and I've been an entrepreneur. And I can tell you that there is more activity going on now to try to create a market market driven option for, for, for people to regain control over their data, regain control over their privacy and fight in a way, you know, against, you know, what's happened in the last 10 years on the west than I've ever seen before. So I think that's very encouraging. Doc Searls (54m 17s): That's our pull quote, Catherine, that's her quote, it's a long one, but it's a good one. I, that that's really encouraging. I, you know, I I'm, my wife and I are actually going to, I'm talking to you from our apartment in New York right now. I wish we still lived in Arlington, but I don't, we don't, but, and we're going to be, we're going to be rebasing ourselves in Bloomington Indiana for the next year, because the ideas have been spreading for the last 10, 20 years are catching on in these places. Bloomington. Boston's actually one of them in the real estate world. And there's a farm to table people in upstate, Michigan, who are saying that, you know, we're an are all about let's, let's build markets around the individuals where the individuals want let's, let's, let's start, let's start building markets from what you and I need out, rather than in the, in the frankly, the cookie-based client server world, where we are always going to be subordinate. Doc Searls (55m 20s): I mean, I mean, I'd like your thoughts on this. Cause I, I feel like I've really reached this conclusion and is a provisional one just in the last few months that client server itself, which, which we chose like in 1995 is which I've been told as a euphemism for slave master is the problem. I mean, it's like we, we built the web on this, you know, timbers leave basically came up with a way that with Hypertech with hypertext protocol that any two IP addresses could, could look at documents at a distance, not that we would build all of e-commerce on a, on a client server model where the servers are in charge of everything in the client, the client is always the one that has to agree to everything. Doc Searls (56m 7s): And, and I wonder what your thoughts are on that, because I'm wondering if we can, if do we move just away from that while we're busy fixing that, or can it never be quite fixed, you know, keeping you in business, frankly? Well, Rob Shavell (56m 20s): Well, well, you know, I think it's a great it's, you know, again, these are really super interesting questions for any of us that have been in the technology industry for decades. And, you know, I'm personally set aside the business of privacy and data collection and everything else, a fan of localism and, and sort of, you know, trying to re-imagine our economy on a, on a more personal scale. But in terms of the technology, in terms of the technology world, you know, I'm also an have been mainly because I run a privacy company, eh, in and around the crypto and blockchain world. Rob Shavell (57m 6s): And if you're deep in those worlds, what you see is a, is a real shift away from client server and one that, and one that's super smart people, including some of the, you know, the best entrepreneurs that are out there, frankly in the world are spending, you know, 16 hours a day rolling up their sleeves working on. So I think the shift away from client server to what these people call web three, which is a much more federated distributed, consensus, driven governance, explicit tokenized, you know, sort of model of technology. Rob Shavell (57m 47s): And I threw out a lot of buzz words there that, you know, people are may or may not understand, but effectively like applying the principles of Bitcoin to a whole lot of things that have been tied down by a server, serves you a webpage to a browser. I think that that, that economy and that marketplace is on fire. And it's a very interesting one to watch. Wow, well, that's our next episode. We'll have to have you back. You can have you back for that one yet. So Doc Searls (58m 19s): I want to ask you a question about a buy, because what I remember was, and I may have this wrong as one of you, I think it was, you went and found these like super smart engineers and lake built a company around them. Was it you the one that did that? Or was it one of them that found you or what was removing you are one of those super smart engineers, but I I'm trying to remember exactly. Cause it's been like probably 10 years. I Rob Shavell (58m 44s): Was, I was, I doc, I'm glad you forgot because I was the, not the, not super smart engineer. My co-founders Andrew, where are they? Where the MIT, they were actually MIT fraternity friends and, and also super smart as engineers, as MIT has new space. So yeah, they were the ones, they were the ones really that had the vision around privacy and the trends happening that we see now that we see happening now 10 years ago. Doc Searls (59m 21s): Yeah. I I'm, I'm remembering that accurately that you were the guy that worked with those two other guys. Rob Shavell (59m 27s): I was the dumb visits that I worked in with two other guys, the dumb Doc Searls (59m 30s): Business guy who is still around 10, 10 years later growing, growing like a weed, you know, I'm really glad you guys have succeeded the way you have. I mean, that's, they've seen so many companies fall by the wayside, you know, at, at project VRM, which by the way, is still going at the Berkman center at, or the Berkman Klein center now at Harvard, meaning that they, they run servers that host us, you know, I'm not there physically, nobody said anywhere, physically anywhere, but, but I, I I've gone back and have like edited the, a bine entries on our list of developers, you know, but you've been there. Others are kind of like, I'm not going to name names, but it kind of showed up in the similar or adjacent businesses and have come and gone, you know, so, well, I mean, Rob Shavell (1h 0m 14s): There's Gabriel and Gabriel duck, duck go, has done tremendous job building a business. And, and there are a few others that have been around, you know, proton mail and the proton mail. For example, there, there are a few of us that have been around since, you know, God knows when, but, but I think we're on the cusp of a new, a new era, you know, whether or not it has the, the level of investment and talent to change the entire industry, I think is a very TBD question. Rob Shavell (1h 0m 54s): But I can tell you that, that factually there's more investment, more talent and more energy coming into the private space today than there ever has been. I think you're right Katherine Druckman (1h 1m 5s): About that. You know, it's funny. I, so I was at my mom's house recently visiting and she lives in what I would consider to be middle of nowhere, Texas, although I suppose anything within about an hour and a half radius of Austin is probably, probably has a little bit of an advantage with their tech savvy maybe, but I'm driving on a fairly rural road and there, I see a giant billboard for duck duck go. And I'm like, oh my God. And privacy has arrived. I mean, it's on this semi rural road in the middle of Texas duck promoting duck echo. And I was blown away by 5 (1h 1m 38s): That. And they're on Doc Searls (1h 1m 40s): Every they fund, like I think everybody has got a public radio station. I think they're on all of those, you know, it's a, and we've had Gabriel on, you know, 5 (1h 1m 48s): So it's been a while. Good guy. Yeah, yeah, Rob Shavell (1h 1m 52s): Absolutely. A he's done a fantastic job and, and you know, it's great to see, it's great to see both apple and, and, and, you know, successful companies like that go. And then even the two-person new startups that we're seeing, you know, I saw one, you know, this week and another one last week. And, and, and, and, you know, 1, 1, 1 is called redact and it's trying to allow you to easily purge and selectively purge your old, you know, postings on across a lot of different sites. Rob Shavell (1h 2m 36s): If you, it said, said certain things on, on, on Skype and it's in your history, for example, you can go search for those and remove them. There's all kinds of people tackling the different aspects of this problem in different ways. And I think it's exciting. Katherine Druckman (1h 2m 51s): That is exciting, especially, you know, the more those of us of a certain age note that we may or may not have posted things to the internet before we considered whether or not that was a good idea. And we worry that maybe they'll bite us in the ass later, but Rob Shavell (1h 3m 8s): Not as Katherine Druckman (1h 3m 10s): It's me, I'm far too young for that to be a problem. Doc Searls (1h 3m 16s): I think there are things that I Things. I said, I'd use net that are, you can find, or whatever Google still maintains was that from like the eighties, I think that are out there. If one looks deeply enough for them, I did that like 15 years ago. And I haven't bothered since, because it turns out it wasn't anything too incriminating, but we were all young ones. So that happens. Some of us pretend we still are. Yeah. Well you can do that more successfully than me, you know, I'm the one that when you're standing at the bus stop, they lower the bus for you, which I hate. Rob Shavell (1h 3m 56s): I hate it. I think he'd do it pretty well because you look, you look the same or younger than me. Well, thank you. Doc Searls (1h 4m 4s): Thank you. I think I had hair then though. I mean, I think it's more hair anyway, you know, but thanks. This was this very kind. I'm sitting here 5 (1h 4m 16s): Talking for a whole hour. I think we've been more than long. Yeah, it goes fast. Katherine Druckman (1h 4m 22s): Might be time to wrap up. I think we're going to have to have a SQL obviously. Yeah. I wonder if we have any parting thoughts or wisdom. I mean, aside from, obviously go check out some of the services we've just mentioned like doctor go redact, delete me, blur. Anything else? Any, hopefully I think the hopeful mess, this is actually one of the more hopeful episodes we've done recently. Doc Searls (1h 4m 48s): Hopefully. Yeah. There's an awful lot of despairing shit out there, frankly, you know, it's like, you know, how many ways are we screwed? Well, let me, where do we start? You know, and you know, but you've, you know, I, I'm just really, really pleased with a lot of the stuff that you've said, especially about what's coming together. You know, the, the investment, the energy, the people coming into a market that helped privacy itself is turning and changing from an issue to a marketplace. You know, I mean, one of the things and the thing when it, interestingly thing for me is that we'll wait forever for the advertising industry to fix itself is not going to happen. Right. It, you know, that I, to me is one of the most interesting things. Doc Searls (1h 5m 30s): My wife actually came up with this metaphor that as soon as it was clear in like 20 12, 13, that do not track was a fail in a sense that nobody was going to respect it. And that the advertising business and their dependents in publishing were going to crap on it. The users took over and they, you know, ad blocking a, been around since 2004 and, and ad blocking in tracking protection, took off to the degree that there may have been a billion or more, maybe more than that blocked ads. And she said, that's the biggest boycott in human history. And yet that industry didn't look at that and say, this is a really interesting message, you know, feedback from the marketplace, but instead, well, that's a problem for us, you know, and that, that's why I don't think they're going to fix themselves, but we can fix it. Doc Searls (1h 6m 19s): The rest of us could fix it. You know, we're, you know, cause we're working for the users, we're working for you and me, you know, and you've got customers, which is really cool. People pay you for what you do. And that's, this is great. I mean, not just like, you know, bundling up a bunch of attention and selling it to somebody, Katherine Druckman (1h 6m 38s): There's our title, by the way, Rob fixes the internet, Rob Shavell (1h 6m 42s): Please, please don't put me in any title, but very, very, a perfect wrap up. Couldn't agree more Doc Searls (1h 6m 53s): Great. Well, it's been awesome having you on here and we will, you know, we say that often, but we really do have to have you back, especially to this is moving fast. So there will be progress report. Rob Shavell (1h 7m 5s): Yeah. Thanks so much for joining us. It's my pleasure and really fun. Let's do it again.