What the Hack Ep. 254: “Even If You’re Not Online, You’re Online”

“What the Hack?” is DeleteMe’s true cybercrime podcast hosted by Beau Friedlander

Beau: Hey, Craig.

Craig: Good afternoon. How are you?

Beau: Good to see you, man.

Craig: We can go inside. We can go inside.

Beau: Where do we go?

Craig: Let’s go inside.

Beau: Oh, into the house house?

Craig: Yeah, sure.

Beau: All right.

Craig: You can say hi to Nancy.

Beau: Sure. I keep seeing an ad on Instagram for a light blue T-shirt with the caption, “Unwilling participant.”

Craig: Have you seen this? This is sort of cool.

Beau: No, I haven’t seen it. Did you just build this?

Craig: A couple years ago. Well, look at this.

Beau: Oh, so you can grill in the… What? Oh, shut up. I have to admit, I’m a little tempted to buy that T-shirt. This week, we’re gonna do a house call to my friend Craig and talk what it means to be an unwilling participant in this, you know, digital data nightmare that we all live in. I’m Beau Friedlander, and this is “What The Hack,” the podcast that asks, in a world where your data is everywhere, how do you stay safe online? Did you set that lamppost?

Craig: Yeah.

Beau: Did you put the electricity to go into it?

Craig: Yeah, and I built the lamppost. Let’s go look.

Beau: Okay. All right. No, no, I have another one. I got another one. That… Why? Is it a good lamppost?

Craig: Yeah, yeah.

Beau: All right. Let’s go look.

Craig: Yeah, the lamppost is a real colonial design. As you can tell, Nancy and I are into the real colonial-style stuff, but but I wanna have everything so it’s little or low maintenance. So this is all made out of Azek. So all I have to do is wash it and it looks like brand new.

Beau: Does it get green if you don’t?

Craig: Yeah, yeah. But you can see how I tapered this. And this is all glued. There’s, you know, electricity that goes right up through. And see this little thing here? Yeah. If you… 22 inches.

Beau: What is that? Oh, you wrote 22 inches on it.

Craig: 22 inches from this corner.

Beau: Yeah.

Craig: There’s the water shut-off. So I never have to remember. All I have to do is come out here. I know it’s out here someplace. I look on what I scratched in there. If we ever did have to turn the water main off, it’s right there.

Beau: Craig is one of my favorite people, like on Earth. He’s not a digital native.

Vice | When the Internet Was New: Can you explain what internet is? That little mark with the A and then the ring around it. At. See, that’s what I said. Mm-hmm. Case said she thought it was about. Yeah. Oh.

Beau: If you use the standard generational definitions, he’s in the majority there, right? North of 60 percent of Americans are not digital natives. But Craig, Craig’s an outlier even among his analog cohort. You see, Craig can make anything. He’s a former teacher turned contractor. I call him MacGyver, which is ridiculous ’cause I’ve never even watched MacGyver. Whoa, your blueberries are crazy.

Craig: Oh, the blueberries are looking great. Look at that one over there. Now one of tomorrow’s projects is I gotta put the bird netting up. We take the bird netting down every year, ’cause you want the bees to go in and pollinate. Look at how loaded this is.

Beau: Look at that one.

Craig: Yeah, I know.

Beau: That one’s nuts.

Beau: Unwilling participant. It’s a slippery position to take when it comes to our digital lives. The age-old friction between convenience and privacy, it’s always there. I say age-old. Dumb. It’s not that old. Dates back to the days when the internet started to become aware of its earning potential.

Jeff Bezos “Nerd of the Amazon” | 60 Minutes Archive: Who would have guessed that one of the hottest stocks of all time, one of the fastest-growing companies in history, would be a bookstore? That’s right, books, one of the oldest products made by man. We didn’t. That’s because we didn’t predict the revolution led by 35-year-old Jeff Bezos, a self-described nerd, who almost overnight has become one of the richest men in the world and made many of his investors instant millionaires. That’s because his revolution created a new way of buying things, by computer over the Internet, and we have been lining up by the millions. He calls his company Amazon.com, Earth’s biggest bookstore.

Beau: Yes, Amazon was a big deal, but non-digital natives took a minute to adopt that way of shopping. That clip dates back to the ’90s when computers were about as common as radios were in 1920.

Nov 2, 1920, First Commercial Radio Broadcast in the U.S.: This is KDKA of the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company in East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Beau: That was actually the first radio broadcast back in 1920.

Nov 2, 1920, First Commercial Radio Broadcast in the U.S.: We’d appreciate it if anyone hearing this broadcast would communicate with us, as we are very anxious to know how far the broadcast is reaching and how it is being received.

Clip: It seems everybody is interested now in home computers. Well, so far, home computers are just a fraction, a small fraction of those being sold in the United States, but because our technology is growing by leaps and bounds, computers can help us with a lot of household items for grownups as well as for the kids. What are you going to use it for mostly?

Clip: Well, probably school work, because they have cartidges that can teach you math and stuff.

Clip: I’m interested in having something I can use a word processor with.

Clip: What do you want to do that for?

Clip: Primarily for typing and working at home. Use it for trying to develop ways to make money.

Beau: The early internet was simple, mostly text, mostly links. Then images arrived, and with them an engineering breakthrough. Instead of storing every single image on your own server, which made downloading them torture on a dial-up account, you could just tell a browser where to find it and let it fetch the file from somewhere else… and wait a year or two for it to appear. It saved bandwidth, it saved money, and nobody thought twice about it. Around the same time in 1994, engineers at Netscape, remember Netscape? Were trying to solve a problem baked into the web’s basic architecture. It had no way to remember you between clicks, so every time you went to a site, it treated you like a total stranger every single time. So a Netscape engineer named Lou Montulli invented something called the cookie, the digital kind, the tiny little text file that let a site remember who you were, kept you logged in, preserved a shopping cart for you. And yeah, as with all things online, it was about money.

The History Of Internet Tracking And The Battle For Privacy | NBC News NOW: Have you been thinking about buying a home computer? With Christmas and Hanukkah just a few months away, your children, maybe some older children, may have already put them on their most wanted lists. There is plenty to think about before you buy a home computer, and Consumer Counselor Phyllis Eliasberg is here to give you a look at what you could buy, or what you should buy, or what you shouldn’t buy.

Beau: Individually, neither innovation was controversial. Together, they created something nobody really intended. Then came the more or less collective realization that these remote images didn’t need to be visible. Huh? Like, why? Tracking, that’s why.

The History Of Internet Tracking And The Battle For Privacy | NBC News NOW: If you can wait a few years, you may be able to find a better bargain.

Clip: The home market should evolve fully by 1985.

Clip: Are we gonna see a decrease in prices as computers become more popular?

Clip: There’ll be a decrease in price, but you’ll tend to see more for your money.

Clip: Well, not only will there be a decrease, you’ll get more for your money, as the man said. But you have to know when you’re buying a bargain.

Beau: An advertising network could embed a microscopic, transparent one-by-one pixel, like an image, into a web page. You couldn’t see it, but your browser could. For those of you who think that came way later, I guess you’re right, depending on what you’re thinking, ’cause we’re talking about the late ’90s. That tech has been around for a while. And once browsers could automatically retrieve content from outside servers and automatically send you your cookie, identifying information along with those requests, the foundation for modern web tracking was set. So the trap that we’re all ensnared in as unwilling participants, that was already in place by the late ’90s. It wasn’t because engineers set out to build a global surveillance system. It was because they were solving immediate technical problems, and nobody was looking 10 years down the road, and nobody was asking if any of it should be regulated, right? The opportunity didn’t stay hidden for long. Third parties realized they could piggyback on those microscopic pixels. Not the website you chose to visit, but invisible companies embedded inside it. Advertising networks, data brokers, data brokers, analytic firms, organizations you’d never heard of and never consciously agreed to interact with. Now, there was a brief moment of panic in the late ’90s, again, when the public figured out what cookies were doing, and so the, you know, browsers then added the pop-up warning. But the web was growing way too fast. Again, there were no laws. Again, if you left that feature on, your screen was filled with dozens of unclosable pop-ups.

Internet cookies reform – why, how and tips (UK/Global) – BBC News – 7th September 2021: Now, if you feel like you can’t go online without having to click on endless pop-up messages about what happens to your information, you are definitely not alone.

Beau: Users didn’t choose tracking, right? They were fatigued into submission. Unwilling participants. They turned the warnings off just to make the web usable again. Unwilling participants. And that brings us to today. When you load a typical webpage, dozens… It’s not dozens. Sometimes it’s thousands of these third parties may be watching. Thousands, hundreds, whatever. They see what you click. They see what you linger over with your mouse, what you searched for, and where you go next. They observe the entire session. It is what creates that sense of déjà vu when you’re online. The internet is not listening to you. Well, not directly. It’s just clocking absolutely everything about the way that you are online, and that gives it all it needs to know to tell you, “Here’s the grill you’re looking for.” Nobody voted for it. Nobody signed the terms. It, it just became infrastructure. Infrastructure. Infrastructure’s something that’s usually regulated, right? It’s usually federal. Not here, and that’s the problem. Show me your chainsaws.

Craig: Well, here, we gotta look at… We got two sets. In this shed are the real antiques. It’s sort of dark in here now. These are the ones… That’s probably the newest one. That’s probably about a, back in the corner there, that’s about a 19- If you- These are in the ’40s through the ’50s.

Beau: The internet is cool, right? Craig even thinks so. He could be one of the guys you see on YouTube explaining how to fix a 1940s chainsaw, but he’s not that guy, ’cause he’s fixing a 1940s chainsaw. That one back there looks like it weighs 50 pounds.

Craig: Oh, this one here? This is a Homelite. I think the date on that was made in about 1957.

Beau: The one that says EZ on it?

Craig: Yeah, EZ. Okay? And as, I remember as a little kid when my dad was building our house, it was either that one or one that looks like it in my mind’s eye when I was a little kid. And that, I’ve run that one.

Beau: Uh-huh.

Craig: They’re deafening, no anti-vibration and everything.

Beau: Yeah, yeah.

Craig: But, it’s really amazing.

Beau: And what’s the deal with this canoe?

Craig: Oh, that’s my canoe that I bought when I was in sixth grade, restored it. It’s an Old Town wood canoe, and it needs another restoration, you know, 60 years later, so. And there’s nothing like a wood canoe. .

Beau: We are all spoiled by the advantages of having access to everything ever recorded, basically the entire contents of the Library of Congress as well as the fabled Library of Alexandria. That’s an ancient Egyptian version that goes way back. And every post anyone ever flung blindly into the social mediaverse based on fact, fiction, political friction, and vibe. With the entirety of everything you might want to know just one finger tap away from a screen near you, the magic is undeniable. Automated magic. Poof. No longer do you need your cousin’s math tricks or the trivia repository tripping off your Aunt Selma’s tongue like so many unicorns of omniscience. YouTube knows a lot of the same stuff my buddy Craig knows, and if he doesn’t, you put it into an LLM and it does. And with AI now knitting it all together, right, into these usable outputs, I fixed my Omni boiler with one recently. It’s possible technology has finally caught up with the Craigs of the world. Possible. The MacGyvers, the savants of doing things. Maybe. What’s that outboard engine over there?

Craig: Oh, that’s-

Beau: That looks pretty old. Is that an outboard engine or is that a chainsaw?

Craig: No, that’s a chainsaw in the back over there.

Beau: No, the one with the yellow.

Craig: Oh, the yellow. No, that’s an early weed whacker with a West Bend engine on it.

Beau: Get out of here.

Craig: Yeah, yeah.

Beau: So why… you just like it?

Craig: Yeah. A friend of mine had this stuff and I was, you know, it’s pretty interesting stuff, so. Yeah.

Beau: You closing me in here?

Craig: No. Yeah, let me show you the good chainsaw.

Beau: Craig’s universe matters here. He has crammed more projects onto his property than you can shake a stick at, and it’s all bristling with years of trial and error, lessons learned, focused intelligence. And no, I’m not gonna put you in touch with him, ’cause he’s semi-retired.

Craig: Oh, here’s the tractor that you put me onto, the Zero.

Beau: Oh, with the knobby wheels?

Craig: Yeah.

Beau: Oh, that’s a lot better.

Craig: Yeah. It tears it up. You couldn’t use this if you’re a landscaper, but-

Beau: No, no, no, no. I mean, even with the soft, even with the flat ones it tears it up.

Craig: So there’s the chainsaws, the daily users. Small, medium, and large.

Beau: You use that red one there?

Craig: Yeah, yeah.

Beau: That one’s huge.

Craig: Yeah, those are-

Beau: What is it?

Craig: That’s a Jonsered.

Beau: Oh, wow.

Craig: They don’t make them anymore, but I think they’re great saws. And up here are all old Homelites. These are from the, ’60s and ’70s. That one there is just about identical to the one my father-in-law had when I first met him.

Beau: Craig learned how to do all his tree cutting and wood processing from his father-in-law. That’s who taught him to paint anything arborist-related bright orange because otherwise tools get lost in the old tool-colored woods of Southern Connecticut. I think it might also be the guy who taught Craig to brand all his stuff with his initials so as to avoid having it be mistaken from something easy to steal. Craig taught me the same trick.

Craig: I run these every now and then.

Beau: Are those all 20-inch bars, or…

Craig: No, this is 16. This is a 20 here. There’s a 20. That one there-

Beau: That’s a 36 or something.

Craig: That’s probably about a 26, 28.

Beau: Nice.

Craig: And over there is a 36.

Beau: You do have a 36.

Craig: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Beau: That is good to know.

Craig: Yeah. Yeah.

Beau: if I ever wanna get rid of that big oak tree-

Craig: That’s a beast. That, that- Yeah, yeah, yeah … these are all-

Beau: How many horsepower is that thing? CC I mean.

Craig: I don’t know.

Beau: CC.

Craig: Well, the 30, the 36-inch bar, that’s probably about 100 CC saw. That’s a Homelite.

Beau: Jeez.

Craig: This is when Homelite was a really good brand.

Beau: Yeah.

Craig: And they were made right down in Port Chester, New York. Right across the border.

Beau: Amazing. With Craig, you get the feel for the hyperlocal because it’s real. It’s not generated by an AI or cascaded in real time by search technology. He has lived in the same area his whole life. When he says across the border, he means the state line between Fairfield County, Connecticut, and Westchester County, New York. And he is a unique example of the expertise that can be accomplished by a person who doesn’t get distracted and sticks to his passions. One of his passions is inventing things. If you’re listening and work in patents, he has a snow-proof mailbox and his Mona Lisa, of course, is the storage bumper that he built on the back of his truck.

Craig: Did I ever show you this?

Beau: No. What? Oh. Yeah, this is time for us to talk about this. So, for anyone listening who feels like making a buck. We’re about to blow your minds. All right. I’m at the back of a… What is this? A Chevy. Must be a Chevy.

Craig: Yeah. 2007 Chevy, 3500 Silverado diesel.

Beau: All right. Okay. This is not the… Did you buy this, or did you make this bed?

Craig: No. The bed I bought.

Beau: Mm-hmm.

Craig: But it’s all aluminum, ’cause I wanted it to last a long time, but it did not hold paint.

Beau: Mm-hmm.

Craig: So I wrapped it with aluminum diamond plate.

Beau: Uh-huh.

Craig: And that… Everybody thought I got a brand-new truck, but I didn’t. I just wrapped it, so.

Beau: Nice. Well-

Craig: So it’s like wallpaper.

Beau: So what’s back here?

Craig: Well-

Beau: Look at the bumper.

Craig: This is a bumper. Yeah. Yeah, this is my bumper, and I built this to store stuff. Because, you know, when you’re in construction, you always have stuff you wanna tie into your truck. So I’ve got ratchet ties, I’ve got-

Beau: Shrink wrap

Craig: Shrink wrap. I got, you know, a lockable cable here. I’ve got jumper cables in here.

Beau: Bungee chords.

Craig: Tow chain. So I’ve built the bumper to hold all that stuff, so.

Beau: So, that looks totally illegal. Are you driving dirty?

Craig: No. No.

Beau: I am going to give Craig the benefit of the doubt when it comes to driving dirty or not. I’ve certainly been guilty of it, and not that long ago, when a friend of mine gifted me a 1974 Country Squire station wagon with the same engine as the old F-150s. Driving dirty is a weird phrase. It’s sort of libertarian. I’m gonna do this thing that isn’t hurting anyone, but isn’t strictly speaking legal either. Here’s where the rubber hits the road. When it comes to our data, Big Tech has been driving dirty for years. Do I have good sound here?

Craig: Years ago I was on a building committee for a big church project, multimillion-dollar project. And I was the chairman of the committee, and I said at the committee meeting to some of the people that are very digitally astute, I said, “You guys have a lot of skills in these particular areas.” They could run computers. They can, you know, do everything on a computer or on their phone. I said, “I would not trade those skills for the skills I have for anything because, you know, my stuff is irreplaceable.” Everybody can learn those things, at some point. But what I’ve got and I know I can build practically anything. I can… From the finest trim work to running heavy equipment to running chainsaws, and I’ve done lots of it, you know? So gardening, you know.

Beau: That shed out there.

Craig: Yeah.

Beau: Did you have drawings for that shed?

Craig: No. You know, usually when I’m gonna build something, I’ll just knock out a little sketch myself just so I can come up with a material list and that kind of thing.

Beau: So you knew you would use beaded board there, but you knew that you would use some kind of-

Craig: Yep.

Beau: But you didn’t have… That’s as far as you went?

Craig: No, I just knocked out a little sketch just out of my head to say, “I think this is gonna look nice,” you know? And proportions are good. So.

Beau: And you needed a place to prop a little duck out there.

Craig: Yeah, that’s right. That’s right.

Beau: Is that duck dead?

Craig: Yeah, a little duck. Yeah.

Beau: It looks like that duck got shot. All this goes to say that if the lights went out tomorrow, if we had a major infrastructure attack on the power grid, it’s not beyond the pall of reason to think that could happen. We are at war with a country that has really good hackers. And if that were to happen, okay, let’s just say Craig would not be sidelined by a lack of access to the internet. But when it comes to scams, he is like all of us: an unwilling participant in the digital marketplace where our data drives vast economies of scale that beggar the imagination. And that makes him an older adult, a not only digital non-native, but a digital dabbler, a person who uses what he uses to hone in on things he already knows and hear what other people know about it. You know, he’s not really looking for anything, but he’ll dabble and sometimes get something, and that makes him vulnerable.

Beau: So what were you looking up? What were you looking for on your phone?

Craig: Oh, I just found– I just got something today. Mm-hmm. A voicemail came through, which I didn’t pick up ’cause I didn’t recognize the number. And a message was left. “Nineteen forty-five for a PlayStation 5 and 3D headset has recently been placed on your Walmart account registered in your name and phone number. If you did not make this purchase, press one now to cancel the order or immediately call us back at the same number to speak with our Walmart support. A pre-authorized purchase of nine hundred and nineteen dollars and forty-five cents for PlayStation 5 and 3D headset has recently been placed on your Walmart account registered in your name and phone number. If you did not make this purchase, press one now to cancel the order or immediately call us back on the same number. Thank you.”

Beau: Can I see it? Let me see it. All right. So paste. Okay. There’s the phone number.

Craig: Okay.

Beau: So this is the crap we all get all the time. If you listen to the series we did on the scam compounds of Southeast Asia, you know that these scams are being perpetrated by giant organizations, and the actual person making the call is often the victim of another kind of scam. They’ve been human trafficked. So it’s hard to say what actually is sitting there in your phone in the form of a text or a call. And I’m gonna search it and see what we get. Barbara Brett address and phone number, Stanford education. Well, it doesn’t pop up immediately as a scam. So my first thing is, like, I do those things first, right? And there’s no scam there. That’s not a scam. But what it is a scam is… let’s go this way. How old are you?

Craig: 71.

Beau: Are you?

Craig: Yeah.

Beau: Huh.

Craig: Yeah.

Beau: Pretty fancy.

Craig: Yeah.

Beau: I had no idea. I thought you were at least 83. So you’re 71 and-

Craig: Yeah …

Beau: You spend a lot of time gaming on things like PlayStation?

Craig: None. None.

Beau: Yeah. What’s the other thing they were selling you? Some sort of 3D goggles?

Craig: I forget. Yeah, but I don’t ever use any of this stuff. I don’t use gaming. I’ve never played a game on my phone, any kind of game on a computer. Nothing.

Beau: You know about Have I Been Pwned? That’s haveibeenpwned.com. It’s a site that allows you to check if your personal data, like email addresses, phone numbers, or passwords, have been compromised in a data breach. It was created in 2013 by a guy named Troy Hunt to give people a safe way to monitor their digital footprint. When a company gets hacked, cybercriminals often leak or sell the stolen databases which contain millions of usernames, emails, and passwords on the dark web. Troy Hunt collects these publicly exposed data dumps, verifies them, and loads them into a database. And here’s how you experience it. You enter your email or your phone number on the homepage. That’s it. The site cross-references it with billions of leaked records and gives you a status. Green, good news, no pwnage found. Your data hasn’t appeared in any breaches. Unlikely. And red, oh no, pwned, and your information’s been found. And it tells you what? Passwords, birth dates, geographic locations, where it was exposed, all that. And if you’re wondering about the, the word pwned, it, it comes from the internet gaming world. It’s just from being “owned.” It’s a typo, turned into pwned. So being pwned means your security has been compromised or defeated, ’cause we’ve all been owned as unwilling participants in this digital mayhem we call the internet. Craig has been pwned. We checked that a while ago. But there’s a kind of pwning that happened back when the internet was driving dirty with our data, and that can’t be undone, or at least not easily. Give me your phone one more time. I’m gonna show you something else. So one of the beautiful things….all right, let’s see what happens when I do this. I’m gonna give myself a break ’cause I know the town you live in. I’m gonna put it in here. All right. Let’s just do… That seems fair. All right. Okay, Craig, tell me how many times you see your information up there where someone might be able to find your phone number. Keep going.

Craig: Mm, there’s a wrong one.

Beau: Keep going.

Craig. Okay, there’s one.

Beau: Phone number, name?

Craig: Yeah, it’s got my… that’s the home phone

Beau: What about age?

Craig: Age, it’s got my age, yep

Beau: All right, so here’s the problem, Craig. A scammer sees that, and they go, “This dude probably has a Walmart account. He probably doesn’t play with, probably doesn’t have a PlayStation.”

Craig: That’s right.

Beau: And so the whole name of the game is getting you to click. Yeah Right? So the best way to do it is, like, you know, you’re not gonna… You’re like, “Oh, that’s preposterous.” Yeah, I wanna-click. It’s all about that click. But I’m sort of more curious about, like, you and I have known each other a while, and we always have good conversations and we are ideologically different. Some ways we’re very similar, but different in others. What do you think of the fact that your name and phone number are that easy to find and some company’s selling it?

Craig: No, that’s terrible. It’s just too much information out there.

Beau: When you see your name up there, I mean, was this the first time that you saw it there?

Craig: No, no.

Beau: So you’re aware that that’s-

Craig: Oh, I’m, I’m totally aware that that’s out there. Yep.

Beau: And it’s just a question of not really understanding how to get it out of there?

Craig: That’s correct.

Beau: Yep. All right. Well, we’re gonna solve that today, as you know. It’s one of the fringe benefits of having a friend In the data removal business. But, so there are laws in… There’s a law in California right now that is allowing people to opt out, and they can go fill out a form and have their stuff removed. What do you… What is your take on… I mean, do you just assume your stuff is there when you see it?

Craig: Oh, yeah.

Beau: But does it… why?

Craig: Because just the age that we’re in, you know? I think, seems like, that information is out there and you’re known.

Beau: Okay. That sounds like you listen to What the Hack?

Craig: Yep. We do.

Beau: Okay. So, all right. But like, and do you think you would’ve… Did you know that before you were kind of more aware of this issue as a-

Craig: Oh, yeah. I think I’ve known this, you know, for a number of years.

Beau: And that’s what I wanna get at. So-

Craig: Yeah …

Beau: Why is this not sort of top of the platform for all the politicians out there? ‘Cause it seems like red meat to me.

Craig: Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

Beau: So what’s the deal? Like, why is it just you’re like, “Okay, that’s just the way it is”? I’m just, I’m curious to know. You know, California has this law, liberal state with a big, you know, red state piece of it.

Craig: Mm-hmm.

Beau: But they have this law. It flew right through. A lot of states are starting to pick up on this and start to say that privacy matters on some level or another. Mm-hmm. But is it just a question of… maybe I could ask you this ’cause you are MacGyver. Is there something like this in history where people just didn’t under- is like the Corvair? Is this like the Corvair where people didn’t understand that what they made was dangerous in some way, you know, until it was already being used in a dangerous way?

Craig: No, I think, lots of people like me think it’s dangerous, but, you know, just as a private citizen feel powerless to do anything about it. You know, I think many of the politicians are in the back pocket of the industries that promote all this stuff. And, so as a private citizen, you know, myself, it’s like, sorta powerless.

Beau: So your point of view on this information being everywhere for everyone is that it shouldn’t be, but this is what happens when you let, business interests run the show.

Craig: Yeah, that’s what I would say, yep. You know, for instance, I’m not on any social media platforms. No Facebook, no X, nothing. You know, just because I don’t want my information out there, you know? I’m, you know, it’s… I know it’s a small thing and a lot of stuff is known about me anyway.

Beau: Right.

Craig: But I try to limit my exposure.

Beau: Why does that matter to you? Like, what do you mean?

Craig: Well, I don’t think that-

Beau: You know- I mean, ’cause there’s stuff on Facebook that you might wanna buy, like on Facebook marketplace?

Craig: Might be. Yeah. Are you doing- That would be good. You know, my wife is on Facebook, and I, you know, I look at her stuff- I see … but I never-

Beau: Do you need to buy something and you go on the marketplace?

Craig: Yeah, yeah. I don’t post anything or anything like that, so… Oh. Yeah.

Beau: But that’s just because you’re busy, isn’t it?

Craig: Yeah, I am busy, but that’s not a… You know, I’d rather spend my time doing other things.

Beau: So you don’t get targeted much then, I would imagine.

Craig: I hope not, no.

Beau: You don’t?

Craig: No.

Beau: I know why you don’t get targeted. ‘Cause you have chainsaws out in your shed. And you have trucks, and you’re busy using them. And you always have a dumpster in your yard. Yeah … ’cause you’re doing some job that requires it. And to me, like you know what has happened in, you know, this… I don’t even know if you think this is interesting, but, like, from when I’m interested in doing something like a construction project on my property, I’ll start looking up stuff, and within a week, everything in my social media is about that thing.

Craig: Well, I’ll even get ads just on my emails for different things.

Beau: That you’re interested in.

Craig: Yeah. It’s crazy.

Beau: Well, you know why that’s happening is because you Google it and then Google sells your information to… so we know that, but, like, the thing I guess I’m trying to get at is, like, this, the low information. You actually live in a low information world. Hmm. You grew up not terribly far from here.

Craig: That’s correct, yep.

Beau: Right?

Craig: Yep.

Beau: And you are obviously not a digital native.

Craig: Right.

Beau: And you have worked, you know, as a teacher

Craig: Yep.

Beau: And you’ve worked as a guy in construction. As a guy in construction who’s not marketing because you don’t need to, they don’t have a handle on you

Craig: No, that’s not… I believe that’s true.

Beau: And when you wanna learn how to do something now, well, I kinda know that you’re like, “I already know how to do all this stuff.”

Craig: Yeah, but a lot of things, it’s interesting you mention that.

Beau: Yeah.

Craig: Even though I’ve done lots of different things, I do all my own automotive work and work on a lot of different things. Even tasks that I’ve done before, I’ll go to YouTube and look it up because it might save me some time or there might be somebody that’s done this that has a better way to do it or something. And, you know, so I look at stuff on YouTube all the time.

Beau: And YouTube is social media. It is.

Craig: Yeah.

Beau: I mean, it doesn’t seem like it is, ’cause you’re not making comments or-

Craig: Yeah, yeah. Yep …

Beau: But it is. And Google owns it, and Google’s paying attention to what you’re looking at and that’s how you’re getting those ads. Basically the opposite of what happens when you go online and you Google your name and the town you’re from, and you find there’s your age, there’s your phone number, there’s your email address, that’s where your house is, that’s how much your house is worth, you know, all very personal stuff. The flip side of that is, you are the opposite of like, you’re like kind of just a hapless… you give me the word ’cause I don’t wanna say the word that came to mind. So what would you call that? Like, what do you call that when there’s, like, a person who’s like, you know what I was gonna say, so I don’t wanna say it.

Craig: No, no, I don’t. I don’t know what you were gonna say.

Beau: Well, I was gonna say helpless victim, but I think that’s wrong.

Craig: Yeah. No, it’s not a victim. I don’t feel like a victim at all.

Beau: No, but it’s like a casualty of a business.

Craig: Yeah.

Beau: It’s like, not even that. It’s like, you’re the byproduct of someone else’s greed.

Craig: Hmm.

Beau: So now I wanna note that you said, “Hmm,” which doesn’t mean you agree with me, but I know you well enough to know that. Recently had Senator Ron Wyden on the podcast. And someone I know who’s conservative said, “Why do you have so many liberals on the show?” And I said, “I don’t.” And they said, “You do.” And I said, “I don’t.” And we went back and forth, and it was like two kids punching each other in the arm in the playground. But the fact of the matter is, it’s not true. And what is true is privacy is not partisan.

Craig: Hmm. Absolutely.

Beau: Privacy is a crisis that we have because when all this digital landscape started to form out of nothing- There were no police. Mm. How could there be? How can you police something that doesn’t exist? Mm-hmm. And so as happens, like it did in the Wild West, people are like, “No cops? Why are there no cops?” Because there’s no boundaries, there’s no property, there’s no nothing. People are just laying claims. And that, we just, we are all, like, sitting here, the aftereffect of these digital 49ers staking claims on what they said was no man’s land. Obviously, it belonged to Native Americans. Like, it belonged to somebody. They just didn’t want that gold, or didn’t know about it, or didn’t use it, or maybe they liked it where it was. But the fact is, like, they’re digital 49ers, and we’re… I don’t know. Do you see where I’m going with that at least?

Craig: Oh, I think so. Yeah, yeah.

Beau: So we’re at a point now where we need these laws. Like, okay, this got figured out, got figured out badly. There were no cops. People did whatever they wanted. Some of this stuff should be illegal. All right. We talked about a few things right now. Let’s just go through them. We talked about the fact that you wanna use this service called YouTube so you can hone your skills.

Craig: Mm-hmm.

Beau: I totally understand that. How do you feel about the amount of money that costs you? Does it cost you anything to go on YouTube and hone your skills?

Craig: Well, not directly, not that I’m aware of, you know? But I’m sure, you know, YouTube has to make some money, you know?

Beau: And to serve you ads. And the thing is that’s… You’re paying with yourself.

Craig: Yeah.

Beau: You’re paying with your data. They are… So let me ask you another question about that. Since you’re paying for your data… I mean, you’re paying with your data, and your data could be as simple as, “I’m interested in fixing a 1956 chainsaw.”

Craig: Yeah.

Beau: And there’s a dude who did it.

Craig: Right.

Beau: That gives him a lot of information. I can probably sell him a Kubota. I can probably sell him this, I can sell him that. I can sell him a million things. He probably would love to have a skid steer. So, so… And then, you know, if you then Google how to fix a skid steer, they’re like, “Nope, he already has a skid steer.” Then they’ll go on. But they’re getting information every time you look at those videos. And then they’re making money off of it. So you’re getting the information, but you’re paying with information they’re making money off of.

Craig: Right. Right.

Beau: Should that be legal?

Craig: No, that’s an interesting question because they’re invading my privacy to do that.

Beau: Yep.

Craig: So…

Beau: Would you be willing to pay $5 a month for the service to use YouTube and have them not do that?

Craig: Probably.

Beau: Me too.

Craig: Yeah, yeah.

Beau: In a heartbeat. Yeah. I’d be like, “Oh, you want five bucks and you won’t do that creepy stuff?”

Craig: Yeah.

Beau: I would give you five bucks and not do that creepy stuff. All right, that’s one of the things we talked about. All right. You wanna go online and Google stuff. You’re looking to… You’re on a new job, and you’re looking for materials, and this is a dumb question for you ’cause you always go to the same place. But let’s say you’re doing a job on mission, ’cause you’ve done that. You go to different places, right? And you don’t know the hardware stores. And you don’t know the supply places, so you’re Googling. Do you wanna be able to do that without Google knowing that… They probably will even know that you’re on mission, because you probably Googled the group that you’re doing the mission with. You probably… They figured out, they know that’s where you went because now you’re there, and you’re looking for wood or for whatever you’re looking for. Yeah. Sheet rock or-

Craig: Yep, yep.

Beau: Should that be legal?

Craig: No, I don’t think it should be. You know, here again, how to put those guardrails in.

Beau: Well, we just have to say we don’t like it.

Craig: No, we don’t like it. No, we don’t like it.

Beau: We don’t like it. So finally, you have daughters. I have daughters.

Craig: Yeah.

Beau: Do you know what I really am not comfortable with? Some faceless, nameless site saying where they live, yeah, how old they are. Like, okay, should it be legal?

Craig: No, no. Absolutely not.

Beau: Now, here’s the bigger problem, is those sites are populated with information, I bet this is gonna… This is the hard part, by publicly available information that the government makes available. So it’s like your wedding license, your… When you buy a house. All this stuff. All this stuff that was presumed to be difficult enough to get that you wouldn’t have a problem. It wasn’t protected because nobody saw the internet coming.

Craig: That’s true.

Beau: The internet’s here now. Should that stuff be protected?

Craig: Yeah, I think, I think it should be. There’s just too much out there for everybody to get, so.

Beau: So is it bad?

Craig: Yeah, but the flip side is, you know, it is interesting because sometimes if I do a search on, for instance, I just bought my little Toyota Tacoma a couple years ago.

Beau: Mm-hmm.

Craig: And I was looking for some some accessory that I wanted to buy, and something popped up, something to the effect of like hidden features on your Tacoma that you don’t know about, which that was pretty helpful ’cause I clicked on that.

Beau: Yeah, yeah.

Craig: You know? And it showed me some stuff that otherwise I wouldn’t have been aware of, so.

Beau: That’s the flip side.

Craig: Yeah, exactly.

Beau: Is like you get, you…. YouTube knows how to make their service valuable to you so that you’re willing to make that trade.

Craig: Yep.

Beau: Do you still think that what they do should be illegal?

Craig: Yeah, I do. Yeah.

Beau: Craig and I hung out till I knew it was probably his bedtime, which I’m not gonna embarrass him and say how early that is, but early. He gets up at like 4:00 or 5:00. He had to get up early the next day, grandkids were coming over, they were putting blueberry netting up. Probably had some other project. He has three different versions of the same tool to do, you know, whatever that job might be. On the drive home, I kept thinking about Craig, the unwilling participant when it comes to things digital at least. The guy who built the drainage system around his house. He dug it himself. Who scratched “22” on his lamppost and a little directional line so that the next owner would know where the water shutoff is. It’s that guy I’m talking about. And that’s the whole thing. This isn’t a story about people who don’t know how the world works. It’s a story about people who know exactly how it works and still can’t get their hands around it because it’s not playing by the rules. The internet was built by people like Craig, actually, but with digital chops, and they have been driving their creations around unlicensed since the early days of the internet. There are no laws governing things that didn’t exist when the laws were being written of course, right? This isn’t political. This is personal. Privacy shouldn’t be political. It never should be. But it needs politicians to stand up to the folks who fund their campaigns and yet, you know, are driving dirty all over the place with our lives online. Don’t like it? Good. You shouldn’t. Do something about it. Write to your local lawmakers. Opt out whenever you can. Now it’s time for the Tinfoil Swan, our paranoid takeaway to keep you safe on and offline. You watched me pull up Craig’s name, age, phone number, and address in about, I don’t know if it was 15 seconds. No seconds. Real quick. No hack required. Just his name and the town he’s lived in his whole life. The file was assembled from public records, open records that are scraped, that shouldn’t be scrapable by companies, but they are. Whoever left that Walmart voicemail almost certainly used something exactly like it to confirm that Craig was worth calling, that he was 71, that he would react to something about gaming, yada, yada, yada. So you know what I’m gonna say here. Go to JoinDeleteMe. If you wanna start free, you can. You know, Spokeo, Whitepages, BeenVerified, Inteli-they all have opt-out pages. It’s a lot of work. If you wanna know what your situation is, just go to the DeleteMe site, joindeleteme.com, and do a free scan. If you remove these things, they come right back. They pop back up just as fast as things are scanned on open source. So, it is easier to have someone do it for you, but it can be done by yourself. Just be open, be ready, and stay safe, and get your information offline because it really does matter. All right. Talk to you next week. Thanks so much. What the Hack is a production of DeleteMe, which was picked by the New York Times’ Wirecutter as the #1 personal information removal service. You should be using it already. If you’re not and you want to, well, you can. Here’s what to do. Go to joindeleteme.com/wth. That’s joindeleteme.com/wth and get 20% off. I kid you not, 20%. 20% off. That’s joindeleteme.com/wth. Now stay safe out there. See you around.

Learn More:

• Learn more about the history of the internet and modern tracking.
• Learn more about data brokers and how they contribute to online exploitation and risk.
• Read more about common online threats in 2026 and how to avoid them.