Defend Your Digital Life w/ Nathan Bartram #1025

The pace at which technology advances is straight up disorienting in our current age. So much so, that it’s likely digital natives and even our kids who can figure out new tech gadgets faster than we can! For those of you who are using apps and AI regularly but not feeling like a pro – you’re worried about your privacy, passwords, & data as you navigate the online world – this episode is for you. Nathan Bartram founded TheNewOil.org in 2018 to equip everyday folks with the resources, websites, and alternatives they need to navigate the online world with confidence. We discuss why to even be concerned about privacy at all, favorite password managers, why Nathan detests Amazon, basic steps that everyone should take, and plenty more!

 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Hat of Money. I'm Joel, and today we're
talking about defending your digital life with Nathan Bartram. I

(00:25):
know I'm not talking to a bunch of dummies, but
I categorize my technologe as mid as the kids say,
at best. I'm at that point in my life where
my twelve year old can figure out new gadgets faster
than I can. It's kind of humiliating to admit that
right now. But for those of you out there who
might feel like me, using tech regularly but not feeling
like a pro. Maybe you're worried about your privacy. You're

(00:47):
worried about passwords and data as you navigate the online
world that has been around for many, many years now.
So me calling it the online world makes me sound old,
But this episode is for you. Nathan Bartram founded the
site thenewoil dot org back in twenty eighteen to help
average folks feel equipped with the information they need to
navigate this world of online reality with confidence. So Nate,

(01:12):
can I call you Nate? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:13):
Of course?

Speaker 1 (01:14):
All right, thank you for joining me today.

Speaker 2 (01:15):
Pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

Speaker 1 (01:17):
Of course, and Nate, you have been a listener to
the show. For many many years. We have emailed back
and forth, and you have often offered suggestions as we've
covered topics about on many of these on many of
these subjects like privacy, passwords, and data so and you
write about them eloquently, have been for many many years now.
First question, though, what is your craftee equivalent? What do

(01:40):
you like to suplurge on? My friend, I'm super curious
to hear. While you're saving for the future, what are
you splurging on in the meantime.

Speaker 2 (01:46):
Oh man, this is going to be a really boring answer, actually,
but I've been thinking about this question, and I think
my answer is going to be privacy and security stuff.
And I know that sounds like a cop out because
that's what I do with the New Oil, right, But
the thing is, that's what I was doing before the
New Oil, Like, that's kind of what led me to
starting the New Oil is I was experimenting with all
this stuff, and I wanted to play. I wanted to

(02:07):
share my journey and my experience. And so even if
the New Oil wasn't a thing, if you know, nobody
was reading it and it was just me by myself. Again,
that's still what I'd be doing, is you know, different
subscriptions and tools and sometimes hardware.

Speaker 1 (02:19):
So okay, can you give me an example of something
you've spent recently on in that category? And people might
be like, all right, I never even thought to do that.

Speaker 2 (02:27):
Okay, not recent but a few years ago I spent
about six hundred dollars on a router, Okay, and yeah,
that's a lot of money for a router. Is it?

Speaker 1 (02:35):
Is it vastly superior than the ones you get from
the Internet companies or that I could buy on you know,
a random tech website like best buy or something.

Speaker 2 (02:42):
You could probably find it on best Buy, But it
is vastly superior. And the reason I bought it is
because it's compatible with an open source firmware called DDWRT,
which allows you to do all kinds of things that honestly,
I'm probably not even using eighty percent of what this
router can do, but it unlocks all kinds of really
cool privacy and security abilities, which some you can get

(03:02):
on a typical router, but some are definitely a little
more advanced in the ability to like segment the network
so you can kind of like, I know, we're diving
in a little bit. But one piece of advice is
one common piece of advice is to put all your
your smart devices on like a guest network, so that way,
if any of them get compromised, it doesn't spread to
the rest of your network. You can kind of do
that without having to create a guest network, So just

(03:24):
really really advance things like that.

Speaker 1 (03:26):
One of the things I appreciate about your tact and
I mentioned this in the bio, is that you're kind
of attempting not to speak to the techies in the
space or super nerds who care about privacy at this
incredibly granular level, but you're trying to speak to people
like me who want to improve their privacy but probably

(03:47):
aren't going to buy a six hundred dollars router, right,
So right, that's like that's your audience. So what would
you say? I guess maybe the first question. A lot
of people assume genies out of the bottle at this point.
I remember that equip data breach in twenty eighteen, and
there's you know, I assume I've signed up for a
Facebook account. At this point, they know everything about me.

(04:09):
What would you say to those people who are like
my guess my data is public genies out of the bottle?
Do I still need to care about privacy?

Speaker 2 (04:15):
Biastanswer, of course, but yes, And it's funny. I actually
wrote a blog post about this. It's I think it's
called a why to care about privacy after so many
years or something like that. And there's the practical reason
in the philosophical reason, And the practical reason is that
data gets old. You know, over time, you move, you
change interests, you become a different person, like most of
us over our lives. We don't dramatically become different people,

(04:37):
but we do change enough that you know, you look
back on yourself ten years ago and you're like, man,
I was a totally different person back then. And over
time that data that they've collected about you will grow
stale and grow old. The philosophical reason is the example
I gave in the blog post was if you're driving
somewhere that you go all the time, like a friend's house,
and you're kind of on autopilot, and you realize all

(04:59):
of a sudden you took a wrong turn. You went
left instead of right. You don't just keep going left
like once you know how to do better, you're like, oh, Okay,
I should change what I'm doing, And so that's a
I guess that one kind of assumes that you do
value your privacy. But yeah, once you realize, like, oh,
there are options and I don't have to keep doing this,
in my opinion, it seems a little silly to just
keep going the wrong way on the road, so to speak.

Speaker 1 (05:20):
Should we value our privacy and in what ways is
our privacy being violated? How does that impact us? I
guess because some people might say, yeah, I've heard that
excuse from some folks. I've got nothing to hide, So
why does it matter if they know my address, my name,
my birthday, my firstborn child's name, Like, who cares?

Speaker 2 (05:39):
I was really hoping you'd bring that up. So the
answer is everyone does have something to hide, and what
it is varies from person to person. And the example
I was thinking of in my head is, especially for
this audience, if you think you have nothing to hide,
don't actually do this, but please send us your bank
account login. Right, Yeah, yeah, because with that information, even
if you don't have a lot of money, maybe you

(06:00):
need that money to pay your groceries. So we all
do have something to hide. And the way that I
define privacy. There's a lot of different ways to define it,
but I define it as having that control over what
you want to share and who you want to share
it with. So privacy. A lot of people confuse privacy
and anonymity. When they hear privacy, they think, oh, I'm
going to go live in a cabin in the woods
and I'm never going to have a phone and nobody's

(06:20):
going to know who I am. But really it's just
it's the same as you would it's your day job.
You know, when when you go to work on Monday,
you're not going to tell your boss about the fight
you had with your spouse, And that's that's privacy. You
have that ability to say, I don't want this person
to know this thing. Yeah, and I think we should
care because a lot of the time we're not being
given that choice from tech companies.

Speaker 1 (06:38):
That's yeah. So no, that's true, and that's that's essentially
what the business model is based on with a lot
of these tech companies. Is right, when it's a free product,
we are the product. And I saw the other day
that what Pinterest makes three dollars a year from the
average user, but Facebook makes like twenty six twenty seven
dollars a year from the average US, So they would

(07:01):
rather you not pay them and just continue to keep
you engaged because they're making money off of you in
other ways. So is part of and is there any
remedy to the fact that we're doing business with companies
who profit in this way from us using their product
without actually paying them a dime. It seems like it

(07:21):
seems like we're making out Scott clean, right. I get Gmail,
and I don't pay Google anything, and it's super helpful
to me to use all of those Google assets that
they provided. But what am I losing in the process?

Speaker 2 (07:33):
I think in answer to your first question, I think
there are ways to use a lot of the common
services in ways that are less privacy invasive. So one
of the really big examples I give you mentioned Facebook.
You can use Facebook in the browser, even on your phone,
and that browser is going to offer you a lot
more protection than it would if you were using the app.
Because the thing about phone apps, especially mobile apps, is

(07:57):
they get a lot of permission. And Google an Apple
are doing a lot better about giving users more control
over that, but for now, they still get a lot
of permission and they can access a lot more data
than you would normally expect, Like, I don't know if
this is still true, but at one point the Facebook
app was using the sensors on your phone, like the
gyroscope to figure out if you were like on a
bus or if you were walking down the street and

(08:18):
things like that. So things like using it in a browser,
especially like a privacy protecting browser, will really mitigate a
lot of that risk you mentioned, like what are you
giving up by using Google It? Again, it really depends
on the person and what they value, because there are
a lot of really good privacy protecting services, Like a
really popular one is proton Mail, and yeah, yeah, I'm

(08:41):
sure you've heard of that one. It's a privacy it's
an encrypted email provider, and it's definitely missing some things
that Google has, but it's building out as Suite and
it's trying to be like a Google competitor, and it's
a pretty polished service. But at the same time, there
are still a lot of people who used Gmail, Like
I've signed up for things that don't accept pro on
Mail for some reason or another, and I have to

(09:01):
use a Gmail or you know, you need a Gmail
account to post on YouTube and things like that. So
I think that is a really good question though, actually
is what are you gaining from using some of these services?
Does it outweigh what you're losing in terms of privacy?
And are there any ways you can mitigate that if
you need that service.

Speaker 1 (09:17):
Sure, trade offs are kind of the reality throughout all
of life. But yeah, I mean, if it wasn't for Gmail,
Google Calendar, like my life would be, I'd be on
the side of the road in a ditch somewhere. It's yeah,
I remember trying to get organized when I was a
youngster and it just wasn't happening. And then finally Google
came along and I was like, oh, okay, this actually

(09:38):
works for my life. But yeah, you are giving things
up in the process. I'm also curious to you are,
and I want to talk more about some of the
products that you mentioned and just other products that some
are free, some cost money, but they can help on
the privacy front instead of just going with the tried
and true brands that maybe you initially think of. So
we'll get to some questions on that in a bit.
But you talk on you're on the blog about how

(10:01):
privacy exists on a spectrum. We had re released an
episode recent about how financial independence exists on a spectrum
and for a lot of people think it's one or
the other. It's like I'm not or I am not true. Well,
the same thing is true with privacy, right, So it's
not like I'm fully private or my goodness, I've exposed
everything that people know about me. It's all public now.

(10:23):
So how do you think about that? And I guess
the only way to get like fully private, even in
today's age, it would be kind of like to never
sign up for these services in the first place and
then move to the backwoods of Maine, which most people
aren't going to do. Plus, I hear the bugs are
horrendous in the summer. So how do you think about
that spectrum and how you help people think about well,
this is like a reasonable step to take, and then

(10:44):
this is maybe unreasonable even though it does give you
added layers of privacy in your life.

Speaker 2 (10:50):
Well, I think that's a question that everyone has to
ask for themselves. I really do believe there's no like
one size fits all in privacy. I think there's certain
things like best practices. Just like personal finance, there's best
practices that everyone should do, you know, like putting away
at least ten percent of their income and stuff like that.
And with privacy, it's it's very similar, things like using
a password manager and two factor authentication whenever possible. But yeah,

(11:13):
I mean, there's a really famous quote that I'm definitely
not going to get right here, but it was a
really famous computer scientist said something along the lines of
no system is truly unhackable unless it's unplugged, the battery
is removed, it's buried six feet underground and surrounded and led,
and even then I'm not sure. And he's absolutely correct,
because we see all kinds of crazy research come out,
especially this time of year. There's a really big hacker

(11:35):
convention that just ended this past weekend, and these are
the people who are always announcing like, oh, we can
use the the Wi Fi waves from your router to
figure out who's in the room through the wall, Like
that's an actual thing. That's an actual thing. But I
mean those are so high level.

Speaker 1 (11:49):
Was that blows my mind?

Speaker 2 (11:51):
Yeah? Yeah, but you know it's like you said, I mean,
it's I'm certainly not going to go live in the
woods and forsake my phone and all that kind of stuff.
So it's it's it's really about people coming up with
what is a realistic threat and what are the realistic
defenses against it, because you can't defend against everything, it's
just not possible. But I think people will find that

(12:11):
it's actually what do they call that, like Pereto's rule
or something. You can get like eighty percent of the
stuff with twenty percent of the effort.

Speaker 1 (12:18):
Yeah, and then at that point the extra effort is
only gonna it's going to be smaller, more incremental gains
that might not be the juice, might not be worth
the squeeze. You mentioned passwords, and my guess is most
people listening have and most sites force you to have
a reasonable password at this point in time, right, They're like,
you got to have uppercase lowercase. You got to have
a couple like an exclamation mark or and you know

(12:40):
you have to. You can't just be password all in
lowercase anymore. And so even my grandma had to update
her password. I'm sure it was, which is good good
for her. But you mentioned password managers. Do you have
suggestions on which ones might be best to use? Some of
them cost money, others don't, and how much dinection do they.

Speaker 2 (13:00):
Offer sure, So I do have with almost all of
the tools we're going to talk about. I do actually
list my recommendations on the website. And for the record,
just because I don't list something on the website doesn't
necessarily mean it's bad, Like I don't list dash Lane,
but I would rather people use dash Lane than not
use a password manager. But some of my favorites I've
been using Bitwarden for years. I've got most of my

(13:21):
family on that one. Proton We've mentioned proton Mail. They
recently rolled out their own password manager that my podcast
co host loves. He uses it for all his stuff.
I think there's a couple others. One password is really popular.
That one costs about a dollar a year, but the
first two are free, so there's actually a lot. There's
a surprising amount of moves you can make in privacy

(13:42):
without spending money. There's a lot of things you can
do that are free, like password managers, two factor switching, browsers.
Those things don't cost money unless you need some of
the more advanced features, which most people don't. So that's
the good news.

Speaker 1 (13:55):
But I'm hearing more ads for VPNs and which you
allow people maybe to either watch Netflix content they otherwise
wouldn't be able to that exists in other countries or
something like that. Not that I'm condoning it, I don't
personally do that, but how much how secure do VPNs
make you and how big of a how important is

(14:17):
that maybe in the digital ecosystem of protecting your privacy.

Speaker 2 (14:21):
So on my website, I organize everything in order of
most important to least important, and that's a little bit subjective.
I've had some people disagree with my ordering there, but
I put VPNs on the last page. They do offer
you some protection, but yeah, a lot of the advertising
is seriously overrated. So what I always tell people is
VPNs do two things. They change your IP address and

(14:45):
they establish a secure connection between you and the VPN server.
And so, in other words, by changing the IP address,
like you said, you look like you're coming from somewhere else,
So you could maybe stream Netflix in the UK or
something like that, or I think a BBC iPlayer is
a really common one, and that is a useful use case.
But in terms of privacy, your IP address is a

(15:05):
very small portion of how companies track you online. So
it's definitely something, but I wouldn't really I think one
time I compared it to like changing the pain on
your car. You've still got the same license plate, you
still got the same ven, you still got all these
other identifying features. So it doesn't really help that much.
And in terms of security, we do sometimes see apps
that are unencrypted, but for the most part. Last time

(15:27):
I checked, Google said that somewhere around ninety five percent
of the Internet is encrypted now. And that's a really
complicated thing that I don't want to go too far
into because that could turn into a whole explanation. But basically,
when I say encrypted, I mean between your device and
their server. So when you connect to Facebook, anybody in
between your phone and Facebook, they might be able to
see you're connected to Facebook, but they can't really see

(15:49):
any of the content or the messages or anything Facebook
can of course, But so VPNs don't really change that.
There is a use case if you're in a place
where you have a reason to believe that maybe the
rauter you're using is compromised, but I personally have never
seen that. Even again, there's a common example is like
using it in public Wi Fi. Your connection is encrypted

(16:09):
at your device, so it would be a fairly advanced
attack for the router to be malicious like that. But
if I would say, if it makes you feel better
and you have the money, you certainly can get a VPN.
They do help some, but they're definitely not the panacea
that advertisers make them out to be.

Speaker 1 (16:24):
Yeah, those ads make it sound like the best thing
since lifespread.

Speaker 2 (16:27):
Oh and yeah, hacker proof anonymous and yeah.

Speaker 1 (16:30):
Yeah, yeah. Okay, Well, so you published a guide on
your site about staying safe while you're shopping online. And
I'm curious, especially as that is one of the things
that probably how the money listeners care about is like, Okay,
what am I giving over when I'm shopping with a
unique vendor or or with a website that I place
orders from regularly. One of the things you tell people

(16:53):
to do, which is impossible to do online but possible
to do in real life, is to use cash more
often when you're buying stuff, just to anonymize those purchases.
But yeah, how do you think about staying safe when
shopping online? Do you have any tips in particular in
regards to that.

Speaker 2 (17:08):
Sure, it depends on what you're trying to stay safe from.
If you're trying to and that's kind of a reoccurring
theme with privacy. We call it a threat model, So
if anybody goes to the website, you'll see a page
about that. It's just a fancy way of saying what
are you trying to protect and who are you trying
to protect it from. If your goal is to not
get your credit card numbers stolen, you probably want to
stick with reputable vendors, like you want to go straight
to the store like Walmart or Target or I'm not

(17:31):
a huge fan of Amazon, but there is something to
be said that we all know who Amazon are or is,
we can probably trust their security fairly well. Here in America,
we have access to a service called privacy dot com
that I'm a huge fan of. It allows you to
create virtual debit cards that lock to that vendor. So,
for example, if you create one for let's say your
Netflix account, it can only ever be used at Netflix.

(17:52):
So if Netflix has a data breach, that card is
useless to the people who stole it. It can't be used
anywhere except Netflix.

Speaker 1 (17:58):
And there are other There are banks who have created
products that go alongside their credit cards too, like Capital
One has one of those two that creates virtual virtual cards,
so it's yeah, that's a real helpful tool, Tore. Yeah,
that anonymized card is only available to be spent. You
can only use it at that one vendor.

Speaker 2 (18:15):
Yeah, definitely. If you live outside the US or for
some reason don't want to use privacy dot Com, definitely
check with your bank. Is It's not a super common feature,
but it's becoming more common. I'm seeing it a lot
more for sure. Yeah. There's also things like using they're
called alias emails, so services like simple Login add E
dot io. These basically you can create an email address

(18:35):
that still forwards to your inbox, so you can manage
it all from one place and it's really convenient. But
it really helps with like spam. If you shop online
and they start spamming you, you can just turn off
the email address. Or in terms of privacy, it also helps.
It kind of breaks up your profile a little bit,
so you're not using the same email address across multiple
services and that helps protect your privacy.

Speaker 1 (18:54):
That sounds nice because unsubscribing can be like a full
time job these days. Oh yes, yeah, sometimes, Nate. I
don't know how this happens. I guess it's cookies, but
you'll visit a site you won't do a darn thing.
Maybe you like literally looked at one item and you'll
get an email in your inbox ten minutes later, and
they'll be like, are you still shopping? You're sure you
didn't want to buy that thing, And I'm like, how
did how did that happen? How did you get in

(19:15):
my inbox? I didn't submit anything to you. It's kind
of creepy.

Speaker 2 (19:18):
That is interesting. I haven't heard that one. Yeah, I
would say cookies would probably be the primary offender there.
I'd have to do some digging. I'm not sure, but.

Speaker 1 (19:27):
It's probably because I have an account there and I'm
logged in and I'm looking at something that must be it.
And maybe it's not fully anonymous. It's a site I've
done business at before and so they know it's me
coming back. But I'm sure that's not. I can't imagine
how they'll be possible at a website that I've never
spent a dollar at before, or never created an account at.
You kind of just briefly mentioned how much you loathe Amazon,

(19:50):
and yeah, you're kind of would love for people to
use Amazon a lot less. I think myself included from
I think most people's just this need response. It's like
I think I might need that thing one click, by
it's there the next day or two days later. And
so people have just gotten used to spending money when
they otherwise would have come up with a more creative

(20:11):
solution in years past. So what's your reason for getting
people off the Amazon train?

Speaker 2 (20:16):
Oh gosh, there's a lot of them, and some of
them are kind of political. So I don't want to
go too deep into that because I know you guys
aren't really a super political podcast. But there's a just
to kind of very briefly brush over this, and I
do have a recent blog post about this. I republish
it every time Prime Week rolls around. They have teamed
up with police to give police access to ring doorbell footage,
so if I'm just walking past somebody's house, police can

(20:38):
see me, even if I'm not on a list. I'm
not suspected of anything.

Speaker 1 (20:41):
You look like a threat to me, Nate. That's all
I'm gonna say. I think you belong behind bars.

Speaker 2 (20:45):
It's the tattoos. But yeah, there's also they're just very
anti worker like workers in I believe this was in Alabama,
workers tried to unionize and Amazon tried to get a
camera above the ballot box to ensure election integrity and
definitely not to know who voted yes and no.

Speaker 1 (21:02):
Of course not.

Speaker 2 (21:03):
Yeah, of course they would know. It's just they just
do a lot of really shady things like that. And
you could also make the argument that they're crushing out
a lot of smaller businesses and making competition harder. So
I think there's a lot of reasons to avoid them,
just from the idea of like centralization and trying to
ensure a healthy competition. And like you said, I want
to make it clear that I understand sometimes you need
to buy on Amazon, like I buy things from there

(21:25):
about two or three times a year, But like you said,
what I want people to avoid is the knee jerk
reaction of like, oh, I need something one click by
when you know, maybe you could run down to your
local store and buy it and sometimes that's even cheaper
and you get it faster and yeah, so it's just
kind of challenging that instinct of going straight to Amazon.
I think would benefit a lot of people.

Speaker 1 (21:43):
I'm curious about the ads that we see online. They're
highly tailored. Now right, Matt's talked about seeing Instagram ads
online for stuff that just like you're shocked. How does
it know me so well? It knows me better than like,
my wife never would have bought this awesome gift for me.
She doesn't know me that well. And so, yeah, when
it comes to the ads we're seeing, is that all
just based on places we're stopping? Is there a way

(22:06):
that's also kind of creepy for a lot of people?
Is there a way to is it ad blockers? What's
the what's the way to kind of make sure that
ads aren't you know, so incredibly detailed as as they
serve up, you know, before our eyeballs in a way
that feels uncomfortable or maybe that we're giving way too
much information.

Speaker 2 (22:25):
Yeah, that's a great question. There's the answer is there's
a lot of ways that they track you, and fortunately
that also means there's a lot of ways you can
fight back. So ad blockers are a good one. My
personal favorite is called you block Origin. I do mention
that one on my website, and that one blocks more
than just ads, It also blocks a lot of common
trackers like Google Analytics and stuff like that, which I

(22:48):
know is for the people who have a website. I
know that's not great because that does damage your analytics,
but unfortunately that's kind of the situation. I guess there's also.

Speaker 1 (22:59):
Better for the individual, and that's kind of who we're
speaking to you right.

Speaker 2 (23:02):
Well, and I guess I will say on that note,
if you're you can choose to whitelist certain sites. So
if you say you're on YouTube and you're like, well,
I want to support the creators, you can tell U
block Origin not to work on YouTube and see the ads.
But there's also apps, especially apps with ads in them. Ads. Ironically,
ads are right now, to my knowledge, like the biggest
privacy invasion that are feeding its own ecosystem because they

(23:26):
use a system called real time bidding, which again that's
a whole thing, but basically, every time you see an AD,
there is a within nanoseconds, there is an auction that
goes on and your information is sent out to everyone
who might be interested in that ad space. So even
if they don't purchase the ad, they still basically get
a copy of all your data. So one of the
things I tell people is just remove as many apps

(23:47):
as you can on your phone, things that you don't
use very often. And this can have, like you know,
personal finance benefits. We just talked about Amazon. If you
take the Amazon app off your phone, you're not as
likely to just instinctually open it and click one click
by yeah, And you're also getting that privacy benefit things
like Reddit. You know, Reddit is littered with ads. Taking
those things off your phone will reduce the amount of
data that's getting sent back to advertisers.

Speaker 1 (24:09):
So it's like a big win just to take some
of those apps that you're man even just think about
the habitual nature of like you press your finger to
the thing because you know exactly where it is on
your screen. Just taking it off there, you're gonna like
hit that space and you like, what's happening now, Like
there's there is something to the habitual nature. But then
also to protecting your privacy, protecting your finances, that taking

(24:32):
those apps off off the phone can be, it can
it can be a serious move to help on all
those fronts. All right, I want to get to more
with you, Nate, and in particular, you're not a fan
of smart TVs, so but I'm guessing most of the
population out there has one loves it. So let's we'll
throw you in the fire on that one in just
a second with the audience. We'll be right back right,

(25:00):
We're back still talking with Nate Bartram about defending your
digital life and privacy and all that stuff. And there's
just a lot more to get to Nate. I'm not
sure if you've read the book. One of my favorite
books of like kind of on this topic was Digital
Minimalism by Cal Newport.

Speaker 2 (25:17):
Yes, that's a great book.

Speaker 1 (25:18):
I love it so good, and I just love the
way he thinks about just the way we have include
technology in our lives. I think for a lot of
people it's just this assumption that more technology is good
and let's adopt everything that comes out and then maybe
at some point we'll discard it. But he's very intentional
from the get go about what he imports and what

(25:40):
he likes, and he has never opened a social media
account in his life. I don't think so. He's he's
one of those rare birds. But yeah, you're not just
doing it for productivity reasons or for attention reasons, which
seem to be kind of Col's main motivation. Like, Hey,
I'm going to keep this digital minimalism going because I
realized it's going to distract me from those other things

(26:01):
I want to accomplish. So why do you fall into
that camp?

Speaker 2 (26:04):
I'm glad you brought that up, the thing I've noticed
about privacy, And for the record, I will admit maybe
this is a bias. Like you know they say, like
when you're a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Yeah,
But the more I do the privacy thing, the more
I notice that there are all of these like peripheral
benefits that maybe privacy isn't like central to that, but
there are little things so I mean, really there's a

(26:25):
lot of them. Like for example, I'm thankfully i am
not a visually impaired, but I'm told that advertising is
chaos for like visually impaired people like screen readers, and
so ad blockers can like make the screen a lot cleaner.
That's like an example of a peripheral benefit for people.
And I think I've noticed since getting into privacy that

(26:45):
it really does clear up a lot of bandwidth. You know,
a lot of the flash in the pan news stories
and the memes, the ones that don't really matter, that
they're kind of out of the new cycle within a
couple of days. I tend to miss a lot of those,
and it just frees up a lot of bandwidth. I
tend to miss a lot of not to sound like
arrogant or anything, but just a lot of petty little
drama that happens on social media. I found a lot

(27:06):
of my interactions with people have gotten a lot more meaningful,
even if they're the same interactions. Like, you know, my
sister might send me a photo of my excuse me,
a photo of my nephew, and you know it's the
same photo she might post on Facebook, but the fact
that she took time out of her day to send
it directly to me, like, really feels a lot more meaningful. Person.
I feel like there's just so many peripheral benefits. There's

(27:27):
the peace of mind. There's just more mental bandwidth from
not looking at ads, having that healthier relationship with technology.
When I get frustrated, I can just turn off my
computer and walk away and I'm disconnected.

Speaker 1 (27:36):
And I want to say, there was now a study
that just dropped, like last week or something about just
how our brains have become rewired in short order from
our use of social media, and it is that we
all know this intuitively as individuals and as a society
when you look around and you're like, what are people
doing when they get a down moment? Boom the phone, right, boom,

(27:58):
the earbuds whatever, And so yeah, I think our attention
spans truly have plummeted, and it impacts our relationships. It
impacts a whole bunch of things in our lives that
downstream effects are real. So with that in mind, I'm curious.
I mentioned the smart TV thing. How much you hate
smart TVs? Why do you hate them? What's the alternative

(28:20):
for people who want to watch streaming content?

Speaker 2 (28:24):
I don't, to be honest, I don't think I hate
is a strong word.

Speaker 1 (28:28):
Okay, all right, I put words in your mouth.

Speaker 2 (28:30):
No, you're good, You're good. I actually I will admit
I do have a smart TV because my wife enjoys streaming.
I think my issue with a lot of smart devices
in general is that we have so little control over them.
You know, you can go into the settings. Okay, Actually,
this is a really good example. I was playing around
with my smart TV and I noticed that in the
menu I could disagree to the terms of service. But

(28:50):
guess what happens when I do?

Speaker 1 (28:52):
They shut off the smart fe Sure, exactly.

Speaker 2 (28:54):
It's not a smart TV anymore. So I can either
agree to all of their terms of service wholesale full stop,
nor or I can just have a dumb TV, which
is great if I want a dumb TV, but I don't.
There's things we use that for.

Speaker 1 (29:05):
I want to say, years ago, Visio was recording people's
viewing habits and they were selling the data on what
people were watching.

Speaker 2 (29:13):
I think a lot of people are still doing that,
actually a lot of manufacturers.

Speaker 1 (29:16):
So that's one of those things where again it's a
trade off. It's like you better know that that's happening,
because it seems like it seems like, oh, well, great,
I got this product and now I can watch whatever
I want to watch out my fingertips. It's super easy.
But if you don't realize that part of that bargain
is the fact that you are giving up the data
on your viewing habits to Samsung or Visio or whoever

(29:37):
it is, then you're not making that choice with all
the data on the table exactly.

Speaker 2 (29:44):
And like you were saying earlier, that's by designs. They
go out of their way to hide those things, or
they like to dress it up and really fancy, like
if you check a privacy policy. A lot of the
time they'll say, oh, we collect this data to make
your experience better. Yeah, and what they really mean by
that is targeted advertising. Yeah, going to Tailor that.

Speaker 1 (30:00):
We're seeing it more too in the car space. Now,
I'm curious how much you know or care about that, like,
and that's I'm not gonna say that. This is my
whole reason for driving old cars, but it makes me
less inclined to upgrade my six Toyota when I realized
that the new one is not only going to have

(30:22):
more computerized parts that are more likely to break, it's
gonna be harder to repair newer vehicles, and they're just
more expensive to buy and own. But then, on top
of that, when you think about the privacy concerns of
newer cars, the fact that they're connected to the Internet
wherever they go. Yeah, that seems like a plus. So
you can listen, you can stream the new Tailor Swift
album when it drops, right. But then there's other there's

(30:43):
other things that come with that with that bargain.

Speaker 2 (30:46):
Yeah, there's a reporter. Her name is Kashmir Hill k
A s H M I R. If you look her up,
she's done several pieces, I believe for New York Times
that have kind of really brought this issue to the mainstream,
which I'm really grateful for. I think you guys have
actually mentioned her on one of your Friday flights. And
it's Yeah, it's really tough because on the one hand,

(31:09):
for now, that is an option you could drive an
older car, which also saves you a lot of money,
as you pointed out, But there's also My last car
was a twenty ten, and I don't want to say
what model it was, but it was a very very
common model, Like I just saw one the other day,
still making these cars. And the last time I went
into AutoZone and I was like, hey, I need a headlight,
and they're like, oh, we don't carry that anymore for
a twenty ten.

Speaker 1 (31:28):
It's too old.

Speaker 2 (31:28):
Yeah exactly, And I'm like, it's a headlight for a
twenty ten, what do you mean?

Speaker 1 (31:32):
In their defense, it was a Ferrari, Nate, we all
know it.

Speaker 2 (31:35):
I wish I made that kind of money, but yeah, no,
it's that's the challenge we're going to face as things
go forward. Is maybe right now you can find vehicles
or maybe I could have ordered it online but it's
going to become harder to find parts, and it's going
to become more of a thing where you have to
get creative or know somebody who's a mechanic. And it's unfortunately,
I don't really have any good solutions in that space,

(31:55):
and I don't think anybody does. There's a good organization
called Privacy for Cars who is doing a lot of
research into this and trying to lobby for better consumer rights.
But I mean, right now, it's you know, again, like
I said, companies do it on purpose. They want you
to dig through pages and pages illegal ease to find
the email address to email them and opt out, and

(32:16):
of course nobody has time for that, so it's it's
a really difficult thing.

Speaker 1 (32:19):
So what are you doing when you're signing up for
something new? The terms of service, of course are I mean,
it's laughable how long they are, how small the type is,
and how ninety nine point nine plus percent of people
quickly use the scrolly thing on their mouse to jump
to the bottom and click. Okay, So but what are

(32:41):
we signing when we say yes, when we hit accept
and what is there a different tact we should take?

Speaker 2 (32:48):
Good? Question? So there's a there's another website called terms
of Service didn't read TSDR for short, kind of like
the what's the abbreviation TLDR too. Yeah, they list a
surprising number of websites and they explain the terms of
service in plain English and like bullet points. I will
be honest, I think some of the stuff that they

(33:09):
cover is a little bit pedantic, but I do appreciate
that they give you that level of information and that'll
kind of tell you and some of it is kind
of common. Like I'm not saying this makes it right,
but a lot of websites, like Instagram, for example, when
you sign up for Instagram, they basically say we can
use your photos for anything. So if you see one
of your photos and an Instagram ad, you don't get
royalties because you sign that away with the terms of service.

(33:30):
So that's a really good website for maybe helping to
vet some of the terms of service and understand what
you're signing away. In terms of alternatives, I mean, there's
a few options there in there's a really good website
called Alternative two Alternative two dot net, and it is
exactly what it says, Like you can type in Instagram
and it'll give you all the different alternatives to Instagram,
and you can filter it by Android, iPhone, if it's free,

(33:53):
if it's paid, all kinds of things, and they have
all kinds of websites and services. So I would say
maybe start with that, because it really depends what you're
talking about with these different services. But yeah, there's honestly
there usually is a good alternative out there in my experience.

Speaker 1 (34:06):
Okay, are you Apple or Android? I know, at least
in the marketing, Apple seems to be better on the
privacy front. How true is that? And which one do
you prefer?

Speaker 2 (34:14):
So I'm cheating. I use Android, but I'm using a
custom version of Android that has had all the googly
parts removed or as many as possible. I should say
so Apple. If we're talking about normal Android, like the
kind you would buy over the counter, versus Apple, I
would make the argument that Apple is more private and secure.
But I also make the argument on my website that

(34:35):
there are a lot of things you can do, like
changing the settings in the phone, replacing the stock apps
with more privacy respecting apps. And I think if you
do all of that and you practice, I call it
good Internet hygiene. Like again, we talked about not keeping
every app on your phone, being careful what links you click,
the kind of basic stuff. I think between all of that,
the difference is really minimal at the end of the day.

(34:56):
And so I think depending on how you use it.
I mean, if you get an IF and you download
every sketchy app from the app store and you never
change the settings, like, I'm pretty sure I can make
an Android much more private than that. Sure, but depending
on how you use it, I think they can both
be I think they're both a good choice.

Speaker 1 (35:12):
Apple seems to do a better job of prompting you
to ask you questions about whether or not you want
to share certain information on the rag with certain apps.
But you're right, it's all about settings the apps that
you're using, and you can make either one of those
phones incredibly intrusive, allowing people access to all sorts of
data that you didn't intend to, depending on how you
use it. What about web browsers. We've already talked about

(35:35):
email providers and proton mail being a good option. What
about web browsers, and like Brave is typically recommended as
one of those browsers, it's better for people who care
about their privacy and then yeah, how much information are
we giving away if we're using one of the stock
or one of the more well known browsers.

Speaker 2 (35:56):
So Chrome is definitely the worst. I'm sorry all the
Google fans out there. Chrome is missing a lot of
basic privacy protections that other browsers have already implemented because
it's run by an ad company. I've also heard that
it uses a lot of device resources, like some of
the hardware memory and stuff like that. Brave is my
typical recommendation for most people because it's based on the
same trying to figure out how to put this in

(36:18):
a not super techy way. So the basic code of
Chrome is open source. Anybody can use it and make
their own version of Chrome, and that's basically what Brave did.
But they've added on all kinds of really cool on
by default privacy preserving features that the average person would
never even know is there. It also includes an ad
blocker and a tractor blocker by default, which is based

(36:38):
on you Block Origin that I mentioned earlier. So Brave,
I think for most people it's going to feel like Chrome.
It's going to be able to use all the same
extensions as Chrome. It's just going to work right out
of the box. You don't need to mess with it
a whole bunch. There is like a built in like
cryptocurrency wallet that you can disable in the setting. So
I just I do want to be upfront about that
there is some stuff that most people don't have a
use for. The other one that's commonly recommended is Firefox,

(37:01):
and Firefox is just it's great as well. The only
thing I would give with that is that when you
do have to do a little bit more tinkering to
get the same level of protection, like you have to
go manually add you block origin and it's based on
a different set of source codes. So there it's rare.
But you may find a couple of extensions that aren't
really compatible. But either of those I think are going
to be a huge step up from something like Chrome

(37:23):
or Safari.

Speaker 1 (37:23):
Even Okay, I was thinking search engines like Google became
the de facto a word for doing a search for
a reason, yes, and yet there were other there were
other alternatives, Duck duck go being like what it seems
like is the best for privacy. But now I'm thinking
with ai op ai that you know, going to chatch

(37:44):
ebt has become more common for especially younger folks, instead
of using traditional search engines. So how do you think
about your security when doing search on the web, whether
it's with an AI tool or with a service like
Duck Duck go o or Google.

Speaker 2 (38:00):
So there are a number of privacy preserving search engines,
which again I do list those on my website. I
think they're under the miscellaneous habits section. There's a few
different search engines because like Duck Duck go for example,
they're technically really just a proxy of Bing. They're not
building their own search engine, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.
There's a couple other start Page does the same thing

(38:22):
with Google. There are some providers like Brave. Brave has
their own search engine now and they're actually doing their
own indexing, so you're not using for the most part,
you're not using Google or BING or anything. There's another
one called Cogi. I think I'm pronouncing that wrong. It's Kagi.
I think they give you like one hundred free queries
a month, but otherwise it's a paid service. And a

(38:42):
lot of those same providers actually are starting to offer
alternatives to AI. So Brave has an AI summary in
the search engine. They also have in the Brave browser
their own AI called Leo, which you can use same thing.
The free version has like a limited number of queries,
but there is a paid version if you get a
lot of value out of that, and it's kind of
proxying your queries back to mistroll or chat GPT or whoever.

(39:05):
Duck Duck Go also has one called Duck Ai Cogi has.
I don't know if they have the actual LLM, but
they do have the search summary like I just mentioned,
and I think you can even disable that one if
you want to. So yeah, there's actually and again on
that note, I did actually, I think a couple of
weeks ago, I added another section to the bottom of
that same page where the search engines are about privacy
preserving AI. So okay, okay, there's plenty of options out

(39:29):
there's a growing number of options out there for this
kind of stuff.

Speaker 1 (39:31):
Well, it seems like Brave is a good solution that
kind of encompasses a few different places where your privacy
is at risk, and with Brave it seems like a
one stop solution for at least a few parts of that.
I'm curious, what about protecting our credit? And Matt and
I we've talked about credit freezes on the show and
how the credit lock products are in fear and they
cost money and it's just a waste of your time

(39:53):
and money to do that. Credit freeze, fortunately now federally
is available to everyone or free. So what's your take
on credit freeze is is that good enough? Do we
need additional services on the front? What are your thoughts?

Speaker 2 (40:07):
So? Yeah, I smile every time you guys mentioned that
because I agree one hundred percent. Credit freezes are the
way to go. They're free in America. There's no point
in paying. I know it's relatively cheap, it's like one
hundred bucks a year or something, but there's no need
to waste that money on something like LifeLock or whatever.
If you want to add a little extra protection, there's
a oh gosh, what are they call it? Fraud alerts?
Is that what they call?

Speaker 1 (40:28):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (40:28):
Yeah, So the only drawback with fraud alerts is they
do need to be renewed every year. I know you
probably know this, but for listeners, they do need to
be renewed every year, So set yourself a little reminder
in your calendar. But the nice thing is you only
need to play them with one agency and then they
kind of pass it around to the others, so that
the way I describe it, and these do work. I
actually have a quick story about this. I call it

(40:49):
two FA for your credit, two factor authentication because even
if you unfreeze your credit, two stories now that I
think about it. So, a few years ago, we went
to buy a car. We unfroze my credit. We went
to the dealership and while I was sitting in I know,
I took out a loan. I know that's not great.
But while I was sitting in the dealership, my phone
rang and when I answered it, they were like, hey,
this is so and so from you know, experience or whoever.

(41:11):
We're just making sure this is a legitimate credit pull.
And I was like, yeah, yeah, I'm sitting in the
dealership right now, like please do it. I really appreciate
the call. So, and then about a year or two ago,
I had the exact opposite where I was at work
and my phone rang and I picked it up and
they're like, hey, somebody's trying to unfreeze your credit. And
I'm like, Nope, not me, don't do that. So it's

(41:31):
really effective. I highly recommend that.

Speaker 1 (41:33):
It's less like lockdown protectionary, which is what the credit
freeze is, but it's more like a head's up which
can help prevent you getting into trouble.

Speaker 2 (41:40):
With also, so exactly, Yeah, it's super awesome.

Speaker 1 (41:42):
Okay, love it. I'm curious you mentioned crypto recently, the
crypto wallet and the Brave browser. What are your thoughts
on crypto and is that, especially as crypto becomes, you know,
more mainstream, is that a way to protect yourself when
let's say you're considering it not just as And that's
what makes crypto so hard to talk about sometimes, is

(42:04):
like it's a speculative asset, but it's also a potential
way to buy thinks. So it just depends on what
websites accepted, and it's is becoming more common. So what
are your thoughts on that as a privacy mechanism Using
cryptocurrency to facilitate some mirror transactions as.

Speaker 2 (42:21):
A privacy mechanism. I think the only real comment I
have is I want people to know that bitcoin is
not anonymous. Uh that's you. You typically hear those words
together like the anonymous cryptocurrency bitcoin. Bitcoin by default does
not have a name attached to the wallet. However, Most
people buy bitcoin through an exchange such as coinbase or

(42:44):
crypto dot com, and when you do that, you have
to you have to submit ID for the whole anti
money laundering they call them KYC or Know your Customer Laws.
And once you do that, bitcoin is very easily traced.
So once you buy bitcoin that is attached to you
and they can very there's a coup called chain analysis.
This is their whole job. They can chase trace where
all that bitcoin goes and where you spend it, and

(43:05):
it's it can be anonymized, but it's incredibly difficult to do.
There are other cryptocurrencies like minarow or z cash that
are privacy by default or more privacy respecting. Minaro is
my personal favorite. The thing I like about Minaro specifically
is that it's also a lot faster. I've tried to
buy things with a bitcoin before, and I end up
sitting there for like, you know, twenty minutes waiting for

(43:27):
the transaction to go through, whereas with Minaro, it's like,
you know, five or ten. I actually just renewed one
of my VPN subscriptions with Minaro, kind of just to
see how to do it. I don't know Honestly, it's
something I don't really have strong opinions about. I think
it's something that if you're interested in it and you're
willing to dive into it, I don't have any issues
with it. Definitely be aware that it is not anonymous,

(43:49):
like I just said, and don't I wouldn't recommend going
all in on cryptocurrency by any means, but I think
if it's something you want to dabble in, I think
it's a really cool technology and it certainly fun.

Speaker 1 (44:00):
I guess all right, a few more questions to get
to with you, Nate, and I want to specifically kind
of get back to that spectrum question and talk about
maybe low hanging fruit that maybe the first things that
people should tackle on this privacy list. We'll talk about
that right after this. We're back with Nate Bartram talking

(44:24):
about your digital life. And Nate, I mentioned low hanging
fruit just when you're talking, and we talked about the
spectrum thing, and hey, there's trade offs. But if you're
like younger sister came to you now, I don't even
know if you have one, but she's like eighteen and
she's in she's going to college, and she's like from
the get go, like, what what are like the three

(44:46):
to five things I should be doing that are going
to have the most bang for my book? Talking about
the eighty twenty what is that twenty percent of things
that's going to have the eighty percent impact? What few
things would you put on that to do list?

Speaker 2 (44:58):
I think first and foremost would be passwords. I think
it's something that most of us agree, like, ah, use
the same password everywhere or you know, we know we
can do better.

Speaker 1 (45:08):
And is that also, by the way, because if one
password gets hacked and you're using that password on one
hundred websites, that, like, your whole digital life could be upended.

Speaker 2 (45:19):
So yes, actually there is an attack. It's called credential stuffing,
which is where the attackers get your username and password
and they just plug it into every website and see
where you have an account, So they'll check Amazon, they'll
check Netflix, they'll check Gmail if it's a Gmail username,
And this does happen. In twenty nineteen, Facebook was caught
storing passwords in plaintext, which is basically like your password

(45:41):
in a readable format was stored on their servers, which
should never ever, ever, ever happen ever, but especially not
for a company as big as Facebook, Like, I can't
stress that enough. Yeah, we've had a number of serious
data breaches happen because of credential stuffing. And one of
the examples I like to give people is your email.
If I can get into your email, I can issue
password resets all day, and I can get into everything else.

Speaker 1 (46:02):
On that front. Then is there you talked about two
factor authentication just a little bit when it comes to
banks and investment sites, how important is that? And is
the email the best way to go? Or are there now?
With certain phones? Right? That's like it only the app
will only open if with facial recognition, So what's the

(46:23):
best way to go about that?

Speaker 2 (46:24):
I think so the one you want to try to
avoid is the text message where they text you a code.
If at all possible, you should try to avoid that.
But if that's all they offer, then I mean, it's
better than nothing. When it comes to the phones, I
would argue that it really depends because, for example, right
now we're seeing this thing called passkeys, which I'm sure
you've heard about, which I do highly recommend, But right

(46:44):
now there's the issue of portability. It's really hard to
export your pass keys, and so Let's say you guys
are listening to this and you say, Okay, cool, I
want to go get a password manager. If you have
all your pass keys in your Android phone or your iPhone,
it might be possible. I'm not sure. I haven't checked
in while, but I know when they first came out
there were no plans to be able to export your
passkeys and move them to another password manager. So now

(47:06):
you're locked into that phone. So if you decide one day,
well I think I'm gonna switch to whatever the other
phone is, Android or iPhone, you may have to like
disable all those passkeys and recreate them all over again. Okay,
but that depends. If your bank is doing it through
their app, you probably won't have that problem. But if
it's like based on your phone, that's something to consider.
But at the same time, if you know that you're

(47:27):
always going to be an iPhone person, then I mean
that's a pretty good level of security I would ark.

Speaker 1 (47:31):
Okay, going back to that list for your sister. Sorry
I diverted us a little bit. Now you're get what
else would you say? So passwords?

Speaker 2 (47:37):
So password managers, and closely related to that is the
two factor you mentioned going to the website settings or
the app settings and seeing if they offer two factor
Definitely switching browsers I mentioned, like switching to Brave or
something like that. And the thing about a lot of
these privacy tools is there's things that they seem like
a lot of work, but they're not so, like, for example,

(47:57):
switching to Brave when you download Brave and you install,
and this is true of Firefox as well. For the record,
when you're setting it up, it asks you, hey, do
you want to import all your bookmarks and your history
and your all that stuff from your old browser. So
it's really not that hard to switch. It just sounds
like it's hard. But then there's things like switching to
a password manager. Ideally, when you make that switch, you
should also be upgrading your passwords to be unique and secure,

(48:18):
and so that might take weeks or months to kind
of go through those. So there's there's kind of a
sliding scale there of how difficult some of these things are.
But password managers, browsers, I think we mentioned removing apps
off your phone, checking the settings, making sure that the
settings are you know, you've got the two factor enabled,
you're not, your profiles not public, or something real quick

(48:39):
actually Venmo. I think you guys have mentioned this on
Friday flight, but Venmo by default has all your transactions public,
which may not be a huge deal, but also maybe
it's weird. Yeah, it's just definitely weird.

Speaker 1 (48:51):
When I go in there, like why is this social
media for who we're sending money to? Like this makes
that makes no sense?

Speaker 2 (48:57):
And I yeah, and people put little inside jokes on
the memo and just yeah.

Speaker 1 (49:01):
So like I don't want people saying that about me exactly.

Speaker 2 (49:04):
So just checking and knowing what are your options and
what data is being shared and can you do anything
about it? I think those would probably be my main things.
But then there's also things we mentioned, email aliasing, encrypted email,
all that kind of stuff that's all on the website
for sure.

Speaker 1 (49:18):
Is there anything else specifically on the personal finance fronts?
You're a personal finance nerd, you also are a data
and privacy nerd those things and sorry to refer to
you as a nerd. I include myself in that category.
But with those things overlap, is there anything specifically in
the personal finance space where because you're talking to an
audience who probably overlaps with us at least on one

(49:40):
of those things, right, What are the biggest privacy moves
to make when it comes to protecting our money.

Speaker 2 (49:46):
We already mentioned freezing your credit I think that's probably
the biggest thing for most people, especially the fraudler is
an extra layer of protection that takes a couple of minutes. Definitely,
the mass credit card thing or paying in cash whenever possible.
And and I think there's also something to be said
for just because I know that kind of contradicts some
of the advice that you guys give about like using

(50:06):
credit cards. And I think credit cards are a good
way to go to because of the protections you've mentioned
and the fact that like if somebody maxes out your
credit card, you still have your debit account, you know,
as opposed to if somebody maxes out your debit card,
you're up a creek.

Speaker 1 (50:19):
Yeah, I mean, there are just fewer federal protections if
someone abuses your debit card than if they abuse your
credit card exactly.

Speaker 2 (50:26):
But I think, yeah, there's a lot of Like I said,
there's a lot of peripheral things that overlap, like the
ads and the ad blocking and the tractor blocking really
helps with reducing targeted ads, and something we actually haven't
mentioned that viewers should definitely look up when they get
a minute. Is this concept of surveillance pricing, which I'm
not sure how prevalent it is, but I know for
sure Target is doing it where basically they will use

(50:47):
your data to try and tailor the price to you,
and of course that means they're going to try and
get the most amount out of you. And one example
they that I read a story about I believe from
the markup is if you go to a Target parking
lot and you check their website, the price on the
item is going to be a little bit higher than
if you checked it at home, because their reasoning is
you're already in the parking lot, You're probably not going

(51:09):
to drive somewhere else, so they may as well charge
you a little bit more.

Speaker 1 (51:12):
Interesting. So yeah, that's when it comes to them, Hey,
is your location data sharing with that app on or not?
And this really is a new dynamic pricing has been
around for a while, but even that, it's like, Hey,
Nate and Joel get offered the same price when we're
looking at a flight to Phoenix on Tuesday at ten am,

(51:34):
but it might change for both of us Tuesday at
eight PM so, but that's dynamic pricing. So now there's
all this talk of yeah, more surveillance pricing where it's
tailored to your search habits and specific information that retailers
know about you, which opens up another can of worms.
And I think that probably makes some of this privacy

(51:56):
stuff even more important as we move forward into a
world where our data is being used against us, It's
being wielded in new ways that we hadn't even suspected.

Speaker 2 (52:06):
Yeah, just a lot of the privacy stuff can be
used to help cut down on that data that they
can then use for this kind of surveillance pricing, or
even just a lot of financial decisions now or not
just taking into account your credit score, but a lot
of other data as well. There's another story that I
list on my website where I believe it was American
Express lowered somebody's credit limit because he shops at Walmart
a lot. And typically people who shop at Walmart are

(52:27):
not always great about repaying their loans, which is ridiculous, right,
because it's like you would shop at Walmart to save money.
They're inexpensive. Yeah, so it's almost like penalizing people for having,
you know, thrifty habits and.

Speaker 1 (52:39):
It's based on too much surveillance.

Speaker 2 (52:41):
Yeah, exactly so, but yeah, I mean as far as
the staples, I think, like I said, the password managers,
freezing credit, those are things that will come in immediately helpful.
Real quick story. I bought a concert ticket one time
and then about six months later, I got the email
that They're like, oh no, we had a data breach,
and I'm like, well, I used a privacy dot com card,
so I'll just go show off that card now. I
don't care if my data was stolen.

Speaker 1 (53:02):
Yeah. Yeah, So just a simple way to protect yourself
on the front end so that you're not dealing with
cleaning up the mess on the back end, which is
time in annoyance for sure. So Nate, thanks so much
for joining joining us today on the show where where
can have a money crowd find out more about you
and what you're up to. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (53:18):
So, like you mentioned, my website is thenewoil dot org
like data is the New Oil. That's where the phrase
comes from. The website is kind of the main focus.
I do some blogging. I do a weekly current events
podcast called Surveillance Report. If anybody you know it's podcast,
So if anybody wants to listen to that, but definitely
check it out. If anybody has any questions, shoot me
an email. I try to respond to them as best

(53:40):
I can, and especially if you see any room for
improvement on the website. Like I don't claim to be perfect,
so if something isn't making sense or you have any questions,
that that means there's room for improvement, and I'm definitely
open to that feedback.

Speaker 1 (53:52):
Awesome, Nate, thanks so much for joining me today, man,
I appreciate it.

Speaker 2 (53:54):
Yeah, thank you for having me all right.

Speaker 1 (53:56):
Always nice for a novice like me to learn more
about a subject that I don't feel well versed in,
and I think Nate did a good job covering a
lot of helpful news you can use information about how
to protect your privacy online. I think my big takeaway
from that conversation was kind of really what we're talking

(54:16):
about at the end, and I haven't really known how
to think about in some ways, some of the AI
persuaded pricing and the surveillance pricing that seems to be
becoming more common, and then when companies are accused of it,
they run away with their hands up saying no, no, no,
that's not what we were doing. What are you talking about.
I'm referring to Delta specifically in this case where they're

(54:37):
like AI pricing. No, we're not doing that. But I
think the tools at the disposal of companies to surveil
us and then use that data against us when it
comes to what they charge us for things is becoming
more pervasive and it's just improving. So when it comes
to protecting our data, I think the stakes are only

(55:00):
ramping up, not just as far as like scams people
breaking into our accounts if we don't have enough protections,
but in as far as literally what we pay for things.
So I think it's becoming more important to at least
do the twenty percent that's going to give the eighty

(55:21):
percent impact some of the things that Nate mentioned today.
And I think he's wise to say you don't have
to because it's gonna be hard to persuade people that's
go one hundred percent all in privacy to the max.
But I think it should be fairly easy to persuade
us to just change our browser, which can have a
big impact, or just use a password protector like a
couple of these things can have high impact, and it's

(55:43):
kind of one of those things where if you're being
chased by a lion and your friends next to you,
you don't have to outrun the line, you have to
outrun your best friend. And sorry, Matt if that means
you get mauled by the lion in this scenario. But
I think it's similar to that right where we don't
have to be a million percent buttoned up on privacy.

(56:04):
But if we can do a few of these things,
not only will it help make us more secure, I
think it'll help save us money by being less just
influenced by technology in general, less enamored with our screens
but that digital minimalism kind of thing, But at the
same time will also just be more secure than the

(56:24):
average person out there, which means we're less likely to
experience the brunt of the full time or part time
job that can exist if our privacy is breached. So
I hope this episode was helpful to you. Please share
it with a friend if you think it would be
helpful to them, and thanks, as always for listening. There's

(56:45):
more money saving information up on the site at howtomoney
dot com. Until next time, best Friend out

Speaker 2 (57:00):
You don't know Hoop