Big tech is making some big moves on your personal information.
Now, they’re making it look good by dressing it up with some fun statistics. For example, Spotify Unwrapped gives you a list of all the music you’ve listened to the most in the past year. Google Maps has a similar function. It compiles a neat list of all the countries, cities, and places you’ve visited.
It’s time to call this out for what it is: they’re showing you all the personal information they’ve gathered from you, and are keeping it in their systems.
Your location data is critical information. We’ve seen journalists, politicians, and gamers doxxed for one thing or the other on the internet.
In this episode, Alexander and Jason discuss how a Catholic priest was outed by a Christian publication. This happened because they tracked his location using Grindr, and found that he was visiting gay bars and private residence from 2018 to 2020. They concluded that it was his phone based on the location data as well.
“A mobile device correlated to Burrill emitted app data signals from the location-based hookup app Grindr on a near-daily basis during parts of 2018, 2019, and 2020 — at both his USCCB office and his USCCB-owned residence, as well as during USCCB meetings and events in other cities.” - The Pillar
That’s highly specialized location data. Three years of the priest’s whereabouts, being logged and stored by the app. And a data vendor was all it took to ruin his entire life.
Should he have been a priest if he was a closeted homosexual? That’s not what we’re trying to answer here. The core of this issue is that someone tracked this individual’s private choices and exposed them without their consent, without them even being aware that they were tracked in the first place.
Those fun end-of-the-year summaries on your app activity aren’t for free. They are blatantly telling you that you are the product, and you can have your data weaponized against you without your knowledge. That’s the kind of chaotic world we can expect with the inevitable weaponization of data.
This is a wake-up call for you to start being more vigilant about who and where you share your data. You need to own the information you create on your gadgets. Those are your personal assets and you worked hard to create them.
With TARTLE, you can take that information into your hands and choose to share it on your time, at your pace. Stop letting third parties and vendors take that away from you. Your choice, your time, your data.
Sign up for TARTLE here.
Trust can be difficult to establish—trust from society, in a brand, with corporations, or with anybody that chooses to participate in TARTLE. If you’ve ever run a business before, you know that finding and nurturing repeat customers is no easy feat.
In this episode, Jason Rigby briefly discusses the world’s pivot towards Web 3.0. We’re moving into an era where transparency on the internet is key. This is a world where we give the end user opportunities to empower themselves, and make the decision to sell their data.
We are creating a world where individuals can take back control of their personal information and create relationships with data buyers from around the world. For sellers, this is a chance to connect with other people, businesses, and organizations that can help them uplift their life.
How far can our personal information travel without our knowledge? Whenever you are purchasing data, there is a high likelihood that the source is incentivized purely off of profit.
All the data you are using to create and improve your products and services is made possible because of the support of your target audience. These are human beings who find value in what you do and create. It doesn’t make sense to get your data from people outside of those that support what you do.
As a buyer, you need to be mindful of where you source all your raw materials—even your information. Other firms may be selling you their data just so they can profit from the covert surveillance and manipulation of the very people you are trying to serve.
If you want to create goodwill and trust, you need to nurture a direct relationship with your customers. You don’t want to leave them in the dark, wondering how you know all about their consumer behavior. Ethical data sourcing has become a crucial part of corporate social responsibility, and it’s time to make that a priority in every organization.
Sign up for TARTLE through this link here.
Follow Alexander McCaig on Twitter and Linkedin.
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What is the main reason you decided to invest in a smartphone or a laptop?
For many of us, it’s the utility and convenience that comes with being able to connect with multiple people in just a few taps that seals the deal for us. For others, it's a hobby to follow the latest tech developments and invest in new releases.
Regardless of why you choose to invest in new gadgets, technology has definitely enhanced our quality of living and made it easier to network. But we question: at what cost?
In this episode, Alexander McCaig and Jason Rigby use an analogy of a gold bar to drive their point home.
Let’s say that you’ve been storing one for years. You saved up for it and you know that it’s yours, it’s a property that you’ve worked hard to obtain. But what if someone just grabs it and claims it as theirs?
This is what big tech does to you every day. Big data has become the automation of oppression.
We are being farmed for our information, which in turn is being analyzed and used for a variety of purposes. For example, we give social media companies the power to control our perspective of the world when they have the data to refine the algorithms used in deciding top posts in our feed.
We give away our location, consumer preferences, and contact details, and connections without understanding the full impact of our inaction. It’s not just a lost opportunity to profit off of what is rightfully ours. It is an infringement on our basic human rights and freedom.
With TARTLE, we want to bring the focus back to your rights. Our platform is an effort to remind you that technology is supposed to be a tool for empowerment and emancipation. It is designed for that evolution, for that upbringing, uplifting of the human being.
To be clear, big tech is not the enemy. We’ve only been placed in a difficult situation because for years, corporations have had free reign over the development of technologies—and the regulations that come with it. We did not have the perception, tools, and resources that could engineer a solution against exploiting the data sharing features.
That changes with TARTLE. You can opt out of being Big Brother’s cash cow by investing your time and effort into our Marketplace. You can sign up for free, submit your data for bidding, and take the full amount that your data packet is worth.
This is an opportunity to discover how much you’ve been missing out. Access the full potential of your personal information and allow these insights to go directly to organizations that can support causes you are passionate about.
We have the links you need to establish a direct relationship with these entities. In exchange, your participation gives these organizations and researchers a repository of ethically sourced data that they can use for the collective good.
Because you deserve that opportunity.
Big brother can’t grow if you don’t feed it data. Cut off their supply today by supporting a platform that puts YOU at the center of technological innovation.
What’s your data worth?
Risk and intelligence are two factors that define the success of any organization. Information is everywhere, and yet companies and organizations are still faced with data-related challenges that hinder their development. Is information-gathering all there is to running an operation?
In this episode, Leo Tilman joins Alexander McCaig to discuss risk and its relevance to finance, strategy, and more. Leo Tilman is a leading authority on strategy and risk, who predicted the financial crisis between 2007-2008. He also authored Agility: How to Navigate the Unknown and Seize Opportunity in a World of Disruption, which is featured in this podcast.
To adapt to the everchanging uncertainties that organizations, governments, and even individuals face, agility is a must. This seven-letter word is often defined as the ability to assess and respond to changes, while making it distinct from flexibility or adaptability. What sets agility apart is that it calls for an individual to be purposefully decisive, while still grounded in the will to succeed in whatever endeavor an individual or group is facing.
Regardless of an entity’s position in the world, they are always within the environment that surrounds them. To understand what defines an individual’s or a group’s agility, we must first define the environment they are in. This is important because it helps provide insight into how agility can be expressed in those specific circumstances.
An environment consists of two components: first, the dominant trends that shape the world around us. These are the specifics of an environment, and illustrate how the environment is a dynamic entity that is capable of changing over time.
The second component refers to the fundamental nature of environments, described through theories. An example is Clausewitz’s theory on war and its accurate description of competitive environments.
An organization must be proactive in assessing the risks that it will face. Here comes the portfolio of risks, which is a set of risks that an organization must make to meet its objective. This involves multiple facets within the organization, like financial risks, strategic risks, and so on.
However, the executives of an organization need to come together and discuss the risks they face, as well as the environment they are in. By discussing and analyzing their circumstance, they’re able to determine what factors they have control over, and what they don’t.
Because of the vast amounts of data that companies and organizations have access to, it becomes a challenge to try and filter through all the data. Furthermore, companies soon realize that truly valuable information, like data about their clients or competitors, isn’t available all the time.
And so, being proactive about data-gathering is essential. By dedicating time and resources towards gathering valuable data, one can understand not only the situation but also the necessary risks needed to be taken. With that in mind, the portfolio of risks is then created.
Regardless of the amount of information that an organization has, and regardless of the strategies put in place, nothing can succeed without the human element. It is the flexibility of human beings that allows groups to move towards their goals.
It is the ability for human beings to adapt through the uncertainty of an environment, and process information that may change the status quo of their situation. Because of the complexity of the environment that anyone is in, it is up to the agility of human beings to formulate responses towards these changes.
For that reason, cultural assessments within an organization are important to move through the internal fog of data that organizations have access to. Because no matter how well we know our circumstances, our clients, or our competition, none of it matters until we first know ourselves.
How much is your data worth?
There is a new collection of words running around - Environmental, Social, Governance. The aim is to develop principles that will help guide businesses, governments, and other organizations in making decisions that are more environmentally and socially responsible. Proponents of ESG are also very much on the lookout for new industries and how they might fit in with those principles. One of those is the growing worlds of esports and virtual reality.
I remember my first virtual reality experience. It was back in the early 1990s and there was a big (and expensive) virtual reality set up at the local movie theater. With the bland background and very heavy polygons, it would be putting it mildly to say that the experience was less than immersive. Anyone could be forgiven for thinking it wasn’t likely to go anywhere. Now, though, it has come a very long way.
The combination of other advanced technologies like motion sensing, augmented reality, and haptic feedback have given us various levels of virtual reality experiences, from the Nintendo Wii to the Oculus headsets. Now that the experiences are getting better and more detailed, it no longer takes much imagination to see how we could go from where we are now to the technology available in Ready Player One, with full haptic suits and a totally immersive experience with full digital representations of ourselves in a virtual universe.
Combine that with the concept of esports and that cool omni directional treadmill and there are some interesting possibilities. Imagine if you could get together with your Twitter circle for a virtual baseball game. Or a car race. What if you could arrange a time to meet and do a virtual hike of the Grand Canyon, visit the Louvre? Mars? The possibilities are endless.
How on earth does this have anything to do with ESG principles? The short answer is the potential savings in resources. Imagine if you could test out a car without actually having to drive it? Or try flying a plane in virtual reality? You might find if you wouldn’t like something that you would have spent thousands of dollars on. Virtual testing could be applied to all sorts of things. For example, you could test walking a dog. If you don’t like it, you wouldn’t find yourself returning a dog, which tends to lead to bad results for the little canine. Trying on clothes is another great use. Rather than just ordering something only to be disappointed, you’d get to see how that jacket looks in a virtual setting before you spend money on it.
It could also open up a whole world for people who would never have the resources to travel. Someone in the lower middle class could explore the Australian Outback. It could also provide a new immersive way of exploring literature or history. Wouldn’t it be great if you could sit in on a Socratic dialogue, or walk through Pompeii before Vesuvius blows up? Needless to say, the educational opportunities are immense.
In terms of actual sports, some of the tech that could be incorporated, such as treadmills, could actually help overall fitness of the population. A virtual football game could have much of the athleticism and none of the head trauma. Using virtual reality tech to play something like Call of Duty, which could incorporate a physical simulation of an M4 automatic rifle, with the same weight and shape could actually get you in pretty good shape.
Of course, none of this actually substitutes for the real thing. The real world will always be superior precisely because it is real. That’s something that even the creator of the Oasis in Ready Player One realized, total immersion in the virtual leads to a disconnect from reality. Used judiciously as a tool though, it could be used to expand people’s horizons and get them to a place where they have a greater appreciation for the world around them and a better understanding of how we are all connected in the long run.
What’s your data worth? Sign up for the TARTLE Marketplace through this link here.
TARTLE has a simple mission – to put people back in control of their own data. To help people be able to decide whether or not to share their data when and with whom. A big part of that is making it possible to actually protect their privacy in a digital age that increasingly encroaches on it.
One of the biggest threats to our privacy is also one of the most prevalent items in the developed world, the smartphone. By now, everyone is aware that they track in some way shape or form everything you do on them. Every click, swipe, search is being recorded and transmitted somewhere for purposes that we can’t even begin to speculate on. Pretty much every app on your phone is also recording and transmitting your information. There are likely dozens of different entities that are recording your data without your consent, all through that powerful little rectangle in your pocket. Then of course there is the fact that the modern smartphone is probably the most effective tracking device ever invented. Not only does it keep track of every move you make, you actually want to have it with you. Somewhere, Orwell is rolling over in his grave.
With their recent merger with Sprint, T-Mobile is now the second biggest cell service provider in the United States. That puts the company in a position to have a significant effect on your privacy. So it seems like a pretty good time to start looking at their latest privacy policy. After all, that is the document that lets you know what your rights are as a T-Mobile customer.
Getting into the policy, T-Mobile starts off pretty strong. They talk about maintaining privacy, which would at least seem to imply that they are planning on working, making corrections as necessary to actually keep your information private. Logically, that would mean that not only do they intend on not violating it themselves, they would also be making it harder for third party apps to infringe on your privacy.
From there, the statement goes on to emphasize how T-Mobile customers deserve transparency. That sounds good, right? Ah, but as we continue things start to get murky. The statement talks about how they are making it easier for customers to protect their privacy. So, that brings up an important question – who is working hard to maintain my privacy? T-Mobile, or me? As a matter of principle, my privacy is my responsibility but then it would be nice if T-Mobile didn’t make a bunch of noises implying something different. If you’re going through this with a critical eye it comes off as a trifle disingenuous.
Which brings us to the real kicker. While they are telling us they are very interested in protecting our privacy and being transparent and that virtually nothing has changed, they then turn around and let us know that they’ll be selling user data to third party advertisers. Which I suppose is transparent since they told us they were going to do it. And in case that might upset you, they have the magic words that most companies are including these days – you have the ability to opt out of data sharing.
Again, who exactly is working to ensure my privacy here? Why is it up to me to opt out of something that I might not fully understand in the first place? Wouldn’t it be both more honest and transparent to require that I opt into a data sharing program? It at least is more likely that I would actually know what it is that I’m getting myself into.
Supposedly they aren’t sharing your name either, but that is hardly important, they already have enough information to determine who you are. Again, this is disingenuous.
Finally, with the advertising, they are also going to continue to serve you up ads that may or may not be in any way relevant to you directly. Too many people don’t really fit into neat little categories. Believe it or not, it is possible for someone to be sitting around watching UFC while ordering a vest from Patagonia and reading articles on the environment. That kind of behavior has to play hell with the algorithms.
In the end, this privacy policy starts strong but quickly makes it clear that we are getting more of the same. Putting people into buckets and forcing people to opt out of programs they might not even be aware of in the first place. That’s no way to build trust or protect people’s data privacy.
What’s your data worth? Sign up and join the TARTLE Marketplace with this link here.
It’s a line we’ve heard over and over in movies and books. We’ve used it, or some variation of it, ourselves. That’s because there are many aspects of life that we simply have to take with a certain degree of trust. We trust that our brakes will work, we trust that our kids aren’t sneaking out of the house at night, that our doctor isn’t a quack. In short, even in the small, mundane aspects of our lives, we rely on others to be honest with us. One could even say that trust is the most valuable thing in society.
But wait! Don’t we always go on about how ‘data is the new gold’? Yes, and that’s true. Data is the most valuable commodity. Trust, however, is not merely a commodity, a resource that can be bought and sold. Trust makes it possible to buy and sell in the first place. In order for data to be a valuable commodity in the first place, we have to be able to trust it.
This is even more apparent in the more macro aspects of life. We trust our parents to tell us the truth about life. We would like to trust our political, business, and religious leaders to tell us the truth. We expect those delivering the news to tell us honestly what is going on in the world. Yet, we can all point to many examples of these very authority figures lying to us, sometimes very obviously.
The constant lying that we have learned to take for granted has generated a true crisis of trust, which itself has led to fresh and strange realignments. Many people go through life now not having any idea of what to believe and who to trust. Others reject one set of lies but reflexively believe whatever someone else tells them, quickly becoming unable to even hear others. This is how we have gotten to a world where a disturbing number of people believe the moon landing was faked and others even argue that the world is flat. It’s easy to dismiss such people as fools, yet, it isn’t entirely their fault. They’ve grown up in an environment where you can never trust the official story, where critical thinking is confused with rejecting what your parents or some other authority figure told you. In a world of lies, they think the only truth is the one thing you aren’t allowed to believe.
Not only is this sad,but it is also utterly unsustainable. Without trust, society simply can’t continue. While we at TARTLE can’t solve all of modern society’s trust issues, we can help in our little corner. We can point out when companies are not acting truthfully with regard to how they acquire their data. We can be an example that doesn’t put profits before people. We can be transparent about how we operate, allowing people to see how their data plays a role in our business and how we make a buck not from people giving us their data but others buying it data.
TARTLE can help by providing truthful data directly from the source, from you the individual. Data that is untainted by any bias, free of the assumptions that are built into any algorithm. By doing this, by helping people to get the source, to get the truth behind the data, maybe we can help rebuild some tiny sense that trust is possible. By being transparent, we can show that it is possible to operate a global company without lying, or being secretive. By setting an example and spreading the word with your help, maybe we can help put just a little trust back into our troubled world.
What’s your data worth?
COVID, COVID, COVID. All the news these days seems to be about that little virus. If you like that kind of thing, then you’re in luck because we are here to talk about it today. More precisely, we’ll be talking about how governments are misusing the data they’ve been collecting due to the pandemic.
Back around a year ago as of this writing tech companies started to put out contact tracing apps that would allow whoever had access to it to let you know if you have been in proximity to someone with COVID. That way you could go get tested or isolate if you wanted to go that route instead. Sounds like a great idea, doesn’t it? Thing is, it’s basically a tracking device that keeps tabs on where you are all day every day. They then can cross reference that data with your friends and family who are using that app and so determine who you talk to and what apps you use to do so. The government could even get a fairly good idea of the kind of things you are buying by determining which stores you walk into based on your location data.
The program was rolled out in Singapore and was held up by many as a model of how to respond not just in the case of COVID but for any future pandemic. However, that was before it was revealed that the government was very happy to use the data being gathered in ways that it wasn’t intended. This may have come as a surprise to some, after all, the government had promised that there would be ‘robust’ privacy protections in place. While many wisely doubted those promises and suspected or assumed that this was happening, it only became public knowledge in January when it came out that Singapore was using the contact tracing data in a murder investigation. Once again, a government promise was bunk and a program begun with good intentions was perverted from the original intent.
A natural response to this is ‘what’s the big deal?’ After all, do we not want murders solved using every tool possible? The problem isn’t really the use of the contact tracing data in the murder investigation, the issue is that this use is the proverbial camel’s nose under the tent. While the policy may currently be to only use the available data for serious crimes, how long before they use it for less serious crimes? Or for the ‘prevention’ of crimes? It’s easy to see how in the United States that kind of tracking data would get appropriated under the Patriot Act and used to arrest or harass people who haven’t actually done anything yet. Fears of exactly that sort of thing happening partially explains why contact tracing apps haven’t gained as much traction in America as they have in other places.
Hopefully it will stay that way. In Singapore, 78% of its citizens use the tracing app, which as we now know gives the government access to and control of their location data. That’s worrisome precisely because the government just takes it for granted that they can do this. Wouldn’t it be better if they at least had to ask?
How would that work? Very simple. If a crime were to occur and other evidence showed that you were at the scene or in contact with the criminal (security camera footage or witness testimony for example) the police could simply ask you for access to your phone because they think it would help. It really is pretty simple. Not only is it simple, it’s ethical because they are treating their citizens like individuals with rights and not subjects who must obey. It’s a big difference and one that TARTLE considers very important.
Abusing data in this way violates two of the big seven, human rights and government transparency. TARTLE will continue to work to improve this for as many people as much as we can. In doing so, we’ll never sell your data or so much as look at it. We are merely a tool for you to use, not the other way around.
What’s your data worth? Sign up and join the TARTLE Marketplace with this link here.
The internet, cloud computing, data and all the rest of it can be amazing when it is used appropriately. Used correctly, these tools can be a massive benefit, helping us to understand the world we live in and to be better able to solve whatever problems come our way. Unfortunately, these tools can be abused all too easily.
It’s like that with all tools. You can use the tool of fire to keep yourself warm, provide light, and cook a meal. An arsonist will take that perfectly neutral tool and use it to burn down a building. A gun can be used to stop a crime or shoot up a school. Digital tools are the same, and just as with those other tools, there is perhaps no more terrifying abuser of digital tools than the government. Just like Nero burning Rome, the KGB using guns and other tools to terrorize their fellow citizens, governments can use the tools of the digital age against their own people.
We’ve talked about this before. China uses the internet to control, rather than foster the flow of information and we recently discussed how New York City uses facial recognition software to profile people. The latest abuse comes out of Morocco where a human rights advocate is currently being held based on falsified charges according to Amnesty International. Apparently, the government does not like Maati Monjib advocating for freedom of expression and is using false data to accuse him of embezzlement. This is frankly terrifying. When the government itself is willing to lie and falsify information to attack its own citizens, there is little any one person can do against that. That’s true no matter where you are or which government is doing the abusing.
What lessons can we take from this situation? One, it is more important than ever to protect your data. There are simply too many bad actors out there who are willing to steal or falsify data for their own ends. Whether the intent is to steal a credit card number and run up the balance or extort a hospital with some ransomware, the need to be careful about privacy is greater than ever. Yet, how does protecting your data from theft prevent anyone from just making stuff up? After all, can’t they just access a given server and insert whatever information they want? Yes and no.
To make that work, the falsified data has to be at least somewhat believable in most cases. Which means they need to have some legitimate data to work with. If your real information is protected, it at least makes that task a lot more difficult. Yet, let’s assume this is possible or that the prosecuting body just doesn’t care. This is why blockchain is important for data. If all data or at least all of your data has a blockchain attached to it, it becomes much harder to falsify. If it doesn’t have the appropriate chain that leads back to you then it isn’t your data. Even if someone figures out how to fake that, it still won’t work because it won’t be duplicated in all the other nodes in the system. A defense, even in a show trial becomes much, much easier.
Of course, a reasonable person will ask how you keep bad actors from using blockchain. Well, you do the best you can. TARTLE screens for known bad actors like actual terrorists. However, there isn’t any way to stop every bad actor before they do something they shouldn’t. Even if you engaged in all the profiling and regulating you can imagine, there would be those who would slip through the cracks, while restricting the freedoms of many more innocents.
TARTLE believes that the free flow of data is paramount. As such we take an innocent until proven guilty approach. Better that ten guilty men go free than one innocent man is punished.
What’s your data worth? Sign up and join the TARTLE Marketplace with this link here.
You know what is inefficient? The US census. In the modern age, why are we trying to print out a form for everyone in the United States to fill out, put it in an envelope, slap a stamp on it and then send it to every single address? And then, as a backup measure, send someone driving around door to door to make sure people fill out the form (often carrying another copy with them), only to have huge numbers of people still not participate? Why on earth would we spend so many resources in paper, people, time, gas, and money when this kind of thing could be done in other ways?
What’s more, the data quality is remarkably low. How low? So low that the Census Bureau felt it necessary to point out that there is “little” evidence of falsified data in the census. They say only about 0.4% of respondents likely falsified data. One wonders how that gets verified or what is meant by falsified data. The word “falsified” implies intent. Yet, how does that account for unintentional inaccuracies? Or people filling out their forms either just before or after they moved?
Regardless, the Census Bureau was concerned enough about data inaccuracy that they did follow up interviews with over 300,000 households. That’s a pretty big response requiring yet more resources, all in the hopes of achieving greater accuracy.
Why does accuracy in the census matter so much? The biggest reason is that it directly affects representation in the state and federal legislatures. The amount of seats in the House of Representatives is directly affected by population. Population numbers, demographics and other data are also important to the distribution of 1.5 trillion dollars in federal funds as well. Or to put it another way, how your tax dollars are distributed and who makes those decisions are directly affected by the accuracy of the census data. Needless to say, it’s important to find the best, most accurate methods of gathering that data possible.
So, what reasons do we have to assume that the data is inaccurate beyond mere accusations? We know that they will sometimes rely on data from landlords, friends and family members if some people don’t respond directly. Some census agents have even been directed to make guesses based on the number of cars and bikes out in the driveway, or even by looking through people’s windows. There are so many problems with that, it’s hard to even know where to begin. A family could be on vacation so no one is around for a while, or they could have friends over for dinner, meaning there are extra cars parked out front. And are we seriously okay with the idea of government employees lurking around our yards peeking into the kitchen windows. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to figure out all sorts of ways that could go wrong.
Sadly, this is often the case with data gathering overall. The census is just the archaic dinosaur version of data skimming, cookies, and selling your data to third parties without your consent. There are inaccuracies, falsifications, guesses and deceptions everywhere that some motive other than accurately representing people is present. Whether those other motives are profit or getting your manager off your back, it all leads to poor data quality.
What if the Census Bureau took a different approach? Rather than spending all sorts of money and effort to get people to take the time to fill out a form and send it back when there is no immediate reward for doing so they worked with TARTLE? They could offer a financial incentive to people to respond to all the same questions from their phone and get a financial reward in the process? It would be faster, more efficient, and almost certainly more accurate, especially if people could choose to send pre-existing data packets that already reflect exactly the kind of information the Census Bureau is after. By making use of the TARTLE data marketplace, the government would get a better understanding of the population and better represent it in Congress and in funding.
What’s your data worth?
