Google's creepy smart glasses are coming

this fall.

The FBI wants to buy nationwide access to

license plate readers and researchers

wanted preschool teachers to wear cameras

to train AI.

More of this coming up soon on This

Week in Privacy, fifty four.

Welcome back to This Week in Privacy.

This is our weekly series where we discuss

the latest updates with what we're working

on,

what's going on within the Privacy Guides

community,

and this week's top stories that we've

seen in data privacy and cybersecurity.

I'm Jonah,

and with me this week is Jordan.

How are you doing, Jordan?

I'm doing great.

Looking forward to jumping into some

topics with you here this week.

Sweet.

Well, why don't we move on?

With that said,

we can start out with some of the

news here.

Why don't you kick us off with our

first story?

Yeah, definitely.

So this is kind of a...

An update to an existing story, I guess,

because if you don't remember,

probably like I'm going to feel like ten

years ago,

Google already tried making smart glasses

with Google Glass and it kind of flopped

pretty,

pretty terribly for obvious reasons,

I guess.

But

Here's kind of what's happening.

So this is the Google blog post here.

Intelligent eyewear is coming this fall.

We're revealing new frames from Gentle

Monster and Warby Parker,

plus features that let you get directions,

send text, snap photos, and more.

I'm not going to read too much into

this press release because a lot of things

when it comes to AI products and...

creepy technology like this that i'm not

sure who asked for this um this is

kind of a lot of marketing stuff here

um i think the most important part to

talk about with this is this is kind

of uh

a terrible trend because we already saw

this with Meta.

They released their Meta Ray Bans and Meta

Glasses.

And that was kind of, unfortunately,

it was kind of a success.

And, you know, maybe you're thinking, oh,

this doesn't really sound that bad.

Like, is this really an issue, right?

And I think the most important part about

this to think about is these products have

cameras on them.

They are also owned by two of the

largest advertising companies in the

world, Meta and Google.

They collect probably the most amount of

data in the entire world,

probably the largest two data collectors

ever.

And you're strapping a camera to your

face.

Now,

I know most people in our audience are

probably like, yeah,

I'm never doing that in my entire life.

I'm never strapping a camera from Meta or

Google to my face.

But that's not the problem.

The problem is that this is going to

be other people strapping a camera to

their face.

And especially in public,

this is going to be a pretty big

issue.

And I also think this is another kind

of awful move where these Ray-Ban meta

glasses weren't originally planning to be

part of like this whole, you know,

AI ecosystem, but now we're seeing with,

you know, these new changes,

these new glasses that meta and Google are

releasing.

they're integrating these AI features into

these glasses.

And they're basically like wholesale,

like sending and collecting information

and sending it to these AI models.

And I do want to talk about this

a little bit afterwards,

but I kind of want to throw it

over to Jonah a little bit.

Like,

how are you feeling about this

announcement?

Do you have any thoughts?

Yeah,

my initial thought was definitely kind of

along the lines of what you just said.

I think it's very unfortunate that Google

didn't learn their lesson from Google

Glass.

I think it was pretty clear at that

time that this sort of thing was

unacceptable.

But now, yeah,

it's just become so normalized by I think

the first mainstream one was those

Snapchat glasses,

but especially the meta glasses.

I think people are wearing those out in

the wild.

run into like Instagram stories and things

like that from regular people like they've

kind of gotten mass adoption and they've

really figured out that they need to

market it as like this fashion item this

partnership with these existing glasses

companies and that is really how this is

taken over which is just very unfortunate

um

Yeah,

it's a shame that we went in this

direction because I think I've said this

on the show before,

but definitely in some various threads,

I'm not totally opposed to the idea of

smart glasses in general.

I wear a smart watch myself and something

like a heads up display in your glasses

would be super convenient,

especially at the time where I used to

wear glasses all the time,

which

i don't anymore so maybe it'd be less

convenient now but i did want them before

and that they're not even doing an option

uh to do that without like having these

cameras strapped to your face i think is

is a shame and

I think that's kind of how these big

tech companies like Google operate.

They kind of just take away any choice

that you have so you have to go

with the version of the product that they

want you to have because competition is

kind of eliminated.

We've seen this in the smartphone space

where there's only a few major players

now.

There used to be a ton of smartphone

manufacturers like ten years ago and now

those are gone and I think

Yeah,

everything is just kind of standardizing

on this one design, which is annoying.

Yeah,

it is kind of frustrating as well as

like,

I think the eyewear industry has also kind

of been profiting from this, right?

Because...

I think a lot of places that sell

glasses,

they sell the glasses at like a regular

store.

Like this isn't something that you can

just like only get on like an electronic

store or something like that.

It's literally like next to the standard

glasses.

So I think it becomes kind of normalized

through that as well, definitely.

I definitely saw them at the Sunglass Hut

stand at Macy's.

They're just meta glasses next to the

Ray-Ban glasses.

It's all the same stuff.

They just...

sell them all together um yeah I mean

I feel like the price is also kind

of ridiculously low but I think also

that's also kind of done by the fact

that these are like powered by collecting

a crap ton of information so it's probably

subsidizing the cost a little bit yeah I

actually don't even know how much these

cost I've never I've never looked into it

personally that is interesting though

They are not expensive.

They're definitely less than a thousand

dollars.

So I feel like that's, I mean,

I feel like Ray-Bans is definitely a

cheaper brand.

I've never heard of these,

like I've never heard of Gentle Monster or

that other one, Warby Parker, but I mean,

maybe they're.

Warby Parker is pretty big in the like

online glasses area.

I think you would see it recommended a

lot.

on like Reddit and stuff as a cheaper

option to buy your glasses in the store

because I don't know how it works around

the world but like at a glasses store

here you can pay three hundred dollars for

some frames or something and then not to

mention the lenses but if you order it

online from that they're like thirty

dollars or something I don't know so I

think that's why they're popular I don't

know if they're super known for being like

a trendsetter in style or anything maybe

they are though maybe people are super

into them

Yeah, I mean, I don't know.

I also want to kind of talk about

this.

I don't know if we...

There's another story that kind of follows

this up because I feel like some people

might be like, oh, this is... Yeah,

this is concerning, but, like,

is there any proof that these glasses are

collecting ridiculous amounts of

information on people?

Are they actually as creepy as, like,

are we just...

making this up like no we're not making

this up um so here's a story from

the bbc uh and basically a regulator has

contacted meta over workers watching

intimate ai glasses videos so basically

there's a uk data watchdog has written to

meta following a concerning report

claiming outsourced workers were able to

view sensitive content filmed by the

company's ai smart glasses and

it's a little bit concerning.

So they,

they were saying that they were even

seeing, you know,

living from living rooms to naked bodies,

you know,

people on the toilet and stuff like that.

This is,

this is experiences and things that,

you know,

a lot of people assume is private and

that is like kind of sacred,

which is being sent to these

companies.

And I guess we don't know whether this

is going to actually be the case with

the Google ones,

but I think given Google's track record of

basically wherever possible sending

information to Google's like a Gemini

service, I mean,

that's how they make money.

That's like,

that's the whole AI industry at the

it's kind of unfortunate that, you know,

there's this normalization of this

technology when we already know that this

technology is like completely, uh,

it doesn't have privacy built in.

And I think the normalization of this is

we're basically going to see every

country, like no matter,

like a lot of people say things like,

Oh, you know,

China has like a million cameras and like,

you know,

these cities in the U S they've got

cameras on every single corner.

Um,

Now there's going to be cameras literally

everywhere.

Every single person is going to be having

these cameras always on at all times.

There's going to be cameras everywhere.

And I think these are a little bit

more concerning compared to a smartphone

because the camera in your pocket or in

your bag is...

You know, it's not pointing at someone.

It's not, like, primed,

ready to capture content at all times.

So I think this is definitely more creepy.

I think it's definitely also kind of

breaking the consent model here as well.

Like,

if you're talking to someone who's wearing

these, like,

do you know whether they're recording you?

Do you know if they're sending your face

to some, like, AI company?

Like, no, you don't.

It's kind of creepy.

So...

yeah that was kind of the point i

wanted to bring up as well like not

only do we not know what these are

collecting um or like what extent these

are always recording but you also can't

know not you not only can you not

know like what these tech companies are

doing but um you can't really tell like

if other people just around you are

recording them right now and if you look

at the images from uh this google blog

they are um really

hidden i think the fact that they have

cameras i literally had to when i read

this for the first time i had to

zoom in really on this gentle monster

thing to see on on those frames to

see if they had cameras at all you

can barely tell uh there's an outline of

a camera when you zoom way in but

i was wondering if they were making some

models without cameras that only um i

don't know if these i think they said

they have heads-up displays but i know

they also like

talk to you in your ear.

Yeah, those ones.

I don't know if you can zoom in

on that easily or not.

But it's,

you really have to look closely to to

see those cameras.

And I think that that's the thing that

is most concerning to me because yeah,

it could just I mean,

it just really normalizes all of this in

in modern society that you don't really

have any privacy when you

go outside in public spaces anymore.

A lot of people would argue you probably

didn't have privacy in these public spaces

before.

But I think that the dynamics are a

bit different because cameras used to be

just less ubiquitous in general.

They used to be bigger,

so it was more obvious that you were

taking pictures.

Or even now,

if you hold up your phone,

you can tell if someone is trying to

take a picture of you.

And it's just very,

very different now because now you can't

tell any of that.

It's very unobvious.

yeah,

I am not a fan of this development

one bit.

Obviously, besides the camera issue,

these are really built around Google

Assistant,

like all of these smart glasses will be

with their respective voice vendors.

All of these big tech companies really

want to push AI and having AI in

your ear at all times as the as

the future right.

And

I mean,

we've talked about AI stuff on here in

the past,

but it's just concerning to me how much

data that people are giving up to these

voice assistants and other AI chat tools.

We've talked about AI chats misleading

people.

We've talked about how AI doesn't protect

your data because it doesn't have things

like end-to-end encryption,

and they're making it...

Not only is it was already hard to

run AI locally,

now it's practically impossible because

who can afford the hardware these days

because of these AI companies buying all

the computers on the market so us mere

mortals can't get one anymore.

It's all just not great,

I guess is the best way to put

it.

Yeah, it's a shame.

A lot of people in the chat hear

about this.

I like this comment.

We need proton face masks.

You know, that'd be funny.

I wonder if there will be some sort

of product that comes out.

I know we've seen it with facial

recognition stuff in the past,

kind of adversarial stuff.

things you can wear to mess with facial

recognition or cameras or whatever.

I don't know if there will be a

good way to kind of avoid being recorded

by these things.

But yeah,

that would certainly be an interesting

product.

I wouldn't say I'd recommend Proton get

into it,

but they make a lot of random things

sometimes, so you never know.

Yeah,

I think the last thing we need is

another Proton product.

Yeah, I know.

Uh, no, but I agree.

I agree with everything you said.

Um, but I do think like, you know,

I think a lot of people are purposely

saying like, Oh no, you know,

I'm not like using it.

Like it's a cool product.

And like,

I just want to be able to take

pictures everywhere.

Um, but I think a

Just because you want Meta to see

everything that you see constantly,

not everyone else wants that.

I understand the comment when you talk

about privacy in public,

but I feel like it's taking a little

bit...

in a strange direction.

Like just because you don't have privacy

in public doesn't mean you should have

cameras literally everywhere and everyone

with one strap to their face.

Like, yeah, I think also that's kind of,

it's kind of changed.

I feel like the aspect of that has

changed now that we have cameras

everywhere.

Maybe that would have been true like,

you know,

back when people had

it was hard to take pictures of people

and hard to do that sort of stuff.

But now everyone's got a camera,

everyone's got, uh,

easy ways to take pictures of people.

Um, I also think that these,

I'm not sure,

like they didn't actually show it in the

demo.

Like I watched the demo to see exactly

how these work.

And you did mention a little bit,

like there's,

there is ones with a display and there's

ones without a display.

So there's,

there's different things going on there.

It's the same as, um, meta's ones.

Um, but,

They're also trying to like if you watched

last week's Android IO thing,

they're kind of pivoting towards like,

you know,

using these connected devices instead of

your phone.

Like one of the demos they showed was

like ordering something on DoorDash and it

was basically Gemini was doing the entire

process for you.

Um,

and I think that's just another thing

where it's like, wow,

think about all the information that

Gemini is processing.

Like it's processing your location,

it's processing your order,

it's processing like so many things at the

same time.

And it's all just like getting heaped into

this product.

Um,

I don't think like it doesn't protect

anything.

Like there's

It's basically just sitting clear text on

Google servers, which, you know,

maybe Google has good security now, but,

you know,

there's always a possibility of it being

breached.

And like we saw with the regulator talking

about meta, like, you know,

who gets access to this data?

Like,

is it going to be outsourced to these

workers overseas?

And even then,

I feel like just storing that data is

also kind of concerning, too.

Yeah.

you know,

all these intimate things that you're

doing.

Like,

does that really need to exist on Google

servers?

Probably not.

I would argue not.

Yeah.

It's strange.

I saw we got a comment from Anonymous

in English.

in the chat saying that they saw a

good comment about privacy in public

spaces.

I tried to open this link.

I'm using brave browser for the screen

sharing right now and apparently lobsters

has blocked the brave browser so I can't

access it but I'll assume it's good and

if it's related to this other comment you

sent how it's not about the lack of

privacy it's

about it being societally inappropriate to

eavesdrop like that.

I totally agree,

and I think a lot of our society

could take a lesson from the Japanese in

this regard.

In Japan,

they notoriously have a camera feature on

their phone, a law, really,

that

requires all their phones to make a very

obvious sound when you're taking a

picture.

And I think that that's the sort of

thing that would not be unwelcome,

in my opinion,

because it's exactly about making it

societally inappropriate to do these

privacy violations in public.

I think if you're taking a picture of...

anyone who wants you to take a picture

of them,

they're not going to mind the sound at

all.

And for everyone else,

you want to have that notification,

I would imagine.

So that's the sort of thing where Japan

clearly saw a problem in society and

solved it.

And I think we could probably do something

to that effect as well.

Will we?

I doubt it, but you can always,

you can always hope.

I also think, no,

I think that's an interesting point to

bring up because, you know,

I think they have tried to like dissuade

people a little bit by saying like, no,

no, no, it has a notification light.

Like it has a little light on it

that shows that it's recording.

And people have already,

people are modding their glasses to get

rid of that.

People are offering that as a service.

They're like,

I don't want people to know I'm recording

them.

Like it's something that people are

actively looking to,

disable, right?

Maybe there's also a camera sound,

you know, oh, we just removed the speaker.

Sorry.

So, yeah, I mean, of course,

these mods exist,

because it's an asshole move to do that

with random people who don't consent to

that.

I mean, we,

this is exactly what we learned with

Google Glass,

which is that nobody likes it.

It's still the case that nobody really

likes to have cameras all up in their

face.

But what these tech companies are doing is

not only normalizing it,

but making it very easy and pretty hidden

to do so.

I.

I don't know what these I don't I

don't know what these glasses look like

specifically when they're recording,

because I don't think they have any

pictures of an indicator or anything that

I've seen.

Someone can correct me if I'm wrong,

but I would not be surprised if these

tech companies are

probably making it intentionally easy to

mod I would imagine a speaker would be

more difficult I mean you can always

remove it but a camera you don't even

have to you don't have to affect the

camera hardware I mean the glasses

hardware at all because you can just paint

over it or put a piece of tape

on it right it's not that hard to

block light sound is a little bit more

tricky but yeah it's

It's strange that we're kind of accepting

this,

but I think Meta has done a pretty

good job at advancing their agenda in this

regard, unfortunately.

Yeah, definitely.

I don't really think I have any more

to add,

but there was a comment here from

Anonymous, and they said,

is there a single Google product that

doesn't violate your privacy by default?

I'm just going to stop there with your

question.

I think no, no, there's not.

I think the fact that you need a

Google account to use a lot of these

services is kind of the issue, right?

I feel like a lot of this stuff

would be probably –

okay right if it was like not connected

to a google account but i think that's

kind of how they make money right like

they have this central account that's

connected to all these services that are

all collecting information about you to

make better choices for advertising all

that sort of stuff um i mean i

can't really think of anything off the top

of my head but maybe there is and

i'm not thinking right well no i totally

agree personally because

I mean,

people will point out pretty often if we

talk about any Google stuff,

how they do have some products which are

private or secure or only run locally.

And Google does put in some effort to

make some of these features local.

So you could look at like on the

Pixel phones, for example,

they have a song recognition feature on

the lock screen and that runs completely

locally on your device.

So it's not like it's streaming locally.

all of the music that you're listening to

to Google or everything going on around

you or whatever.

And there's little features like that.

You can enable end to end encryption of

your sync in Google Chrome to protect your

browsing data and passwords and history

and whatever.

So little stuff like that,

people will say,

that does exist so they can make private

and secure software.

But the reality is all of that stuff

that they're making,

they're kind of side projects and they

really exist for the purpose of getting

you to use all of these other Google

services and getting you to trust Google.

Google software development a bit more.

I think like all of these things being

pixel exclusive,

like that song recognition thing,

for example,

a lot of them are like that.

A lot of them are to get you

invested into the Chrome ecosystem and

stuff like that is,

that's kind of their motivation at the end

of the day.

I mean,

people will even argue that some Google

services can be private.

Like they'll point at Google Workspace for

Education, for example,

which has these terms of service,

especially because of laws and regulations

relating to how student and children's

data can be used in the first place.

But even that is not like a selfless

act on Google's part to release a good

product that is private.

private for students,

it's a way to normalize the entire Google

software ecosystem so that when they

become adults,

they'll use Gmail and Google Drive,

or when they enter the workplace,

they'll demand to use Google Docs because

that's what they're familiar with,

and Microsoft Word will seem old and

crusty in comparison.

And

That's ultimately the only thing that

Google cares about.

It's building this market share and

getting as much advertising data as

possible.

So no,

I would not use any of these Google

services.

I think

it's I think they just don't lead to

anything good happening.

And historically,

maybe the handful of things that Google

has done that are good for the world,

like creating the Android open source

project, for example,

I think they're actively trying to

distance themselves from it and lock it

down as much as they can,

through changes to their to how they run

the source code and making even more

features

pixel exclusive, I think, a long time ago,

they they took out the dialer in the

messaging app from Android itself.

So it's not even usable as a phone

anymore.

And like on its own,

they depend on themselves and OEMs making

these apps.

So now Android is like,

unless somebody is going to maintain those

things,

it locks people into these ecosystems that

keep growing, growing smaller and smaller.

So

Yeah,

Google has just become kind of an evil

company, unfortunately.

And I don't think there's much to do

about it at this point.

Definitely.

All right,

I guess we can move on to the

next story here.

Jonah, what's our next story here?

Yeah, let's take a look.

So this was reported by four or four

media.

Their headline is the FBI wants to buy

nationwide access to license plate

readers.

Only a couple of vendors could likely

fulfill what the FBI is after,

namely Flock and Motorola.

So their article says the FBI wants to

buy access to ALPRs nationwide,

which would likely allow the agency to

track the movements of vehicles and by

extension people across the country

without a warrant,

according to FBI procurement records that

for foreign media reviewed.

The documents that they reviewed show that

ALPRs continue to be a sought-after tool

for law enforcement,

not just for local police and individual

communities, but federal agents too.

This news is coming, as they note,

as protests and pushback against these

license plate readers have spread around

the country, which, of course,

we've covered many times here on the show.

Luckily,

there are a lot of stories about

individual agents

uh cities and towns rejecting these things

or going into contracts with flock and

then canceling them because of outrage i

think these are things that most people

generally do not want or see the value

of uh but they are still being adopted

in a number of other places so this

four for media article notes that

In the case of Flock specifically,

all of the Flock systems that get

installed are under the control of the

cities or other entities that order them,

not Flock themselves.

I don't know if that's technical or just

a matter of policy,

but at the end of the day,

The city that installed it can choose

whether to share data with federal law

enforcement.

And I believe the default is that they

don't share that information,

although it would be easy to check.

And I'm sure a lot of law enforcement

agencies, local police stations,

et cetera,

would be more than happy to share all

of their data with federal law

enforcement.

So I don't think that's a huge protection.

But yeah,

it's very concerning because all of this

data being kind of combined by flock into

this massive database in a very easily

searchable database will reveal very fine

grained detailed information about

people's travel habits,

And I wouldn't be surprised knowing what

applications of AI we've seen in other

fields, like the military, for example.

I think we talked about that in a

previous episode,

but there was a story about... Yeah,

I believe it was Anthropic who were kind

of taking a stand against the military by

saying you can't use...

their AI for like targeting people and

that sort of thing.

But other AI companies have not been as

strong against this.

And I would imagine that we're very close

if this goes through from a system where

not only can the FBI look up people's

license plates to track them and see what

they're doing,

but

they will be able to implement AI systems

who can analyze all of this data and

probably preemptively track people,

find people of interest depending on where

they're going.

Maybe there's hotspots that they are

concerned about and they want to see all

the people who go in and out and

that sort of thing.

We've seen that sort of geolocation

feature in other stories in the past.

uh specifically with google this most

often happens with people or law

enforcement agencies will make requests to

google asking for all of the phones

basically that were in a given area and

these areas can be quite large and cover

tens or hundreds or thousands of Google

accounts that will then have their privacy

breached just because they were somewhat

in the vicinity of a crime that occurred.

So I would be very concerned about that.

We've definitely seen a lot of flock in

the news.

That's the big name that people are

pushing back against right now.

I know that Motorola has a pretty

extensive system as well,

which for media called out in this

article.

I don't actually know how extensive that

is or how many cities have installed it

or what that system entails.

I'd have to look.

more into that.

But in this article,

the FBI says that they are open to

awarding a contract to multiple vendors if

that helps them achieve their goal of

pretty much nationwide access to this

data.

So it's very possible that they could

enter a contract with Flock, Motorola,

maybe even some other companies and

combine all of that data into one system.

So

Yeah,

I think this is a very concerning

development in the area of government mass

surveillance.

This is exactly the sort of problem that

Nate just talked about with Naomi

Brockwell in that interview we did

recently.

As far as warrantless searches of our data

goes,

that was more to address data brokers.

But this is the same category of stuff

where they can get all this data from

private companies and compile it all and

use it without getting a warrant,

which it's just scary stuff, I think.

Yeah,

I definitely was going to touch on that.

Like it does seem like this is sort

of exactly like what we were talking about

with that interview.

Like, you know,

this data shouldn't be just easily

accessible by like police departments and

like the government.

Like they shouldn't be able to know every

single person's movements within a city

and whatnot.

I think that is pretty bad information.

Is the solution to this basically at this

point, you know,

just getting these camera systems removed

or perhaps like a legal precedent for

perhaps, you know,

this being against the Fourth Amendment

or?

Yeah, I mean,

it's my opinion that it's clearly against

the Fourth Amendment,

but obviously that's not much of a concern

to the government these days, it seems.

I think that you definitely have to take

both approaches.

The best way to do this is to

make sure that this isn't happening in

your town,

and that means getting involved with these

city councils.

I know that politics is very...

annoying to deal with and i think a

lot of people lose hope uh when it

comes to like nationwide federal

government or even their state government

um in some cases but

Your local government,

you can't have a lot of power and

it's a very small group of people,

I think,

that they can get away with a lot

of stuff just because there's no pushback

at all.

So even a little pushback on this sort

of thing can definitely help out your

community.

And I would try to do that and

I would try to get more community members

involved and just be persistent about it

if your city or town is...

considering implementing flock or has

already implemented it um but the other

approach is definitely something like the

the surveillance accountability act that

naomi brockwell drafted and recently

introduced with uh thomas massey i you can

if you want to learn more about that

you could go watch that interview after

this i would say

telling other all the listeners here,

I would say that I think it's very

unlikely that that will come to pass,

especially because Thomas Massey lost out

in the Republican primary because Trump

really wanted him out and spent a lot

of money to make that happen.

So

I don't think either way,

I don't think it was really going to

go anywhere.

But I do think that that kind of

bill was important for like privacy

education.

I'm glad that Thomas Massey signed on to

it,

even if he's going to be out of

office soon,

because it's kind of like a nice parting

gift to the American people to at least

educate people about privacy and be like,

this is what should be happening.

And we should at least be discussing it

more and seeing what we can we can

do about it.

Because

We need some more protections against this

kind of...

The government would probably consider

gray area stuff with the Fourth Amendment.

And we need an easier way to hold

the government accountable and sue the

government for...

violations of the fourth amendment because

for some reason we're in the situation

right now where the u.s constitution

guarantees a lot of rights but if the

government violates those rights you have

very little recourse it's very challenging

to sue the federal government because the

entire system is stacked against the

ability for you to do that which kind

of

I mean,

weakens the entire idea of having this

judicial system in the first place.

I think it's very unfortunate.

But just like we have Section two one,

which reinforces the First Amendment,

I do think we need something similar when

it comes to data brokers,

when it comes to these huge tech companies

like Flock that are collecting all of this

camera data around the country,

preventing that sort of surveillance from

happening,

especially preventing the government from

abusing that data and compiling it all

into an even larger mass surveillance

system I think absolutely needs to happen

and I think we need to be talking

about that more and demanding it.

Definitely and it's yeah it is kind of

unfortunate that like we kind of had a

I feel like in the US there's very

few politicians who actually care about

privacy.

I think the other one was Ron Wyden,

I believe,

and I guess that kind of sucks now

that we've got only basically him left.

It is kind of frustrating,

but I think what Jonah said,

the local level is also really important.

I feel like these companies like Flock and

Motorola, they probably are doing...

Isn't there probably a lot of lobbying and

a lot of money behind this whole

initiative?

Is that why a lot of cities are

choosing to implement this?

I mean, absolutely.

There's got to be.

I remember we saw...

I don't know if it made it into

the show notes,

but we just read in one of our

chats about...

a city in Texas that is losing flock

because of pushback from the community.

And one city council member had a total

crash out basically and wrote a huge

manifesto about how crazy it is to get

rid of flock and how they might as

well go back to the eighteen hundreds if

they can't use these surveillance cameras

to track people around their city.

If you read that entire letter that he

wrote,

it came from a very emotional place,

which I think that

isn't typical of even politicians who

don't get their way unless they were like

personally invested in this in some way.

So I would not be surprised at all

if there are kickbacks from flock and

these other surveillance providers to to

these cities that implement them,

because it seemed like, you know,

he was really personally losing out.

And that does seem like the sort of

thing that that they would do.

Yeah.

I think just to like finish out this

topic here,

I guess like for some people in the

audience who, you know,

might be feeling a little bit skeptical of

this technology,

maybe they're not a hundred percent

against it yet.

They're not really sure.

Is there,

is there like evidence that this

technology is even good for catching

criminals or is actually an effective tool

or is this just, you know,

a thinly veiled excuse to actually install

these cameras everywhere?

Yeah.

You know,

I haven't seen much evidence to that

effect.

Even if there were evidence,

I would have to look into that more.

But it certainly isn't having the, like,

enough of a profound effect to make it

worth it by any means.

At the end of the day,

you have to balance this against the

rights that people have to privacy and the

rights that people have against privacy.

warrantless and illegal government

searches at least in theory and any

potential benefits that this has for law

enforcement aren't outweighed by people's

rights and by the u.s constitution i don't

think um it's probably not super

controversial to to most people to want to

make catching crime easier and to help

help out law enforcement with their jobs a

little bit.

But that help has to come through legal

routes like requiring a warrant and having

some oversight from another branch of

government from the from the judicial side

of things rather than their executive

branch.

And without those checks and balances,

it's just an authoritarian system,

which is completely unacceptable.

Definitely.

I a hundred percent agree.

Um,

I guess here we can dive into this

next topic here.

Uh,

this is a story about researchers wanting

preschool teachers to wear cameras to

train AI.

So this is kind of a ridiculous story.

I can't believe we're actually,

this is actually a thing.

Um,

And this is a quote from this article

by four or four media with your

permission,

your child's lead teacher may wear a small

teacher worn camera that captures the

teacher's approximate first person

perspective.

And,

or we may place a fixed video camera

in the classroom,

a document given to parents and later

shared with four or four media reads

university of Washington researchers plan

to have preschool teachers wear cameras

that would record everything they saw from

a first person perspective.

including the children they were teaching.

Then they would use this footage to

develop AI models.

One parent who spoke to for media

understood the program as opt out rather

than opt in.

The university said that classroom

participation was contingent upon

receiving parental permission from all the

children.

Uh,

I just want to say like already from

the top here, uh,

when it comes to children,

like we already have a lot of laws

around, you know,

collecting children's information because

let's be honest,

like children can't consent.

They don't, they don't, they're not fully,

uh, capable of consenting.

Um, so, you know,

when we have preschool children here,

like these are like, you know,

these are toddlers, like these are,

these are very, very young children.

Um,

It's kind of concerning, right?

So I think that

That should already be our thing from the

top here.

These are children that can't consent.

Their information,

their faces could have been recorded.

I assume that none of the parents approved

this,

but maybe I'm thinking too positively of

them.

But, I mean,

I certainly wouldn't allow this to happen

if my child was going to a school.

So, yeah, this is, I guess,

another aspect of how AI is becoming very

entrenched into the education system.

I think, you know,

we're probably going to see like children

accessing AI models and these children

safe AI models and like, you know,

all this kind of creepy stuff.

But yeah, Jonah,

do you have any thoughts on this one?

You're muted.

Oops.

My immediate thought when I saw this

story,

I sent this picture in the chat right

away because I feel like we were warned

about this sort of thing.

How many years ago?

Eight years ago.

And there's a lot of lessons in the

media that I think

people should be taking away from and

don't.

But that is the classic problem.

It's a classic quote about sci-fi writers

and other writers in the arts and

literature space will write a story about

the torment nexus and how it's super bad.

Don't build it and then tech pros are

like, let's build the torment nexus.

It sounds so cool.

That's the sort of thing we're getting

into here.

I don't know what it is that like

these schools are hoping to learn from the

from this.

I feel like I know that this article

does say the goal is to better understand

children's everyday learning experiences

and develop AI tools that can help assess

classroom interaction quality.

That to me feels like the sort of

thing that you could just ask teachers

about how things are going in your

classroom.

what what issues are you having i don't

know if you need ai to analyze all

of this and put it into a nice

chart for school administrators to look at

i i don't know what these charts are

really doing for for the education sector

in general i think that this is like

a lot of things in the schools these

days um

overly bureaucratic administrations really

taking away from the educational system

and really hurting teachers,

hurting students,

and

I don't really see how this could be

beneficial.

What I did not see in this article

is what the teachers in question think

about this system.

We've heard what parents think and what

the people doing the study and what the

administrators at the school think.

would be kind of surprised if the teachers

were like super on board with this and

really wanted to know how to integrate ai

into their classroom more i feel like

that's not something that people are

clamoring for and i think that a lot

of people in the educational space know

that all of this integration of ai and

all of this reliance on ai is making

the quality of education

worse uh it's making like like an overuse

of technology in the classroom especially

without proper technology education in the

first place no uh no no guidelines for

students to follow no i mean in a

lot of cases no advice is really given

you just put in front of a an

ipad or a chromebook and

told to do things.

And a lot of students are expected to

know the basics.

But if you're not learning the dangers of

this stuff,

if you're not learning how to browse the

internet responsibly,

it's just a gateway into all sorts of

bad behaviors.

I don't think that technology needs to be

completely removed from the classrooms or

anything like that.

cameras probably do.

I can't imagine.

I still can't imagine why anyone would

want what's described in this article.

But in general, you know,

technology is important.

And certainly you should be skilled in it.

But I think students are basically being

trained to be consumers of technology and

whatever is put in front of them,

AI is only going to worsen that problem.

And something needs to be done about that

we need to bring back proper tech

education,

we need to bring back

I think more

Just more reliance on the people who are

actually doing these jobs and interacting

with these students and giving them the

tools that they ask for.

Because while this is happening,

while they're trying to shove cameras and

AI into every corner of these classrooms,

teachers are not getting the resources

they need.

They have to spend their own money to

get pencils to hand out to their students

and stuff like that.

Our priorities are so...

mixed up here in the educational space.

At least that's my perspective here in the

US.

I don't know how education works around

the world.

I feel like

I hear China has a lot of education

stuff done,

but then they have their own separate

problems.

I don't know what the best solution is,

but I think that something needs to be

done.

This is clearly not the right direction.

Even if there are multiple directions we

could be going in, this is not it.

Yeah,

I definitely agree with your analysis

there.

I think also the

the thing that I feel like kind of

happens with schools is I feel like

sometimes people don't think that children

need human rights.

Like just because they're children doesn't

mean that they can't,

like they can be guinea pigs for this

technology.

Like I feel like if you said we're

going to be installing machines

AI cameras in McDonald's that's going to

automatically analyze your facial patterns

and like

send all of this data to train AI,

I feel like people would be kind of

like, what the heck?

Like what?

I'm not going to McDonald's anymore.

Like what?

But then as soon as you say it's

for a learning environment, you know,

we're trying to help kids.

Like it's like, no,

like I don't think that's really,

I think that's kind of a bad excuse.

It did say in this,

they got a response back from the

University of,

was it University of Washington?

Yes, University of Washington,

they got a response back and they said,

our initial outreach was intended to help

us better understand how families would

feel about a project that uses artificial

intelligence to support teachers.

Now,

I actually kind of feel like this is

a little bit of a

cop-out maybe like I kind of am interested

to see what this actual thing that they

were trying to do contained um I think

there is a yeah there is actually a

picture of it on there I don't know

if we can open that up on on

this on the stream but uh yeah it

is kind of strange like I don't think

it's it says specifically that that's a

reason

And I don't know,

it just kind of comes across a little

bit strange that they would say that's the

reason why they were doing this,

not because, you know, well,

these are the nefarious reasons, but...

Maybe, oh yeah,

I can share the document that they got

here.

It basically said what you said at the

beginning,

your child's teacher may wear a small

camera,

And they will be used for supporting

teachers through coaching and Ai tools

research and children's learning

experiences research publications and

conference presentations project

demonstration videos restricted access

research data set and it may be processed

using cloud based Ai services.

They say that participation is completely

voluntary.

If you change your mind,

you can let the teacher or research team

know,

and we will remove any recordings that

include your child.

If recordings have already been used in AI

model training a group with other data

prior to your

through a withdrawal request,

it may not be possible to remove your

child's data,

which is a problem you see in a

lot of research studies.

Once it gets anonymized,

it's very challenging to change whether

you can send to them.

But I think this is in particular,

especially because they are using

cloud-based AI,

is problematic uh so and and also the

fact that they are still going to take

these recordings they're just going to go

through and remove your child from them if

you if you opt out um which is

obviously not like an ideal solution

mistakes can always be made to that effect

and how would you how do you even

know the university of washington

is not doing this research anymore uh they

say given the early responses from parents

we have terminated the study they're no

longer seeking participation at any site

so that's that's good once again just like

with the flock stuff it's good to push

back against these very invasive things

that are happening in our communities in

our society taking some responsibility um

and

making sure that i mean making sure that

your children are protected their data

making sure that this kind of stuff

doesn't impact their futures in any way

that's all super important for parents to

do so

So, yeah, I, you know, in this case,

it's a good outcome,

but I would not be surprised if this

exact sort of thing gets tried by research

teams and by other companies around the

country and around the world in the

future.

I mean,

already there's so many products for

education that

kind of surveil what children are doing in

the classroom on their computers.

You could look at like GoGuardian,

which constantly records your screen so

that that can be checked later.

And this is just one step beyond that.

But I wouldn't be surprised if this is

the sort of thing that AI companies or

other tech companies are itching to turn

into a full product at some point.

Yeah.

And I do think also the,

I think it would definitely be a benefit

if there was like, you know,

in the U S there was a nationwide

privacy law or something, you know,

that was,

I think it also is like the,

the protection of like,

I think some of these privacy laws are

like, you know,

we don't allow a collection of children.

Like I think it's the CCPA or something.

It doesn't allow collection of data on,

on minors, but it's like,

what about everyone else too?

Like, I think it's,

Most people would probably be against this

sort of thing,

being recorded and then that information

being sent to be trained.

I think that's also another problem with

these AI models is the training data.

How do they delete it?

Once this information gets put into an AI

model,

what if it contains personal information

of somebody?

Yeah.

I mean, they said they don't delete it,

so that answers that.

Yeah.

As far as we know,

that's the case for every other AI model

as well.

if there's information that gets scraped

by these things or that gets fed into

it like uh you know that's just a

black box exactly exactly yeah i think

that's kind of uh

everything we wanted to share about that

article.

We're going to get into a story about

discord,

rolling out some end to end encryption,

which is cool.

But before we dive into that,

let's share some updates with what's going

on within the community and our team.

Jordan,

why don't you start us off with some

updates on the videos that's been

happening?

Yes.

So I guess for anyone that's kind of

missed it,

we put out a video last week with

Naomi Brockwell,

and that was an interview that Nate did.

So basically we asked her some questions

about, like we talked about earlier,

the Surveillance Accountability Act that

finally got public release.

And if you haven't seen that already,

definitely check it out.

We also

released this week.

We released a bonus section of that

of that video where we asked her some

less privacy related questions so if

that's something you're interested in you

can get access to that by becoming a

member at privacyguides.org donate and

yeah you can definitely check that out if

you're interested in extra stuff we're

trying to basically offer more stuff for

our members and you know

give you extra perks for supporting us

because we do really appreciate it.

So definitely check that out.

That is available on, oh,

hold on a second.

That is available on privacyguides.org

slash videos.

You can check that out there.

You can see the bonus episode there and

the standard episode that we released.

So that's now live, the bonus section.

It's only like ten minutes,

but it's definitely some interesting

stuff.

If you're curious about Naomi's background

or if you just want to hear some

more of her personal thoughts,

definitely check.

that out as you know some cool bonus

stuff to check out um and if you

haven't already seen the interview with

her i would definitely recommend seeing

that too um

And I guess on my end this week,

I've been working on a video that Nate

put together.

He recorded and edited the basics of that

written up by him as well.

And I've just been editing that this week.

And I'm kind of hoping it's kind of

a more complex video.

It's about passwords,

kind of debunking some of the issues that

we've had with information on the internet

being a little bit outdated when it comes

to these password-related topics.

So definitely look out for that one.

That'll be coming soon.

It's more of a complicated edit.

So I suspect it might take a little

bit longer to edit because there's all

sorts of stuff we need to explain visually

in that video.

But I think it'll also be pretty

interesting.

Yeah,

I don't really have anything more in terms

of video content we're working on.

What about you, John?

Is there any extra site updates you can

talk about this week?

Yeah, there's a couple things going on.

This week and last week,

I've been working on kind of a redesign

for the entire website.

So that's currently accessible in a GitHub

PR right now,

if anyone is interested in taking a look.

But a couple changes that we're making to

all of that that I hope we'll be

able to publish soon.

because I think it's time for a change.

We've had the same website for quite a

while,

and I think there's improvements and

things that we've learned that we can make

it a bit easier to read and a

bit easier to navigate for sure.

So hopefully this helps out a bit.

There's also a discussion going on on the

forum right now that I opened a few

hours ago,

which is about a project that I want

to work on,

which is maintaining our own directory of

Android app fingerprints for the app

verifier app.

I don't know if anyone is familiar with

that here or uses that on Graphene OS.

You can get it from a Crescent.

So I know that a lot of people

who are concerned about the security of

what they're installing or who are on

Graphene OS use this.

And the way that the app works is

you have to

enter the fingerprint of the api of the

apk signature that you get from an

external trusted source so you can confirm

whether it is um the correct thing that

you're installing i think that we could

pretty easily crowdsource a trusted list

of this and i think that it would

be a good benefit for the community and

i think that we'd have enough people to

maintain it well so that's a potential

project that we're starting on it seems to

have support in the on the forum so

far but if you have any thoughts on

it i definitely want to get people's

feedback on that thread so i would

highlight that

Otherwise, a lot of the usual stuff,

as usual, privacyguides.org slash news.

You can catch up on other news stories

in privacy security that we've seen in the

space that we don't talk about on the

show because we are a bit limited here.

We discuss these news stories a bit more

than just read through them.

So we can't get through them all or

we'd be here for like six hours every

live stream.

But...

There's a lot of good stuff there as

well,

and it's a good place to stay up

to date in addition to our forum.

So that's kind of the main things that

I'm aware of for this week.

All of the stuff that we work on

at Privacy Guides, of course,

it's made possible by our supporters.

Like you said,

if you go to privacyguides.org slash

donate,

you can send us a one-time donation,

or you can sign up for...

a monthly membership,

which would include access to early access

videos and the bonus questions and

interviews and other exclusive videos like

the ones Jordan just talked about.

This is the only bonus questions video

that we've done for interviews so far,

but it's something that we hope to

continue doing

for for future interviews that we do we

have and we have a couple lined up

and i think getting people's personal

perspectives on different things in the in

this space is is cool and useful uh

another way to support us is by picking

up some swag at shop.privacyguides.org i

have a water bottle says privacy guys on

it i like this water bottle a lot

uh there's some more

Maybe boring merch like this one that just

says privacy, guys.

But we have some good designs there as

well if people are more interested in the

activism side of things.

I think we have some good stuff that

you might be interested in.

So you can consider checking it out.

As always,

I'll remind you that Privacy Guides is a

nonprofit project.

We research,

we share privacy-related information,

and we facilitate communities on our forum

and matrix where people can talk about

this stuff, ask questions,

get advice about staying private online

and preserving your digital rights.

So that's my spiel with all of that

out of the way.

Jordan,

why don't you take us away with our

next story here?

Or is it my turn?

Wait, who just did that one?

I think it's your turn if you want

to take this next story about Discord.

I will do this.

If my computer works,

why can't I like this?

Sorry.

This is from Bleeping Computer.

Discord rolls out end-to-end encryption on

voice and video calls, which is very cool.

Discord has announced that all voice and

video calls through the communication

platform are now protected by default,

which is important,

with end-to-end encryption.

The implementation was completed in March.

Extensive at-scale testing has given

Discord the confidence to formally

implement

announce the end-to-end encrypted

deployment now and to start removing

client code that supports unencrypted

fallback.

There's some technical details here.

The migration to end-to-end encryption was

achieved by extending the open source

encryption protocol, Dave,

to support all of the platforms where

Discord clients run, desktop, mobile,

web browsers, PlayStation, Xbox,

and Discord APKs.

I think that is very cool of them

to work on

stuff that's open source and stuff that

could potentially be adopted by other

video chat providers because Discord

clearly has the resources to build

something that works and works well and

works at scale that smaller projects and

smaller companies probably wouldn't be

able to do or wouldn't be able to

do very well.

So...

Yeah,

contributing to open source is always

good.

This Bleeping Computer article says that

this protocol called Dave was first

introduced in September of twenty twenty

four,

and it was developed in with assistance in

auditing from Trail of Bits,

which is a pretty reputable security

auditing firm when it when it comes to

encryption and all of that stuff.

So

Hopefully, it is all done well.

And I think that this is a big

upgrade for Discord.

I believe Discord has already added

end-to-end encryption for, no,

I don't think they have it for text

messages yet, unless their DMs do.

I'd have to look this up quick,

unless anyone knows in the chat.

But at least for voice, it's something...

I know that Discord is mainly a chat

app,

but I know that video calls and voice

calls are very extensively used by Discord

users as well.

So this is not like a super insignificant

change.

There's some platforms that rarely,

if ever, get video calls used on them.

But this is not one of them.

It's very common.

So having this available by default,

at least on videos, is...

It's great for everyone, I think.

And as usual, end-to-end encryption,

I think, not only benefits users,

but it also benefits these companies.

They don't need all of this data.

And kind of distancing themselves from

potentially that liability is also good

for businesses.

So it kind of works out for everyone

on both ends to support encryption as much

as possible,

which is why more companies should work on

implementing it.

Did you see any interesting stuff in this

article, Jordan?

No, I think you covered the main stuff.

I do want to add, though,

you did hint that possibly Discord might

have encrypted DMs or anything like that.

At this stage,

that's not something that they've said

that they're going to do.

I think they've said in a couple of

times on Twitter

know when they've been pressured on this

and people have asked them in questions

like why why aren't dms encrypted like you

know it kind of makes sense this should

be something that you do um confusingly

worded because it said that the encryption

layer covers dms but then i realized they

probably just spent video calls in dms i

don't know if i would call those

DMs them because it's not a message.

But whatever, whatever, bleepy computer.

We got there eventually.

I did want to highlight one thing in

this article that I didn't mention,

which is that they had issues with this

encryption layer in Firefox,

with their web client in Firefox.

And instead of just doing what I think

a lot of companies,

especially

Google, of course, because they're biased.

But what a lot of companies would probably

do and just block Firefox and say,

you got to use got to use chromium

to do this.

Discord actually worked with Mozilla to

solve those problems and get it working.

So that's another cool thing that they're

doing.

Would I recommend Discord overall?

Probably not,

especially without encrypted messages.

But a lot of people use it anyways.

A lot of even open source projects use

it anyways.

So if you're in certain open source spaces

even, it is sort of unavoidable,

unfortunately.

So yeah, I think it's good overall.

It's always good even with these less

privacy-respecting products to...

move in the direction of them being more

privacy respecting because not only does

it benefit the users but it kind of

normalizes this stuff it makes more people

expect end-to-end encryption because

they'll be like well discord has this and

this other app doesn't so that's a selling

point for discord and people will need to

add end-to-end encryption if they want to

compete and i think that that is a

good thing you should always all of these

products should always be competing on

security features because that's how we

all that's how we all benefit

Yeah, and I also think, you know,

we're seeing companies now that are, like,

pulling out of encryption.

Like, we saw Instagram DMs are, like,

they're discontinuing encryption on that

for some reason.

Like, what?

What is going on there?

Like, we need to, when companies start,

you know, saying that this is too hard,

this is, like,

causing too much friction or, like,

you know, it wasn't making sense.

Yeah.

There's plenty of platforms that do it.

Signal is everything.

Every single thing through Signal is

encrypted and it works perfectly fine.

So, you know,

I think this excuse or like, you know,

thing is like kind of a little bit

ridiculous, I think.

I feel like discord was almost filling a

role like similar to zoom for some people.

Like they were doing like company meetings

on discord.

Like people,

people use it for a lot of stuff.

Um,

so it kind of makes sense why they

finally pushed to have this enabled on

every chat.

Um,

But I think it's a good start.

But I think stuff like if we had,

it's obviously not a good service from a

privacy perspective.

It all runs on Google Cloud

infrastructure.

Its business model is questionable,

I would say.

Having Nitro and having a shop and all

these things,

I think it's a better business model than

WhatsApp, let's say.

it's still a little bit sus and I

think they're they're kind of uh vying to

be purchased and I think when that does

happen they're gonna become a lot less

privacy uh and a lot less

freedom oriented.

Like, you know,

they're not going to care about supporting

Firefox.

They're not going to spend the development

time to do that once they get purchased,

which I think is going to happen.

I think they're going to get bought by

someone.

It's just,

they're so big at this point that I

think, you know,

it's their value is probably ridiculously

large at this point,

because if you think of any online

communities, they've got a discord server.

So it's kind of become very ubiquitous,

especially when it comes to gaming stuff.

Yeah,

that's the problem with this VC-funded

stuff.

You either have to make way more money

than Discord is probably making,

or you've got to be acquired by a

company that is doing that.

So yeah,

Discord has stuck around this long,

but who knows in the future.

It is very easy to see why...

people have switched to discord, the UI,

the user,

the interface and the experience is for

some reason remains

very unique i don't know why more people

are not just doing what discord is discord

pretty much just did what slack does

except slack is absurdly expensive and

annoying to use and discord is not um

and there's been really no development in

other spaces since which is

is unfortunate i've always thought that

matrix and element clearly need to just

copy discord set up uh these like having

roles and having colored usernames and

having all of your communities in one

sidebar and having easily sorted rooms and

having all of this stuff like that is

extremely useful for communities and

Matrix and Element,

as well as pretty much all other chat

platforms,

just refuse to do the same thing.

Like, if you see something that's good,

you could just copy it.

I would be fine with that.

But they don't.

Somebody in the chat said,

check out Fluxer.

It's an AGPL complete Discord clone.

I did look at Fluxer a while ago,

and it seems very cool.

It actually does seem like the most

promising potential replacement.

I got to look at it again because

I haven't looked recently.

It...

I'm really hoping we can find an

alternative that supports Federation.

There's that other Discord alternative

that I think it's called Revolt.

I can't remember the name.

They like rebranded or something.

So it's confusing in my mind.

But they are like an open source thing,

but they have a worse experience in my

opinion.

And also it's just one centralized

service.

And I think we're in a bad place

if we're

swapping out one centralized service for

another, even if it is open source.

especially if it's not encrypted because

it is just putting all of your eggs

in one basket, basically.

But Fluxer does have Federation on their

roadmap,

so I'm very hopeful that they can do

it and get it done.

We have seen other projects and other even

chat projects say that they're going to do

Federation and then they never get around

to it because unfortunately it is a it

is a challenging problem to solve.

But

I don't think you have to do federation

in the way that Matrix does it,

which is extremely inefficient and weird

because all of the servers in a federation

basically have to sync data with each

other and they all have to store all

of that information.

I think a system...

more like Mastodon where there are like

centralized servers,

but you can access all of them in

the same UI would be very beneficial for

people.

So like, for example,

we could host a privacy guides Fluxer

server.

But then if you go to the main

Fluxer app,

you could still access it and also other

Fluxer servers that you see.

So that is something I hope happens.

Or if it doesn't happen with Fluxer,

I hope some other app does it.

I'm just really hoping I just really

hoping someone does it.

It's probably one of the top things that

I would

hope to see because right now I've kind

of got all of these chats going in

signal which is okay but it's clearly not

the same level of organization as

something like discord and not everyone is

willing to join public signal groups

because signal shares a lot of information

you can direct message anyone in there you

can't really block that uh so

Yeah,

at least you don't have to share your

phone number anymore.

So Signal has improved in that regard,

but it's not at all even close to

replacing Discord for a lot of people,

unfortunately.

So there's got to be another app.

And hopefully it happens sooner rather

than later, but I guess we'll see.

Yeah, I think also Discord is kind of,

it's become like sort of a centralized

place where a lot of communities are now.

And I feel like getting people to move

is going to be a challenge unless

something else comes along that is like

superior to Discord in every possible way.

You know,

I think if they are like this Fluxer

project,

I haven't heard of this before today, but,

you know, if they are able to,

create something that does allow like

federation and stuff like that.

Like, I think that's going to be,

that's going to solve one of the,

the biggest issues that the discord has,

which is everything is just centralized on

discord, which is,

I would argue is a little bit of

a problem because, you know,

it gives them kind of a lot of

control over the communities that are

there.

Um, whereas, you know,

like what we've done is, you know,

Jonah's set up like a forum for everybody

to discuss stuff on and that's all like

public.

You don't need to provide like personal

information and stuff.

I think we should go back to,

should go back to forums and stop putting

everything on like discord service.

Cause yeah,

I'm kind of over that method of putting

information out there.

It's not very easy to search.

I don't know.

But maybe I'm becoming too old,

and that is too cool.

That's just the cool new thing.

No, searchable information is always good.

And I think the messaging space is ripe

for a Discord replacement.

Because, I mean,

I agree it's going to be very challenging

to get a lot of people to switch,

especially right away.

But I think the moment Fluxer implements

Federation, for example, or maybe...

another federated app comes out for

messaging that lets you run a centralized

service so you can control the user

experience.

I think a lot of open source projects

especially will switch to that.

There are still a good amount of

communities on Matrix and we saw a lot

of them switch when Matrix first came out

and got good because it was better than

IRC for a lot of people.

But

I think the user experience of Matrix at

the end of the day, even now,

it's not up to par.

It's not as fast.

It's not as nice as something like

Discord.

And I think...

open source projects had this problem

where they want to have chat rooms on

matrix but some people would be joining

with matrix.org which is a terrible server

to be using or would be joining with

some other bad servers or would be you

know they can't control the experience of

the end users so a lot of these

uh a lot of these open source projects

end up

opening the their own servers to

registration so they can at least

guarantee something but then that's a huge

undertaking to to like run a mozilla.org

server for to just to the public to

a ton of people like that requires a

lot of space and processing power so

matrix a very a very hard solution i

think for projects to stick with but

something more lightweight and

not focused on like full decentralization

but more focused on just letting people

self-host their own communities i think uh

i think that that will convince a lot

of open source projects to switch i i'm

pretty certain of it and i think that

if that happens that's that's typically

how we see change especially online

because that

that once all the technical people switch

i think that pulls in other people it'll

pull in the gaming space next because

they're that's pretty tech adjacent a lot

of those people are also very techy and

then that'll pull in even more mainstreams

i think that's the sort of way that

these projects become mainstream but they

have to be usable they have to be

usable by a lot of people and have

a good experience as well as adoption uh

so haven't seen a messenger that does all

of that yet but

Maybe this will be it.

Or maybe another one will be it.

I don't know.

But hopefully, again,

hopefully something soon.

Yeah, and I think the most,

like the most important part, though,

is like,

I feel like it needs to be,

we keep making this mistake, like Skype,

I remember everyone used to be on Skype,

and then everyone moved to Discord,

or like everyone was on TeamSpeak,

and they moved to Discord.

And it's like,

can we move to, like, an open platform?

Can we move to something that's not, like,

controlled by the whims of, like,

a couple of people that own this company?

Like,

I think that's kind of the thing I'm

seeing here.

Like, Discord, I remember back in, like,

I joined it when it, like,

first came out in, like, and, you know,

it was a really cool alternative.

It was, like,

way better than everything else.

But, like,

I feel like we've gotten to the point

now where it's, like,

we have the ability to,

to make something better.

Like I feel like it wouldn't be that

hard for someone to make something that is

better because there's so many teething

issues now with it.

Like people are complaining like about

decisions that have been made by the

development team.

Like, Oh, why is it moving to like,

why are you moving every platform to like

a non-native experience?

Like why are you,

why are you making the app like really

laggy on my phone?

Like it's,

it's it's decisions that like this this

top-down system is kind of making right

like I feel like if it was a

decentralized open source uh sort of thing

it would be maybe that is an option

that you can switch your clients to but

there's also another option you know like

there could be something a bit you know

avoid these issues that we keep having but

again like you know matrix

also has showed us that that doesn't

always work that well.

Um, because I think a lot of the,

a lot of the development around matrix is

done by a single company.

It's not really done by a community of

people as much as we would like.

Um, like, you know,

matrix.org foundation is like quite strong

behind the development of,

of it as a project, um,

which kind of makes sense, but,

it does mean they can make decisions that

affect everything else.

Like I remember it's like all the spaces

stuff.

And then we had before spaces,

it was like everything was in,

I don't know.

I'm not honestly that much of a matrix

user.

I'm just on there because there's channels

that I have to be in.

But there's definitely issues with that

aspect as well.

But I feel like the issues are a

little bit more forgivable at least.

Yeah, totally agree.

A couple messages in the chat here.

Ion Sailor said, Stout, thank you.

Not Revolt.

Revolt was the original name.

I didn't much like it at the time,

but I think Stout is much worse.

No offense to the Stout people.

Harder to remember.

Yeah, I'm not a fan of Stout,

unfortunately.

I would have loved for it to be

cool,

but I know they've rejected Federation and

they're just kind of building their own

thing.

do i want to see something more able

to be self-hosted but also um i just

don't like it as much as discord in

the first place so kind of loses on

on both fronts um hello asked why is

matrix.org terrible or do you just mean

the ui um no i was talking about

the matrix.org home server is just

very,

very slow to federate and causes a lot

of problems.

And it's a very,

it's a centralizing force.

Mastodon sort of has this issue with

Mastodon.social too.

Most people just join that by default,

but Mastodon puts in more of an effort

to guide people to other servers,

whereas Matrix doesn't really,

which is very annoying because their main

server is,

can very often be slow to sync with

other servers.

So it makes, you know,

there's a bad experience

when you're interacting with anyone else

on matrix, who's not on matrix.org, um,

it, you just receive message slower.

You can miss messages and other people

can,

can receive message messages slower from

you.

Uh,

the size of their server causes problems

in rooms because it's the majority of the

room.

And so if it decides to break something,

things can randomly break.

And it's so centralized that when

matrix.org goes down, which it,

done in the past and will in the

future it basically turns most of matrix

into a ghost town because there's only

like ten people in each room who are

on a separate server in a lot of

cases or or even less in smaller rooms

so yeah it's definitely a putting all your

eggs in one basket case and it's not

even a very performant basket

unfortunately so

Whenever anyone complains about Matrix,

the first thing I tell them is to

switch from Matrix.org to literally

anything else.

And they always come back and say, wow,

this is much better to use Matrix after

I switched.

Wow.

Yeah.

I mean, I don't know.

I'm not on Matrix.org and my experience

has been fine.

I mean,

I think it's definitely helped with the

Element X sliding sync stuff.

Like it is a little bit nicer that

it doesn't like kind of lock up the

entire experience when it's sinking.

Um,

I think that's kind of like the worst

part of it, um,

with like the original element clients.

Um, but.

Yeah.

I think it's also the issue that I

see with matrix is I've looked into this.

I've been like, Oh, I wonder how,

how hard it would be to run like

a matrix.org home server.

Like surely that's not like, um,

matrix home server.

Like surely that's not that hard.

And then I look into it and it's

like, Oh, you know,

you need quite a bit of Ram.

You need quite a lot of disk space.

You know, it,

it makes it a lot more inaccessible.

I think when you start requiring all

these, uh,

extra things and, like,

quite high hardware requirements.

It's going to end up costing a lot

of money if you're doing that on a

VPS.

Or, you know,

it's going to require a lot of decent

hardware to at least have, like...

I feel like you need to have decent

hardware for the performance to just be

okay.

And SSDs and all that.

So, I don't know.

Yeah.

This is the problem I have with Matrix.

That I alluded to earlier with everything

needing to sync with each other.

It's just, like...

Not only is it challenging for a project

like Mozilla or a project like Privacy

Guides to self-host everything so we can

control our rooms and our own accounts and

stuff, but also just to use Matrix.

You can't spin up your own instance super

easily.

And when you do,

you have to get all of that data.

matrix like it makes sense for very

specific use cases where you would want to

actually have all of that data it's

certainly good for decentralization but

it's not it's not what most open source

projects or what most projects in general

need and it doesn't really make a lot

of sense for the huge groups uh who

are trying to use it um so like

At Privacy Guides, for example,

we host our own forum, as you mentioned,

at discuss.privacyguides.net,

and that runs on Discourse,

which is a great forum software,

and that's something that we can just host

ourselves.

You don't have to host anything to use

it.

No,

you can't access other Discourse forums to

it or anything.

It's just a normal website,

but it's an experience that we can

control, and it's easy for people to use,

and if you get, like,

the discourse mobile app,

you can add multiple discourse forms to it

to get notifications and stuff from from

all of them that you're a part of.

I know the discourse is

commonly confused with Discord,

but it's separate.

And Discourse is very commonly used in the

open source space as well.

So many Linux distros, Fedora, Ubuntu,

so many open source projects all use

Discourse.

So you'll probably,

you'd recognize it if you saw it because

a lot of these sites look the same.

But it's nice to have a system like

that.

And that's why I think if there is

a federated version that's more like

The open source project can kind of

control it, but it's all separate.

I think that that would see a lot

of adoption because a lot of open source

projects are already doing that when it is

an option here.

But there's just not really a product

that's good for instant messaging right

now.

Yeah, definitely.

I guess we can kind of move on

to the next story here,

and that is about Poland urging officials

to ditch Signal for state-run messaging

apps.

This is a story from Cyber Insider.

Basically,

Poland's government is urging public

sector organizations to reduce their

reliance on Signal for official

communications and instead adopt

domestically controlled encrypted

messaging systems for

following a surge in phishing attacks

targeting politicians, government,

personnel, and military staff.

And basically, instead of, you know,

whatever Signal or any of these other

encrypted apps that we suggest,

they are pushing people to use

I'm not going to even try pronouncing

that,

but this app that they're suggesting,

I don't know how to say that.

I guess it's in Polish,

which definitely makes sense.

But yeah, there's two apps there, MSZYFR,

I don't know how that's meant to be

said, and SKR-Z.

Okay.

I did see someone also mention that this

first one here is actually a Matrix

client.

So that definitely tracks considering

Matrix's involvement with governments and

militaries and police forces.

I think that definitely makes sense.

So if we just dive into this here,

yep.

So according to the advisory,

both systems operate entirely under Polish

jurisdiction with their infrastructure

hosted in Poland and administered in

accordance with national cybersecurity

standards.

The move mirrors a broader European trend

towards digital sovereignty in government

communications.

Earlier this month,

Germany's Bundestag similarly encouraged

lawmakers to transition to

away from signal and use wire messaging

platform after phishing attacks targeted

politicians.

So I think this is a little bit,

I can understand why these countries are

saying that they would rather use

something that exists in their own

country, like for, you know,

sovereignty reasons and, you know,

not trusting software from other

countries,

but

But I think the issue that comes with

this whole practice is you start

recommending people use less secure

options.

You actually reduce security when you do

this because you're telling people not to

use the most secure apps.

If they're saying not to use Signal or

they're saying not to use SimpleX or

they're saying not to use any of these

other recommended messages that we

suggest,

you're pushing people to these

apps,

which I would argue probably don't offer

the same guarantees of privacy.

Although they're in a foreign

jurisdiction,

but I don't think that really matters when

it comes down to the encryption guarantees

because Signal,

they can't access the message content.

So I think it's

it's a little bit silly.

In my opinion,

I don't think there's any evidence that

these apps are compromised.

And I think the phishing attacks are also

something that needs better education.

Like we just need to

basically make sure that these public

sector organizations are telling people,

you know,

like Signal is never going to text you

and ask you to scan a QR code.

Like these, these,

these organizations need to,

to give better advice and better

cybersecurity hygiene.

Like they should be telling people,

you know,

don't do this sort of stuff because,

I don't think switching to these national

messengers is going to increase security.

I feel like it's going to decrease

security.

But that's kind of my initial thoughts.

Do you have anything you wanted to add

on that?

I feel like I would imagine all of

these systems,

even though they're built on

Matrix in this case,

Germany switching to wire, of course.

I'll talk about that in a sec too.

I would imagine even though it's Matrix,

they probably don't federate at all or

they...

I've seen some governments set up like a

Matrix server per agency and stuff like

that,

but then they only federate with each

other and not the wider area.

So that's probably a way that they want

to have phishing protection since there's

no way to kind of

block phishing attacks on signal um but at

the same time yeah that education is still

important and you're still going to have

phishing attacks occur through other means

even if your matrix system is totally

walled off so like just ignoring that as

a problem and not

You know, it can go both ways.

I don't think it's ever a great solution

when the answer is like,

you just got to educate your users because

if there's one thing that has proven to

not be very effective is just telling

people to do something.

But at the same time, you know,

tech literacy is important.

And again,

all of these social engineering attacks,

they can take so many

so many routes to get to people.

I don't know how much of a benefit

switching just this one service over is

going to have

As far as wire,

I didn't actually know that the holding

company for wire moved to Germany because

I remember in twenty nineteen,

it was a whole thing where they moved

to the US and then it was like,

well,

is this under US jurisdiction anyways?

I just looked this up now because I

wanted to look up like,

is that still the case?

Why would Germany be there still sticking

with a US company?

But I guess they're not American anymore.

so it makes a bit more sense um

unfortunately wire has kind of gone

downhill for consumers here so it's not

like something we focus on just because

they are really focused on the business

side of things now so whatever but yeah

it's it's interesting that they're all

switching i don't

I'm of two minds about it,

because I feel like it's important.

It's not only is it important to like

own all of your data and self host

your own stuff.

And that goes not only for people

personally,

but also for organizations and

governments.

And also,

I think not being reliant on the US

is important for the for the rest of

the world.

But

I don't know how much better these

solutions are going to be for them,

especially in light of...

known to be secure solutions like Signal.

It's one thing to switch from Microsoft

Windows and from Google Drive to European

solutions or Linux distros or something

like LibreOffice or OnlyOffice or

NextCloud or whatever.

That sort of stuff makes sense.

But when you abandon tools that are...

provably secure like signal or like the

tour network or etc that that's where it

makes a bit less sense to me to

just like blindly shy away from american

companies so it can go either way i

don't think this is like a a terrible

idea for for poland to be doing but

matrix security

not up to Signal's quality by any means.

There's a reason that Signal is kind of

the standard in that space.

So yeah,

maybe it's going a bit too far,

or maybe it's good for the EU to

be more self-reliant.

I don't know.

You all can let me know what you

think about it, but yeah,

I kind of mixed up the whole thing.

I do think, you know, I don't know.

I feel like I sort of take like

a somewhat pragmatic approach.

Like if something is in the US,

but it offers a much more secure

experience and a much more usable

experience, I'm okay with using that,

right?

Like I think if, you know, if ProtonMail,

for instance, was in the US,

I think it would still be

like, verifiably, like,

it would still have good security, right?

Like, I don't think that would.

That'd be a little email specifically

could be a little tricky.

I was just gonna bring this up.

I think people are a bit like,

overly paranoid about data entering and

leaving the US.

In reality,

especially for an app like Signal.

or like the Tor network, for example,

there aren't really a lot of laws on

the books that could compel them to like

turn over a lot of information right now.

And that can always change, but like,

We've talked about European countries with

very invasive policies in the past and

when we've seen a lot of pushes to

get rid of end-to-end encryption in

messaging apps and in other apps,

a lot of those pushes are more from

Europe than in the US because I think

Europe is a bit overly focused on

businesses exploiting your data,

which is a good thing to be concerned

about.

But I really don't think in the EU

and in other European countries,

enough focus is being turned on to

stopping the government from abusing your

data.

We see a lot of

privacy laws in the EU that are very

good and very robust,

and they reign in tech companies,

both in the EU,

but also American tech companies,

which is always a good thing.

But those privacy laws very often do not

apply to the government getting your data

or the government collecting it,

or they have specific carve outs for

government agencies.

And so

When you're talking about regular people,

I mean, obviously,

this is an app for the government,

so it doesn't really matter in this case.

But when you're talking about people

switching to European services,

it is concerning.

Going back to Proton, though,

while I think the way that they secure

messages is good,

and I don't think that there's really...

necessarily a mechanism in the US that

they could be compelled to decrypt

someone's messages, for example,

or build a backdoor into their web

encryption.

Wiretapping,

the whole wiretapping situation in the US

is not great,

and I can certainly imagine an issue where

they are forced to collect unencrypted

emails coming in,

and since that's most emails,

that would be a concern for me.

So

There's probably some more protections

against that in Proton's current

jurisdiction,

but it's not a cut-and-dry thing is the

main thing I would say.

I think I just see a lot of

Europeans very overly...

putting their faith into things like the

GDPR,

which does have very good protections,

but it's not completely comprehensive

against anybody who might want your data.

In my opinion,

that bill is primarily made to rein in

American companies more than anything

else,

which has been a European goal for a

while, which again,

probably makes sense for them,

but it's not going to save you from

all potential privacy threats.

yeah as someone who's not in either europe

or america uh i guess i'm definitely less

have no skin in the game, I guess.

So I think, yeah, I don't know.

I,

I don't really care that much about like

the jurisdiction, I would say.

I would prefer if it wasn't in Australia

though,

because we have like really awful

surveillance laws.

So anything that isn't in Australia is

like a better, in my opinion,

just because, yeah, we don't really,

it's kind of a problem with our country.

I don't know.

Our politicians are,

not great at,

they just rush through surveillance stuff.

And there's a comment here from Cannabida.

They're switching to a communicator built

in-house.

Also, it's not available to the public,

only government officials.

I guess that is interesting.

I kind of assumed that they were doing

that,

but I think it is one of the

ones that they mentioned is based on

Matrix, I think.

But, yeah,

it is still like an in-house communicator.

system i think um which i guess can

prevent a little bit of the phishing

aspect but like i still think you know

phishing is kind of a large attack surface

especially if you're a public sector even

a public figure like i feel like the

risk of phishing is a lot more likely

if you're a public figure um and phishing

attacks can can include lots of different

things like you know installing malware on

your device like it doesn't matter where

the app is is is installed from or

where the app is um

is developed.

I think that's not really protecting

against the phishing attacks.

Um, you know,

installing malware on devices,

getting people to click on links.

Uh,

I don't really see how that is relevant

to the location of the app being in

your current jurisdiction.

Whereas not, um,

I'm not sure that's the greatest reason to

want to do that.

I can certainly see from like a

sovereignty aspect.

Like I think I would probably,

I don't know.

I think when it comes to public citizens

data,

I don't think it should be shared with

some American tech corporation.

That's obviously not where that data

should be going.

But if it's communications with public

sector stuff,

I guess there could be national security

concerns with sending that data.

But again, if it's encrypted,

I don't see how that's really that

relevant.

Speaking of national security,

I just wanted to fact check this message

quick.

This is why they're recommending two.

The first one is indeed built on Matrix,

and the second one is totally isolated,

and that's for...

handling restricted information and that

is the the home the homemade one i

don't know if they're saying because this

the the second messenger that we mentioned

is an isolated classified communications

network i don't know if that implies the

first one is going to be more open

to federation or not but um yeah it

does seem a little confusing that they

need to have two different messengers

instead of having one good one but i

guess maybe it's

nice for governments to segment classified

information into its own thing easier to

keep track of so probably makes sense I

don't know I'm not a government data

manager so however they decide to handle

all their classified information is

probably good but it does seem a little

inefficient yeah and I'm not really sure

if you know I know Poland I feel

like Poland is like one of the smaller

countries in Europe but I might be wrong

on that I feel like trusting data to

like you know

a tiny group of developers from Poland who

may or may not have the world-class

expertise of

cryptography that signal has is probably

not the greatest idea but you know maybe

they are maybe they do maybe there are

just so many cryptographers in Poland that

I I'm not sure but um I don't

know how Poland compares uh like in terms

of population I know it's it's it's quite

a big country like on a on a

map geographically but I don't know how

many I don't know if it's

If I'm looking at a map quick,

it is top ten.

I will say,

just in the defense of some smaller

countries,

there are a lot of surprisingly good open

source projects and internet-related

projects if you get into the networking

DNS space coming out of the Czech

Republic.

There are some experts in these countries,

but also...

It does seem strange to me.

I mean, I guess it makes sense.

But does every single EU government need

to have their own homemade system?

I don't know if that's the case.

Maybe they could pool some resources.

And I guess they sort of are with

Matrix.

But yeah,

it's still a whole situation of standing

up throughout stuff that probably...

not the most necessary.

Someone in the chat said the EU could

really do with the First Amendment.

I think a lot of like,

I think it, I mean,

I don't really hand things too much to

the US,

but I feel like that is pretty much

the gold standard when it comes to like,

freedom of speech, I guess.

I feel like not many other countries have

such a robust protections.

Because

Yeah, I mean, a lot of countries really,

really don't.

I think it's taken for granted in the

in the US.

And I think a lot of people just

assume because it's I mean,

it is a human right.

You should just have it.

And I think a lot of people in

Western countries like assume they just

have this right.

And they assume it up until the point

where they find out they don't.

And I know there's a lot of complaints

coming out of like the UK, for example,

about

them like really cracking down and

policing social media stuff uh super super

strictly um and that's the sort of scary

thing that's happening in society lately

um you know the us is not obviously

not perfect by any means and certainly

hasn't been great lately but it's good to

have these legal protections on the books

even if they

can get abused um by the government we

were just talking about fourth amendment

rights issues earlier so it's not a

perfect system by any means but it at

least gives you potentially some some

recourse and it does usually eventually

end up happening where um

like your rights eventually get defended

in court and precedence is set and like

this stops being an issue whereas like

there's there's no reason for that to

happen in countries without like a

codified bill of rights in their

constitution because all of these

violations unlike in the u.s they they're

just legal um

At least if they're illegal in the US

and the US abuses it,

there's potentially something that will be

done.

I don't really see a way out for

people in the UK, for example,

unless they get the law changed and get

that right established.

So it's just an extra uphill battle that

needs to happen in countries that don't

have this codified into law.

Yeah,

I can't believe the founding fathers

didn't think of data brokers like

collecting all your information.

I know.

That's, like, unfortunate.

They really did not predict any of the

problems today.

I don't know what they were doing.

They should have got that crystal ball

out.

Yeah, I mean, I don't know.

I definitely agree, like,

there's people that maybe would deny that,

but, like, it is pretty much, like,

it is definitely a pinnacle of...

yeah,

there's definitely like stuff that goes on

in Australia and in Europe where,

you know, people think that they've,

they can say anything and not face

repercussions or not say anything,

you know, within reason, obviously,

but it's definitely,

it's definitely a benefit of that

jurisdiction.

But yeah, I think we've kind of,

do you have anything more to add to

this story or should we move into some

forum updates?

I don't think so.

I think we could move on.

All right.

So I guess moving into forum updates here

in a minute,

we'll start taking viewer questions.

So if you've been holding on to any

questions about any of the stories we've

talked about so far,

go ahead and start leaving them on our

forum thread or in the comments section on

the live stream.

For now,

let's check in on our community forum.

And as always,

there's a lot of activity going on there.

But this week, the forum,

we wanted to talk about this thread that

was kind of popular this week.

And it's about Bitwarden scrubbing always

free and inclusion values from its website

as its longtime executives stepped down.

Yeah,

I just posted this article from Fast

Company to the forum almost a week ago

because someone sent it to me on Mastodon.

It's proven to be a little controversial

on the forum.

They've rolled back some of these changes,

so it is a bit more clear on

their website that the free version,

they have the always free text back.

But I mainly shared it because I think

it's another example of

David Price- bit warden doing some sketchy

things post receiving a huge amount of vc

funding.

David Price- There was there was another

issue related to the source code and their

open source licensing that they eventually

rolled back and they were like oh oh

it's a mistake and they.

David Price- pretty much said the same

thing about this issue,

they said it was a it's an oversight

and they and they made it better,

but I don't think we need to be.

policing companies this much and pointing

out these mistakes,

I think it just shows that the culture

at Bitwarden has changed a bit because I

can't imagine this happening in its

previous state where it was just a fully

open source kind of community project and

not trying to turn into this huge

corporate juggernaut in the password

manager space.

So I think it's just an unfortunate

direction for Bitwarden.

And that was mainly the main thing that

I wanted to point out.

It's just another step in that bad

direction that we predicted quite a while

ago.

When we talked about this first happening

and them taking VC money,

we predicted that

this sort of thing would happen and that

changes would be made to bitwarden

eventually and there would be more of a

business focus um i think we we just

talked about wire messenger i think that's

a good example i don't know if that

was caused by vc or private equity but

that sort of shift from like the personal

consumer side of things to a b to

b product never really helps consumers and

Yeah,

I think that regular consumers of

Bitwarden are going to be kind of left

in the dust.

The nice thing about Bitwarden being open

source, of course,

is that if that ever happens and if

it becomes really serious with Bitwarden,

I'm very confident that some community of

open source developers will fork it and

kind of pick up the torch wherever

Bitwarden decides to leave off because so

many people use Bitwarden,

especially in the open source and tech

space.

And there already are open source

implementations of some

some functionality of Bitwarden.

So like there's Vault Warden, for example,

which lets you self-host the entire server

backend,

which is actually probably a large chunk

of the work that would be required to

create a fully open source fork.

All you would need to do is fork

the Bitwarden client, basically,

and maintain it going forward in the

future.

But everything

Everything should be fine as far as

Bitwarden and its longevity.

You might just have to stop using

Bitwarden itself at some point and switch

to maybe a client Vault Gordon makes or

some other open source project,

which will be annoying for people,

but that might just be how it is

because that's the direction that I really

see Bitwarden going in, unfortunately.

Jordan, you're muted.

I feel like password managers are kind of

extremely irritating if they go down or if

like there's an issue where you have to

switch because I think they contain like

so much information and especially,

I don't know,

this may not be the case for everyone,

but, you know, I've got family members,

I've got like friends who are using this

and, you know, if they were to say,

you know, remove the free plan,

I think a lot of people would be

like,

I don't know.

I don't really want to pay for this.

And because that's just the society we

live in at this point,

like people don't want to pay however much

per month for software that they use,

which is kind of being normalized by,

you know,

everything being driven by advertising.

And when there's a company like Bitwarden

who has this really good product,

I think it's going to

be more likely that it's going to move

in a direction where they want to make

more money with it.

And if they have a bunch of freeloaders,

I guess in quotes,

they're not saying that not paying is not

good, but some people can't afford it.

But I think there is definitely probably a

lot of people using Bitwarden for free and

not paying,

and they could convert those users into

paying users.

I kind of remember...

I don't know if I'm remembering correctly,

but I think this was a similar issue

with One Password.

I think they originally were doing a

one-time purchase model,

and you could use a local vault.

And they kind of switched their entire

business model to be a subscription

company.

away from, you know, buy it once.

I think people are much more likely to

be fine with buying it once and then

having it forever than paying for another

subscription because everything is a

subscription.

How, like,

people are kind of sick of it.

Well, just look at Plex.

Did we talk about that last week or

did I just talk about it online?

Because Plex is raising their lifetime

price to seven hundred fifty dollars,

which is insane because they obviously

want people to sign up for their I

think it's sixty or seventy dollar a year.

So like yearly subscription, right?

They just really want to.

build that recurring revenue.

And I think that all of these problems

that people have with Plex developed

because of VC funding in that case as

well.

And it's the same case for OnePassword.

They really focused on the business side

of things.

And of course,

open source alternatives do arise.

A lot of people switch to Jellyfin.

A lot of people...

don't because jellyfin isn't as good yet,

unfortunately.

But yeah, to play devil's advocate a bit.

There are some companies that

kind of use the business to business model

to kind of subsidize a different consumer

plan which is good i says i'm pretty

sure that's what bitwarden is doing

currently i think i've read somewhere that

they just don't make money on the consumer

side of things but they keep it around

but they get all their funding from

businesses which which makes sense um one

password is in the same boat you could

definitely say that about something like

matrix an element because they certainly

are getting most of their money from big

businesses that are signing up for chat or

all of these government agencies that are

now adopting it i can't imagine they make

like barely any money from matrix.org

itself we just we just benefit from it

we talked about

Cape, the cell phone carrier last week,

they recently launched a consumer plan

that there's no way they're making money

on,

but they probably make enough from

business contracts and government

contracts.

The list goes on.

The problem we see with that is a

lot of the times that only holds true

under the current leadership.

And

it's inevitable that leadership of a

company will change.

And it almost never changes to people who

maintain that.

Maybe Bitwarden is dedicated to keeping

this up,

but that dedication is only going to last

as long as the people in charge want

it to.

And when they get replaced,

which also could happen more easily

because of their VC funding,

those VC funds might kick them out if

they don't like them enough.

Who knows how much shareholder voting

power they have.

It's probably a significant amount.

Things can take a turn at any time

once you switch to this model instead of

going all in on the consumer side.

So yeah, I remain concerned.

It's possible, though,

that with all of those companies I

mentioned,

it might not be a concern for us

for a good long while.

But you just never know.

That's the big problem.

yeah i think also i don't know i've

kind of almost become very hesitant of

companies that take vc funding now because

of this cycle it just keeps happening over

and over again like i just should i

move my data to this company that's may

not exist or be sold on to someone

someone else or may

completely change its values based on,

you know,

investors in the company wanting changes.

I think, yeah, it is definitely a concern,

but I think at least in the password

manager space,

we have so many good options.

Like if you don't like Bitwarden proton

pass, if you don't like proton pass,

there's key pass.

If you don't like,

I know we recommend CYONO as well.

That's like a German one, I think.

So, you know, there's lots of,

there's lots of,

options, I think.

And I think, you know,

if you don't like this direction,

if you're starting to feel like this is

going in a direction that you don't want

to be part of,

I think it might be,

this might be a sign

a sign of the times that the,

that this might need to basically,

you might need to start switching things

up or at least be ready to switch

if something worse does happen.

But I mean,

I feel like the main business model of

password managers is to protect your

information.

So I feel like if they're not protecting

your information well enough,

or if they're making security

compromises,

then that's kind of compromising the

product.

And I think that's at least the security

aspect is safe.

I think that you could say the same

about one password.

I think it's,

it is got a lot of VC funding,

but at least the security aspect seems

like something that they would never

compromise on.

So I don't know.

It's just an unfortunate situation that a

lot of these

Some of these projects at least are VC

funded and there are risks with that.

But at least right now there is no

active concern, I think,

with this direction.

I think it's definitely a caution.

I'm proceeding with caution.

But I think if we see more changes

happening,

that affect the product we might have to

um you know re-look into the into the

product but right now it seems like

they're they're

Their direction is to continue being a

secure password manager.

That's their main focus, at least.

Yeah,

just got to keep an eye on it.

There's another password manager that I've

seen around called Passbolt, too.

I need to look into them again because

I know...

I don't remember the reason we didn't want

to list them at the time,

but they seem to be doing something

unique.

Anyways, I say that just to say,

if anyone has used Passport and wants to

let me know more about it,

can share in the chat or definitely post

it on on the forum because i would

love to take another look at it that

is more team focused but it seems like

you could easily just use it as a

personal or like a family password manager

so and it's in its open source and

stuff again i haven't i haven't looked

into it but they've been around a while

and i definitely want to so

Yeah, I like companies.

I'm mainly interested in them because they

make it very easy to self-host and they

make it their prominent thing.

I think they have a cloud service,

but it's always a good sign, I think,

when they make the option pretty easy.

Self-hosting Bitwarden,

somewhat challenging.

Exactly why Vaultwarden exists,

because the official stuff is hard.

So, yeah.

Fair enough.

I guess here we've kind of,

this discussion has kind of covered

everything we need here.

I guess we could kind of move into

taking some questions.

I'm not seeing any in the chat or...

Yeah, if you have any questions,

this is a good time to share.

I'm sure I'm in the chat.

I did see a comment if I scroll

up here somewhere.

It wasn't...

It wasn't a question.

Oh, yeah, there it is from Hello.

I just wanted to thank you for the

feedback on the form,

especially because I was literally last

week thinking about changing it to maybe

that category view because the latest

section can get a bit overwhelming,

but also I do like it as well.

So this is good feedback to know because

I've definitely seen that on other forms

and feel kind of mixed about it.

I always do that view when I'm on

the forum,

so that is definitely a good change.

The categories here or the latest?

I always go to latest first, so yeah.

That should be the default, but yeah.

We'll probably keep it as the default.

Yeah, I agree.

I definitely think it's the better view.

We did get a comment here again on

our forum post from XMR chat, please.

This is a request to add XMR chat

to the live stream.

Yeah, I mean,

we can look into it and we can

try.

But I mean, as Jonah said,

there's like a whole website redesign

going on.

It's like all these projects going on at

the same time.

We do accept Monero though.

I was going to say,

and it's probably one of the things that

makes XMR chat a bit tricky because we

accept Monero through BTC pay server right

now, which kind of like...

I believe it generates a new Monero

address per person, basically,

so you can get your receipt and stuff.

We don't just have a single Monero address

to send Monero to.

Maybe we can get one, though.

I don't know.

I haven't asked if we can do that,

so I would have to just look into

that more and see how it works.

yeah definitely uh definitely more of a

magic grants question i think um

Another thing,

if we don't have any questions yet,

I wanted to point out another form post

that's currently in the latest view right

now because it was updated recently.

There was a post in the Project Showcase

that got a bit of traction because they

are working on an open source home camera

security system.

They just posted an update to the form

with a lot of changes that they've worked

on over the past...

few months, which look pretty cool.

So I got to look into this project

again a bit more.

It's called Secluso.

But they're very active on the forum if

you ask questions.

So I just wanted to point that out

because if anyone is looking into home

security cameras or wants to check out an

open source solution,

I think that they would at least be

good to chat with on the forum because

they're there and can answer your

questions as opposed to

opposed to some other things but i gotta

check it out myself to see how good

it is yeah it definitely looks interesting

i think also we've kind of had discussions

internally about like would we would we

ever cover like you know home automation

security stuff um so maybe

i know this there hasn't really been like

that many good options to like yeah that's

what i was gonna say the home automation

stuff is kind of tricky because like i've

been messing with all that stuff

personally around my house over the past

year and some stuff is working but a

lot of stuff is not working super well

unfortunately um and it's something that i

mean we definitely want to base all of

the stuff that we're writing on

community feedback and what people

generally agree is the best solution and

there's not a lot of like consensus on

the forum about what's actually good um

or like experiences being shared.

So again, I keep talking about the forum,

but I think if you have any insight

into the home automation space,

it would be very helpful for you to

share it there.

And so we can get a bit more

ideas of things to look into.

Yeah,

I also think like I feel like the

smart home ecosystem is like incredibly

hard to navigate,

like there's so many standards,

there's so many

downsides, upsides, all these, every,

all these protocols it's, and then,

you know,

there's also the thing of where are these

products even available?

Like,

are these products available globally?

Like if we were to recommend something

that let's say is very popular in Europe,

but then it's not popular in the U

S and it's like, well,

that's not really very useful.

Is it?

Um, so I dunno, it is,

I'm kind of curious to hear what other

people think.

Um,

But yeah,

I've been messing around with it a bit,

but not really with, at least here,

a lot of the stuff is basically all

matter.

And that has another set of problems

compared to other standards.

Yeah, I'm not a huge fan of matter.

I know some people in our chats are,

but

I don't know.

I'll have to write up all my grievances

sometime.

I got to get my thoughts together on

all this smart home stuff.

Yeah.

Oh, we got a comment here from Cannabida.

Would be cool to see some privacy guidance

when it comes to cars.

They collect huge amounts of data.

Yeah.

just don't drive one no um it's it's

it's hard um and it's especially hard

nowadays because not only do you have to

be worried about your car but you're just

being tracked by all these cameras that

people are putting in um tracking you by

your license plate so yeah surveillance

while traveling is uh

very very tough right now uh as far

as i understand it as uh when it

comes to cars really the only usable

solution is to buy like a car from

or earlier it can't be a fancy car

in i mean they have they'd already been

doing some crazy stuff then but like if

you get a a normal car probably isn't

like fully computerized yet so uh

But yeah,

that's not a great solution for everybody,

certainly.

Especially if you don't want to deal with

a lot of car things,

because an older car is probably going to

have more problems than a brand new one.

But I don't really know of any...

great solutions to this problem.

This is another thing that we don't get

a lot of information from.

So I either assume nobody in the community

that we have really knows a lot about

it,

or it's just not a topic that a

lot of people here are super interested

in.

So that makes it challenging to know what

to look into as well.

I mean,

this is kind of something that came up

in the news.

I'm personally not someone that drives or

has ever driven,

but I did see that there's this brand

called Rivian that said they're allowing

you to disable all data connectivity in

their cars.

Okay.

I did see that.

Hello literally just asked about that.

And I had not seen that news.

So that's good to bring it up.

Do you know any more about it other

than that?

In fact,

there was actually a thread on the forum

about this already because someone was

wondering, you know,

like how does this work?

Like is this like an airplane thing,

like airplane mode feature?

Like how does this work?

And, yeah, it's in their support page.

Like if you go to Rivian and you

go to their support website,

it does say that,

you can choose to do that and it

prevents all data leaving the vehicle,

but it disables some functionality.

I think this is quite interesting.

Like I feel like no other car

manufacturers had this as an option

before.

And I guess,

I think one thing with this though is

it needs a bit of third party testing.

I think,

I think I wouldn't trust this a hundred

percent.

Like, is this,

I would think you would have to do

a bit of testing to make sure this

is actually the case.

I'm very confused about this.

I'm looking at their support page.

They say it'll limit or disable certain

functionality in the vehicle,

and their list is navigation,

active lane centering,

over-the-air updates,

which provide new features,

better performance, safety enhancements,

and bug fixes.

Losing over-the-air updates obviously

makes sense because it's like you disable

connections.

I feel like

it this we should still this technology

should still exist because ten,

fifteen years ago you could get a car

with navigation and it would work without

the internet.

Like you can download an offline map.

So should and maybe that is the case

here.

I guess they do say it will limit

or disable it.

So I don't have a Rivian obviously can't

test this.

Maybe maybe it is just offline maps and

that's fine.

You know,

you lose out on some cool stuff like

Traffic or whatever,

but probably not the worst thing in the

world.

What I don't know is whether Rivian

supports...

Apple CarPlay or Android Auto,

I would be curious about that because this

would be a very cool feature if you

could use your phone for all of the

infotainment stuff and you could still get

things like whatever Maps app you want and

music streaming and all that other stuff

without having to do it through the car

sending and receiving data.

But I don't know if Ravine supports that.

Some car companies don't.

So I'm sorry to break it to you,

Jonah,

but they don't support Android Auto or

CarPlay.

That is crazy.

They should do that.

I think Tesla added it now.

They were a holdout for a very long

time,

and they finally got on board to some

degree.

So yeah, that is a shame.

That makes the whole prospect...

a bit worse, because I don't know,

it's good to have this sort of privacy,

but there often isn't like a need for

it to come at the expense of too

many features,

or there are like private ways to alter

to offer it alternatively,

that maybe aren't the full experience,

but they get like,

ninety percent of the way there.

And I think people will put up with

that.

Whereas here,

Like, is this going to,

can you not get Spotify in your car

anymore?

Is that how it works?

Do you have to do it, like, through,

do you have to do music through Bluetooth?

Yeah, I mean, you,

some of this functionality I think is

useful.

Some of it is not.

So it's good to have the choice,

but I wish it was a bit better.

I also think like the data connectivity

issue,

like disabling data sending is one issue

when it comes to cars.

I think someone, I can't remember which,

who said this,

but cars are becoming like walking

computers with hard drives, right?

Like there's a lot of data on the

car that it collects when you drive

around, like, you know,

every place you've ever been,

all the distances and,

all that extra metadata that possibly if

you sell the vehicle at any point or

if it gets impounded, for example,

that data is incriminating or could be

used in that way.

I think just because it's not sending the

data out doesn't mean that maybe we

shouldn't be collecting this data in the

first place.

Yeah,

I think it also could help with offering

this feature on more cars because I feel

like not everyone...

I've never heard of Rivian before.

I don't even know what that is.

Really?

I don't think they sell...

That is very surprising to me.

Yeah, they don't sell in Australia.

What are the most common cars you see

in Australia?

Yeah.

uh probably like toyotas and hyundais and

ford f like the big fords ford trucks

i don't know what they're called yeah

everyone loves a good pickup truck ranger

for some reason um i guess it makes

sense that it would mostly be

Japanese Korean Vehicles it's hard to it's

probably hard to get vehicles over to

Australia shipping wise

Yeah.

A bunch of like European car manufacturers

are kind of dropped out of Australia

because of that.

Um, cause it's not really like,

there's not that many people here to buy

cars as well.

Like you're not going to sell many cars.

There's only like,

twenty seven million people here.

That's like, that's like the,

that's like the size of a US state.

Like that's like nobody.

Uh, so it doesn't really make,

it doesn't make that much sense.

I think, uh, in a lot of cases,

but, um,

Yeah,

someone said it went viral on Hacker News

and Reddit.

Seems like definitely something technical

people want.

I agree.

Yeah, I mean, don't get me wrong.

It's a great feature.

More cars should have it.

But I think, okay,

I don't use an Android phone too often.

or Graphene OS.

So I'm curious,

does Graphene OS support Android Auto?

Because I know you can install all this

sandbox Google Play stuff.

I don't know if they have support for

it.

They do, yeah.

It does.

It basically works the same way as it

does on Google Android.

So, I mean...

I really don't like Android Auto.

I don't like a lot of things in

the Android world because you are reliant

on Play services.

But I think a lot of people would

prefer if their car functioned entirely

off of their phone through Android Auto

and CarPlay.

I think that would be better than doing

it through the car manufacturer system for

most people.

So I think it's a real shame that

the only car company that is kind of

doing something good in this space

apparently is also not letting you do that

because I feel like, I don't know,

they're missing out quite a bit.

Yeah, it definitely seems, though,

like I feel like electric car brands are

probably, you know,

they're a lot more like I feel like

if you remember back like ten years ago,

I feel like cars were like stuck in

this weird phase where they were like

still using like capacitive touchscreens

and like really crappy interfaces and

stuff.

And now we've gotten to a point where

these EV companies who are like they're

not just a car company.

They're like a software company as well.

Like they're building all this stuff.

this other stuff so there's really no

excuse i think to offer i mean in

tesla's case it seems to be the only

thing they know how to build well so

uh yeah this is why i did not

buy it um unfortunately i still have to

figure out how to make my current car

i got recently more privacy respecting but

i don't drive too often so it doesn't

come up a lot i keep i keep

putting it off um but yeah sometimes there

are ways to like

remove the SIM card or disable that sort

of LTE connectivity,

and that can help quite a bit.

I know Henry from Tech Lore a while

ago,

I don't know what car he drives now,

but he got some older,

I want to say Nissan Leaf or something,

but he talked,

there's probably a video on his channel

where he talked about removing the SIM

card and then it was fine.

And there are some cars you can't do

that with.

And

I still have to look up research whether

or how much is possible with my Polestar

two, but I'm worried.

There won't be a lot, unfortunately.

It might be a trade-off that I'm making

because I want an electric car,

and all of the other electric cars are

much worse.

Except maybe Rivian,

but I was never in a million years

going to buy a Rivian because they only

make a gigantic pickup truck and a

gigantic SUV.

So it was never...

That was never going to happen.

So unfortunately,

I can't benefit from this feature.

But yeah.

Yeah, I don't think the advice...

It's really irritating that the advice...

I feel like the advice now is buy

a ten-year-old car.

That is really bad advice.

Don't buy a ten-year-old car.

That's just going to have so many issues

and it's going to be a pain.

Well, you know what?

People...

do drive pretty old cars pretty commonly.

But yeah, they can have problems too.

I've got friends that have old cars and

yeah, it's just, I don't know.

I think it's, it's, it's always issues.

Like it's always issues.

Like, you know,

once you reach a certain amount of

mileage,

I can't say I've ever had to pay

too much to get my bicycle repaired.

Biking is like the private solution.

You got to start doing it.

Yeah,

I guess specifically if you buy an older

car, it's got to be like a Honda,

maybe a Toyota.

the in my experience the Japanese are

pretty good at making reliable cars um

don't buy a Ford don't buy an American

car wait what is that is that the

consensus that the American cars aren't

that reliable or well the main consensus

is uh that Hondas are particularly good

but

I don't know how common this phrase is.

Maybe this is only in my circles,

in my family,

but everyone says that Ford stands for fix

or repair daily.

So that's what I hear.

All the other American car companies are,

I don't even know how many cars they

make anymore that aren't pickup trucks.

So unless you want a pickup truck,

it might not even be an option.

Or you want like a Ford Mustang or

something and a sports car or something.

yeah that's probably not super practical

though as a daily card i'd imagine um

but yeah i feel like we've definitely been

let's uh someone said uh check consumer

reports yeah japanese cars are most

reliable interesting okay um yeah i wasn't

aware there was a trend oh no i

definitely don't doubt it i mean i drove

a honda civic for a very long time

basically until

recently last year and that had like over

two hundred thirty thousand miles on it

and now my sister drives it and she's

still she's still driving I think she had

to fix up like a handful of things

but overall since then since replacing as

far as I know only like one or

two things it's been reliable ever since

so

They kind of just last forever.

Unfortunately, with that Honda Civic,

the car itself and the engine and

everything are very reliable.

All of the stuff that surrounds the engine

tends to be pretty cheap and kind of

plasticky and falling apart.

So it's not like the highest quality car

to drive, unfortunately, even though...

Even though it will outlive everything.

Yeah.

But, you know, what can you do?

You just gotta research cars if you're

buying an old one.

They're hugely hit or miss, for sure.

Okay, yeah.

I mean,

at least you'll save a bit of money.

I feel like cars now, like,

the prices have definitely gone pretty

bad.

Well, even used cars.

The used car market is insane, but...

It's ridiculous, but it's, you know,

so is the new car market.

It's even more insane.

So there's, there's no winning.

You're winning a little bit by used.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think my, my brother,

he bought a car like five years ago

and now he checked the price on,

on the car listings and it's worth even

more now than when he bought it.

Like, how does that even work?

When, when did he buy it?

probably like i guess ten years ago right

now okay yeah that that makes sense i

don't know if it's as i haven't looked

at used car pricing in a while i

know like during the pandemic it was

absolutely insane and i don't know if it's

come down a bit since then or if

in fact it's continued to go up i

have no idea um but yeah the used

car market it's crazy it's crazy

Yes, I guess, yeah,

we should probably close out the episode

here.

We're closing in on the two hour and

thirty mark.

Oh boy.

well yeah i haven't seen any more

questions from anyone anyways um so yeah i

think this seems like a good time to

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