Welcome! Apple Stands Ground On Encryption, Dangers of Facial Recognition Databases and more on Tech Talk with Craig ...

Welcome!  
This has been a busy week in the world of technology.  We are going to hit several topics today. From Employer device privacy, dangers of huge facial recognition databases, Marriott enters the home rental market, overblown results on dangers of screen technology, big tech stomping on small tech, smart home alarms, and cable companies, Apple stands ground on iPhone encryption, and Microsoft ends support of Windows 7. It is going to be a busy show -- so stay tuned.
For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com
I've got some free online privacy training coming up.
I have been teaching courses on security for the FBI InfraGard's program. And now I'll share some of the step-by-step tips and tricks that we all can use to keep ourselves and our information safe online. And it won't cost you a dime.
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Related Articles:
What Does Your Employer Know About Your Daily Activities
Privacy Gone: Tech Start-up Has Huge Facial Recognition Database
If You Can’t Beat ‘Em - Join ‘Em says Marriott
Screen Time Causing Mental Health Issues Are Overblown
Big Tech Stomps All Over Small Businesses
Home Security and Alarm Systems Useless After Charter Cable  Pulls Plug
Security First, Apple Stands Ground on iPhone Encryption
No Security for Windows 7 After Today ---
Automated Machine Generated Transcript:
Hey, it's my intro music. Hello, everybody, Craig Peterson here. Welcome, welcome. Hopefully, you've been able to join me before. We talk a lot about technology and of course a lot about privacy and security. Technology today is all about privacy and security. Isn't it? It just seems like every time we turn around, and there's some other business out there just trying to get our information or even worse, some hacker who's trying to get it from us. So I try and help everybody understand what is going on what is privacy? What's it all about? I give a lot of tips and tricks on things and recommendations. I do a whole lot of different pieces of training, free training, pop up stuff, Facebook, and YouTube lives. I'm trying to get the word out. So I appreciate everybody that shares this. We've had an increase every week, with people subscribing to the podcast, which is excellent! You're listening to me here on the radio, and who are spreading the word. You know, there again, there's so much information out there, it's hard to know what you should believe. There are all kinds of motivations behind it. So hey, what's my motivation? Well, I'm trying to get the word out, I know that probably 90% of you wouldn't ever be a client of mine. And that's just fine. Because hopefully, the 5% that would be a client of mine will become a client, and we can help them out. But I want to get this information out. Sorry, I don't hold anything back. You've probably noticed it if you're one of those people who learned about the show or the podcast so that you now know about it, and you heard it from a friend, and the friend said, Yeah, you have to listen to Craig. You probably had an earful from somebody telling you about how I am just giving away the store. And that's my Go, hey, if I'm not giving you the store, let me know if you have any questions, let me know. It is just "me" at Craig Peterson dot com. Now, many of you may have noticed if you're on my mailing list, that we changed the format of the newsletter starting this last week. Right? It was one of those January 1 promises that we had hoped to get it up by the first of the year, and it took us a couple of extra weeks is not always the case. But then here's the new format for the weekly newsletter, if there is any real critical security stuff, updates patches that you need to apply in your business or your home. Those are now going right at the top of the newsletter. This last week, I think we had about ten a dozen or so of these very high priority security patches that required immediate patching. And we went so far as to give you links right there in my newsletter, so you can click on the links to those CVEs we're giving you a link so that you know what the critical vulnerabilities are. It tells you even what to do what software it is everything right, step by step. That's the name of my game. You can use all of that now to stay one step ahead of the bad guys one step ahead of the crackers. That's the whole idea, right? The bad guys out there trying to crack into your computers. Now, we also had two other sections. I'm not going to be able to this week, I, you know, I don't know. We'll see. We'll see. But one of the sections was my weekly podcasts broadcast in the video. So I gave you links in the newsletter last week to the YouTube videos. So you can see articles that I'm talking about it has captions so you can read along if you wanted to watch it there. And I also posted them up on Facebook. The last one for last week's show would have gone out on Friday. So Yesterday, you should have gotten that one if you're a Facebook follower. So please do follow please do subscribe. I'm, I'm I don't know that I'll be able to get much help this week because we've got something huge happening. I am trying to help people here with some of the privacy stuff. So I am going to be we're putting together right now. And I'm going to be giving away a step by step guide for you to be able to protect your privacy online through tracking. Now you know about ads online, right. And ad revenue, I think, is essential for businesses. You need to be able to show ads to get attention, right? There are so many competitors out there and so many different spaces. So how can you get your message out if you can't advertise? So there was a trend for a while to have ad blockers. Ad-blockers are more than a bit of a problem now, because how does the publisher generate any revenue when they can't sell ads.
And I saw a fascinating statistic that got me going this week. Have you seen where ads directed at users of iOS, which is Apple's mobile operating system that users of Apple's iOS are using Safari, advertising to them is worth less than it is to Android? Now think about that for a minute. Why is it cost more now to send to Android users than Apple users? Well, Apple integrated some new anti-tracking technology into Safari. That is a very, very big deal, because now with that anti-tracking, technology, and Safari, the advertisers Cannot track you and other sites that you're online. So the fact that can't track you means they don't know as much about you, which means you're not worth as much from an advertiser standpoint. Now, you could argue either way, right? In my business, we do some advertising. However, mostly it is word of mouth, and that's what we've done for decades now. And word of mouth works, right? Because people know me that I helped out their business and kind of, I'm, we need some help. We need some security stuff. We need a cyber assessment, you know, how good is this? Am I covering everything? Right? So that's how I usually do it. But most businesses are having to do it via advertising. I'm thinking about doing some advertising in the future for some of the products I've put together. Apple is stopping them from tracking you when you go to multiple sites. What would it be like, if I told you how to go about blocking advertisers from tracking you going to multiple sites on your computer as well. So that's what I'm putting together. Right now we're putting together a step by step guide that we're going to be giving away. It's part of a training webinar we're going to be doing as well, that is going to teach you a lot about some of the privacy stuff that you can do. And that's coming up here in a couple of weeks. So make sure you're on my email list at, Of course, Craig Peterson, calm slash subscribe, because you'll be able to get all of that and it's free. Again, I don't hold anything back to people. I'm not some guy who doesn't know what he's talking about and just has to market sell, sell, sell. I am trying to help out here. Okay, so make sure you are on that email list. Just go ahead and go to Craig Peterson, calm slash subscribe, and all it asks for is your name and email address. And then you're going to get this new newsletter I'm doing. So the second portion of the newsletter is the top four videos that I did that week. So these are the ones that people watch the most. And I know a lot of you don't watch the video. All of the articles I discuss are in the newsletter in the third section. So that's what we're doing now. And that's based on feedback that we've had from all you guys, and I appreciate it. We got some super fans out there that email me and pretty much every week. Some people send me Facebook stuff and LinkedIn stuff, which is cool as well to see some of that. I have to warn you I will answer or someone, not me, will answer as a member of my team. And it might take a little while okay because I get thousands of emails a day, and I have some very heavy mail filtration in place. Now the excellent news is that mail filter tends to work extremely well and tends not to block legitimate emails. But the operative word there is, usually. At any rate, I still get hundreds to have to go through every day of legitimate ones, and I try and respond so if you do send an email to me that's just me at Craig Peterson calm, make sure the chat a little bit of patience and we'll we will get back to you. If it's urgent, you can always try and text me as well because, you know, I had this contact from a law firm, and they had to get some briefs filed with the court by 4 pm. And it was like 1:30 in the afternoon, and they reached out to me, a Windows machine decided to die, and we can't get him to come back. So you know, I do get those types of emergency things, but email is probably not the best way to do that. The best way to do that is probably via texting Me? Well, that's the new newsletter. We also use the newsletter to announce special pieces of training. Karen, my wife, and I have been working on a special webinar for about a week or two. And we've got another week or so hours worth of work in it. So you know how this goes, right? I said I would have just said to myself, I didn't promise you, but I would have a new newsletter out the first of the year, and it took until the middle of a month. So I guess that's not too bad, right, two weeks-ish to get that out. So you know, we'll see what happens with this webinar. But it should be on time. But if you're on the mailing list, you'll know about it. Just Craig peterson.com slash subscribe. Something else important. I don't want people to use my mailing lists to spam other people. So what I do is I do something so that when you subscribe, it's going to send you an email, and I noticed there had been 100 people who subscribed, and I sent them an email. They have to click on the link. That's to confirm that this is their email that it's not somebody else who's messing around. That's trying to send them spam from the right. So I'm going to have to reach out to those hundred people individually. But if you subscribe, make sure you check your email box, he's I'll send it from my email address for me at Craig peterson.com. Look for that link, click on that link. Then you'll be able to get that that the weekly emails from me and notices about what's coming up. I typically remind you in advance about one of these pieces of training, and I'll remind you like a couple of days before, I just don't want you to miss them, but I don't get kind of asked him like some other people do no question. And we don't do these very often. My big courses and training are only really once a year. Hey, you're listening to Craig Peters on WGAN stick around because we're going to get right into it when we get back
Hi, everybody, Craig Peterson here. Welcome back, WGAN and online, of course, over at Craig Peterson dot com. Hey, did you know that your employer monitors you? Well, you may have known that. We're going to get into a little about what some employers are doing and also why some businesses are tracking. And when it comes to employers, of course, and some of the trackings, we're talking about still legal stuff. And when it comes to some of the big box retailers, it's still legal as well. So I guess the big question is, should it be, and what are they looking into? What are they gleaning from it, and why would they be doing it? Let's get down to that, and I'll give you a couple of tips to help you protect yourself. The Wall Street Journal this week, had a great article That was talking about, well, it was illustrating that was a kind of a cool way they did this thing. But it was talking about this guy who they named Chet. And, you know, Chet, kind of an old name, which is kind of funny, because we're always talking about it this week on the radio. When was the last time you met somebody named Chet? And for me, it's probably been 30 years, maybe, maybe a little bit longer. And perhaps that's why they use the name chat, right? Just not that common a name. But this is a paywall Wall Street Journal article, and you get like one or two or three a month or whatever it is for free. And then other than that, they want you to pay for it. So you may or may not be able to see it, but what they're doing, I think, is fascinating, because this article is walking through the day. In the life of this fictional workers, names chat. And it starts by noting that the employer logs his time and his location when he first wakes up to check his email in the morning. So there's stage one. Most of us, according to statistics, check our email first thing in the day and the last thing at night. Now I am not like that. But most of us are. So if you are, hey, I get it. But you check your email, so your employer knows that and then from there, this guy chat, he goes on to the Guest Wi-Fi. Now, here's where it's a little bit interesting. And it's something that a lot of people might not be thinking of. But when you connect to a guest Wi-Fi somewhere that provides a method for someone else, to be able to monitor you and where you are and who you are. So, for instance, if you go to your local Walmart store, Target store, you name it, store, they have Wi-Fi provided for you and that Wi-Fi can then be used to identify you and track you through the store. Some of this technology set up in such a way that it's just so accurate. It knows that you're standing in front of a specific item within the store for a minute or 30 seconds, whatever it might be. And then they can use that data now to figure out more stuff, right, big data is what it's all about. So far, poor old chap, he logged Into the guest Wi-Fi connection at the coffee shop in the morning. And then he went over to the gym. And of course, at the gym, there's a guest Wi-Fi, and you're attracted the gym, your locations tracked, and if you're like most people, you've got your Email Setup, so that it is checking every one every five minutes, 15 minutes or automatically your emails push to you. Right? Isn't that how that works? So now your employer knows where you were, and probably knows you're at the gym and even which Coffee Shop you're at. It depends on whether or not the employer has tracking software on your phone. They may know the exact location of all of those things. Now, if you're connecting to the office, and let's say you get through the email system at the office and using a VPN, that is when a lot of stuff changes and they know even more. So now, Chet arrives at his building where he works. And I don't know if you've seen these and we talked about some significant security problems with this. I'll bring it up again here right now. But when you walk in and you have your phone, and you use your phone as your badge, you know, kind of like used to swipe a badge, or maybe you tapped a badge. Now it'll use Bluetooth on your phone to identify you. Some of the newer systems are even using your face, and some are using facial recognition. Now I have a massive problem with the facial recognition stuff because Now they've got a picture of you. That's on the computer. Right? They have to take that to have the initial validation to say, yeah, this is chat. He's allowed to come in after 6 am and leave after 6 pm or whatever it is, and how secure is their database? I think that's the big question. Do you know if they're keeping your biometric safe? See, it's one thing to have your card lost or stolen, that you might swipe, are easily replaced, it can be disabled. It's one thing to forget your password or have your password stolen? Because you can always change your password. But how about your face? Your face isn't something you can easily change unless you're what was it John Travolta and Nick Nolte's Face Off, the name of that movie. I can hear you all yelling at the radio right now. Anyways, that is not going to change now. The same thing is true of your fingerprint. The same things true of Iris scans are so many types of biometrics now that people are just giving up for free. I heard something great on Stuart Varney's show on TV here this week. And Stewart was talking about yet another breach. And in this particular case, it was the Saudi Prince who had broken into Jeff Bezos iPhone using some software from a company over in Israel. And what's changed? Well, it isn't that there was a hack or that it waJeff Bezos was hacked. You know, we've had so many celebrities hacked before, what he noted, and what I want to bring up here now is we don't seem to care anymore. There was a time when that would be a big deal. What do you mean, the Crown Prince hacked the Jeff Bezos is the richest man in the world smartphone and stole all of his pictures. We just don't seem to care anymore. So when we're going into the office in the morning, and it's doing a facial scan, we don't think twice about giving our face information to them. Now the government forces us to if you want a passport, or if you want a driver's license, or if you're going to get on an airplane, you know, it's one thing to have it at the point of a gun. It's quite another just to give it up voluntarily if you ask me. So now, when chats walking around the office, that Bluetooth in his phone is trackable for Near Fields communications. Some of us use our phones to unlock our computers when we're in front of them, just using that Bluetooth. And then on the other side, we have the issue of well, you know, we got Wi-Fi, and we're using the company Wi-Fi, and they want us to use the company Wi-Fi. Tracking as you move around is supposedly utilizing a lot of this data is to see which teams are frequently collaborating make sure employees aren't accessing areas they're not authorized to be in, etc.
So once chat set said, this desk is browsers tracked along with his email, there's new software now that are looking at the email, it's looking at things like slack or teams, whatever you might be using to collaborate. It's figuring out whether or not the workers that you're interacting with are responding quickly. See which employees are most productive. Some of the software in the company computers, even snap screenshots every 30 seconds to evaluate the productivity in the hour's work. Now, of course, that's not typically done for people who are who knowledge workers are. That's usually more for people who are, you know, taking dictation or doing some form of a repetitive task but, you know, Hawthorne effect, right? We've been doing this forever. I remember teaching that at Pepperdine as a professor there, ai artificial intelligence keyword scanning also been used and all of this, even chats, phone conversations on his work desk, phone and work cell phone can be recorded, transcribed and monitored. And they're using this to measure productivity, etc. So bottom line, your life is not yours. You are just not secure in almost anything. But I don't want you to give up. I want you to keep trying. I want you to make sure that you're using your iPhone, use Safari because it blocks some of this tracking. And I'm going to have some excellent information for your next couple of weeks. We're working on it now to help you stop the tracking. But check it out. It's on the Wall Street Journal site. You're listening to Craig Peterson right here on WGAN and online at Craig Peterson dot com. Hey everybody, Welcome back. Craig Peterson here on WGAN online and of course at Craig Peterson dot com. That's Peterson with an "O." Hey, are you panicking about your kids or your grandkids and the use of the smartphones? Do you remember what they were saying about TV years ago? And how it rots the brains and you know, we use it as a babysitter. Kind of still do, don't we? And what effect does this have on their brains? We're starting to see the results of these devices on the younger generations because we've had the iPhone for over ten years. We've had the internet now for Well, just been about almost 20 years since it's been legal to do business online now actually is longer than that because it was 91. Wow, okay, thirty, it's been around for quite a while, and we're starting to see some of the results. We're seeing kids that have a little less patient, and they won't sit and read, like we used to read right, though, won't even sit and watch most movies, their ideal clip on these online sites where they're watching video is 15 to 30 seconds. They now have an attention span less than a goldfish, which is eight seconds a goldfish is attention span. Now, that's a bad thing. Okay. And now that they're into the workplace, some of these kids, here's what's happening now. They'll sit in a meeting, and we're as millennial usually, whereas baby boomers would sit there until give us plan our strategy, what are we going to do? So one of our options, we want to No. Okay, so we're going to do some research. So you look up this, you look up that you talk to these people, and then let's get together in a couple of days. And let's review what we've learned. And then let's make a decision, and you'll try and make a decision in unison. Now, when we're talking about the younger generation, the millennial generation, and of course, we've got Generation Z in the workplace too. Still, when we're talking about millennials, they will tend to try and get the answer right away. They'll sit on their phone, they'll b, and Google will reach out to their friends on social media and ask for their opinion. The friends might not know anything about what it is that you need to have researched. They may not know hardly anything about the whole topic that you're trying to get research, but they will reach out to these friends and get their opinions. And they are opinions are not necessarily worth anything, right? Then they will typically decide. Hey, listen, we're going to decide before we leave today. Whereas it might take the baby boomers a couple of weeks to make a decision, the younger generations millennials and Z's, will both try and make a decision right away. Now, what's the reason for this? And, you know, I, pretty much every psychologist and psychiatrist that I've spoken to, in fact, I think every one of them has said, Listen, this is 100% because of social media. It's 100%. Because of their ability to go online, these kids live online, and they always have. So how about younger kids, let's say you have grandkids or kids that are in their teens are approaching their teens. Now. Even maybe Five years old. I know some people that are getting smartphones and smart devices for their young kids, your five-year-olds. What's going on? Well, there was the research that came out a week ago by two psychology professors. They looked at the data that produced in 40 different studies.
And this article in The New York Times goes on to say that they looked at the links between social media use, and they see if there are any ties with depression and anxiety, and they were looking at teenagers. And we've got the lead person here, lead investigator of this study, principal authors Candice Rodgers, a professor, University of California, Irvine, published in the Journal of child psychology and psychiatry. And the quotes here from the New York Times, there doesn't seem to be an evidence base that would explain the level of panic and consternation around these issues. And these are significant issues right with this has been a big debate for a long time as parents as grandparents, we don't want to harm our children. And we know that staring in the phones has affected us, you know, look, look at the relationship between couples and families. Did you see that Robin William's movie from years ago called RV, where the whole family was sitting around in the same room, and they were texting each other? You know, that's kind of the real world. You see people up for meals, and they're on their phones, reading articles, texting, whatever it is they're doing. There is a significant risk to our mental health from these machines in particular, and Congress has looked at some of the legislation they might pass. There have been other things to write but Is it the phone, that's the real problem when it comes to these mental issues, and that's what they were looking at the social media aspects of it. The World Health Organization said last year that infants under a year old should not have exposure to electronic screens. And the children between the ages of two and four should not have more than an hour of sedentary screen time each day. Some of the big execs over in Silicon Valley don't allow their kids to use some of the hardware-software they create. This is a problem from several directions still, right, even though there's no direct correlation between, well, let's call it depression here, and the use of social media by kids. However, I certainly have seen studies that would indicate otherwise, but there Saying that in most cases, the phone is just a mirror that reveals the problems a child would have, even without the phone. So they're saying that focusing on keeping children away from screens and making it hard to have more productive conversations about topics like how to make phones more useful for low-income people, blah, blah, blah, right? So I guess really, what they're saying is that if you compare the effects of your phone, to the impact of maybe eating correctly, or getting enough sleep, or playing games, outdoors smoking, the phone is just a very, very minor. So there was a little bit of a correlation but not a huge one. Mr. Hancock, who is one of the authors here, he's the founder of the Stanford Social Media Lab. He reads similar conclusions. He says he looked at about 226 steps. On the well being of phone users conducted, that he said that when you look at all these different kinds of well being, the net effect size is virtually zero.
So there you go. Now, you know, in 2011, doctors were worried about something called Facebook depression. But by 2016 is more research came out, and they looked at that statement, they deleted any mention of Facebook depression, and emphasize that conflicting evidence and the potential positive benefits of using social media because of course, there is another side to all of that. So there you go. There's your answer if you have grandkids or kids, and you've been anxious about your kids, using these devices getting depressed because of social media, you know, okay, it's not a big problem. But here's one thing that I didn't hear dressed in any of these reports. And that is these negative self-images that tend to develop from being on social media. You look at these Instagram posts, and you look at the Kylie Jenners' of the world. I think that many girls and many boys are getting the wrong idea about what a woman's body should or could look like, and also getting a false value about it right. How much does that matter? Does that is that your relationship? I think they're getting a warped view of things, which is why I mentioned at the beginning this program that I think we see now in business, and I've talked with many people about it is very, very real. No question about it. All right. Well, when we come back, we're going to talk a little more about privacy. And this new secret of company that might end privacy as we know, in fact, they kind of already have me listening to Craig Peterson on WGAN and online, Craig Peterson dot com. Hello, everybody, Welcome back, Craig Peterson here, WGAN online and of course, Craig Peterson.com. Hey, we're talking a lot about privacy this week and next week, and that's mainly because well, it's in the news. And my wife and I have been working hard on some materials that we're going to be providing you guys. The only way you're going to get them is if you're on my mailing list because otherwise, you're never going to find out about them. But step by step guides know the sort of things I usually do this kind of going a step beyond the special reports, and then we're going to have a little webinar on it as well. We're just we're doing a whole bunch because privacy is something that I think we're starting to take for granted. Privacy is what we're beginning to expect. And I think that's a real problem. So when I saw this article this week in the New York Times by Kashmir Hill, I knew I had to share this with you. This is a brand new article. And it is very, very concerning to me for a number of reasons. It's about this guy. His name is Juan tomcat. He is from Australia, and moved up to Silicon Valley, and had been trying to do some sort of social type of an application, something that would, you know, compete out there in the world, make him a few bucks and have some fun doing it. And so he released a couple of different social apps. He had one that put Donald Trump's yellow hair on your own photo. He had a couple of others that were kind of a photo-sharing thing and nothing was all that successful. So we decided to need to be there to do a little bit more research and So he did. And he figured, you know, maybe what we need here is something a little more. That's going to help people recognize other people. So you meet someone, you have their picture, can I find that person just as an example. And in fact, he struggled for quite a while trying to figure out that this software that he had written, figuring out how the heck they were going to market it and, you know, they went to a bunch of different people and tried to figure it out and, and get it all to work. So what he ended up doing was kind of like what Mark Zuckerberg does start Facebook. He illegally crawled Facebook, YouTube Venmo millions of other websites and grabbed photographs from them and recorded the URLs for those photographs. So it's too late for you. If you have any photos anywhere online, basically That he might have found, because we're talking about 3 billion images that are in his database. That is incredible. So we had one programmer, right, this scraper that went in and stole all of these pictures. By the way, it is clearly against the terms of usage for Facebook, as well as YouTube, Twitter, Instagram Venmo. To use these to scrape the sites and to use these pictures for facial recognition. Twitter explicitly banned it, but you know, who cares, right? Like Zuckerberg, when he started Facebook, those allegations of how he stole the Harvard year yearbook and grabbed all of these pictures and then had people rating each other make mostly guys writing girls kind of a dating app sort of thing is kind of how it started. So in Now, he has found some investments. And that includes some serious money guys behind this whole thing. And it is. One of those people is Peter teal, who is one of the people who sit on the board of directors of Facebook. So Facebook says, well, we're looking into him grabbing the photos off of Facebook. I kind of wonder if anything's going to happen with Peter Thiel being on the board of directors as well. Here's how the software works. I don't know if you've seen facial recognition software before, but it basically looks at the difference. The distance between your eyes, your nose, your cheeks, you know, different points on your face that are defined, typically by bones, right. The nose is mostly the cartilage that's given its shape and its position. But it takes all of that and draws a line. I'm sure you've seen this sort of thing before. So what he's done now is he's taken those more than 3 billion images. And he's categorized them all by coming up with the vectors and mathematical formulas describing every last one of those 3 billion faces. So he's trying to figure out what I can now do with this database that I have? And he got some guys to help with some of the marketing. And he got some people to go after a few different categories industries. And he found that law enforcement was very interested in this. So let's talk about law enforcement for a minute and facial recognition technology because law enforcement has legally been using facial recognition technology for 20 years. You watch one of these TV shows like the CSI is on TV, which I don't like those shows because there are too many technical errors, and it drives me crazy. You can't do that doesn't exist, that technology doesn't exist. But so that's why I don't watch a lot of people do. The government has their National Crime information computer centers. They've got databases of faces of arrested people, people who are in prison, etc. The police can run your face through this database of people that they've had contact with before. Now it's expanded. This has been for good 20 years, but it's expanded more recently to include the databases of our DMV is our motor vehicle. In other words, our driver's licenses on the state level, and they pulled all of those in as well. Now those photos have to be shot pretty much straight on, and when they are shot straight on, then the recognition software that the law enforcement personnel are using can kind of recognize that person and do matches and everything else. So it's been an excellent tool for a lot of years. And one of the things law enforcement cannot do is collect data on everybody. So these databases that law enforcement has been using are somewhat limited.
Now, I talked about this whole problem, man, it's probably been ten years ago when I first talked about it here on the radio. But the big problem I saw back then was that law enforcement was starting to use these public data aggregators. And I've had a few on the phone here before. I've done interviews with some of their CEOs and their technical people. But what these data aggregators do is take what's called open-source information, as well as paid information. Open-source information might be something they scrape a website, that is, all of the property owners in a town, or they scrape a site that has either information, right, almost everything. They might get feeds from companies like Equifax that are telling them about your credit rating, and you did this, and you bought that. They'll scrape UCC one filing to Secretary of State's office that will say, Yeah, he owns a brand new Ford Explorer, this model number, even license plate numbers they can get. So they'll pull all of this data together, they can get their hands on, and then they sell it. And you've seen ads, and I'm sure online, you know, check yourself online, see what we know about you. These are data aggregators that are selling this data, and it gets used by skip tracers, bounty hunters, law enforcement, all kinds of businesses to determine creditworthiness. They're even used to see 30 news to see if maybe you should or should not get a job. So it's kind of scary data. When you look at it, and I've looked at mine before, when I did these interviews, and I found that about a third to two-thirds of it was correct. Most of it was incorrect. We just had something similar happen when I was out at a wedding out west, and we were at this house. There was a card when we got back from an insurance company and stuck in the door handle. It had the name of a deceased relative on it. Well, you know, she's dead, so they're probably trying to sell insurance. I'm not going to do anything with this card. The next day is when we had the knock at the door, and it was the insurance investigator. She said that this relative had been in a fatal accident with car x. And they were trying to track her down. Well, guess what? She had been deceased for at least six months before the fatal accident occurred. Some third-party had used her identity, and she had to try to figure it out, Someone was hiding who they were. Now this insurance investigator was trying to figure out what's going on. The insurance investigator had her suspicions as to what might be going on. She showed us all of the information she had gathered from these public information sources, these data brokers, and they put it all together. She showed it to my wife, saying you're honest with me, and obviously, you got the death certificate, etc. Sure enough, what did they find? Well, yeah, she'd been dead for a while when the accident happened. But when, when we looked at the details of the information that they had about the deceased relative It was dramatically incorrect. It did show some associations. But it showed people on there we'd never heard of before as relatives. They had relationships wrong. But you know, it was the right place for that insurance investigator to start with and worked well. The police started using these types of databases and the federal investigators as well, because they are not regulated, like the law enforcement agencies are. Now we're starting to see law enforcement agencies, and according to this article in The New York Times, some 600 law enforcement agencies are now using this technology from a company called Clearview. They have been able to solve some bizarre, unbelievable crimes, things that happened. They found a good Samaritan. They found shoplifters they found burglars, thieves, all kinds of things that they couldn't see before because these people had never been involved with law enforcement previously. So I don't know, what do you think there are no limits on the type of data collection. I think maybe we're all going to be in trouble here. Because what happens when someone runs a picture or when they upload pictures into it. It becomes problematic here because these pictures are uploaded, and the company keeps them. Now you've got a blacklist of people that have had contact with law enforcement. What's going to happen when your employer sees that, because this database is not showing perfect matches by their admission at best 70% of the time, they come up with possible matches. Stick around, and we'll be right back.
Hey everybody, Welcome back. Craig Peterson here on WGAN and, of course, online at Craig peterson.com. Hopefully, we were able to catch the first hour of today's show. We covered something in this last segment that I want to go more in-depth into, which is this secret company that has kind of come out of left-wing that is going to end privacy as we know it. And, of course, they're breaking the rules and laws all ready to put the silly thing together. And it bothers me, frankly, but above that, right, we're really from above looking at all of this. What's bothering me is honestly, I don't know we call it an apathy where we just don't seem to care that much anymore. We care when we hear about a data breach, and we care when we find out that they stole our personal information. Part of what I'm going to be teaching you in a couple of weeks in this course is how you can tell what information was stolen. So I'm going to give you some dark web tools, the dark internet so that you know where to find out if your information has been stolen. And I think that's important. So we're going to include that in the upcoming webinar, we might put that in as a bonus for attending the webinar coming up in a couple of weeks. But it is disturbing that we can hear about something like what I just talked about the last segment, which you'll find online at my website. That, to me, is very bothersome, but it's also disturbing that we're no longer getting our up and trying to get Congress or somebody to do something about it. Not that I think Congress is the answer well to anything pretty much, right? Anything they touch, they're going to mess up. We're becoming apathetic as business owners, as well as business people. As the person who all of a sudden now is responsible for it within the organization, right, the office managers, those of us who liked computers, and we kind of got stuck with the role, and that's kind of what ended up happening to me to those years ago. Right. I think I'm a lot like you in that respect that, you know, it's challenging to be an expert in everything. I've got to kind of run the office, and I got to make sure. How am I going to learn about all of this security stuff? And then on top of it, the boss is breathing down our necks, trying to get this security stuff done, right. And if you're a business owner, you're worried about it too. But what are you doing about it? And to grease the wheel, I am probably like most people out there, and you really haven't done. You've probably got antivirus software, which, as of now, is utterly useless against the newest attacks. I mean, 100% useless. Why do you think they're giving Norton away now when you buy a subscription to LifeLock?
You know, it doesn't do any good anymore, that's excellent technology 20 years ago, but today, it just doesn't work. Collectively as office managers, as business owners, even as C-levels on boards in fair-sized little companies. It's like burying our head in the sand. And we're, we're hoping nothing's going to happen. Right? I'm going into companies frequently, that is, you know, re governed by various rules and regulations, and very aren't doing what the laws and regulations require and they just sitting there saying well We'll just wait for an audit. When an audit happens, if an audit happens, we'll deal with them, then, right?
But what happens when your data gets stolen? There are some very crazy things going on right now. We have a client that we picked up last year. It's just incredible. They have a completely new network system, we've fixed up a lot of things for them. I think things are going to be much better for them. We got an alert from our systems that they were getting 4000 hack attempts and our coming from Iran, coming from India, Iran. It is the first time I've got to say, the very first time in all of the years now, but I've been responsible for cybersecurity for all these businesses. It is the first time that I have ever actually seen an Iranian IP address in an attack. They're trying to log into this guy's email account. So one of the employees, and I'm not going to go into more detail than that. But this is real. You hear about breaches every week, and there are more breaches every weekend. It's small businesses, large businesses, home users, just because there are breaches every week, I want everybody to be aware that that doesn't mean that it's acceptable. It may be a kind of standard. Hopefully, it's the old normal, and probably, you're going to be able to find somebody that's going to be able to help you out, right? You go to a company like mine, and you say, Hey, listen, just take care of this for me, or you attend some of my courses so that you can learn some of this stuff that you need to do at least the bare minimum. Hopefully, you're doing that and not just getting passive after hearing about it so much. What's the what's that saying "the first year, you're shocked and horrified by something, and then you become accustomed to it, and then you embrace it." Not that I'm saying you guys are going to embrace hacking and become hackers. I don't think that'll ever happen. But you just get used to that idea until you do get hacked. And then it's all done and over with. Enough of that right now, make sure you're on my email list. So you get my weekly alerts, you get my monthly summaries of the absolute must-do patches for that month. You will also find out about my pop-up training. I haven't been sending out direct notices about the Facebook Lives and things I probably should. Still, you can get all of that just by going to Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe because we've got some great stuff coming up here in a couple of weeks going to do some of the training and webinars to go along with it. I want to move on now to another article that was over on the CNN website. And it's talking about a significant change in a major US Corporation. I was on the phone with them earlier today. We've got VRBO, and you might have heard of them. That's Vacation Rentals by owner. They've been around since 95. You may not have heard of them, but they've been around a long time. Airbnb, you probably heard about them. And you've probably heard about Marriott. They've been busy buying up hotel chains, including one chain, in particular, was hacked previously, and Marriott just really inherited all of their problems by buying that company, keep in mind if you're looking to grow and make any acquisitions. What's interesting is how do you deal with a company like Marriott, which is bricks and mortar? How do you deal with the online startups like the VRBO and Airbnb is, it is completely changing the way the hospitality business works. I kind of put "hospitality" in air quotes here. You probably didn't see me. But is it hospitality when all you have is a home that you're going into an apartment you're going into versus a fully functional hotel? Right? That's the big question. So this is cool, I think, because Marriott has decided not to try and beat Airbnb at its own game. It's going to join them. April last year, Marriott came out with its homes and villas program. And it has 5000 rentable premium and luxury homes in almost 200 locations around the world. It is amazing. It's a significant departure for Marriott. They've been offering hotel rooms for nearly 100 years. But in this case, Marriott is going to do what Airbnb and VRBO have been doing and offering homes and villas up for rent. And this is a part of the whole sharing economy, bike scooters, and homes. That's a code from Stephanie Lennart. She's Marriott's global chief Commercial Officer, when she told CNN, home rentals and being B's have been around for decades, so the core idea itself isn't that new. The new part is technology platforms, bringing it to consumers at scale so that it's democratized and affordable. So Marriott's already had success, obviously through hotel business, and as I said, I was on the phone with him this morning. I'm going to be staying in one of their hotels again. But the company is being led here by Stephanie outside of the brand comfort zone, that you know brick and mortar. It's great. They've been around for almost 100 years. But everything is changing out there. And are you changing in your business? Are you making it easy for your customers to do business with you? And that's what they were asking themselves. They've been kind of tracking and watching the home rental market. She had a pilot program going over in Europe and 2018. That became ultimately the homes and villas program that they had. They found that their most loyal customers at Marriott 30% of them had used a home rental in the prior year. I've used Airbnb. I've used VR Bo, and you know, frankly, I've had mixed results from the two of those different things. And they found out nine times out of 10 this person was renting a home for a whole different purpose and they were getting that from someone else and Marriott thinks that this is a complimentary business and adds to their core business. So isn't that kind of interesting? people stay more than triple the average one and a half night stays at the hotels in these different types of bookings. And they think that they are going to be able to do a whole lot more. They're focusing on some of these millennial trends. And frankly, you know, I'm an old G. But I have to tell you, boomers, age 23% of travelers are age 55 to 64, booked a homestay from 21% in 2017. So it's happening. We're all doing it out there, and congratulations to married for sticking their neck out. And frankly, you might need to two so keep an eye out for what other people are doing in competing industries and maybe borrow their ideas. Listen to Craig Peterson and WGAN. We'll be right back. We're going to talk a little bit about lawmakers and what small businesses are telling them right now.
Welcome back. Welcome, welcome. Craig Peterson here online and on WGAN and many other radio stations during the week. Thanks for joining me. Lawmakers have long been accused of being corrupt. I'm not going to defend them, that's for sure. Here is a different type of corruption and one that a lot of people haven't thought a lot about. You know, there's been a lot in the news about Joe Biden's son. Hunter, getting money from Ukraine. Joe Biden's brother getting what is it $1.5 billion from Iraq is the latest story that I saw out there. Nancy Pelosi's son-in-law, getting money from Ukraine, John Kerry's relative getting money from Ukraine, right. You do hear a lot about alleged corruption, and you have to wonder, frankly, how do these Congress critters go down to Washington, DC, nary a penny in their pocket and end up multimillionaires. It's nuts, isn't it? And of course, they exempt themselves from certain laws that we have to live by, for instance, insider training trading rules. If you're a congressman hearing bills, it is regulations will likely be added here or there, or you're going to mandate some action by businesses. It is perfectly legal for you to go out and invest in companies that are going to take care of this problem and charge businesses a lot of money, right. All of a sudden, you're a likely multi-millionaire. If you or I were to have done that, we would be nailed for insider trading. It's long been a double standard. But here's another side of that double standard that's bothered me for a very long time. This isn't business. It includes unions. And this is where a business or union wants to get rid of the competition. And what they'll do is they'll get a congress critter to sponsor a bill that let's say it requires a licensing for something like most states have licensing for barbers. Are you kidding me? What does a barber need to know? Well, you don't know how to haircut. But you know what? A state-sponsored haircut. What does that look like something under the Soviet Union? Well, they have to know how to clean the instruments and clean them properly. They don't use autoclaves. But they do use alcohol and various other things to clean them. So what does that take a five-minute quiz on it? If you want to keep barbers out, you can put together a nice little Barbers association that goes to the state capitol. They say I think for the health and safety of our citizens in the state, we've got to have rules and regulations surrounding barbers. It gets passed. And now all of a sudden, you get to control how many barbers are. And in some states, they have several people who are allowed to have licenses look at taxi medallions in the big cities like New York City as an example. And in New York City, there's only so many of them. And they were valued at like a million and a half bucks apiece, just crazy money, and people suck their life savings into them. And then, of course, the bottom fell out of the whole medallion taxi market when Uber show showed up, and, of course, some of these other wild ride-hailing services. So we've known for a long time that both unions and businesses use the federal government to squeeze out the competition and I don't think there's any The real debate about that it happened. It happens all of the time. The left does it the right does it. They all do it to us. Well, there this last Friday, there was a hearing, and there were executives from four different businesses that pleaded with federal lawmakers to rein in Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon. It is a New York Times article. And this was a congressional hearing that was in Boulder, Colorado. They had some smaller companies. Now, these companies are pretty big in their market segments, but much, much smaller than Google, Facebook, Apple, or Amazon. We're talking about such a nose, pop sockets, Basecamp, and tile. Now I have used equipment. I've had people from all of those companies on my radio show before, and those top executives testified that the biggest technology company Companies blocked their businesses. They stopped them from growing. And according to the New York Times, their stories vary. But they shared a theme that tech giants have used their powerful positions in search eCommerce, online ads, and smartphones to squeeze them out, as well as other rivals. Now, when we get down to this, I think it also boils down to the antitrust laws that we have. Right through, the whole idea was, well, we're not going to let companies get too big. We're not going to let them get two horizontal we're going to help make sure they stay in the industry, make sure there's competition. But we say that on the one hand, the federal government does right, but then, on the other hand, they don't do it at all. So let's take a great example of General Motors and what happened to GM. When a company gets to a certain size, the government This side that it is too big to fail. So our lawmakers look at it and say, Oh my gosh, how many voters work at that company. So instead of letting the market take care of the problem, and these, By the way, most of these people probably ultimately would have had jobs, probably better jobs, probably higher-paying jobs. But instead of letting the market take care of it, and split up GM, keep the profitable divisions alive, maybe let GM continue to operate them and sell off the unprofitable divisions or let them die off. Which is the way the markets work, right? It's the fittest survival of the fittest if you will, and that does well for everybody because now you have a stronger company that's doing better. While we're in the car industry. Look at what happened with Chrysler twice now twice. They've been bailed out by the tax. payers. So why didn't the antitrust laws work in those cases? Right? They didn't work. We've got examples here in New England, look at Seabrook and what's happened there and with the Old Man, and the costs that have been incurred by the ratepayers. Then we have this whole about hubbub about tobacco, so what's happening now is these big guys like Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon, are capitalizing on the strength that they have because of their size. The government regulations, and using it as a weapon against the smaller startups. And this happens every time, as I said, this is a left issue. It's the right issue. It's unions, and it's big business. These are the guys we're talking about right now. It sort of happened just this week in a federal hearing. So you now have these big companies that we don't let the market deal with anymore. Do you think that the government would allow Google to go under? Now none of these companies, to the best of my knowledge, are having cashflow issues right now Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon. They're probably not likely to go under. But these smaller guys, you know, Pop Sockets and Basecamp have had issues. They've had products that they've had to let go because they weren't profitable enough, right. That sounds like what GM should have done. Tile? Who knows these guys, right? There is not the competition there needs to be out there. How do you compete with Google? Now there are some out there. I use DuckDuckGo instead of Google because DuckDuckGo does not track me.
It does not sell my information. It is a pretty darn, safe place to go. Apple I use because they do not make money off of selling my data. They make money off of selling Hardware and Software and Services right. So Apple, according to Tile, is put up hurdles for their smartphone app that didn't apply to Apple's competing product. The high-end audio company said Google copied its patent speaker technology and use its dominance and search to enter new markets. Pop sockets were to make smartphone grip said that Amazon bullied it into sales agreements and ignored complaints about counterfeits on the Amazon retail platform. It goes on and on, you know, intimidating with a smile. And frankly, as I think I pointed out pretty clearly, I think Congress is part of this problem, not necessarily part of this solution. So what are you going to do about it? Let me know what you think me at Craig Peterson calm. Just drop me an email me at Craig Peterson dot com, and you're listening to me on WGAN.
Hello, everybody, Craig Peterson here back on WGAN. It's our last half hour together today but fear not. We have more coming up this week. Make sure you subscribe to your favorite podcast platform, whether that's tune in Apple podcasts. I'm all over the place on any major podcasting platform. You can just search for me, and you'll find me Well, you know, if you search for me, you're not going to find me but search for Craig Peterson, and hopefully, you'll find me. I hope you saw this morning's email because we have covered several features there. We also have links to this week's podcast so that you can watch those, so hopefully, you've got that. And then we're keeping you up to date on the latest security news that you need. The patches you have to apply at your home and your company. The Big ones. And we define big and vital based on how easy it is for a bad guy to use it and whether or not we know bad guys are using it out there. We contacted the FBI this week, because of something we've been seeing going on. The FBI puts all this together and shares it. I want to put a plug out there for Infragard.
There are chapters in all 50 states now. I think you will enjoy it if you are the person who's responsible for the security of your organization. Now, this includes health care and financial but even lawyers and doctors and everybody that might be considered part of the critical infrastructure is invited. I find it useful because I do get some excellent insight information, sometimes directly from the FBI through the FBI Infragard program. Now you can have to apply, and they have to do this basic background check on you. And then you can become a member and, and they share some stuff with you. They don't share with everybody else. Sometimes I think that it's, you know, they share with us maybe a little less than they should. I believe they should share with us a little bit more, but it's well worth it if you are someone involved in security. So I, you know, you've got my feeling here already right on IoT, the Internet of Things and smart homes. I have some smart home equipment in our home. There's an apple speaker, what do they call that Apple home, something like that I can't even remember now. And I've got some of the Amazon Echo stuff. I've got a little echo hockey pocket. So there's two or three them in the house, and we've got one of the apps Amazon Fire tablets. And we also have an Amazon Echo two, which is one with the screen. Then we use that for talking to grandkids and stuff, but also asking questions playing music and things. It is so handy. And then we've used Apple home also to hook up some lights and other devices. Now the apple home, by far, has the best security design of all of the rest, it tends to be a little bit more expensive. And there are not as many vendors using it because it's a bit more expensive. And Apple frankly was a little bit late to that game, but we are using it to control lights in the home, which is kind of cool. So if you invest in a lot of this IoT stuff, maybe you've made the mistake of getting Google Home. Perhaps you're using the Amazon Echo stuff, and maybe you are using the Apple stuff there. You know those are the two better ones that are out there right now. Neither Apple nor Amazon are known to sell your information or have big hacks against their devices. I chuckled when I mentioned the Google Home known to share and sell your data, and be hackable. And they found some apps people were using that were recording everything they were saying and uploading it to the internet. So stay away from that. But there are a lot more companies and just those that are in the IoT space.
For instance, Verizon now has Home Security stuff where they have cameras will install, and they have alarm systems, spectrum charter also has that type of thing. So you invest a lot of money in that, and you've heard ads on the station here for some of these different you know, home security devices, wired yourself. You don't have to. Why is it just everything in between, right? Well, what happens when one of those companies decides that they don't want to be in that business anymore? That is what's happening right now with Charter Cable is killing its Home Security Service. It's been telling customers that the security devices that they've purchased, they weren't on a month to month. It wasn't a lease, and it wasn't a rental. But they're saying that their devices, the devices they purchased, will stop working on February 5. Amazing, right? So this is Charter Cable, you might know it as Spectrum that's another brand name that they've been using. And over the years, some customers to spend a lot of money on these products that will no longer work. Now I mentioned in the last segment so knows and when I was talking about the big con companies and unions left and right both working with the government to keep competition away. Well, Sonos has done something kind of similar to this charter thing. If you have an older Sonos speaker, they will give you a discount on a new Sonos speaker, because they're not going to support the old ones anymore. And they will then brick your former Sonos speaker. So the speaker that you bought and paid money for a bricking means it will no longer work. There is no way to recover it. There's no way to make it work ever again. That is a very, very big deal until a lot of people upset with Sonos. But you know, as we go forward, this is going to happen more and more and more. You're going to have internet cameras, and you're going to have sensors, they're going to be useless in a couple of weeks. Now, that's bad when you consider some people. It is according to the DSL report. Some people spend 1200 bucks on their systems. So here's a massive problem for you if you are a Charter customer Spectrum customer, and you have their security devices, and this is something that you have to watch out for, right? It's, it's the old question going with a smaller guy a bigger guy, what do you want to do? Companies come to come to me to help them with security because they know I care. They know it's a family business, that we have the whole family involved in, you know, obviously, as well as other people that work for us, versus going to an Ernst and Young, that's going to charge them an arm and a leg. They're not going to get any kind of attention from, but when we're talking about this type of equipment, this is where I think you get a real win. By going with Amazon, they are going to be a runaround. They can afford to upgrade your equipment with you, and I'm not worried about getting abandoned. Buy them a charter partner now with Amazon's ring and boat to give customers a free equipment bundle if they buy a year's worth of monitoring. Well, isn't that wonderful? So if you're an existing customer, you can throw away all of your stuff and get getting new hardware for free if you sign up for a year, and if you don't own any of their existing equipment, you can still get a hardware bundle and a year of service. So the big question is why there's no way for charter customers to keep using devices. They're using the ZigBee specification, which I've had the ZigBee people on my show before. It allows multi-vendor interoperability for smart home products. Why can't they just switch on over to another ZigBee based system? Well turns out that years ago, spectrum devices were firmware coded to prevent them from being seen and unusable within their Normal University. ZigBee devices. So this is a problem we're going to have going forward. It goes back to also data portability that we wanted for so long. Remember Hippo is supposed to give us medical record portability, we go to any doctor, they'd all have our medical records the hospital to be able to read them. And that was more than 25 years ago, and it still hasn't happened. So I'm not going to hold my breath. These alarm systems are going to be able to keep our, you know, keep it useful for the next five or ten years, more than going to be going away. All right, when we get back, we're going to talk about a significant event that occurred last week with Microsoft. And another big event. We're going to talk about what the FBI has been saying about Apple lately. So stick around, and we'll be right back. You're listening to Craig Peterson. On WGAN and online. Craig Peterson.com.
Hey everybody, welcome ba