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Published: June 25, 2020, 12:44 a.m.

Good morning everybody!

I was on with Matt this morning and we had a good discussion about How Contract Tracing Apps Work and Fail, Massive Spying on Google Users, Major Justice Overhaul For Facebook, and Twitter. Let's get into my conversation with Matt on WGAN.

These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com

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Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: This sort of thing that South Koreas been mandating for everyone.

[00:00:03] Matt Gagnon: Yeah.

[00:00:03] Craig Peterson: And China's been mandating if you go to China.

[00:00:07]Matt Gagnon: Look at my shocked face. I know you can see it through the radio right now.

[00:00:11] Craig Peterson: Yeah, absolutely. Now you brought up the security, right? So that was me with Mr. Matt this morning, we talked a little bit about the justice department and their big overhaul it's underway right now. Massive spying on users of Google Chrome and contact tracing apps. Did you know how they actually work and what they can do for you? And frankly, to you. Let's get going. Here's Matt.

[00:00:42] Matt Gagnon: It's a technological revolution, your Google home, your Alexa, just tell it to listen to the news, radio WGAN and the like Craig Peterson.

[00:00:51] You can listen to the program. Cause I know he does every day. Craig, welcome to the program this morning.

[00:00:56] Craig Peterson: I Do. I use my little Amazon Alexa? I have a little echo dot and it's fantastic. Even on in my car. I can just ask my Alexa app to go ahead and tune it in WGAN and off it goes.

[00:01:09] Matt Gagnon: Indeed. So it's a great technological advancement, which is a nice thing to do. Now that we're talking to you, the tech advisor for the WGAN morning news. So I wanted to start off Craig, by noting something that I have noticed recently, which is that there's a lot of people freaking out about what's on their phones for contact tracing apps and stuff. That's kind of being done in the background of their phones to try to keep track of the coronavirus and whatnot, but it goes into, I think, nicely into the story that you want to talk about, about the contact tracing apps and how they are failing miserably at basic security.

[00:01:47] Craig Peterson: Yeah, they sure are. And then there's a lot of confusion around these things too. You can't just download a contact tracing app and somehow thinks that it's going to trace all your contacts. First of all, that's just not going to work. Then there are two basic types of these apps. There's one that's GPS related.

[00:02:07] So it can be handy and it will let you know, if you come up down with symptoms later on, we'll let you know, we'll remind you. Oh, you went here, you grab a sandwich there, you did this, you did that. And so if the public health people want to know, where have you been, who might you have had contact with at least tells you where you are.

[00:02:29] The second type of app is typically based on a platform that both Apple and Google put together. And that platform is designed to use the near field Bluetooth stuff. The 10-year phones. So with Bluetooth at the latest versions of it, it can detect how far you are away or the devices away from another Bluetooth device.

[00:02:55] And those are the types of that. We'll let you know, first of all, Hey, you're within six feet of a coworker. So a lot of businesses are using those just to remind coworkers to stay apart. And secondarily it could be used by public health services to let them know who you came close to.

[00:03:13] Matt Gagnon: I am sorry but that is so sketchy.

[00:03:17] Craig Peterson: It is. Yeah, it really is.

[00:03:18] That's the sort of thing that South Korea has been mandating for everyone. And China's been mandating. If you go to China.

[00:03:26] Matt Gagnon: Look at my shocked face. I know you can see it through the radio right now.

[00:03:32] Craig Peterson: Yeah, absolutely. Now you brought up the security, right? Who trusts the government anymore?

[00:03:39] I guess there are some people right who trust the government, but most people know that. Okay. There's potentially legitimate purpose here may be well-intentioned, but giant security mistakes. And in fact, right now there are more than 2000 of these trackers out there. And the trackers that have been checked have been found to not keep your data private, not to keep your information.

[00:04:06] Matt Gagnon: You're kidding, You're kidding.

[00:04:07] Craig Peterson: Weird isn't it. So, yeah, it'd be, be careful with these things. They are not a panacea. The only way they might be effective is if some people saying 50%, some people say 70% of the population has them on their devices and that's never going to happen anyway.

[00:04:27] Matt Gagnon: Craig Peterson, our tech guru joins us on Wednesdays at this time to go over what's happening in the world of technology.

[00:04:32] You can also hear him on Saturdays, on this very station with a longer-form version of this chat, where he gets into more depth and detail about all of these stories and more, coming up next. Craig, I want to talk about the spying. Speaking of people you don't trust, Google. And go with the spine that's being done on Google Chrome.

[00:04:50] What's happening here.

[00:04:51] Oh, this is an interesting problem. Google has, yeah, there's been some massive spying that's been going on and it's entirely around Google Chrome that we're going to talk about right now.

[00:05:03] Craig Peterson: Of course, there are all kinds of spying going after our businesses they are stealing our data. We know that we've talked about that before, but there's been this spyware effort for extensions on Google's Chrome web browsers.

[00:05:19] Then this is kind of an interesting problem here because there are malicious ad-on's and Google has from the official play store removed more than 70 of them. So number one only uses the official play store. Right. And I hate to have to say that, but a lot of people don't. A lot of gamers don't because a lot of the games are not available from the official store.

[00:05:46] So in this case, Google removed those extensions that violated their policies, which is really kind of nice, but here's the biggest problem. There have been apparently millions of people's records downloaded by some of the spyware, including your contacts, banking information, et cetera, et cetera. So this is a problem and it's going to continue to be a problem.

[00:06:13] It's not unique to Google. It is a general problem out there. So if you're going to put an extension on your browser, be very careful. And my best advice is, do not add search bars to your browser.

[00:06:28] Matt Gagnon: Oh God, you ever do that?

[00:06:30] Geez. Those things are terrible.

[00:06:31] Craig Peterson: Oh, they're the worst.

[00:06:32] Matt Gagnon: Yeah, don't do it. Don't do it is pretty much good advice for most things I'd say. Craig Peterson joins us on, right now to talk about what's going on in the world of technology before I let you go, Craig, I have one more question I want to get to you. And this one could spiral into a seven-hour discussion, but section two 30, has been, of the communications. Decency act of 1996, by the way, is where that comes from, has been sort of at the center of this debate about free speech online, and what social media platforms are doing.

[00:07:01] And, and the justice department has now proposed a set of new things to do to update that what are they proposing?

[00:07:09] Craig Peterson: Well, here is the bottom line. If you're using that telephone and you threaten someone, or you say something that is illegal, the telephone company, isn't prosecuted, the telephone company doesn't go to jail.

[00:07:24] So what section two 30 was all about is saying, well, you know, some of these businesses out there are kind of like common carriers kind of like the telephone company and we should not hold Facebook or Google to the same standards as we might hold a third party, a little website that's publishing hate speech, for instance.

[00:07:45] Well, that was put in place so that Google, Facebook, et cetera, did not have to do any form of censorship and they would not be held accountable. Guess what they're doing right now, Matt,

[00:07:58] I have a guess, Craig Peterson.

[00:08:01] It's censorship, right? They have been labeling speech. They have been demonetizing people.

[00:08:07] They have been removing accounts. Even they have been acting less like the telephone company and more like just a regular publisher. Just like a newspaper would get sued as long as they're not the New York times by the customs department. and, would be prosecuted and bad things could happen. So the department of justice is trying to come up with some ground in the middle here saying Google, Facebook, Twitter, et cetera.

[00:08:39] If you are going to quote fact check unquote, which of course is in fact-checking people. And if you are going to demonetize them, if you're going to remove them, if you're going to eliminate their right to speech, we're not going to protect you anymore.

[00:08:56] Matt Gagnon: Yeah, that's an interesting way of going about it.

[00:08:57] And I know that we're basically at a time, you're correct, but I've always been critical of this move to try to shift some of the things that are in section two 30 because I think that while a lot of the people that have assigned that as the reason why Facebook and Google are doing terrible things to you, it gives a lot of power.

[00:09:14] To the federal government just sort of started policing some of these private entities. I mean, they're, they're publicly traded corporations. Right.

[00:09:22] Craig Peterson: Yeah.

[00:09:22] Matt Gagnon: And

[00:09:22] Craig Peterson: it makes

[00:09:23] Matt Gagnon: me deeply, deeply uncomfortable to give say like Barack Obama, that power. Right. It's, you know, it's one thing in the hands of your friends and another thing in the hands of your, political opposites, but that's

[00:09:34] You may trust it today but what about tomorrow.

[00:09:38] That is an interesting way of going about it though. The kind of like the middle ground here saying that you still actually have. The afforded protections. But if you get into the habit of curating and, and, and trying to police speech on your platform, then you are taking a more active hand in the management of what's on the platform.

[00:09:55] Ergo. You're not really a platform anymore. Right? I mean, like, that's, that's the core of it. I, you know, you might be able to get me on that. You know, its an interesting idea.

[00:10:04] Craig Peterson: It says one I'm kind of agreeing with, but I hate the potential fallout, right? The unforeseen circumstances.

[00:10:11] Matt Gagnon: Yeah. I mean, again, this could go into like a 10-hour conversation.

[00:10:14] Tech policy is like that, you know, you're talking, you had done, you pull one string and then 25 other strings go with it. So we could, we could talk about this for ages, but Craig Peterson, we appreciate you talking for as long as you have. We'll talk to you again next week. And of course, listen to him on Saturday.

[00:10:28] He'll definitely be here at WGAN and talk more about this. Thanks a lot, Craig.

[00:10:32] Craig Peterson: Exactly 1:00 PM.

[00:10:34] Matt Gagnon: 1:00 PM on Saturday. All right. So coming up next, Joe Biden,

[00:10:37] Craig Peterson: I'm thinking about dropping the weekend radio shows that I've been doing for more than 20 years, a long time. But I'm not sure that, the reason is I'm not sure that I'm really getting traction out of them that I need to get. Cause I want to help a lot of people. I also need to pay my bills. Right. And I just, I'm not getting the feedback from the radio shows. So. I think I might drop them, but I'd love to hear from you guys what you think. So I would still do these morning hits on, on radio, maybe some TV morning hits. but the radio shows on the weekend just takes hours and hours to do and I just don't know if it is worth it. Anyways. Email me M E at Craig Peterson dot com. Let me know what you think. It'll also let me do a little bit more when it comes to these podcasts and maybe posting some stuff, doing Facebook and YouTube Lives, et cetera. So let me know me@craigpeterson.com. Everybody, have a great day and at least this weekend we'll be back on Saturday.

[00:11:45] Take care. Bye-bye.

 

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