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Dec 29, 2018

What's up with Huawei?  We will talk about some of the reasons that the US is very unhappy with them.

What is the next big risk to your privacy? Listen in and I will explain why you must be concerned with your child's video game habits.

Is anonymous data really anonymous? Today we will discuss what MIT has found in researching anonymous data. 

What information are your apps storing? We will talk about what information they store and share.

Are your kids spending an inordinate amount of time on their smartphones?  We will discuss some research that MIT is doing and what it has uncovered about the development of their brains. 

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

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Transcript:

Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors.

Airing date: 12/29/2018

Your Information Is Never Really Anonymous

Craig Peterson: 0:00
Hey Hi everybody. Craig Peterson here. Thanks for joining us today. We are also, of course, posting the video online. We're trying to get the live streaming work that may or may not work. But you know what the heck, it's the last week of the year. And really the last show of the year too.

Craig Peterson 0:21
I guess it is both, isn't it? And so you will maybe next year that gives us what 52 shows next year to get it right. And speaking of 52 shows, this is show number 987. That's 987 weeks worth of shows many weeks. We have multiple shows. But we stick to the one a week nomenclature because it's just amazing. This I don't use daily show counts and daily show numbers

Craig Peterson 0:48
and our viewership is up of course because we're starting to post some of the videos we have a lot of this narrow insider site that you can find online right now it's free, but it is going to be a paid thing eventually. And also you will find some of this stuff up on YouTube and on Facebook where we're trying to get out there more to help more people so little itchy. Today though we've got a few things to talk about security wise Huawei course you heard all of the uproar and we saw the market kind of not being quite sure what to do when while ways I think she was or is there CFO was arrested in Canada when she was changing planes. And apparently, that was at the request of the United States because of a few different things. Now they talked in the media about one of them, which was a Huawei apparently sold technology to Iran. That was counter to our trade agreement with them with China with many other countries that when we have this embargo against Iran, they shouldn't be trading but there are six other reasons here. We'll talk about today about Huawei. In case you're wondering what company I'm talking about Huawei is spelled H-U-A-W-E-I, okay, this is Huawei is how it is pronounced. So we'll be talking about that we're going to talk about a groundbreaking studying that has examined the effects of screen time on kids. I remember when I was a kid, they were all worried about how much time we spend in front of a TV. And, you know, it probably didn't do me any good project early, maybe a lot of harm, hard to tell. But what's happening now that these kids of ours have iPads, on iPhones and on our grandkids? And how about the generations beyond.

Craig Peterson 2:46
And to that end of the next big, big risk to your privacy is your child's video game habits will talk about that

Craig Peterson 2:55
and how that's going to affect you. We got another thing here about deleting all of your apps. You talked a little bit about it a lot, a lot about it last week. But we've got more information on a do want to know that people to know that you stopped at Planned Parenthood. And I mentioned this as a fact. And guess what comes out in Fast Company.

Craig Peterson 3:18
Yes, yet another confirmation of what Craig said urban planners and researchers at MIT found that it's shockingly easy to re-identify the anonymous data that people generate all day, every day in our cities. I mentioned this a few weeks back

Craig Peterson 3:40
because it's been obvious to me,

Craig Peterson 3:43
just like with 23 me thing, remember, I was telling you about a major pharmaceutical company investing 300 million into 23 and me and using that money to gain access to the data that 23andme has. And some people are upset about that some people are concerned. Should they care what the heck, right?

Craig Peterson 4:04
And people say, well, it's anonymized. It doesn't really matter. And yet, we have seen the data already from these DNA research firms being used against us. You remember the arrest out in California, that serial killer, the guy was a cop and he had been a cop I'm apparently nowadays his brain isn't quite all there. But they've found him not because he put his DNA and DNA bank but because the information on the DNA bank pointed to someone that might be a close relative of, of this family member being the killer. So they investigated more investigated more, and they found the killer right. And he's up on charges. I don't think he's been convicted yet. But they have the DNA evidence for from the case. Now 23 and me I use and I used it for both of its features. One the ancestry which proved everything I already knew, which was I'm not the milkman to kid but I am mostly Norwegian, and then North-Western European, as in Ireland, Scotland, UK, Wales, all that area. So that's me. And that's kind of what we figured. And then from a health standpoint, I got lots of very good news on I don't have any of the genetic mutations that cause disease. So I wouldn't be able to pass those on to my kids. And I'm unlikely to get sick in my older age, which is very good news. And it's stuff that a lot of people are interested in. Or you might be interested in that too. I have a friend of mine

Craig Peterson 5:48
whose wife came back as having one of the genetic markers for a higher tendency to have breast cancer. And I know some people, including some movie stars that have had both breasts removed, because they had to genetic markers for breast cancer. So there's a lot of good things that come of that.

Craig Peterson 6:08
And there are also good things that are coming from the research in DNA because it's not as though we have this massive book here that says, Well, this DNA strand means this. And this one means that and if you have this one, and that one, but not this one, then this is going to happen. But if you have this, that in this other one, this will happen. We don't have any event, the only way we know anything about DNA is trial and error. And when it comes to animals and plants, we've been using DNA research for a long

Craig Peterson 6:39
time, we've looked at RNA and RNA blocking our an AI, all of this stuff. It's, it's fascinating if everyone to study it, it's just absolutely fascinating. But when it comes to us, as humans, you can't just go ahead and turn off a DNA strand and see what happens. We don't want to do that. Because that might be lethal fatal.

Craig Peterson 7:00
And who's going to volunteer for a test like that, just turn off the strand. See what happens, turn off that one, it's fine to do that with violets. And then we found in the violence we could make a purple violet white, which is really kind of interesting, but not in humans. So when humans what we have to do is study and study and study and study. And that's what the whole 23 me thing is about. They're making a lot of their money, I would guess most of their money, I haven't seen their financials, but they're making a lot of their money by selling the DNA raw data to pharmaceutical companies. Now, why do pharmaceutical companies want this DNA data, they want the data because it's important to them to see the DNA but also to get information from the other part of what 23AndMe does. And that is they asked a lot of questions.

Craig Peterson 7:54
And I sat down, and I answered hundreds of questions, and that you don't have to do it all at once. I did it over the course of you know, I don't remember. It was a couple of weeks, a few weeks and answered hundreds of them. And the idea here is they asked you things like, are you balding? No, no, not balding. Well, that's good, right?

Craig Peterson 8:12
Or do you have a sensitivity to sunlight? you sneeze when you go into the sunlight? And what does a particular herb tastes like to you? Can you smell that? So they're they're getting information. And then they're pulling it all together to try and figure out a precisely what does this all mean. So if everybody that sneezes when they walk into the sun has these jeans, and no one who says they don't sneeze, when they walk out into the sun has these other genes, then we're fine, right? We know we've found it. And so that's what they're doing this a lot of trial and error. And 23AndMe is constantly updating you letting you know, hey, we found this new interpretation of this particular gene or gene sequence. And so they let you know, and they say, here's what changed, or they got more information on some family ancestry. They found some older DNA, they found another strain, they found some root DNA, they're constantly updating it. So having a company like these pharmaceutical companies, getting this information is ultimately going to be good for all of us. Because if you come down with a disease or let's say that this is an even better scenario, the odds are excellent that you're going to get a specific disease. So what they've done is they look at the DNA they say, okay, we know this DNA sequence is like 98% likely to cause this disease. So let's turn off have DNA sequence wisdom that agas Wouldn't you love to be able to do that. So they turn it off, and you will never get that disease. That's what we're aiming for.

Craig Peterson 9:58
And when it comes to medications, recovery, using that some doses of this will work for one person, but you have to have a higher dose for someone else, or this drug doesn't work at all, for someone, my wife, if it's morphine, she gets really loopy and floaty and detached. And she hates feeling

Craig Peterson 10:17
so you know, in surgery, they've got to use different drugs. Why isn't that the same for everybody? Well, it's not the same for everyone, because of DNA, as well as some environmental conditions that could have occurred. So understanding all of this is phenomenal, is going to help us as human beings and help us on the earth, it's going to be great, okay, ultimately, ultimately, rough roads between the here and there in the future. But ultimately, it's going to be really, really good.

Craig Peterson 10:49
However, let's go back to the serial killer in California, he did not give his DNA and yet they were able to track him down. It's figured right now that with as little as I've seen different numbers, but let's just say 20% of the people in in the United States have 20% of the people in the United States have their DNA analyzed, and it's in a database, they will be able to find 100% of any one of people, anybody if they have a DNA sample. In other words, if someone commits a crime, and they don't have their DNA on file,

Craig Peterson 11:33
they will have 100% chance of finding that person. Well, not quite 100, but really, really, really close to 100, because what they'll be able to do is the same thing they did with the with the serial killer. And that is used some statistical analysis on the DNA to figure out what family tree this person is from because they'll know the sex. And right now they know that I'm not balding, just based on the DNA that I'm unlikely to. They know for my DNA, that I have slightly wavy hair, they know all of this stuff. So they'll be able to do a portrait. And there is some really cool work underway that takes your DNA and just from DNA, create a 3d image of what that person is likely to look like. And it is on Tanni if you've seen absolutely uncanny how close they're able to get. So with the DNA, they can tell all kinds of physical attributes, they can even create an almost a photo of that person. Of course, there's other factors, again, environmental, etc. But it's pretty darn close. And then on top of it, it's okay. This person is obviously part of the Peterson family. And we the specifically a family from New Hampshire and this area, and they will be able to narrow right down and say, Hey, do you have an uncle?

Craig Peterson 12:57
And the answer? Yeah, why? Where does he live?

Craig Peterson 13:02
Does he look something like this? And this is months away, frankly, just months away, not the 20% of people having their DNA tested and put on file. But being able to do the rest of this have a picture generated that, more or less looks like the person involved much better than these police sketches from people who are just trying to recall what that person looks like, in most cases, right.

Craig Peterson 13:30
So you can take anonymized data and on anonymize it, re-identify the people. And depending on what the data is, you're going to use different techniques. But when it comes to DNA, we just explained how that works. But the same things true with calling histories, etc. You know, if you're constantly calling numbers in 603, area, code, 805 area code 212 area code, we know that you probably have some ties there. And then we dig into those phone numbers. And we find from those phone numbers, more information about who they are, what they do, oh, wait a minute, these people are part of a family. And they're the only family group that appears to be called from this phone number. So we put all this together. And we know how to again, re-identify you that you are part of this family. This is where you live.

Craig Peterson 14:30
And that's what's been happening with the NSA data collection on just taking basic data points. Even if they don't have the phone numbers, right,

Craig Peterson 14:38
the cell towers that were involved with your phone, they'll know where you work and where you live, because you're going to be pinging that same cell tower all of the time. So be very careful. This group of MIT scientists and urban planners are shown in the study that it's really fairly simple to figure out who is who, anyway, so anonymized data can be D anonymize pretty quickly even when you're working with multiple data sets inside of a city. Well, particularly, excuse me when you're working on that.

Craig Peterson 15:09
So they did the test I said, in the end, it took a week to match 17% of the users and 11 weeks to get 95% accuracy rate. And with the added GPS data from smartphones took less than a week to hit the 95% accuracy. So kind of keep that in mind. You just don't have privacy anymore. And there they can D anonymize data. It's happened before. So be careful and think twice about the whole DNA thing. You know, already I've done it, I think it's going to be an amazing benefit to society is going to save lives, save pain, help people avoid misery, so I'm definitely going to do it. And I don't like the excuse of, well, you know, it's, it's going to happen anyways, I don't like the excuse of, well, I haven't committed any crimes anyways, you know, then those I don't think are legitimate because this data could be misused against us, just like having passport number stolen, we talked about last week can be used in your credit cards, your identity. And if you read that special report that I've sent out, you know that all of that information is out there, and the bad guys are using it, right.

Craig Peterson 16:26
So we know where do you draw the line here? That's that's the big question.

Craig Peterson 16:32
Well, hot segment when little bit long. Let's get into the rest of these. You only got about 10 minutes left here in the show. 12 minutes left today. Delete all your apps. We talked last week about the article that came out in the New York Times. This is an article from motherboard you'll see up on my website at http://CraigPeterson.com.

Craig Peterson 16:53
but they go into more detail. They're talking about sensitive stops at hospitals, Planned Parenthood, various other places, do you want your employer to have that information? Because remember, now most of us get our insurance or health insurance or more employers do we want them to know that we've been making trips to this type of doctor, that type of doctor, etc, right? How much that information is going to be available in a pre-employment report where they are looking at you as a possible employee, and they find that you're doing something that might end up costing them a lot of money that might end up causing you to not be able to get to work very often, right? How far do you want this all to go? So the New York Times did publish a guide to managing restricting location on specific apps, I told you already how to do that, that might be well worth us doing as well, the best way to guarantee privacy, but the, again, the best platform to maintain your privacy. And this shouldn't be a shock to anybody.

Craig Peterson 18:00
iOS, iOS does a much better job when it comes to informing you about the GPS tracking and also cell tower tracking and allowing you to turn it off. So make sure you go into security and privacy whether it's an iPhone or an Android

Craig Peterson 18:17
phone and turn off the tracking or at least do what I do, which is turn it on only one I'm using the app. And of course, the big tip here is guys and gals delete apps you aren't using. Most of us have apps I have a ton of half I caught for free, right. So I just haven't I bought them I bought them quote-unquote, bought them because they were free. Why wouldn't I, it's a cool app, I might use it and it's sitting there on

Craig Peterson 18:47
my phone

Craig Peterson 18:48
taking up space. Now in the iOS world. It'll automatically offload from your phone if you don't use it and it needs the space which is great iOS has some of the best memory batteries management software out there it's they've done a great job on that but still delete apps you weren't using well let's talk about another big risk of your privacy This is from Market Watch carry Paul wrote this article again it's up on http://CraigPeterson.com.

Craig Peterson 19:15
I try and make sure all of the articles I talked about and I curator up on my website as well. And I just I give you a little bit of a summary here and then you can click through gives you a link to the original article. But this article is kind of interesting because it's telling you to be careful who you play with. online gaming is a growing target for hackers. A new report from identity theft protection, firm experience. Yeah, that's kind of funny, isn't it? They found cybercriminals are increasingly posing as gamers to gain access to the computers and personal data. That's players.

Craig Peterson 19:51
We're not trying to imply that all gamers are hackers but they do live in an anonymous environment, have good computer skills and are in an industry with billions in revenue. So be very careful about that. The gaming business is worth about 4 billion annual revenue globally which is quite big and cybercriminals can easily pose a gamer or take over an avatar the info to infiltrate games and communities they still personal credit card information, valuable game pieces, and tokens according to experience report.

Craig Peterson 20:29
So, be very careful because your kids playing games can come in and you to right, we got a lot of 30 somethings that played video games, maybe a little bit too much talking about games and online does talk about screen time,

Craig Peterson 20:45
Apple introduced a new feature with iOS 12 that tells you week per week if your screen time one up or one down. I think that's great. And kind of, you know, brings it into mind. Now, in my case, it's a little inaccurate, because, frankly, use my iPad and I use my phone to read books. I have the Kindle app on their plots. I read PDFs and other things. So yeah, that that's good. It's bad. But let's talk about our kids.

Craig Peterson 21:13
This is from CBS News. Again, up on http://CraigPeterson.com. 60 minutes goes inside a landmark government study of young minds SC of phones, tablets, and other screens are impacting adolescent brain development.

Craig Peterson 21:28
So if you have kids and wonder if they're spending time on their smartphones, and it's causing problems, the National Institutes of Health launched the most ambitious study of adolescent brain development ever attempted. They have 21 sites across the country, and they were following nine and 10-year-old kids and scanning their brains are going to follow more than 11,000 kids for 10 years and spend $300 million doing it. I guess I'd follow some kids for $300 million.

Craig Peterson 22:00
So here's what they've learned so far, they haven't released it yet, obviously. But the focus when they started talking about doing the study was tobacco, marijuana, all drugs. The screen time component really came into play because we were wondering what is the impact the first wave of data from the scans of 4500 participants is in and it has the Dowling of the doctor Dahlia, the NIH, and other scientists and treating the MRI is found significant differences in the brains of some kids who use smartphones, tablets, and video games more than seven hours a day,

Craig Peterson 22:40
Dr. Dowling says. What we can say is that this is what brains look like of kids who spend a lot of time on screen now there's pictures of these brain scans in this article, again, up on my website. It's really fascinating so that it's color-coded, showing the differences in these brains

Craig Peterson 23:00
thinning of the cortex, which is the outermost layer of the brain that processes information from your five senses is going on. It's it's really, really bad, multinational process. They're doing a lot. If you want to find out more, check it out online at http://CraigPeterson.com. And we've got about four minutes left.

Craig Peterson 23:21
So let's go into Huawei. My gosh, so you know that her name is Ming one, zero. I guess she's how Huawei CFO the daughter of its founder. And it's caused some real tensions between China Canada in the United States. That's not why we're getting go get into this right now. Her Ras and everything. They're just a matter of public record, you can find it quite easily bought Huawei, US sky calm tech, which is a company that deals with a rainy and telecom firms to sell Huawei equipment to Iran, in contravention of US sanctions on the country. That was apparently between 2009 and 2014. So we remember where the Obama administration gave billions of dollars to Iran. We did have some sanctions in place. They were kind of lifted, they've been put back in place. So China is saying that her detention was a human rights violation. But let's talk about why this matters. Huawei is very big in the telecommunications business, not just in, you know, the cell phones, but the very big telecommunications for the equipment that the carriers use base stations antennas that are the world's largest manufacturer, mobile operators use these to run the wireless networks. They carry information that helps run control grids at manufacturing firms.

Craig Peterson 24:54
Think about everything that goes through the cell towers and what Comcast has an etc, etc.

Craig Peterson 25:02
Well, that's why the United States said we're worried. And so they started looking into it more. And they found out that looked like Huawei. Not only was it controlled by the People's Liberation Army of China, that communist government over there, but they had been putting spy equipment, software hardware into things, all kinds of crazy allegations, but backdoors could be used for data snooping it this goes on for on the non-close inspections are missing. And you heard about what happened with the allegations are super micro and the infiltration into Google and Apple. It is really, really crazy. And now we've got the rollout of 5g wireless networks coming and while always right in the middle of that rollout. So we're very worried that Huawei could quite easily be used as a vehicle to launch attacks by the Chinese government. While ways obviously not immune to influences from the Chinese Communist government. They are saying, Hey, listen, we're just a company. Well, yeah, your company owned by the People's Liberation Army of China. We know some of the things, the atrocious things the Communist Chinese have been doing to its citizens,

Craig Peterson 26:18
not just the tens of millions, that they starve to death we're talking about today. Right now, if you speak out against the government, you get blacklisted. You can't even get on a train. You can't get on a plane, you can't go anywhere. It can't do anything because you said something that the government doesn't agree with. So this is a real big

Craig Peterson 26:38
concern. And then add on top of that the fact that the Chinese government considers the cyber war to be full out warfare and they have a huge cyber war department and I forget what the name of it is. It's a number that they're using. We had a briefing on that with the in regard but they are using cyber warfare as a way to attack other countries including the United States. So if we have Huawei equipment critical to our communications and China decides to shut down our communications the impact could be horrific. So there are a lot of reasons why we don't want while way to be doing what they're doing and why we issued an arrest warrant that Canadians us to seize hers she was changing plane so this article

Craig Peterson 27:34
and more course right there on http://CraigPeterson.com. Have a look you'll find it there hopefully this has all been helpful stuff you can use in your daily lives you now know not to use Huawei phones not to use Android if you can avoid it and think twice about your DNA make sure you visit me online subscribe to my weekly newsletter http://CraigPeterson.com/subscribe. Have a great weekend. A Happy New Year. http://CraigPeterson.com Take care guys. Bye-bye.

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Related articles:

The Next Big Risk To Your Privacy: Your Child’s Video-Game Habit

Groundbreaking Study Examines Effects Of Screen Time On Kids

The 6 Reasons Why Huawei Gives The Us And Its Allies Security Nightmares

Delete All Your Apps

Sorry, Your Data Can Still Be Identified Even If It’s Anonymized
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