Data, Democracy, and the Fight for Digital Privacy

EP4 - The Fairfax Files: Data, Democracy, and the Fight for Digital Privacy with Brittany Kaiser

Michael J. Hershman | Guest: Brittany Kaiser

Welcome back to the Fairfax Files, the podcast at the intersection of cyber security investigation allegations and the fight to protect privacy in the digital age. Today we have one of the most consequential figures to emerge from the modern data rights movement, Brittany Kaiser. She began a career not in tech, but in human rights law. She worked on data driven humanitarian campaigns, using the power of information to do good in some of the world's most difficult environments. Then came a chapter that would challenge not just her life, but the global conversation on how our data is used, weaponized and sold. As a Director of Business Development at what became Cambridge Analytica, she had a front row seat to one of the most significant data scandals in history. And when she saw enough, she did something rare in that world. She walked out, she went to Parliament, she cooperated with investigations on both sides of the Atlantic, she submitted her evidence to Transparency International and she told the world exactly what had happened in testimony in her best selling book, Targeted and on screen in the Netflix documentary the Great Hack. Today she is CEO of Alpha Compute Corp, trading on nasdaq, where she is building what she believes is the only answer to the data crisis computing infrastructure where privacy is not a policy, it's a mathematical guarantee. Brittany, thank you so much for joining us today. It's a beautiful day in New York and we overlooking Central Park. We have so much to discuss today because I'm so interested in the areas of data privacy, human rights and environmental issues. So let's begin with human rights. I know that you got involved in early on in your career and I'd like to know how and why.

My first interest in human rights was protecting humans and their environment. I became an environmental activist at a very young age and started working for Environment America while I was still in high school. I was at boarding school at Phillips Academy Andover and got involved in a cause and I had gone to the 2004 DNC in Boston and gone to see then Senator Barack Obama, State Senator,

by the way, do you imagine at that point that he might be the President of the United States one day?

I felt so strongly that he was going to be the President of the United States that when he got off stage I waited for him and I said, you know, I'm so inspired by what you're doing. I'm from Chicago and I love that you're helping protect Lake Michigan. I want to help you. What can I do? And he said, oh, you know, young lady, I'm going to be running for U.S. senate. Maybe you want to volunteer on my campaign and So I did. And that began my journey of understanding how you can get involved in campaigns, how you can advocate for causes, and how you can use political power to have positive impact in people's lives.

Wasn't that campaign, correct me if I'm wrong, his U.S. senate campaign and subsequently his presidential campaign was in part driven by data and information technology.

Yes, absolutely. So in the senatorial campaign, we started to use emails for fundraising, which then was very, very new. We also did that for, for Howard Dean's presidential campaign before he lost to John Kerry. And we were breaking all fundraising records just by using emails for the first time to reach out and ask people for donations. And then on Barack Obama's senatorial campaign, at the end, when he made a big speech endorsing John Kerry at the dnc and he said, we're not the blue states or the red states, we are the United States. And he made that huge, powerful speech. That's when everyone started to really think this man is presidential material and started to follow him. And I knew that as soon as he was going to run for president, I was going to quit whatever I was doing and join that campaign. I was in my second year of university in Edinburgh in Scotland and I quit to move back to Chicago and join his presidential campaign and build what was the first ever true data driven presidential campaign.

So did a light bulb go off in your mind and did you say to yourself, now I'm looking at the way data could influence, potentially influence elections in the future?

Yes, I think on the presidential campaign from 2007, 2008, what we built as the new media team was the first ever ability to use social media to do political outreach. So I sat next to Chris Hughes, the co founder of Facebook. He was one of my friends from boarding school and he co founded Facebook with Mark Zuckerberg. He had left Andover to go to Harvard and they were roommates and they created Facebook together. And instead of Chris moving to California to go work for Sean Parker like the rest of them had, Chris moved to Chicago and joined the Obama campaign with me. And so every day we were able to create new features in Facebook specifically for Barack Obama's presidential campaign. And so we were starting to see what type of data could be collected. Data about what people cared about, what they were liking, what groups they were interested in. And we started to see that if we would craft messages that were targeted about what these people cared about, that all of a sudden we were increasing our engagement rates in ways that no one had ever really seen before. And so this Targeted messaging idea began to be the bedrock of our voter engagement campaigns. All of a sudden we were getting millions of people to sign up to vote for the first time that had never really engaged in the political process before. We were getting people to care about issues that were important to and their families when they had never really engaged with politics before. And it was jaw dropping for me to see how well these technologies worked. And I thought, well, if you can do this for politics, you can do this for human rights.

And I want to talk to you about human rights, but I want to follow this tact right now about technology, social media and elections. Back then, did you all have discussions about the good it could do and also the evil it might do?

Maybe I was a little naive at the time, but because I was working for someone who was highly ethical, you know, Senator Obama was a man that was very focused on campaign ethics and only using 100% positive communications. We didn't do any negative campaigning, not against other Democrats and not even against Republicans.

So it was a time where using 100% positive messaging, I didn't feel like anything we were doing had any ethical quandaries attached to it. And maybe I should have thought that way. It took me many years to actually implement that technology for people who maybe have a little bit less values driven communication strategies and to see the negative impact of that and realize, well, you know, technology is in the eye of the beholder, it's just a tool. So if good people use it, then inherently it can be good. But if people use it for the wrong reasons, it can cause a lot of damage.

It's interesting you talk about the use of it in causing some damage. I wonder whether the folks that are involved in technology, by and large, and I hate to generalize, but are they tone deaf to issues related to ethics and to values and to morality?

Well, I think a lot of people who are implementing these types of technologies are really using it as a, as a means to an end. And so they see if this is going to get me into office or this is going to sell my product, I'm going to do whatever it takes in order to get to my end goal. And they're not really thinking about the negative consequences of the means in the way that they should. Because between people's mental health and fractionalizing society, using targeted communications for the wrong reasons can have very destructive consequences.

This is a change in culture, a big change in culture, because, you know, our country was founded on certain principles and those principles go directly to the issue of Morality and ethics. And it seems to me that there's been a decline in discussion about that, particularly in the tech world. How do we bring that discussion to the forefront of the conversations?

That's really what I've been trying to do for most of the past decade, which is remind people that yes, technology can be an inherent good in our lives, but, but it can also be used as a weapon. And if we are not careful in terms of thinking about legislative and regulatory protections. And also, as you know, I'm the CEO of a tech company, thinking as a tech executive, what are my products and services actually doing to society and how do I negate the harms, how do I lower the risk of what I'm putting out there? And I think that is such an important conversation that we can't just leave to people to make that decision on their own. And that's why I've spent so much time on the legislative and regulatory front to make sure that instead of some of these technologies being in a gray area that, you know, abusing technologies becomes illegal.

Given the advances in technology through AI, is it really possible to regulate?

Well, the law doesn't always keep up with how fast technology is moving. We do know that. But there are some fundamental principles that we should expect in our digital lives, which is that we already have laws about, in our civil society that we really expect to be followed. We expect to not have, you know, slander and libel. We expect to not have incitement of violence. We expect to not have incitement of racial hatred. We expect to not have voter suppression, and that's illegal in almost every country. Yet targeted communications used in the political process often are doing many of the above.

But don't we also. Shouldn't we also expect to have the right to privacy? Isn't that horse kind of out of the barn at this point?

It's hard to say today that anyone truly has privacy. I really hate to have to say that, but it is really true. The way that technology functions is inherently extractive, which is to take as much data from you as possible and pull it up the value chain so it creates a more powerful company. Most of big tech companies, their valuation is based off of how much of our data that they have. And so because that's their business model, it's really hard to make technology non extractive. And now in the age of AI, it becomes even more disastrous because people are sharing within AI even more intimate information than you normally would on a social media platform. So we're starting to see that the Conversation around data protection and privacy is nearly essential to protecting ourselves as individuals, our families, our businesses. People are signing terms and conditions that they've never read before, and they're uploading their entire lives into Cloud or ChatGPT, and then they no longer own their IP, their copyright. You know, their patents aren't going to stand up in court. They can have, you know, malicious hackers get access to, to their most personal information, even classified information, because government departments are using these tools. So for me, I'm highly concerned, for not just personal reasons, but for national security purposes, that we're not taking the data protection conversation more seriously.

But you also, and you mentioned that they no longer own the data because it's out in the cyber world, but you also believe that they should be compensated in some way for the use of their data.

Yes, absolutely. So my obsession with data ownership as a property right is really to start thinking about our data the way that we think about other valuable property. Because both in the United States and many other countries in the world, property rights law is the strongest form of law. As a human rights lawyer, again, I don't like to have to admit that, but winning a human rights case is very difficult. Winning a property rights case, you basically always win if you can prove that your property's been damaged. The way that property normally works is that if someone wants to use your property, kind of like an Airbnb model for a house, they tell you who they are, what they're going to use it for, how much you're going to get compensated, and you get paid before you hand away the keys. And if they damage it while they have the keys, you get compensated for it, and you get the keys back at an agreed time. That is something that everyone can understand, and that's the way that I want people to start thinking about their data. There's now a global movement for data to be its own asset class and to be valued on a balance sheet. So I think a lot more companies especially, are going to start thinking about their data as a true asset that is valuable, that can be written on their balance sheet, and they're not going to give it away to other companies as easily as they have.

Okay, now I'm going to say two words that perhaps you'd never want to hear again. Cambridge Analytica. You went back overseas, didn't abandon our country, but left it for a while, and you started working in the human rights area, which we're going to talk about. But somehow you wound up back in technology and was head of development Business development at Cambridge. An experience that perhaps you'd want to forget, but one that you'll never be able to really forget. This was a classic example of the misuse of data for political purposes. Over 80 million people Facebook users had their data scraped and they were victimized essentially by a political process beginning in, really, the 2016 Trump campaign. I suspect that you had high hopes that when you went there, you'd be doing good for society. What happened?

Originally, I had moved back to London to finish my law school and to work at Amnesty International, which for me was really exciting. I was working on implementing human rights education into 13 different countries around the world and was very focused on training as a human rights barrister. My academic concentration was prevention and Punishment of crimes against humanity. And so I was doing all of that work. And after Amnesty International started working on implementing what I had learned on the Obama campaign for nonprofits and charities and other NGOs that were based in London and felt really good about what I was doing. But as I entered into my PhD, which ended up being prevention of atrocity Crime, it ended up being more about data science than about diplomacy. And I realized I did not know enough about data to write about how we could build early warning systems to prevent crisis. And so I needed to learn more about data science and how that functioned and advance predictive algorithms. And so I had a friend of mine introduce me to the CEO of Cambridge Analytica, Alexander Nix, and he gave me a job almost immediately. He was pretty excited to be hiring an Obama girl for his elections company. And I think I bit off a little more than I could chew in the beginning. I learned a lot more about data than I bargained for, that's for sure. I was there for nearly four and a half years and worked on elections in over 50 different countries around the world, including back in the United States, which is what brought me back to the U.S. opening our New York and D.C. offices. And I started to see, as I mentioned earlier in our conversation, that the way that other people used the tools that we built on the Obama campaign was not the way that we used them on the Obama campaign. These were used for what I would call nefarious purposes, sometimes very targeted negative political campaigns, running the types of campaigns that I was not proud to be a part of and started to question whether targeting neurotic people with fear based messaging.

So this was all about money and power.

In the end, that's what it is.

Damn the outcome. It's just money and power.

If you have enough money to target people with Specific types of advertising, political advertising, even some things that don't look like political advertising, but are. Then you will get the power that you seek, because it is now really a math equation more than anything else.

And I suspect that as time went on, you had some sleepless nights.

And you finally decided enough is enough. And so you became what's known as a whistleblower. You went to Parliament to testify. You gave information to an organization I co founded, Transparency International, which is the leading advocacy group against corruption and also supports human rights campaigns across the world. When did you decide? Was it during breakfast, lunch, or dinner? When you decided, okay, enough is enough. I've got to get out of here. I've got to alert the world as to what is happening?

Yeah, it was a series of red flags, flags that built up over time. Originally, it was when I started to be told, since I was Director of Business Development, that when we wanted to work in a new country and I was trying to figure out what we were allowed to do with data and what we weren't, combining commercial and political data, whatever, it happened to be that the data scientists knew what to do. And I should stop calling the lawyers for advice because I was creating too many invoices. That doesn't sound right. I've spent nearly a decade in law school. I know when I need to call a lawyer and get advice. And so then after Trump won the election, about a month later, the colleagues of mine that had actually worked on the Trump campaign and on, on Trump's super PAC did a two day long presentation of exactly what they had done. And they showed us things that I hoped I would never see in my entire life, including an entire targeted group that they had focused on, which was called the Deterrence group. And if you label voters as deterrents, it means you're deterring them to go vote. And that, in my opinion, is voter suppression. I think in the eyes of the law, it should be considered voter suppression. And I realized that something very wrong had gone on and I needed to do something about it. So I spent a while collecting evidence, trying to figure out what had happened. What documents.

Were you having this conversation with yourself or did you speak to others about what you should do?

Originally, it was just with myself during that presentation I was talking to you about. I started recording in my lap once they showed the deterrence group. And I thought, oh, no, I'm going to need to do something about this. So I started recording. And that recording was even in my Netflix documentary, the Great Hack. Some of the audio from it and I started to collect those documents over a period of time. And then one of my friends, Paul Hilder, who was a co founder of Change.org and Avaz, I started talking to him about the fact that I probably wanted to figure out how to get out of there. And he said, well, you know, I'm happy to help you find something else to do with your life, you know, but you're probably going to need to talk about what went on there and why you left. So he started working with me, working through my documents, trying to figure out what I had, what my evidence actually could show and could say. And we started packaging up my.

Did he talk to you about the possible consequences of doing what you were about to do?

Well, I'm lucky that I was training as a human rights barrister and I had studied whistleblowing law, so I was aware of what my rights were in the US and the uk. Luckily, whistleblowers do have protections in both countries. And as a British Permanent resident and an American citizen, I understood that if I had evidence of.

But you're talking about legal rights.

Of course.

I'm really talking about the other sort of consequences. Turning your life upside down.

Down, of course, for me, because I have a legal background, I thought first, in the eyes of the law, I have evidence of, you know, fraud, waste or abuse, therefore my NDA becomes null and void. So technically I can't be sued for becoming a whistleblower. You know, there's always frivolous lawsuits and people trying to come after you. So from a legal basis, I am sound as long as I am sudden submitting my evidence to Parliament, to Congress, to government agencies, and I did give evidence to 27 different government investigations in the end. But you don't ever know what else could happen. I mean, we call it a crisis of conscience for a reason, because you feel like you can't sleep at night if you don't do something and then you jump off a cliff without knowing if you have a parachute.

So you can't sleep at night without doing something and then you can't sleep at night for fear of some sort of retaliation. Not within the legal system, but outside the legal system. You were going up against some very powerful people.

Were you frightened? Did you have threats?

Absolutely, I had threats, absolutely. I was frightened. But I had 24, 7 security. I was followed around by a Netflix documentary team, which meant I was constantly surrounded by plenty of people. And I just kept pushing through, you know, investigation after investigation, lawsuit after lawsuit, giving expert witness testimony, going through my 100,000 documents and choosing what needed to be given where, how I could actually explain how these technologies function, how I could explain what went wrong, and how we could use that information to change law, first and foremost, to get justice for people who had been victims of this, and then, of course, to hopefully build something that could mean this doesn't happen again in the future.

And do you think you achieved some of those goals?

Yeah, over the past. It's been over eight years. Eight years and a couple months since I became a whistleblower. I have helped write and pass over 60 different laws in the United States. Many of those have been adopted, not just in the US but abroad as definitions of your digital assets being intangible, personal property, definitions of custodianship and fiduciary responsibility around data, definitions around technology, especially in the political process. So a lot more regulations around political advertising, labeling of political advertising, labeling of disinformation and misinformation, labeling of edited videos and images, especially AI edited videos and images. I have just been on the front lines of this since coming out as a whistleblower. And I have seen legislatively and regulatoryly, regulatorily, we've had a huge amount of impact. And culturally, people are now more aware that they should have more rights than they do. And I see people standing up for themselves. I see entrepreneurs thinking about how they use technology in their business, and I see more of a public zeitgeist, of questioning what they're doing on a daily basis instead of just being addicted to technology and not really thinking through the consequences.

Brittany, our country here in the United States for many, many years and under many presidents, both Democratic and Republican, we always felt that we had a moral responsibility to use what I call the bully pulpit to convince other countries to see human rights as a right for all people. Civil rights and human rights, that's changed in recent years. The global conversation about human rights has really been declining. If you will tell me what your thoughts are about that.

Yeah, for me, I have been so passionate about human rights and human rights law for my entire career that for a long time that's all I could think about. It was the lead to all of my conversations. And I now feel like, because society has become so divisive over political topics, mostly because of targeted information on social media, that it's become nearly impossible to have a normal conversation about human rights. And a lot of people do not realize what human rights are and how important they are to protect. Instead, everything gets politicized and weaponized to the point where it's nearly impossible to have everyone see eye to eye on what I always thought was something that we globally decided on. You know, we have our Human Rights Charter, we have international agreements and treaties to protect human rights. But actually trying to implement that through different political systems these days is becoming harder and harder. And I really do believe it's because of the divisiveness that technology has caused. We all used to be able to have much more moderate conversations. And because of the way that algorithms function and only show people what they want to hear and show them more and more of what makes them emotional, inflammatory content that gets them upset, they go down a rabbit hole of beliefs that normally would not be justified by human beings around them. But the technology makes them feel like their radical views are acceptable and makes them more radicalized. And that has been, I think, one of the biggest detriments to the protection of human rights in society today.

Has this technology that you're speaking of, and I assume in particular social media, in your belief, has that led to some of the increase in violence, let's say, in our own country here in the United States?

Oh yes, absolutely. You can tell that so many people that normally would have been reasonable have become radicalized by their own thoughts because they are living in a complete silo. They just have their own views being regurgitated to them in more and more inflammatory ways to the point where they feel justified in committing violence against other people because they think that the other people are so wrong, that what they're doing is right.

Is there any hope to change this? Let me be more specific. I've been studying Generation Z and I've been looking at certain statistics About Generation Z. 38% of Generation Z don't believe that democracy is the don't, don't believe not necessarily the democracy, but don't believe that loyalty to their own country here in the United states is important. 28% believe that violence is okay to create political change. Their mind is pretty well made up. They are of the technological generation. And I don't know how we can possibly cope with this or change it to try to get it back on track.

Yeah, it's probably pretty upsetting to me that this is where we are today. I believe, you know, I'm an American citizen only. I'm a patriot. I come from a military family. And I can't believe that so many young Americans don't feel patriotic. They don't feel good about their country, they don't feel good about their government. They don't feel hope or trust in the system. And that causes even more fractions in society than we've ever had before. For me, this is something that I've really taken up as a huge issue recently, which is that I feel like the way that some technologies function are detrimental to our national security as a country. And that the ways that we can be targeted by both foreign and domestic adversaries is very dangerous and that we need to secure our own compute power, data ownership and ability to stop our people from being targeted in order to hope that we actually have the ability to have national security in the future. I think you've probably seen recently that the entire country over the past month has gone a little crazy on trying to stop America's domestic energy developments and AI data centers. I mean, this is a Chinese disinformation campaign. You can see it from a mile away.

Look, I'm glad you brought that up. The pushback on the data centers is more related to the use of water energy, not necessarily about the use of

the data, of course, but people are mad at AI. They're mad that AI is taking their jobs. They're mad that AI means that their entire world is changing. You can blame it on the water. I've never seen so many people so active about pollution of water, considering that used to be that's what got me into political activism in the first place. That's not what this is about. It's an excuse.

I wonder how much this AI discussion is, is hype by the companies that are actually benefiting from, from the technology. And what, what I mean by that is we know that AI is going to displace workers. We know that, but the numbers I'm hearing are so dramatic. I wonder if it's just not something that is being used to pump up stock prices and, and wealth.

Well, of course, I mean, there's, there's a few different ways to look at this problem right now. One is that, you know, we're in an AI race against China. And this whole discord of a discourse of everyone being mad at AI data centers started when our President and the CEOs of our top AI companies were all in China. When they're away from their desks, not paying attention, all of a sudden there's a huge campaign across America. All targeted disinformation on social media about how AI data centers are destroying the environment, destroying people's lives, taking away people's jobs, et cetera and so forth. And then everyone starts flying back, and by the time President Trump and all of the AI CEOs get back there have been over 300 local bills dropped in America to stop the development of our, of our energy supply and to stop the building of AI data centers. Even projects that are mid being built, like in the middle of building the data center. This is one of the craziest cyber warfare campaigns I've ever seen in my entire life.

But there are limitations to AI. I mean, look, AI, whether it be ChatGPT or Claude or whatever, the medium, it can write a beautiful eulogy for a funeral. But AI can't cry. It can, I love that. It can write jokes, but it can't laugh. It can write a symphony, but it doesn't have the feeling that Beethoven had or others had. The thing that AI can't do is critical thinking and emotion. And we have to be able to get that message across, I think to the population.

And I think where I'm coming from is that if we're ever going to hope to be able to use AI safely, that we need to be able to process AI locally within our borders. We need to be able to run AI that isn't created by other countries. We need to be able to protect everyone's data so that AI isn't constantly collecting so much about you that it's able to manipulate you. You've probably noticed that, you know, you say, you know, AI has no emotions, but it's sycophantic. It tries to please you, so it always tries to tell you what you want to hear. And that is creating a huge addiction to artificial intelligence where young people are no longer even, you know, using their own brain to think. We have young people with AI psychosis where they think that they're able to do anything because they now have this tool that makes their impact infinite. The only way to really protect this is to have data protection locally within our borders so that we can run our own AI models and be able to stop the way that the data is collected and used to target us back. It's the only way that we're going to be able to implement these AI tools safely.

Do you see that happening in the near future?

Yes. I mean, that's why I started my company. I'm the CEO of Alpha Compute. We do something called confidential computing, where we allow people, people to run large language models so you can run AI without anyone getting access to your data. So what it does, it takes a snapshot of all of the data and whatever you're uploading to it, and it will answer your question and give you the intelligence you're looking for. But none of that data goes back to third parties. One of the most dangerous things about AI is the amount of data it's able to collect from you and learn about you and then start to manipulate you and addict you to it.

It's called mind capture.

Exactly. So I have nothing against AI being used intelligently. Of course, with my legal background, I use it for drafting long form documents, I use it for doing first versions of contracts. I absolutely love it. It's making my life so much easier and making me and my business so much more impactful. But I run it on confidential computing so the owners of those large language models get 0 of my data. I still have my IP, my copyright, my patents will hold up in court. And if I'm working with government data, all of that classified information remains classified and it doesn't go to third parties. Confidential computing is used by the Department of or it's used by Amazon and Alibaba for global secure shipping, but it's not given to the people.

So this is the future of data privacy.

Absolutely.

And it's being done mathematically?

Yes, it's a mathematical proof called zk Proofs that show that none of your data is going to third parties. So it's just math. You don't have to trust it. It shows you that it's impossible for anyone to get access to your information, which means that health care companies and the Department of Health, everything that they would be running, would be automatically HIPAA compliant. If you are in another regulated industry like finance or military or government, all of your data remains yours. All of it remains within that department, within your database, and never goes to third parties. This is the opposite of the way that most technology functions, and it's why nobody's promoting. Took me the past nine months to find all of the best people in the world, the best cryptographers, the best engineers and developers out of Nvidia and Intel, and find people that are actually able to do this type of work and start to be in a place where we can make this accessible for people.

Well, Brittany, look, I thank you for being with us today. And I'm impressed by the work you're doing to try to save, frankly, humanity from itself. The work you're doing not only in data protection, but also promoting human rights is so important in this time of diversity and dissent.

We have to make sure that the Internet that we hand to our children is. You know, there's one of two Internets and one of them is going in the complete wrong direction. We've already had lost generations to addictive technology where everyone's been negatively targeted. But then there's another one. There is an Internet that's possible where we own all of our data, where we have control and transparency and permission structures to how that data is used, where we can earn money every day by deciding to share anonymized, safely shared data sets, and where we can run AI without those AI tools being able to target us and our families. That is possible. That Internet does exist, and we need to make sure that that is the Internet that we hand to the next

generation and not become captive to technology.

Absolutely. It's a tool to improve our lives. The late, great Dr. Stephen Hawking used to to say that we build technology to live in luxurious leisure. And what he meant by that is that we build technology so that we can pursue our passions and lead amazing lives, spend more time with our families and doing things that are important to us. It's just a tool, nothing more.

Brittany, many parents today that I've spoken with are so fearful and concerned about the addictive nature of social media and the fact that they're having difficulty controlling their children's use of it. What advice would you give to them?

The most important advice, number one, is to limit the use of it. You can't have your children stuck to a screen and exploring these tools at all hours of the night. It needs to be a certain amount of time that they're using it to learn new things that they want to learn, to help them with their homework, whatever it happens to be. But time limitation, number one. Otherwise it becomes just as addictive as social media or gaming or, you know, or gambling. Really, Number two is when your children are using AI tools, make sure to go into the privacy settings and turn off the AI ability for their data to be used for training. When their data is used for training, it means that the AI learns so much about them that it is able to further addict them and manipulate them. And that's where we've seen, unfortunately, so many young people have been convinced by these tools to commit suicide or it's even hurt their parents. I mean, it's really gotten quite bad. So that absolutely needs to be turned off. No training with kids data. Thirdly, you should realize that it now is possible to run AI completely confidentially without any of the data being accessible by the company who owns the model. So when you're running AI, you have the ability to own all of that information and none of that can ever be used to target you. I think this is just as important for parents as as it is for entrepreneurs. Anyone that is working in their business and thinks that Claude or ChatGPT is helping them with their business, actually it's stealing their business. I think you've probably seen OpenAI and Anthropic launching a new type of company every day, a new tool. Oh, guess what? Well, how did they learn how to make their own bank? How did they learn how to make an app development platform? Oh, because the company that have all of that data uploaded into their systems and so they're able to just create a new business and replace their clients. That is highly dangerous and I don't think people are thinking about that every day. So I highly recommend that everyone that listens to this look into what confidential computing is. We're making sure that it is accessible to everyone. Right now it's very hard to understand. We want to make it easy so that people can enjoy themselves and use AI in a good impactful way and not have it become social media disaster 2.0.

What would you say to the governments like the British government that is passing laws to restrict the use of social media by youth?

I do believe in restricting social media to youth by not communications technology. I think the biggest problem is that taking access away for young people is only going to hamper them in their career. What they really need to be doing is regulating social media companies so that they're not targeting children and collecting their data. There are plenty of ethical platforms that kids can use and saying that they can't use those platforms is just going to make their lives harder and they're just going to sneak away and figure out a way to do it anyway

to be well, history has showed us, look at the era of prohibition against alcohol, it really didn't work. So history has taught us that banning government regulation and banning of certain practices, particularly when it comes to technology, is not going to work.

Exactly. I think it all comes back to to data. If companies are not abusing people by collecting all of their data and using it to target them back, then there's a lot less issues with kids using digital platforms and a lot less issues with every individual and your mental health when using these platforms. So we really need to think about how do we make sure that these platforms are becoming ethical, are forced to be ethical and forced to respect human rights and data rights.

I don't think we can accomplish that, unfortunately, unless we ourselves are supportive of a culture that believes in ethics and values and morality.

That's why I started the Own youn Data campaign over eight years ago. Now, specifically to start a movement behind this idea that data rights are human rights, that our information is valuable and is an asset that we should be able to own and make useful for ourselves to improve our own lives, to build our businesses, and that should not be able to be stolen from us and used against us. And I really believe that now there are at least a billion people around the world that do understand that and that are getting behind that. And people are starting to choose privacy protecting platforms instead of the ones that are taking advantage of them. But it needs to be shouted from the rooftops. It needs to be something that everyone gets behind. And this cultural zeitgeist around privacy and data protection and data ownership needs to be first and foremost to make sure that in the age of AI, we actually have the ability to have an ethical future with technology.

Thank you. Thank you so much, Brittany. Thanks for being with us.

And thank you again for having me. This has been such an enjoyable conversation. I'm so grateful for all of the work that you've done in transparency and advocacy in your life and supporting people like me to make sure that we can make the world a better place.

Let's keep trying to do that.

Data, Democracy, and the Fight for Digital Privacy

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