Join us in the adventure of exploring the complexities and nuances of data ownership in today's digital era.
Guests:
Rafael Brown, CEO/Founder at Symbol Zero
On LinkedIn | https://www.linkedin.com/in/rafaelbrown/
Carey D'Souza, CEO and Co-Founder at IAMPASS [@iampassHQ]
On LinkedIn | https://www.linkedin.com/in/careydsouza/
On Twitter | https://twitter.com/carey_dsouza
Sean Martin, Co-Founder at ITSPmagazine [@ITSPmagazine] and Host of Redefining CyberSecurity Podcast [@RedefiningCyber]
On ITSPmagazine | https://www.itspmagazine.com/itspmagazine-podcast-radio-hosts/sean-martin
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Host: Marco Ciappelli, Co-Founder at ITSPmagazine [@ITSPmagazine] and Host of Redefining Society Podcast and Audio Signals Podcast
On ITSPmagazine | https://www.itspmagazine.com/itspmagazine-podcast-radio-hosts/marco-ciappelli
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Episode Introduction
Welcome to the latest episode of our recurring monthly series, 'Once Upon A Time, Tomorrow’! In this episode, Sean wears an interesting Hat that he own, while Rafael and Carey are not wearing any hat and I try to keep the crew together as we journey into an engaging discussion around a concept that is as fundamental as it is complex - ownership in a digital age. The conversation gets kicked off with a light-hearted banter before the speakers dive into deeper channels of thoughts on the value of ownership and how it translates in the digital era.
As the discussion progresses, we touch upon different facets of ownership, from tangible possessions like hats to intangible assets like data and content. The speakers decode and analyze the process of content creation, sharing, as well as the blurred lines of data ownership. Bringing to the virtual discussion table personal anecdotes and reflections, the conversation gradually brings to the forefront fundamental questions surrounding the notion of ownership.
With the era of massive digitization and a surge in technology like AI, neural links, and blockchain, what does owning something mean? And more importantly, who owns what? The conversation also takes fascinating detours into ideas about data's importance, the value of digital vs. physical possessions, intellectual property, and the dynamics of 'value' in the context of digital ownership.
Ultimately, we reflect upon how the timeless concept of ownership has been redefined by the tides of technology and what it holds for the future. In the labyrinth of insights and ideas about the realms of digital ownership, there's much to learn and even more to ponder about.
Tune in, as we try to make sense of these complexities and attempt to unravel what it means to own something in this digital age.
Enjoy, share, and subscribe for more!
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Resources
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Please note that this transcript was created using AI technology and may contain inaccuracies or deviations from the original audio file. The transcript is provided for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a substitute for the original recording, as errors may exist. At this time, we provide it “as it is,” and we hope it can be helpful for our audience.
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Go, sir, somebody's gonna start this. I don't know who it is. . I, I vote for the guy with a hat. I, I'll be the, uh, what is it? The Ghost of Christmas Past? No, I don't know. Is that right? ? Yeah. Chris Christmas. Carol. Yeah. Whatever you want. I'm gonna come in singing. I think that's a different show, but, uh, , I dunno.
I, I decided to, uh, not rent this hat. I actually bought this hat. It's not a rental. Got it. I bought it. I figured I've never worn it. These conversations are always fun. I'm wearing it tonight. But do you digitally own the hat? I do now, because I'm digitally capturing it. Now does the platform we're recording on, do they have some stake in it as well?
I don't think so. I will say that I have a friend who, um, who at one point was involved in running a, uh, an NFT hat business and, um, um, the, the mango platform. And, and, and for a point, um, I had, I had, uh, boxes of, of mango baseball caps in my garage that technically had, you know, technically had NFTs attached to them and had value.
And there was always this like, if the house goes up in flames, how much money is in theoretical money and hats do you lose? Did you do the calculation? Was it 10 bucks? It was 10 bucks. It was. At least briefly, a lot more than that. It was hundreds of thousands in hats. Briefly. Briefly, that did depreciate over time and no longer have value.
Now I think that the cardboard has more value than the hats.
Ah, so interesting. Well, Sean, did you wear a hat? Sean, did you, have you ever wore a hat driving a car or an Uber?
You could complicate things. Now, like, you've just been in a car, and maybe you lost some property, because it became part of the car that you were in. Uh, certainly my information, when I, I think we were joking about this before, renting a car, I've, I've lost my personal driving history, for a period, as I rented that car.
The owner of that brand now has it, I'm sure. Probably shares it with a rental company too, or maybe they have some agreement. Yeah. But I know, I know people that have, that have left, uh, in cars and some have gotten it back, some haven't left some leave things purposefully. I no longer, I no longer claim ownership of this.
Um, there's a, there's a movie on Netflix called old, called old dads. And it's a comedy with Bill Burr and a bunch of other folks, and there's a scene in the movie where they, you know, of course, their dad's in Los Angeles because it's, you know, it's a Hollywood movie. There's a scene where they're going to do a trip to Las Vegas, um, and They, they get a, they get a rental car and they're, they're driving out, actually it's, they're driving it somewhere near Las Vegas to find this kind of old guru drifter in the desert.
And what they don't account for is that they have a rental car and the company that sent them, um, has the rental car turn on. Uh, basically like a dash cam and record their conversations in the car for purposes of HR. And so because it's a company trip and they're driving in a car rented by the company, um, the, the, you know, I mean, it's, it's part of the comedy, but the company records their conversations, reviews it.
And then fires them based on the conversations that they have in the car.
It's a comedy, but it's real. And it's serious. It's really serious. And it's not funny. Or maybe it is, I don't know, I didn't see it. It is funny, but it's also very real.
It is. So talking about data ownership, then what, what, what is ownership? Like who owns the data? Who owns anything? Do you own it? Or if you, if, if you say something or do something, then the person capturing it, does that person own it? So what if I record something accidentally? Um, if I, if I'm in a coffee shop recording myself speak.
But I can also hear some background conversation. Do I own it? If my, if my spouse or my friends are in the other room, hearing us speak, um, do, can we tell them, Hey, you got to forget about what information you got from this conversation. So what is ownership really? I mean, how do you define ownership? And how can you, well, certain things you can enforce ownership, some things you can't.
And I think we've, we've, that whole AI copyright, Intellectual property debate. That thing rears up in terms of who owns what. Yeah, and even, even setting aside ownership, it's a matter, there's a lot of data is public by design even, right? Or, it has to be. Even if it's not public by design, I think. There's the company that owns it and then there's, we've had situations where companies sell data, right?
Cambridge Analytica, for example. I always think of the scenario where I'm, I'm visiting somebody's house and they have an Echo. An Amazon Echo or something. I thought you went in a cave. No, but I, but all of that stuff's recorded, right? Whatever is said, the music's played, conversations held, the yelling and screaming, whatever else takes place, uh, after a lot of the booze is consumed.
I mean, all that's, all that's recorded, right? Presumably by these devices. Well, you know, it's capturing data outside the cars passing by people walking by. Yeah, the camera's on my phone, so do I own it? So, okay, that's a good question. May I add this? Uh, so I walk the dogs around. There's two homes that have the camera outside.
Obviously it's capturing people on the sidewalk. My camera try not to do that, but it says, Hey. You're being recorded. And I'm like, I never authorized you. So, um, is that because it's outside the properties on the sidewalk? So you're kind of telling, but I'm like, I don't think you're supposed to do that. No.
And so I have that in my neighborhood as well. Like I, I, you know, I walk a circuit on this kind of large cul de sac. It's like a figure eight. And there are two houses where you go by and it goes, you're being recorded. I'm like, I. didn't give an authorization that you could record me, where what they seem to be doing is saying we are recording in front of our house.
But, you know, I can also, like, if I'm walking along and a car goes by, a car in the street triggers that also. Like, I will at point, at points hear that audio when I'm going up to the house because I see a car go by. And so, They are motion sensing tracking, not just their yard or the sidewalk, but all the way through to both sides of the road and, and basically recording anything there we are.
And that's, I think, part of what we want to get at is that we are entering an age where, where ownership gets blurred. Identity is tricky and consent is sometimes you are present and you can leave. Uh, question then. Is it better to ask in both the cases where it seems like people were being, um, people were being respectful and asking for consent, which basically raised the questions in your heads.
I do not give you permission, but I'm pretty sure 80 80 percent of the house in your neighborhood have got a Ring camera or a Nest camera, which is constantly recording and they're not asking anybody for any permission. That we seem to be okay with. So the question then is like, so ownership, does ownership of data only comes into play when somebody asks you what consent like, is that yours?
And then you say, Oh yeah, absolutely. That's mine. But if somebody doesn't ask you that, you don't care. So is this, is this Schrodinger's cat? It's dead or alive. You can, you can go even, let's go way back. And then we go back to the, to the owning of your own property or whatever it is, or your image, your text, your speaking.
So the idea that I had when I said, let's talk about this is because it's all of these we're talking about, it's all digital related. Right? I mean, we're talking about recording. We're talking about music, video, whatever it is. So the idea at the beginning was what happened when we went from analog to digital, and that was possible to change this entire thing of I didn't buy that thing, uh, but I thought I bought it now instead of renting it, but I have a larger access.
Uh, I can get a better car because I'm not paying for the entire car. I'm just leasing it or renting it or whatever it is. I can have more music in my library. I can watch any movie I want, not just the blockbuster that I bought or that I rented for Three, three days or whatever that was. So then, but, but your question about let's define identity, I mean, property, it made me think about a, an episode of a comedian that you probably know called Eddie Izzard.
And I think he's a genius and they talks about colonization when the English went to any other country back in the days in the 1700 1800 and and put the flag and he said we just put the flag this is our territory and people there would be like wait a minute we've been living here for For many years.
And they're like, yes, but do you have a flag? It's like, no, we don't have a flag. But our family and says like, no flag, no ownership. This is our territory. So it's very, what I'm saying is very arbitrary to decide what you own or not. And very philosophical, but it gets way over the top when you actually can't touch things like, Oh, about this cup.
I own it. Yeah. Okay. So, so I think you bring up an interesting point when back in the day you could go somewhere and plant a flag. I mean, we've done that on the moon, bloody hell. Or a fence, a fence in a, in a, in the Western territory. Nobody bought anything there. I think the concept of ownership has changed quite a bit too, I mean, right now, I can't go and plant a flag, the flag of Carrie D'Souza from a neighbor's garden, and he's probably going to kick me out unceremoniously, but I think, um, I think, so the ownership, the concept of ownership, like, even if there's an unclaimed, I guess, is there such thing as an unclaimed property where you can go and just plant a flag and just own it.
This is this. I own it now. What does that mean? How do we define ownership?
Go ahead, Raf. Well, I think one part of it is that, um, there is ownership of digital goods. And the notion that digital goods can generally be replicated, but that individual ownership or access to those digital goods is, has gotten to the point of where it replaces some amount of physical goods. But then there's also ownership of physical goods that have digital components.
So, you know, on the one hand we can go, I have, you know, if I had a Tesla, I could go, I own the Tesla. But I don't own the FSD, the full service driving, because I haven't bought access to that. And, you know, that becomes a license. Um, but it's still, it's a physical thing. And you go, like, do I own the data?
Because this data is connected to this physical thing. So that's kind of one class. So there's a physical thing that has access and licenses and data. But then, on the other hand, you've also got Digital formats that are replacing physical formats, particularly of media, where you go, um, first, you know, the first into the space was Apple with iTunes, where in 2003, you could purchase.
music digitally. That was the first digital store that I'm aware of. The second was Steam. Uh, PC games. And everybody kind of gradually replicated that format of, okay, a, a digital information Media purchases the 70 30 split and it's this thing that sits in the store and then you have a license that is connected to that store and that's one means and then you you go forward about 10 years and you go okay now we have these streaming licenses and I have a access to a membership of a Netflix or Spotify or Disney plus or or whatever and then you don't own them.
You don't own this nugget of physical, uh, of digital media, you own access to things in their library. And so we now have kind of this notion of kind of a subscription access on the one hand, or you still have an actual purchase, um, for different, for different types of media. But I'd still kind of keep that separate from like, you know, a car or a house or an other physical thing that has.
That generates some amount of digital information, and then there's a question of, do you own that? And we even have that with smart cities. This notion of, you know, like this, they tried to do this in Toronto, and it failed, because the Google division that was trying to set up a smart cities contract was trying to own the data of the citizens in this neighborhood.
And so You know, a physical construction of an actual neighborhood, you know, several blocks of a particular chunk near the waterfront. Google was like, hey, we'll fund a bunch of this, but we want to own the data. We'll make it better, but we want to own the data. So who owns, who owns the data becomes hugely important on a connection to a physical thing.
But if it's purely Digital information, it's, is this access? Is this, I, is this my library? Is this, I get a window onto Spotify's library, Pandora's library, um, Warner Brothers library, and do they take that away? And, and even with a, I own this, this, I own this nugget that I bought from them, are there still areas where they can take access to that nugget away, even if I paid money for it?
Even if, if it's not a subscription? Can they take it away or just remove it entirely from their library? They can. I mean, I think this is no different than the actual libraries we, the actual book libraries that we have in our neighborhoods. You might go there and borrow a book and, but they might decide, you know, that book is outdated, chuck it out.
And now you no longer have access to it. And you've got to find another. So it's no different from that. But for me, then if I go and read five books, And that the intellectual property is owned by the writer and the publishing house and stuff like that. But based on that, I generate my own ideas and write something that's sort of a derivative of these five ideas.
So then, then do I give them fractional My idea? Not if you use chat GPT, then it's fair game. Well chat GPT, um, uh, uh, uh, uh, the new Google Gemini I suppose is much better than GPT. GPT is sort of kind of funny. The more ideas you call it GPT, it sort of seems to diminish in what the output is, or they've just gotten better at creating restraints.
So they're not letting people willy nilly use it to. Go make me a million bucks. That's how it works by the way. Well, so one thing I will say is, is that we are at a point where there are lots of different types of digital ownership being set up a big thing right now, you know, and it's kind of funny, but it's in any kind of digital ownership, whether it's like the blockchain or cloud or, you know, a company or a collective or whoever, it's trust built on consistency.
Um, and so as an example, Um, in the video game space, games were early on into digital ownership. Not of like, oh, I own this sword, but I own the game. That you, you buy a game, you own the game. Games went early on PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo, Steam on the PC side of transitioning from you bought a disc to you bought a digital license to access that, that content.
And that became very important because it allowed us to go, now you can have an MMO, you have a membership in, in that, in, in World of Warcraft, you have a subscription, whatever. But the thing is in that it's built on trust and consistency. Um, Sony. Indirectly did something to break some of that recently, and I don't think that they meant to.
Technically it's not their fault, it's actually Warner Brothers Discovery. Um, Warner Brothers Discovery with David Zaslav is changing around a lot of things as they try to find a path to profitability or to selling Warner Brothers. Uh, in the last week, or earlier this week, um, they yanked stuff from the PlayStation TV, uh, PlayStation Store.
Um, Going back to the PS3, you could buy TV episodes. Um, now it's one thing to not offer those in the future, but Warner Brothers Discovery made the unusual request to Sony PlayStation of a bunch of these things. We are removing the license to, you know, discover some discovery reality shows or documentaries.
Pull these from your store. People who bought these will no longer have access to the things that they purchased. That breaks trust. That's a thing that should be done very infrequently, if ever, um, because once consumers have purchased a thing, if you say, we can rescind that purchase, then once you do that once, you can do that every time.
Um, if you, if a, if a digital store wants to build trust around ownership, it has to have really clear and consistent rules. And the biggest rule in Steam is actually very good about this. They go, you can pull a game. And you can not offer it for future sale, but once you've offered it from sale, we are always going to host that executable and the people who bought it can always re download.
And, in fact, to be fair, Microsoft, Xbox, Sony, PlayStation, Nintendo, with whatever they call their device at the time, they're being better about that. And Nintendo is learning this as they try to have a more consistent cloud store. Once you set up purchases, you always have to have access to those. Um, I, you know, I buy a lot of games.
I love the fact that when I got my Xbox Series X. I plugged it in and I had access to the digital purpose purchases, you know, because of their compatibility of my original Xbox games. My xbox 360 games and my xbox one games on my xbox series x like and and i'm not like hey You know, this is you know advertisement This is becoming the base level that consumers are starting to expect to where even nintendo now understands When they go to switch to They don't necessarily have compatibility backed indefinitely, but the understanding now from consumers, especially game consumers who are early on, is if I have a Switch 2, I should have all my digitally purchased Switch games and probably all my classic games that I bought on my Switch.
People are basically like, I want all my stuff. If I bought my stuff, let me keep my stuff. You can put it everywhere you want to, you know, but more and more they want to have that. Easily accessible. And if it's a license, you want to know that you have a license to that access. If it's purchase, you go, if I ever bought it, I always have all my stuff because it should be the equivalent of if I bought the Blu ray or the VHS or the DVD, and I've got it on my shelf.
Exactly. Don't ever, because if you, if you take away access to the digital stuff, it's like someone came into your house and took the Blu ray off your shelf and walked off with it. Okay, think how crazy is that? We're kind of like make believe stuff, so they didn't know what I've got. Plenty of blu rays. I wish that we would come and take it away.
I don't pay garbage. John, you wanted to say something before before it. I had so many thoughts in my head. I think, um, I know we're talking about ownership of of things here and let's go this way because carry you mentioned something before we. Started recording about, uh, passing things on or down, uh, when we, when we leave this earth, and then I'll leave my other thought for, for later.
Um, perhaps it'll feed into that as well. But this idea that we, we, uh, we cherish these things that we've, we've Struggled to make money, enough money to buy and, and, and enjoy in our lives. And, and then, then we leave and this stuff goes somewhere else. We, the car gets, gets passed down. Maybe it gets sold at auction.
The house gets passed down. Maybe, maybe the kids, when the kid lives in it, maybe they can't all afford to live in it so that the house gets sold at auction. I don't know, pick, pick all your stuff, but when it comes to the data, right? What, what about. This subscription that you're talking about, rough who, who gets that?
Do we've actually passed that down? Do people, people say, my Xbox, your account subscription
are diligent. And does, does that happen naturally? I don't know. Thankfully I haven't had to deal with that, but yeah. Or, or, or, or in, in a divorce, if you have, um. You know, if you have two people who purchase stuff together, you know, the current way to do it would be to go like, okay, um, I get the Xbox account and you get the PlayStation account and, yeah.
And, and, and, and like, and I get the Apple account and you get the Google account. Like you'd have to divvy it up based on accounts because. There isn't a good way currently to go, okay, we did these purchases with our joint finances and, um, in this particular library, I want this, this, and this, you know, like I, when my ex and I split up, you know, we, we split up our, our, our music library.
Um, you know, we, we split up our movies, um, and, and, you know, and there's a whole, you know, there's a bunch of like, well, do you want this one that, you know, like it, it wasn't, you know, it's never easy. It doesn't have to be horrible, but it's still just like, if it's a physical thing, you pass it back and forth.
If it's digital, we currently have a notion of accounts connected to a company. Um. And some people have said, you know, posited like, well, the blockchain solves that. I don't think that the blockchain actually does because the biggest problem with the notion of the blockchain solves it, and I know that Kerry wants to get in on this, is the notion that it's public.
And the thing that blockchain advocates forget is that people don't want their private data on the blockchain. I don't want my shopping, if I go grocery shopping, I don't want my shopping list on the blockchain. Or anything. Because I just don't want people to Yeah, I don't want people to know if I bought three avocados, like consumer data needs to not be on the blockchain because it's private.
Like the lottery, like five bucks a piece. But you're right. I mean, yeah, you don't want some of the data. The online stuff like Facebook and social media stuff, that's only public. Who cares about who gets to own that? I mean, Facebook, Meta, Facebook, they own all of that anyways. But there's a lot of your personal data, like your thoughts, your, your habits, and stuff, which, which is captured somewhere.
Your reading habits, your listening habits, or the groceries you buy, or the car you drive, all of that is still, um, and so who owns that data? Do you need to pass it on? Or, or is it, is that data now owned by Owned by these companies from who you have purchased stuff or where you've indulged in these things.
So then they can use it any which way. And if they're using your data, does your estate or your family, do they get the benefits of it? Like we do that. I mean, if you're a famous, famous singer or an actor, your estate would get the benefits or the proceeds of any, any intellectual property that was monetized after your death.
But what happens So, uh, So one thing I was, I was thinking when I thought about this topic is the, the difference between, again, the tangible and the intangible and how can we, are we able as human to feel affection towards something that it's really not there, right? So again, you can't touch it, you can't, Experience it.
There's also maybe that idea that if you keep it in the right way, retain the value. I mean, now I'm going to talk like my dad or my grandfather here, but you know, and and and also maybe acquire value in time because it become old and then vintage and then an antique, right? And I'm trying to think in my head how I compare it.
Um, you know, apples and oranges or apple and apple when I think about the ownership of the digital library of games or music or anything else. And so by saying these, I'm also like, is this why maybe people are not really putting that much value on data unless you are in the cybersecurity industry or Or in cloud storage.
And I mean, the everyday person, I don't know, that they feel this way. I don't think the everyday person has just a really quick point. I think the everyday person isn't fully aware of how much data on the one hand, but also they've been conditioned initially by social media to the notion that they don't actually get to give consent and that they don't really have ownership, like that they may have ownership of their.
Movie purchase, but that they don't necessarily have ownership of the photos that they put up on Facebook, um, or the ownership of their advertising profile. Well, I also think that people, and the third point, Raph, I'm going to add to that is that I also think that people don't understand the value of the data they're putting up.
That's the biggest thing I think we want. We've got the tangible stuff, the stuff that we We spend, uh, most of our, majority of our lives working for somebody else to, to basically collect enough money to go and buy stuff. That stuff we tend to own and we have got attachment, but I think the value, and we attach more value to that stuff, but not so much for, if I'm going to Target or if I'm going to Walmart, if I'm going home, wherever I'm going and buying stuff and they collect the patents, data patents.
I don't necessarily attach value. There's no, it's hard for normal humans to create a value around. Okay. It's not going to be the same value of the guitar I bought or the motorcycle or the books I bought, or even the music. So it's a different value, right? Um, but your, your sales receipt, that's valuable data.
And I think that's, that's. That's why I think that's one of the reasons why we potentially don't care much about ownership of that stuff.
And this, um, I'm going to tie a few things together here, which is kind of my initial thought. Cause last week I published a newsletter. It was about the collective. Oh, I'm a cybersecurity guy. So everything's around cybersecurity is the idea that we have a collective where you would use all of this data that we're talking about and sensors and.
Everybody would have a view of the world around them and would be able to be alerted and spot weird and bad things from taking place. So that's the article. As I was walking through Central Park and up Fifth Avenue today, I was, I was looking at the scene as there was some snow falling down. I thought, this is, this is a beautiful scene right here.
And I thought, There are cameras everywhere capturing this scene. People walking in their coats with the fur on and their hats, not this hat, but different hats on, right, the lights of the cars, the lights, the street lamps in the, in the park. This is all being captured. So people's movements, people's activity, all the stuff going on, presumably there are cars with With sensors and, uh, and signals coming out and buses and, and who knows whatever, right?
Phones, certainly. So just massive amounts of data floating around. And I was thinking, are we able to create new worlds from this? Exact scene right here, right now, and use that for something else. And then it goes to your point, Raph, of technology companies having a desire to create cities, right? That let's face it, probably have a lot of this data to say, this is why I would build this city this way.
People move this way. They stop at these lights this way, the traffic piles up this way. They stop at this Starbucks. Because of all of that, and they don't want to wait over here in the rain, they'd rather go into Starbucks and have, have a cup of coffee. All of that decision making and design and everything.
Comes from all of this data. I was just picturing this world that every moment that we're living, we're creating a digital version of this world. And I could, I could presumably say, show me, uh, what's today, December 7th, New York city, perhaps even me in that scene. 2030. But not really you because it's a parallel, it's a parallel universe.
Is it? You know, this was actually the premise of, um, I think if I remember correctly, it was Deja Vu, um, a Wait, didn't you just say that? A, a, a crime thriller with, uh, Denzel, Denzel Washington, where they positive that you create that, that you could Basically go back in time and recreate scenes and then kind of walk into those scenes because of the data that was created that, that they were solving the crime by putting together a simulation that they could walk into using the data that had been generated.
Um, and I mean, the reality is, is that that there is no common pool of all that data, but there are a lot of different individual sources of data. I'm just going to throw the term digital twin out there because that was the other thing that I was thinking of, right, where you could actually play out scenes and figure out where things are going to go and perhaps make changes.
Didn't they, wasn't there a Tom Cruise movie, Minority Report, where they sort of did try to do that? That became rather Well, and that was Well, that was looking into a digital Right? Wasn't that looking into the future? So this was the core idea of, of Deja Vu, which was that they built, that they built a digital twin simulation of this particular part of New Orleans in order to figure out what had happened during this terrorist attack.
So that they, you know, it was rewinding back in time, running the simulation and then walking around and looking at. To try to, not to like change events, but to go, this thing happened here. I mean, it was basically like sleuthing in the digital twin I, everything. Yeah. Go. Difference. I wanna point out is I, I think what you're describing is an entity gets a hold of all of this information somehow, some way and does something purposeful with it.
Mm-Hmm. . Right. What I'm suggesting is we all have access to it. At all times. In any device we have access to.
We have access to it in our heads. I mean, we look at this many times and we're like, oh shit, if I had not said that or done that, things could have been It's all in here. I'll bring up a couple of things to To throw at you guys to react to. So, um, yesterday, uh, Meta announced, you know, Meta, Facebook announced their new AI image generator that was trained on 1.
1 billion Instagram and Facebook photos. Um, so, uh, effectively everything that's been put into, into Facebook and Instagram is, um, is fair game for use. And, you know, to be fair. Meta did announce that they would, they did say that they would do exactly this about, about four or five months ago. Um, so that they just rolled it out.
Anyone has access, but basically it's going, Hey, any of the stuff that you've put in is grist for the mill and you can generate new images. That might be using your images or anyone else's out there. So that's, that's even if you deleted it four or five months ago when you got that news. Yeah, it's, it's, it's still in there.
Well, there was actually even, um, so some people did try to. And there was a further news story after they initially announced this, that, uh, that the delete was actually, um, literally a fake lever that, that it deleted nothing, that people confirmed that their information was still in there. It was essentially a PR move.
Even if you do delete stuff and Facebook makes your account or Meta makes your account inaccessible, that data is still there on their servers. It's not going away. They've just taken your access away. I'm gonna throw a wrench right here. Well, I've got a bigger wrench to throw at you for your wrench. Go for it.
But let me throw mine. So, you guys got me thinking about how we even decided The concept of ownership, right? Because I mean, we take that as a given, you know, I own this land. I own this thing. I own this photo. Okay, how about the shit that is in the photo? If I take a photo of someone else, of course, I'm not even supposed to put it there according to the law.
And I take a picture of the Empire State Building. I already own it. Okay. took possession of something that I actually do not own and somebody else does. So that's my. Without paying, but you've got technology. We talked about technology and ownership. So there's at least four different companies working on connecting the neocortex and Neuralink is one of the most famous one, but there's at least three others.
There's a couple of companies that are doing it non invasively. So in which case they've potentially got access to your thoughts. So now we're stepping into a completely, um, foreign territory. We're like, holy shit, you can't even think about it. So who owns what then? If you do, they own it. Yes. Basically released.
I mean, and, and VCI is is a whole, you know, future area. But a lot of what this gets at is this notion of public and private. Like you move it, you know, going back to walking down the street. Um, we are starting to understand that we will have recordings of us in the public sphere. We generally don't want to have those in the private space at home, but it gets harder to control your image or your being recorded when you are in the public space, whether you are a building, like the Empire State Building, or you're a person walking down the street, um, that, that there are so many recording devices that you realize that you have the potential to be recorded, but it is still really important to try to mediate.
What type of recording and broadcast of recording. Um, going back to meta, another thing that's kind of concerning is that meta is going into the space of Google Glass. Um, if you guys remember that a while back, the, the meta Ray Ban glasses are glasses that look like normal sunglasses, but they have a camera right in the middle, and it's relatively unobtrusive, and there is a light, a white light that comes on.
It doesn't blink, it's not colored, um, That might just look like it's active, but when that light comes on, you are, uh, or the person who's wearing the glasses is recording what they're seeing. And the tricky thing is that with that device, the recording is Not stored and hosted on the device. It goes to the Facebook servers.
Um, there's another company, uh, trying to, um, Humane, Humane AI, the Humane AI pin, that has a thing that looks kind of like a pager, kind of like a cross between a pager and a pocket protector. And it has a, and the same thing as the Ray Ban AI Uh, Ray Ban Glasses. It's a camera and a microphone and what it records in terms of audio, photos, and video gets sent to their servers.
Small devices that are wearable devices that have a limited amount of processing and an antenna and transfer and the data is stored on proprietary servers and the person who pulls it off is pulling it off. To access or post, but effectively the company that provides the hardware. Owns the data and how is that devices now and so, and, and especially when the devices can unobtrusively and pretty much constantly record, and it's not clear when they're recording both the humane AI pin and the Meta Ray ban glasses are both doing the whole Google glass whole thing all over again.
Yep. And they've just say glass hole. I think I heard glass.
I think the lesson here to like to learn here is that you can Data ownership is up for grabs. Anybody can take anybody's data without consent, as long as you're sort of doing it in such a way that it's not, um, it's not, it's not It's conspicuous. As long as you don't get cut. If you go back to the old thing about AI and how they harvested all these books and now it's gonna make up answer where it's, it's, it's, Yeah, that's probably where I'm going.
And then basically coming with an answer. How different is that? Like, the whole point is that I mean, every artist has always been inspired by others. You, you, you memorize things. And so, I mean, obviously there is, I think it all comes down in this case to, to money, right? You know, I do something, it's my, there is a proper check.
Um, artistic value and, and, and all of that. So we can go back again, who decided that this is your stuff, but lawyers, man, these, I, yeah, well, you know, I mean, an artist, it's like, I'm making a living out of this. So if you, I need to have something attached to it and, and, and I understand that, but there is a limit to say when it becomes public domain.
So if I go to the museum and I see the Mona Lisa, and then I'm a. Painter. And I decide that, Hey, this inspired me something. Wait a minute. You can't use it because that's the, our idea came from watching at the Mona Lisa. You owe Leonardo da Vinci a lot of fucking money. Um, I don't know if that's possible, but, but when it comes to invading anything and really capturing and recreating everything around us, I mean, that's, that we're crossing into not ownership, but.
Privacy and Kerry and the two of us already had an episode about about that. So, and that's the thing is, is we're kind of crossing back and forth between data that is information or arts in a medium and data that is privacy and potentially. private telemetry and, and biometry. And the problem is it's all kind of getting merged together and we need better laws for navigating it because, you know, here's an, here's an example.
If you took the, the Meta Ray Ban glasses and you went into a movie theater and you used those to watch and record. A first run movie in the theater right now, that would run afoul of particular laws that have been set up because someone could say, hey, you just recorded Barbenheimer, uh, you know, Barbie and Oppenheimer in a double feature in their entirety, and you're not allowed to do that because rules were set up to not allow you to record in a theater.
So sometimes it's not okay to record. When companies push back and go, we don't want our intellectual property to be recorded in the same fashion, but in a very different context, we need to find ways, either as individuals or as a society to also push back and go, it's not okay to record me here, or I want to have control over my image in this space, because it's not that different from a, from recording in a movie theater.
Should I bring up the bootleg? You remember bootleg? So, I mean, what I'm saying is we've always done that. It's just that now we got a technology that really allows us to do it on another level. Yeah. So, so then in that case, then every, every paparazzi reporter out there taking pictures of famous people without consent.
And they're publishing it left, right, center. So like, what, who owns what data? Like, what do you, Yeah. And, and actually it's, it's important to keep in mind that this, this has been established legally that if a paparazzi, um, records or takes a photo of someone that while on the one hand, the person could try to sue for privacy to not have the photo distributed and might win or lose that on the other side.
If that celebrity takes that photo by the, by the paparazzi and posts that to their Instagram, decides they like the picture, technically they're supposed to get permission because that paparazzi owns the copyright on that photo of them. There was a case healthy and I think about that the monkey on the case.
Wow. That's a day I lost faith in our judicial system completely. Which is all made up anyway. We just make up this, this lows. As we roll, we make it up. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Um, we want one positive, uh, spin on data. Um, so, Google, after the whole, like, their whole push into smart cities in Toronto that failed, in the last few years, Google AI actually did do a good project, which is Uh, a stoplight at a program called Project Greenlight, which is traffic calming.
And this was a good example of one of those like few examples of where everyone's like, Oh, that's actually not that bad. Like, okay, Google, you did a good thing. You. Tried not to be evil. Do you really stick to your gun? You try not to be evil? Occasionally. I don't know if they tried not to be evil. Ask me in maybe six months.
Yes. But Project Greenlight was an interesting program where they essentially said we can analyze the traffic patterns and look at the stoplights and then we can supply information to the cities to set up more optimized patterns based on AI machine learning analysis of particular sections where we can say, if you did this instead of that, then you would have better flow.
Because nobody Other than kind of the cities and city planners is really focused on like large scale movement data of traffic in traffic patterns. We're okay with giving up that data. We might be okay with giving up commuter data. Google Maps already basically has all of our commuter data. Um, but, um, and, and, and a bit of Waze and Apple Maps, but mostly Google Maps, but it's when you drill down to the micro where.
You go, Oh, I was directly recorded. Like, Oh, somebody put on a quest three, tapped it to mixed reality mode, went into a coffee shop and recorded me and maybe my, you know, my laptop screen because they're looking around and they basically got a camera on their head. Um, when it's individual, that's when we get concerned because we go, that's a privacy invasion.
And we do still kind of want to go, I own my privacy. That private data of me. I want, I want to, or at least, or at least, at least people who are older still have that notion. A lot of the teenagers are basically like, yeah, I don't own anything. Well, that's not true though. I mean, I'm going to, I'm going to challenge you on that.
I think, I think. The notion of privacy has changed. What my parents think that is personal and private is very different than what I think and it's very different from my what my niece and nephew think and chances are generation after them. I think that they, they, The definition of privacy or the definition of what data I should own and what I should let go, that's sort of changed and shifted and metamorphosized over the last few generations.
And it will continue to do that. I think as technology, technology evolves and, and
The notion of what's private and what's public or what should be public and what you should care about is going to keep changing, I think. Let's go back to the objects because I'm curious to know who owns Sean's hat. I want to go back to that before the end of it, but nothing of this would have been possible without.
Technology getting to a certain point, like think about the sharing of the sharing economy. It wasn't that constant before, because, well, maybe it was a communal thing. Oh, we're going to share this horse, take it when you need it in the village. Um, I mean, I'm sure a certain thing you were sharing it, but the globalization is technology has allowed all of this.
And, and where I'm going with this is that there is no coming back. Um, it's. But this guardrail that we're all talking about nowadays when it comes to AI is again Stop bitching about AI because it's not gonna put back into the can because it's outside Enjoy the ride Yeah, but what can, what can we do? I mean, honestly, I mean, we're not the decision makers here, but I don't know, maybe some thoughts about what would be good to do carry just, just about just like everything else, like change, um, change of perception, like AI ownership.
Data, change our perception. Stop holding on to the old notions and perception. Some stuff is still personal and private and that should be. But generally understand that these are tools that are, that are there to help you, um, live your life, um, enrich your life, live your life better. And so as long as you understand that, just do it.
Don't, don't help them. Um, so using that, I think it's important to in in looking at again at privacy connected to ownership, it's it's to recognize that whether it is private data or it's public data or it's media data that it has value. Now, it doesn't mean that that value. blocks the conversation, but even, you know, like just to go back to, to the whole, Hey, Meta's and Meta is going to take, um, people's Facebook and Instagram, uh, pictures and feed them into their AI engine.
That should be a transaction. Um, if people put into Facebook and then Facebook is making a tool, especially if there's any charge for using that tool, it should, there should be recompense for the data that is feeding that tool, because the tool doesn't exist without the data. And so even if you go, you don't get cons, consent to take your things out, there should be some.
understanding of compensation because otherwise it's saying this data has no value and clearly in all of these AI tools there's value because there is transaction around the process of Gathering the data set around setting up the training libraries, categorizing, filtering, and labeling, and then outputting to the AI companies.
There's a whole economy that's mostly hidden to folks, um, and partially because it often uses, um, sourcing of basically labor from developing countries to gather. Like, there's a whole human process. and human intelligence that feeds into this AI, where people just go like the AI tool just happened. No.
Thousands of people worked on this thing, and not just the engineers, but the people who fed this thing. And the reality is that most of the people who worked on it were paid minimum wage. In their country, they were paid low amounts in their country, but the data that they're handling was mostly not paid for.
So it's not that the AI tools are bad to have, but there needs to be fair compensation for the people who generated the data and for the people who handled the data and brought it there. Because otherwise the only people who make money are the people at the end product. The AI companies and the cloud companies who are pushing you a tool and going, Hey, we made this for free, but now we're going to make money on it.
That raises a very complex question about how do you characterize the value proposition for Each piece of data this data is valued at this much coming from so it's a it's a super complex You could do something very well, it could be a movie again where I I think if you give value to my data as an individual not the company because I think rafael What you said is it's perfect because it has a value that Is only tangible for the company, not for the individual and only has value when he's aggregated into a large amount.
It's like you're a drop of oil. It doesn't do shit, but a lot of drop of oils give me power and right? So if we could get to quantify what my data is. Exactly. And it has to be because if you think about it, the transition from iTunes to streaming audio with Pandora and those streaming audio and streaming video companies are based on quantifying the value of individual pieces of data.
And, you know, you go like, oh, I mean, to be fair, streaming audio companies still take the majority of the profit for themselves, but they, they count out in micro fractions of pennies, um, across all the streams. They have to, because that was the whole point of the two lawsuits that Nap, that Napster was hit with, that shut Napster down, was companies said, you can't, you know, yes, there's a paradigm shift, but you can't just take our, our data and assign no value to it because you have value.
Therefore we have to have value. That whole process led to, led to streaming audio and streaming video and the notion that we can then go, Hey, I open up Disney plus or Netflix or, you know, library of choice, and there's a whole bunch of stuff. But you have to say, collectively this all has value, and then you have to find some way to assign value to individual parts of it.
Another good example of, is, uh, Apple Arcade. Apple Arcade has a, and to be fair, Apple and, at this point, Apple, Google, Xbox, PlayStation, and Netflix all do this, where they go We have a subscription game service and people play stuff and we know what they play because we are the platform. And then what they do is they go, we pay out to developers based on time of engagement.
Which is similar, it's slightly different from how, you know, let's say like Pandora or Spotify do it. But it's the same basic principles. You go, I have all this data, and I only exist as a platform because of this library of data. And then I've got to pay out to it. So you go with Apple Arcade and you go, they pay out based on going.
In the last 30 days, what games were played and what was the collective number of hours and minutes and seconds for each game across the range in our overall pool? And then you go, I pay each developer for the use of their game by our subscribers. But wasn't that the model of radio and, and pay royalty to play in a song?
I mean, that's been going on forever. That's what Spotify does. So that's what most of the streaming people do too. But no, I think, I think the concern there is that the proportion of what they make was the proportion of what they give out. No, I, yeah, of course. Yeah. But I think Audible has a similar model, right?
You, you get credits and you, you get books or you can actually pay. Money in exchange for the book. So there's some, some price setting and certainly some supply and demand. Like you're describing there, Raph. And yeah, gore gets tricky as I don't know, maybe it's not tricky, it's just, it's easy to see a book or it's easy to see a game and you, you interact with that.
I'm just trying to think of what the outcome is. Is it a, is it an image that's generated and my image contributed to that so I get a slice of it or? I think, I think with the music, Sean, it, we were used to it. Right. I mean, music was already something for rent. Maybe we didn't pay the rent, but the radio station did now you mentioned audible and makes me think I'm like, okay, they do own, I guess I own, like, I don't know, more than 200 books.
It's my library, I can look at it. I'm like, Oh, I don't have to move all this shit when I, when I go in another house, cause try to move with books and I can still listen in whenever I want. So yeah, there is a value there, but again, you go to my dad is like, no, I'm buying the book, but he has no plan of moving ever.
It hasn't moved in who knows how long. I don't know. There is value in carrying all your stuff here too. I don't know. There is. It's all a single point of failure. You lose your phone. You're like completely lost at sea. Yeah, but if a fire comes and your library of Alexandria goes in flame, then, uh, what you got?
Shit. At least I can buy another phone. RELOGIN IN MY AUDIBLE AND ALL MY LIBRARY IS MAGICALLY THERE. I know we're at an hour, but I want to bring up this idea, because it goes back to Raf's, uh, Smart City example, where, what if there are collectives where we purposefully, knowingly, contribute, where we're not expecting to get, yeah, pay necessarily for the return.
But we get benefits from the return. So then the smart city example, we're all going to put our data in because we know the city is going to get smarter and the experience that we have is going to get better. Um, so it's not a monetary exchange there necessarily. Maybe there is, I don't know, maybe on top of it, make money somehow.
Well, Waze is a classic example. I mean, you, you share your traffic, you share your location and everybody shares that in hopes that you will find a faster route or. So it's a similar model. You're getting something out of it. So it's not necessarily I can go back to the, to the exact, the very first, the very first episode we ever did, Marco.
You remember that one? It was around Oh, yeah. We were part of this group, and if you, if you're a subscriber, perhaps you get better treatment. And if you, if you pay for a premium map, maybe you get better routes faster than others. Yeah, your routes are better than theirs. You know, I'm going to add to this.
When we said So let's say that you can quantify your data. You know what is going to happen? It's going to happen that somebody's data is going to be worth it more than somebody else. Right? So isn't somebody more, I don't know, influential about something? So what it does maybe? I don't know. I'm just throwing there.
If you're an athlete, maybe your, your biometric may be more important than The guy that I don't know, smokes a pack a day and sits on his ass. . I dunno. I'm just thinking , I mean, is there gonna be an even, is it every, everybody votes count one with the same? My influence rise with this, uh, with this Egypt hat on?
Or is it, does it drop?
I think you got value there, Sean. I think. I think that it's okay, because I view it also like, in terms of AI tools, um, if, you know, just to use an example, if my collective writings on LinkedIn is weighed against, you know, Stephen King's, um, uh, collective, uh, works, he's going to get more value because Both his works are more influential than my writings, and he has more following, but also he's just written more.
Um, and so I, you know, the data shouldn't necessarily just be, it should come down to some amount of like, Reputation or followers or usage, um, context, I think it's some amount of content as well, but you know, like there's another good example of, um, how are you using the data, right? The same piece of data could have different values depending on where it's used and for what it's used.
Like Sean's top hat, if you're shooting for. The Macintosh, the English talking Macintosh, or Johnny Walker, Red Label, be perfect there.
But I think context is important, but, but, um, I, I think, yeah, I mean, I think, I think it'd be great to, to get to a point where we contribute stuff into a system and the system is beneficial to us. And I think that's the payment. Be kind of cool. Well, I just thinking that, you know, just to have a little flashback and when we were exchanging, um, I don't know, baseball card maybe in the U.
S. I would have exchanged, uh, I would have changed the soccer players card when I was a kid and you were walking out either without any card because you'd lose them all or you, or you would walk back with a lot of them or an empty hands and, uh, and now I don't know. I don't know. Do kids still play with this thing?
I think they do. I don't know. NFTs, man. Now it's all NFTs. Actually, actually, it's, it's, it's, it's all Pokemon cards now. Yeah. So, I mean, they, they, they do still, there is still use for physical things. Um, and you know, Pokemon is, is, is probably one of the best examples beyond the Pokemon games, you know, think of this, uh, during the pandemic.
Pokemon cards went through the roof, um, which is funny because a lot of people are supposed to be at home, but not like digital Pokemon cards, physical Pokemon cards. They, some of the numbers I saw were that 40 percent of all the Pokemon cards that have been printed over the last 30 years were printed in the last three years.
They were doing billions of Pokemon cards a year in the last few years. And the reality is just that the game has grown even more. It's, it's, it's the biggest, you know, educational or sorry, entertainment IP in the world. But you know, yes, it's often in anime and in movies and in TV. But it's also just in cards, like youth are still playing with physical things, um, and, and, and physical cards still have value to them, even in a day where they're on their phone constantly.
I think there is room for everything, and there'll be value for it. Each one. And I'm just throwing the final words here to Sean, which is very well known to have his entire theory about what will have more value in the future. Yeah. I think anybody who's listened to me for, uh, for any number of minutes, uh, know I have this position that I think we'll have nostalgia and a longing for these physical things that Many of which are being replaced by digital.
Um, we'll, we'll Recall some of the experiences we've had interacting with physical objects that no longer exist and we'll wish we had them back and I think because of that, uh, the, the value of, of our current world, uh, will have more value than, than our digital. So that's potentially, I'm just thinking of the example I gave on how many years ago it was now on the piece I wrote, but writing a, uh, Writing an old wooden rollercoaster.
I don't know if you'll ever replicate that precisely. No, no desire. You might want to do it once, but then, but for everyday pleasures, you would want to go and write the, the engineer at steel and there's actually a typewriter, right? Typing on the typewriter. It's fantastic. And I just bought a typewriter just for the, the, the, the, the, the whole, um, The feedback we get from keys and the that stuff is complete, but then I type a book or a blog post on my no, I'd go mental.
It's but it's nice to so yeah, it was suck that that you make a mistake in a certain point and you don't have a control Z and you have to rewrite it all again. That itself was an out form like how. Oh yeah, you have the white, right? He keeps trying to do that to me. I don't understand. Think about that.
Like, we used to have this notion that you wanted to write out something and you wrote it long form. And then that went from writing often in cursive long form to writing through typing on a keyboard. Uh, on a typewriter and using whiteout. And then that went to, okay, we've got a computer and we can type out to, oh, you, the computer has autocorrect built in and now it has.
you know, it can suggest finishing your sentence. Um, I, I was asked, I've been asked on LinkedIn, do I use, um, you know, do I use generative AI for when I write? And I go, never. Do I use generative AI? At points, you know, it's experimentally or to understand it. Yes. But the thing that people forget is that we write oftentimes many people to gather our thoughts, to iterate back and forth, to sometimes.
We don't interrogate a thought enough to be able to explain it through text to another person in the same way that we would do in a conversation, and we haven't let go of the need to do that any more than we've let go. We have not let go of the need to have physical things. Yes, we have digital, but we don't let go of the physical because we didn't become energy beings.
We still greatly enjoy the physical. And, um, What's clear coming out of the pandemic is that everyone is reconnecting with the physical, that we are mediating between going outside and trying to get comfortable doing it again. But we need that balance between the physical and the digital and to find the rights for ownership and identity and privacy and all of that in the same way that we go, Hey.
Yes, we now have computers that can do much more than a typewriter, but however you compose your thoughts, you don't lose the ability to compose your thoughts or the need to compose your thoughts. The medium doesn't change the fact that you still need to figure out what you're thinking. And if you do let go of that, that's as detrimental to your expression as it is to go.
Hey, I have all this digital stuff so I'm never going outside. No, there's a world out there. There's a brain in here. We need all of those things still. The new frontiers don't let go of the old. Well, wait till Neuralink, Neuralink is online. It's all that, that, that's it. You're done for them. On top of that, the typing machine will probably have learned all the things you've written if it was only a way to do so.
Neuralink and AI and then that's it. It's game over. But I think we should vote. Yeah, we need to go, but we should vote to who owns. Sean Hutt. Does he own it? Or I don't know. My daughter owns it. Right now we all do because we're going to take a screenshot and then we're going to take it out from you and just place it on each single one of us.
We're going to set up speculative shares on the blockchain and then we're going to create virtual versions that we're going to put into Fortnite and Roblox. Let's do that. All right, everybody. Thank you so much. I'll be looking for my royalty checks in the mail. Thank you, everybody, for staying with us.
You never know when we start and we end. And, uh, if you stay tuned, next conversation, we're probably going to take it out. Stripe from here. And it would be nice to talk about how we all use generative AI. I really enjoyed those conversations. So use it. You have about a month, all of you to get really good at it.
Take care, everybody. Thank you so much. Cheers.