Learn about the critical roles cybersecurity, social media, and privacy, or what is left of it, play in our day-to-day life. Challenge your understanding of the digital world and redefine your engagement with technology.
Guest: Gary Guseinov, CEO at RealDefense and iolo [@iolo_tech]
On LinkedIn | https://www.linkedin.com/in/garyguseinov/
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Host: Marco Ciappelli, Co-Founder at ITSPmagazine [@ITSPmagazine] and Host of Redefining Society Podcast
On ITSPmagazine | https://www.itspmagazine.com/itspmagazine-podcast-radio-hosts/marco-ciappelli
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Episode Introduction
Welcome to an exciting episode of Redefining Society, hosted by the always intriguing Marco Ciappelli. Today, we dive deep into the entwined world of technology, privacy, and cybersecurity, exploring how our relationship with technology has evolved over the years and how it continues to shape our daily lives. Our guest is industry veteran Gary Guseinov, who brings decades of expertise and unique insights to the table.
From social media to artificial intelligence, today's episode explores the omnipresence of connected devices and the ever-changing landscape of our digital existence. With both Gary and Marco holding candid discussions on topics like digital fingerprinting and the privacy grey area, this episode challenges you to examine your relationship with the technology you use every day.
As we take a look back at how things have changed over the past years, we also delve into the future, questioning the course of cybersecurity and privacy. Together, Marco and Gary challenge listeners to think about their role as consumers and their understanding of technology's intersection with daily life. They also discuss the ethical implications of how our data is collected and used, the ambiguity surrounding privacy, and our ability to control it.
Moreover, we delve into the realm of cybersecurity and its relationship with privacy, which as Gary states, is more unpredictable, unknown, and undefined. The pair also share their perspectives on the ethics of media buying, the ever-evolving laws, and how consumers can protect themselves from potential threats.
Today's episode of Redefining Society is not only a deep dive into the fascinating world of technology and privacy but also an essential education for every listener navigating this digital age. You'll gain a fresh perspective on the decisions you make online and a newfound appreciation for the subtle intricacies of the digital world.
We encourage you to share this episode with your colleagues, family, and friends, sparking more conversations about our digital society. We invite you to step into the future with us, question your relationship with technology, and perhaps redefine it in the process.
Don't forget to subscribe to Redefining Society, your go-to podcast for understanding the ever-changing landscape of our digital society. Because the only constant in this world is change, and being equipped with knowledge is the best way to navigate it.
So, let's redefine society together.
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Resources
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To see and hear more Redefining Society stories on ITSPmagazine, visit:
https://www.itspmagazine.com/redefining-society-podcast
Watch the webcast version on-demand on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnYu0psdcllTUoWMGGQHlGVZA575VtGr9
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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 useful for our audience.
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voiceover00:15
Welcome to the intersection of technology, cybersecurity, and society. Welcome to ITSPmagazine. Let's face it, the future is now we're living in a connected cyber society, and we need to stop ignoring it or pretending that it's not affecting us. Join us as we explore how humanity arrived at this current state of digital reality, and what it means to live amongst so much technology and data. Knowledge is power. Now, more than ever.
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Marco Ciappelli01:52
We're live but actually we're not like we're recording. So if you're watching this, it's already happened. So this is Marco Ciappelli. We're redefining society podcasts and ITSPmagazine. Today, again, same disclaimer, if you're listening to this, there is a video version. If you're watching this and you want to listen to this later on in the car, you can do that because there's going to be a podcast version as well. And there'll be everything in the note. Now me alone, that's boring. As I always say, I have a great guest today. Gary, Gary goosing off, I hope I'm pronouncing your last name correctly. If not, it's because I'm Italian so sorry and get away with murder. But happy to have you on the show. Let Tell me a little bit about yourself. And then we're going to dig into what we're planning to talk about today, sir, for the funding society.
Gary Guseinov02:47
Yeah, Mark. Thanks for having me on the show. I'm happy to be here. I've been in cybersecurity space for over 20 years, I started a company called Cyber defender 2003. Prior to that, I was in the direct response, customer acquisition business, I had my own agency. I've also co founded a few tech companies. One of them was an influencer marketing company that ultimately blog Tik Tok to United States. And so I'm very familiar with customer acquisition marketing have acquired over a billion consumers. I've managed about five to $10 billion of media, and have done about $500 million of venture capital private equity fundraising for my different ventures. I currently run a company called Real defense where Pasadena based tech company we provide cybersecurity privacy and optimization software technology services to consumers directly. We also licensed our technology, we're in 33 countries, we are in 4000 retail stores, we're partnered with Lenovo, Dell, some of the biggest PC manufacturers in the world. And we're the leading company in this category. In terms of scale, we have millions of subscribers, and very profitable and growing raised about $50 million in and working capital over the past five years.
Marco Ciappelli04:04
That's a lot of good stuff. So you've been in this industry for a while. And that's a good thing. I mean, I always think 1410 20 years in this industry, it's it's it's centuries of culture, if you look back in history, like you know, sometimes we have conversation, we've been doing this ITSPmagazine thing for eight years and and I look back at five years, I'm like, wow, things have changed. But you know, what isn't changes I feel there's still that the need for education for consumers. And I think today we're gonna dig into that. I mean, I'm sure you can talk about heavy cybersecurity, but that's not that channel. That's my my partner, Sean that that talk about? Cybersecurity in this case is more for me the relationship between security technology which Always come together you can really divide it and, and our daily life and mass media and social media and all of that. So I like maybe to start with a look back at what you have learned and what you've seen change it into how things have become better worst for consumers and in their knowledge and about cybersecurity, privacy and the way they interact with with all of this.
Gary Guseinov05:29
Ya know, it's interesting, you know, in I was always concerned about privacy, more than I was concerned about cybersecurity. And this is, as in comparison to, you know, if you compare the two, and you, you have to look at cybersecurity from just a sort of general understanding that you have to block and tackle threats at all time. So there's viruses, malware, there's Trojans, there's all kinds of attacks that happen on devices all the time, and those attacks have to be blocked and tackled. So that's obvious. And you have to have, it's like having a bumper on your car seat belt, you have to have the privacy area is very ambiguous. It's it's unpredictable, it's unknown, it's undefined. For many reasons. It's not defined as a category in terms of when you say privacy. Do you mean, your physical privacy? Do you mean, your photos? Do you mean videos? You mean, YouTube? Do you mean your geolocation? Do you mean when you're walking into Starbucks and Starbucks trucks your, you know, on, you know, goings and and you're what you've purchased? Is that part of privacy? Where does it start? Where does it end? There's no definition. So the the opportunity, I think is, comes down to understanding what your risks are, as a consumer, focusing on what you can control what you're doing, and not focusing on what you can't control. Not expect technology companies that are not in the business of privacy, like social media networks, and others, expect them to protect your privacy. That's not their business, they're not there to protect your privacy, they're there to exploit information. I was gonna go around, yeah, they're, they're making money off of your behavior. They're not trying to hurt you. They're not trying to make your life miserable. That's not their intent. But you have to understand what's happening. And so once you do understand what's happening, then you should take appropriate steps. And so I'm happy to discuss the spectrum of what that is, and hopefully, you know, consumers that or people, anyone, anyone who's listening to this can make their own decisions based on how much they want to, you know, exploit themselves and, and whatnot. And so the spectrum is really wide.
Marco Ciappelli07:51
Yeah, of course, we can talk about a million things. But what what I want to talk about is what I'm kind of familiar with being, you know, coming from years of branding and advertising and marketing, and been doing that. All school when I started, you know, before the commercial Internet, really, and in the commercial Internet, and the calm of social media. So I think you're kind of already touching on that and exploiting privacy. Because as at this point, a lot of people say, if you're not the client, you're the product. So if you don't pay for something, you're still paying for something with something. And for me, it comes to do you know, or you don't know, have you been tricked into, hey, this is free, I'm not going to tell you what I'm going to do with all your data. Or here's where you can do you can pay and get the ads, you can pay or not pay. Give me your data. How do you feel about that? I mean, you said, You've been into this media buying industry. How has this evolved? And how do you feel about that from an ethical perspective?
Gary Guseinov09:02
Yeah, I have a lot of opinion about that. So I understand both sides of it. I understand the advertising side, I understand how advertising tech works. I've built my own technologies around that. I also understand the risk for the consumer. I think the problem starts with disclosure and explicit sort of communication that doesn't exist in the relationship between the advertiser and the consumer. And it's it's been ambiguous over the years. And it's become even more ambiguous now. And advertisers, ad networks and various advertisers don't necessarily control the interaction between their product and the consumer online because of third party networks and technologies like browsers and devices that are standing between the advertiser and the consumer. So there's a lot of you know, sort of dependent See on these other players, it's third parties to deliver the right message to communicate disclosure properly to deal with that information, the way that they said they're going to deal with it. And so there's a big Delta there. More importantly, is that the laws that have been enacted, so GDPR, and all kinds of other laws, the United States and Europe to protect the consumer address one layer of of this of this problem, right, they're saying, Well, if you're going to collect, you know, first name, last name and email address of someone, you have to maintain certain disclosures, you have to, you know, let them opt out, etc. Where the advertisers are moving towards is fingerprinting, digital fingerprinting, where they don't need to know who you are, they don't need to know your name, your IP address, it's all being recorded in form of a digital profile that can travel with you anywhere you go. So you can be 10 steps away from the actual transaction process, and still know who that person is, regardless of their IP address, or even their name or anything, anything demographically, psychographically associated with them. And so that fingerprinting comes in lots of different flavors, it's how you type it's websites you visit, it's, it's your digital footprint that's unique to you, it cannot be duplicated by anyone, when you add artificial intelligence on top of this, it becomes impossible to, to block because anything you do online becomes very clearly identifiable. Okay. And so in the sort of government uses this tech to track that people, right, that that's been going on for a long time. And we know that and I think that's totally okay, because you have to have this layer of sophistication where you're blocking against terrorist attacks, or some sort of, you know, behavior that that could, you know, hurt people. But when it comes to practical living, you know, someone buying insurance policy and buying a car, whatever that information is to mitigate it. And so what when you start interacting with digital devices, every one of your steps that you take, whether it's downloading an app or doing something within that app, it's all recorded, it's all tracked, it's not done to hurt you, it's just done as a matter of process. This is what these companies do. And so a practical sort of solution is, don't give up information of you don't have to give it up. Okay, just don't give it to anyone. If you're going to give up information, and you don't know this other entity, this party, this app, this company's website, don't give them real information, you can give hypothetical information that that you can later retract or not use, so that you can't they can't use it against you. The other one is separate yourself from being digitally identified. So use special tools that obfuscate digital fingerprinting, Latin words, tools that make it seem as if the company that wants that information is getting it. But in fact, they're getting inaccurate information. So you're basically creating like a smokescreen around yourself. There's tools to do that. Put a VPN on your device. So if you're traveling or you're at home, and you want your IP to be obfuscated, for certain transactions, or certain websites, or certain apps, then use a VPN, there are lots of benefits to using these types of tools. And so you have to be aware that those risks are out there and that you need to take precautionary steps. Not at every time, not every time you connect to the internet, not at every app that you use. But in some instances, you should use these these technologies to protect yourself. So
Marco Ciappelli13:56
it sounds to me and I understand that that of course. It's up to the user in certain circumstances, but there is the GDPR. You know, there is the California Protection Act and many others, which to be honest, it's kind of a pain. So I'm gonna get to convenience versus security, right convenience versus paying the price for it. So it's all great. I mean, the I'm in the cybersecurity field, I'm going to be at RSA pretty soon in San Francisco, I hear the stories. I think about the everyday user. And you know, I'm not not a cybersecurity expert, per se, but I mean the, you know, I talk about it quite a bit from a society perspective. And then I think about I don't know, my friends or my dad or my wife or whatever it is, I'm like even if I say use it to if a two factor authentication, I can see the eyes roll all the way back in the in the head, and it's a damn You know, or password manager? I mean, I've we've talked about this thing for a long time. But don't too is there, on your opinion, a different approach that could change things? I mean, do you see like regulation to be? And the other question is to is, wants to your personal information or out of the bag? Can you put it back in the bag? Like, you know, for you know, right, we forgot? I don't know. I'm not a big fan of
Gary Guseinov15:34
it, you know? Yeah, it's difficult to answer that. So I'll do my best. I think that technology companies have a duty and a responsibility to be good actors, right in this in this theater. Right? They have to do the right thing at the end of the day. And so what they don't do very well is they don't, and this is actually consistent across the board with old tech. They don't think of cybersecurity as a component of their development process, right? So when they sit down and say, Let's build an app, dating app, what have you, cybersecurity or security, whether it's privacy, or physical security, or virtual security doesn't come into their mind. They don't, they don't think of it as as a must have. They think of it as a good to have and also a reaction to something bad happening. So let's take dating, online dating, for example, right? There are lots of problems in online dating world fake profiles, scams, people who don't, you know, are not who they say they are fake pictures. You know, what have you there's all kinds of problems, right? The companies who develop these apps didn't think about those things before they made those apps they should have because that's a that's a natural sort of evolution of the problem, right? If you're going to create these virtual environments, there's going to be scams. So they react to them. When the bad something, someone gets hurt, someone gets killed, someone complains, then they improve, and then they iterate. Why don't we have the same requirements we have for the automotive industry or the pharma, pharmaceutical industry, for the tech industry. If you if you go by if you build a car, you can't sell it to consumers until department Transportation says that bumper works. Those seatbelts are there for a reason. The engine is supposed to be this size, and the car width needs to be this. If that those guardrails are not there, you're going to have cars made out of cardboard and running on nuclear fusion, a run around the streets, because no one is paying attention to the rules. That's what we have have. That's what's going on with the tech world. There are no guardrails. And so the government at some point in the in the late 90s, early 2000, had the section 230 enacted with which gave basically carte blanche to every tech company and do whatever they want with the data they collect and the data they utilize for for for their websites or their apps, and then different additional environments. And so since then, there hasn't been any changes to it. But section 230 is a horrible law, it, it needs to be changed and updated to conform to modern standards.
Marco Ciappelli18:21
Can you can you explain it for the audience that may not know No, I mean, of course, not the entire law, but kind of like the gist of it and why it is a problem? Yeah, it's
Gary Guseinov18:31
relatively simple. It basically says that, if you are someone like a social media company, and so on post content on your network, that content is not the responsibility of the social network.
Marco Ciappelli18:47
Because they are not the one producing that
Gary Guseinov18:49
content. There are two companies. It's that same same concept of a telephone, you know, are you responsible for the conversation that takes place? Is the phone company responsible? And that's their that's their logic, but differences is that the conversation that happens on the phone is not public information. But the content that is delivered online, can become public and is public and is indexed. Okay. So that argument doesn't work in today's world. And and and I think that, you know, law makers are afraid or don't know how to change the law to address this concern, and more importantly, are pressured by the big tech companies not to change it, because if they do change this law can imagine what will happen to big companies like Facebook and others who live off of this. They live off of this content. And so there are ways to mitigate this. I think that if you put the right disclosures in place, make them explicit. Tell users what exactly is going to happen once they submit their information, what's not going to help And if you need to do something with that data and share it, just ask, tell the user and say, You know what, we're going to sell your first name, last name and address to 50 companies, and they're going to pay us a lot of money, we're going to give you a small fraction of that payment. Do you agree? Yes or no? Yes, I agree, guess what, everybody gets paid. Everyone has an understanding of what's going to happen. And we move on with our day. But what happens is, all this activity happens in the background, without our knowledge, they get make money, consumers don't make any money. And then later, you find out that some broker had your information, you get upset, and then you start, you know, filing lawsuits and all that. And so I think the there's a little gap there between disclosure, you know, opportunity to maybe even make some money for the consumer and mitigate that situation before becomes a problem. So that's not there. I don't think I'll ever be there.
Marco Ciappelli21:03
Well, you know, I know we're getting philosophical, which is my territory, I'd love that, you know, when we're going to the people think and, you know, make it just a definition of privacy, you started with that, you know, privacy now is not what privacy used to be. It's kind of a joke, but you know, it is. But I was reading the other day on monitoring, no, it wasn't even read, it was on NPR, there was a segment about how big stores are gonna put names there. But imagine a lot of big chains that give you a card. So you get a discount, you put your phone number in there, you get the discount, well, it doesn't stop there is not that they do it, they get your information of everything you buy, just for their own sake and give you a better service, they sell it to third party, that they then sell it to third party, then they re aggregate the crap out of it sorry for the word. And all of a sudden, they know. And then if somebody is pregnant, they know if you know how many people you have in the family, you got kids, I mean, crazy. And this is even without the Internet. I mean, even without computation and big data. This was done years and years ago. So it's not a new system. And it's just amplified to the extreme when you do it online. Right? When the smiley company does it, it's okay, because you get the recommendation that you want. And you're okay with it. But do you really know what's going on in the back of that? My question is, do you think people really care?
Gary Guseinov22:49
Well, some people will think that not maybe not everyone, but I think some people care, I think the the question should be is whether or not, if you don't want your information to be tracked, you should have the ability to do that, you should be able to say to the company, I don't want to be tracked in here, you know, I don't need to tell you why I just don't want to be tracked for whatever reason. So I think that option should exist. And that option should not be, you know, it should not exist in some sort of a vacuum or, you know, it should be easy for you to do so. And it currently isn't the benefit of predictability, meaning the whether it's artificial intelligence or big businesses, big tech companies being able to kind of predict what you're going to do, there's a benefit to that. And in fact, the benefit is dramatic, if you, you know, are being offered certain products at the right moment. If you're driving and you're being told where to go to avoid traffic, if you know, if your life becomes better with predictability and artificial intelligence, then everybody wins. Because it's a good thing, right? But the minute you don't want that the minute you don't want to be predicted, you don't want to be pitched, you should be able to say no. And that note is does not exist in a vacuum and needs to be clearly communicated to those parties involved. And maybe it's temporary. Now, maybe I don't want to be tracked for two days. And then I want to turn it back on again, right? It's not permanent. And so that mechanism of control doesn't exist. And so you have to be the warrior at the end of the day, utilizing these different technologies know when to turn them on or off and mitigated.
Marco Ciappelli24:31
Which is crazy. Come on. I know. So talking about this, uh, like to touch I don't know, we didn't we didn't talk about this before. But what you just mentioned, it makes me think about the promise of web 3.0 And all encryption and all the thing that you know, I'm going to turn it on when I need it to do this transaction. I'm going to take it Back inside my wallet again and you can't get my information anymore. I'm asking this to different people. And some people are very excited about it. Some people say it's kind of a marketing pitch. How do you feel about this? Do you think that it could actually happen that all of a sudden we switch something and we have a better system?
Gary Guseinov25:22
But I don't think it's going to happen like that quickly. What is the idea behind virtual reality, virtual virtual reality has been here for a long time. And I don't know if you remember, the virtual reality market playing which VR ml, it was a HTML alternative that basically allowed you to write code in such a way where everything was a virtual reality, there was special browser plugins for it. This is Netscape days, this is 15 years old, or maybe even more off because it required a lot of computing power. And so for virtual reality web three to actually work in the way it's intended to work. We don't have the computing power today to do it, we don't have the chips, we don't have the internet speeds. So that's one of the biggest sort of stumbling blocks we're going to be coming across in the next 510 years. The bigger issue is utility of this technology, right? So do we want to use virtual reality as a replacement to other tech, which is right
Marco Ciappelli26:14
now, and I was talking about more than that to the encryption. So you know, I was talking about the the old encryption and you know, the like, kind of like the cryptocurrency and operating system like that. So virtual reality is another thing, of course, but I was referring to retaining in the in the crypto chain, your individuality and not sharing it with everybody.
Gary Guseinov26:40
Right? So. So the, you know, one of the problems that web three is trying to solve is the virtualization of communication streams. So right now, when you have SMS, email, we have all these different ways social media accounts, you have to maintain different code bases, different security protocols for all those different streams of communication. Imagine if they all went away, and the only thing you had was your virtual reality presence in the web three space. So think of it as avatars. Got it, got it. Got it, right. So that avatar is now talking through all these different streams, email, web, the whole thing. And IT security is really your digital identity that happens to web three. So the security component is virtualized. And it's almost like a sandbox in the cloud. Like, it doesn't hit you on your device, it hits you in the cloud. So all those messages and everything else that goes there, that's much easier to control from a security standpoint, then the machine that that is currently getting hit with the threat. Because every every machine has to be separately managed separately secured, not the virtual environment, virtual environment can be secured in real time much faster than the endpoint device needs to be secured for a zero day attack. So that that's an ideal scenario. Okay. Are we even close to that? No one has this technology. No one's talking about this technology. I don't know what Facebook is working on with 10s of billions of dollars spent. But they're building video games, are they building actual new world operating system, new world security environments, which is what we really need, not more video games. And so I you know, I think we're far away from this. It's all hypothetical. And yes, it'd be great if your identity is presented in this virtual form and the blockchain or maybe some derivative of blockchains I'm not a big fan of blockchain. It's I don't think it's sophisticated I think it's old tech. There's other ways to to do this. You don't need a blockchain to track information it's I think that's it's a waste of energy because you're tracking information that's inconsequential. There are other tech better tech out there to secure your your virtual identity. But what would be interesting is if you if that virtual identity was was first of all very secure and second of all was an opportunity for you meaning if that if your information is used in any way you get paid. If your information is looked up some other way you know who is looking at it you can control turn off turn on right and the advocates of of cryptocurrency they're big pitches. You don't need a bank, you can just store your own money. We can't even store keep our packages safe and fire our house. People who steal our you know, Amazon boxes, right? Somehow be good stewards of cryptocurrency in a virtual environment. It sounds amazing, but it's not practical. In today's world. It has to be really secure and stable for someone to take the position that banking is unnecessary, and I can make Take my own currency, my own digital identity, my own digital life in a virtual environment in a very secure form. Yeah.
Marco Ciappelli30:09
It's, I get no, go ahead. Go ahead, finish. No, I
Gary Guseinov30:13
say hopefully we'll get there. I don't think we're anywhere near that point. Yeah,
Marco Ciappelli30:17
yeah, I was gonna say that it's beautiful to think about that as the Utopia the ideal solution. But the reason why I asked you that, and I'm still thinking, they're all the walled gardens that we're dealing with everyday. And and now I understand why you went with a virtual reality, meaning your virtual, digital tween persona, that that's what you use. And you realize that you just said how complicated it is because not only you have different languages, but you have, you know, you are different password, you are different logins, you can just log into Facebook and login into another one with the same I mean, they're trying to do that, you know, they're trying to say log with this log with that. But already, you have, I don't know, 345 different competitors in that and they're all trying to keep you in their own walled garden. And I kind of think about that when I think about the metaverse and people like, yeah, there is this Metaverse and there is this metaverse. And I'm like, if you want to call a Metaverse, it's one. Because like, the moment I can go with my stuff from one to another, that's gonna be the metaverse. Otherwise, you're giving me another platform? You know, it's it's not what I'm thinking, to be honest with you. And I think I think we went a little bit on the tangent here with that. But it does connect with this concept of privacy, which is where I want to end our conversation again. And I don't know if there is an answer, which many times during my conversation there isn't there is not an answer. There is a lot of thinking, a lot of thoughts a lot of if, and maybe and what would be and but the reality is that right now, I don't think there is a solution that you just take it, apply it and all of a sudden, the whole, the whole internet and connected world is going to change.
Gary Guseinov32:16
I see the future where consumers are going to take extraordinary steps to protect their privacy, I think I see a future where privacy exploitation will reach levels that we haven't seen before, because it's extremely profitable and and saves companies a lot of money by being very macro micro targeted on consumer behavior. It reduces the inefficiency of the advertising dollar and inefficiency of manufacturing process and efficiency of human capital investment. And so if you look at all those areas of opportunity, and you use artificial intelligence to reduce these costs, you're going to want to invest heavily into microtargeting. And so I think we're just at the cusp of that of the rise of that. On a consumer side, I think you're going to see clothing designers come up with products that obfuscate your facial, you know, your visual of your face in such a way where cameras cannot detect your biometric. They identify you, I think you're going to see technologies that obfuscate your physical presence by giving away fake information so that beacons cannot pick up on your geolocation, I think you're going to see tools and software that obfuscates your metadata online, so that it makes it seem like you're in one place where you're not, because you don't want to be robbed, or you don't want to someone to know where you're actually currently present that your friends and family, whatever, advertisers, and so I think we're going to see a lot of evolution, going in separate directions, I don't think we're going to see kind of everyone come together and shake hands and say, here's how we're going to play nice in the sandbox, that's not going to happen. It's the opposite. And we're going to see consumers that are gonna be very sophisticated, who are going to have very special tools, equipment, hardware, software, and special utilities that protect our identity on different levels. And businesses are going to get even more sophisticated to, to address this opportunity in terms of micro targeting. That's happening already.
Marco Ciappelli34:20
Yeah, I mean, I wish we had the, the, the answer for for everything and 42 Maybe, you know, that's the magic number. But it is it's just the way we are you know, it's social engineering has been done since the beginning of our societies. Now it's done different it's exponential. I think like, online as broke everything, you know, AI I've conversation about AI and use for use it for phishing email, and it's like, yeah, you can have a targeted phishing email one on one done by In a I in a fraction of a second, instead of having to send the same one to everyone, and let's see who bites I mean, it's gonna be difficult and difficult. So I don't want to scare anyone. But I also think that education is definitely that. And the answer, again, is, maybe to go back to the social media in the bubble of information, and are they responsible or not? I think in the end, somebody's gonna have to take some responsibility, because, like you said, it's not about one single call is about you, and 1000s and 100 1000s. And millions of people are seeing that fake news, for example, and somebody's got to do something about it, he's gonna be an AI, I don't know, but somebody's gonna have to catch that thing. And I think companies are doing a lot, I think it's not in their interest to keep this going out of control.
Gary Guseinov35:51
I think that, you know, if you could put the future of blockchain on the map here, in terms of how could help, I think where it could help is on collective intelligence level, in other words, consumers, creating their own network of intelligence that fights back on a collective level, not an individual level. And so individually, you can only spend so much on cybersecurity and privacy tools, let's say it's 1000s of dollars a year. That's very high. But if you are using collective thinking collective, you know, reasoning collective, you know, sort of security across the network, you can spend a lot more collectively and defend your yourself against these types of threats. And so we were far even further away from that. But once we have very high, you know, high end chips that can be embedded into, you know, our bodies, and we come closer to the singularity and all those things are happening. You gotta see collective security as an as a as a sort of barrier to entry for anyone for businesses or governments, what have you, I think we're somehow going to get there in the next, you know, maybe 20 to 30 years. But that's the best security measurement that you can take is only when you have the masses, not not individually, or yes, your device,
Marco Ciappelli37:27
the power of the crowd. And I like that concept of collective security, the idea of community coming together, either small businesses or cities that create that protection, I think it's, it's great because it doesn't preclude globalization, but it doesn't force the community again, which you know, it's part of who we are. So Gary, I enjoyed this conversation, we went all over the places. But I think, again, show like this is successful, an episode like this, if makes people think. So I want I want people to think I think there was a lot of interesting point that you made in terms of be on guard and, and take precaution. And most of all, understand what you're using as much as you can, given that nothing comes with a manual anymore. And probably we couldn't even understand half of half of half of that manual. But at least some disclaimers, I think it could be could be helpful. And until then, yeah, just just do what you can. And stay tuned, because we'll have many more conversations like this on redefining society, because we did we do need to change and redefine ourselves as we go. Maybe not as fast as technology evolve. But you know, we're going to try to keep up. And people like Gary, that that look at these things. Do this business out of this and think about what the possible outcome will be. I think it's a good thing. So share it with your friends and family. If you thought you got something out of that subscribe to redefine society, podcast and ITSPmagazine. And, of course in the notes, there'll be links to Gary, his company, what he does and how to get in touch with. So, Gary, thank you so much. Great conversation.
Gary Guseinov39:19
Martha, thank you pleasure being here.
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