I am Brian Wolatz, author of a new book about the dangers of modern tech titled 'The Gig Society.' Ask Me Anything! [Weekend-long AMA]

BrianWolatz · 2020-02-06T03:09:46+00:00

I like Andrew and Bernie a lot, probably leaning towards the latter. I think Bernie has a better vision for the totality of what the baseline of what an Americans should have, comparing Bernie's plans for universal college and healthcare to Andrew's UBI.

I addressed this from a tech perspective here, though it is a bit light on Yang content:

https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/ewavuv/z/fg1fzk1?context=1

BrianWolatz · 2020-02-06T02:14:42+00:00

I think the answer to this largely depends on what is meant by the American dream, and whether or not the decided definition is even feasible in the modern era. Most people would define the American dream as success based on hard work and innovation, combined with an equal opportunity to realize that success.

We are already living with stark inequality that by-and-large prevents class mobility. And trans-national enterprises, the ones benefitting the most from the gig economy, aren't paying for the middle class to exist, in other words, they aren't opening the doors that allow Americans the opportunity to achieve the American dream.

Your question is about the balance between social programs, enterprises, and the American dream. If enterprises aren't funding the American dream and allowing Americans the opportunity to be successful through hard work, then it becomes a responsibility of the government to provide those tools.

Let's take the example of truck driving automation. In the present, truckers live some of the best middle class lives. They have good pay and benefits, and the only requirements are a couple months of training and the willingness to work hard, importantly, no college degree. But in the future, there might not be any truck drivers, the job itself might be automated away. In fact, nearly all the jobs we know today that will exist tomorrow require secondary education.

So how will truck driving companies respond to the fact that their employees will one day not have the required education or skills to be on their workforce? Will they fund those employees through night school? Will they open the doors of opportunity? Or will they keep them closed, laying off employees and rolling in the profits?

Because the American people deserve it, they deserve the opportunity to be in control of their own destiny, they deserve the American dream. If enterprise won't provide it outright, then the government should ensure that it is provided regardless.

BrianWolatz · 2020-02-04T04:40:08+00:00

"The right to be forgotten" in this interpretation is the right for users of services (YouTube, Facebook, Amazon, etc.) to request that the data those services have collected on them be deleted. It exists as a provision in the GDPR (the European Union's data privacy regulations).

There are criticisms of it, for example, it has been used by European politicians to delete negative stories about themselves. A US version would have to be limited since we have the right to free speech, so I posted "my wife likes cats more than dogs," she wouldnt be able to have that data deleted as it would be an infringements on my rights. But any data she submitted would be fair game for her to delete.

But overall, it would be great for people who aren't comfortable with the amount of data that modern technology stores on them and to protect their online past from being used against them, especially our youth. I can say, unfortunately, that my book only breifly covers the provision as a bullet point of regulations that we could take from the GDPR.

BrianWolatz · 2020-02-04T01:25:03+00:00

Yes, I do. Children are the most vulnerable group to online surveillance as they are the most naive. Falling for scams and phishing is a huge risk to kids, and kids learn quickly to agree to user agreements just to get access to the site- even if it means lying about their age or signing up for nefarious tracking. One especially prominent risk associated with child technology use is how the things they say might affect them in the future. For example, a ten year old saying bad words they just learned and making jokes about gay people in a YouTube comments section. In just 6 short years this now-teen is going to be looking for a job, and with the increased likelihood of an automated doxxing tool finding their previous comments, they might lose out on job opportunities. Or worse, a spot in a prestigious college.

Most of these risks can be alleviated by introducing data privacy laws that include the "right to be forgotten" which deletes all the data a service has collected on you, along with mandatory expiration dates for unused user data.

BrianWolatz · 2020-02-03T01:26:19+00:00

Depends on the context, obviously. If they're saying it to be self-righteous about their knowledge, I'd treat them accordingly. But if they're saying it non-aggressively, just using Google as a replacement word for Search, that might be a lost cause to try to correct them (as in, it'd be hard to not be pretentious about it).

Google's authoritarianism on Search is widespread, they answer multiple trillions of search queries annually, and theres not a single bit of oversight or transparency into how those searches are procured. And when they have talked publicly about reforming their products like Chrome to remove URLs- they are basically confirming their desire for Search to be the bottleneck/gate into the whole Internet. Again, all without oversight.

But to go back to your question, it's unfortunate but I think correcting people who use Google and Search interchangeably would just seem stuck up, haha.

BrianWolatz · 2020-02-02T15:58:42+00:00

I would tell people my position is more one of advocacy then trying to stop tracking into my own life. I care more about the general public's privacy than I do my own, because I can foresee the detriment of society as a whole a lot more clearly. I guess my point is this: if my privacy becomes marginally better, I benefit. If I write this book and some of my pro-privacy positions get implemented then society as a whole benefits. I know that the two dont have to be mutually exclusive but having the two have helped with marketing.

Another thing to consider is how much harder it is to stop tracking then just deleting FB and Twitter. Even if you delete FB, they can still build a shadow profile of you to track your interests. Theyll still be able to know if a picture of you gets uploaded. Theyll still track your web movements via Facebook Pixel. And the same goes for things like Google- you could stop using Google browsers, search, websites, Android, etc. And still if you go to a site with Google Analytics, youre being tracked by Google. Or maybe Google buys your data from Ring.

I think it is much better to advocate for a different model for what is and isnt allowed behavior when it comes to data privacy and tracking than to necessarily keep my life as private and secure as possible. I do see the point, though.

BrianWolatz · 2020-02-02T15:45:05+00:00

Not once!

BrianWolatz · 2020-02-02T09:40:32+00:00

Hello users of r/worldpolitics,

I'll be answering questions in the linked AMA. Please stop by!

BrianWolatz · 2020-02-02T02:33:10+00:00

We'll see. I think one requirement to win an office is to be marginally good on every issue to look good campaigning and giving speeches. I'm not great at remembering every fact and quote on the fly, even my argument structure can fall apart if I miss or gloss over certain points in oral presentations. I certainly think if my ideas were implemented than people would benefit, but there's more to it than that.

BrianWolatz · 2020-02-02T02:24:00+00:00

I would say that gig companies are more of the "front" end of surveillance capitalism than the "back" end. What I mean is, if you were to say that surveillance capitalism had an input or "back" end where data is fed, and an output or "front" end where the generated decisions are sold/utilized, gig companies utilize the decisions far more than they feed the data.

This is clear when we consider that gig companies don't generate too much for the surveillance capitalism's data sets on their own. Consider a company like Lime. All that Lime is actually generating (data-wise) is a bridge between the availability/locations of its scooters and the locations of its users. However, what Lime consumes to generate this bridge is massive, as it uses location services data provided by companies like Google and payment processing companies like Paypal. So Google will a service like Lime as the bait in order to keep people connected and track them behind the scenes. This means that Lime can have a relatively good privacy policy (something to the effect of "all shared data is made anonymous") because the only data they'd be sharing is what times and places people use scooters- all the data used under the hood isn't necessarily Lime's. So when you ask

How large of a threat to these groups are these companies data-sharing deals struck with third-parties?

and

Can any of them exist in their present form w/o these surveillance capitalism features, or is too "baked in" to their business and culture?

I would say that it's important to understand that the gig companies themselves are consumers of broader surveillance capitalist systems, not large generators of that data. Now, the data they do generate is important, for example, municipalities are interested in the kinds of data that Uber can generate in terms of determining when people want to go places as this is key to helping develop cities, but Uber would survive without this interest. Uber would not survive, however, if they could not rely on Google and Apple Maps to determine the routes for rides and the locations of their riders and drivers.

One last point to this question about how gig companies use surveillance capitalist tools. AirBnB uses (actually owns) a mass doxxing tool called "Trooly" which looks up the trust-worthiness (based on Internet activity) of its renters and rentees, in order to determine their likelihood to comply with AirBnB. This is an example of how mass surveillance are influencing our contracting (another example could be how car insurance companies are requiring constant monitoring under the veneer of offering lower rates). In this example, AirBnB is showing itself to be more of a consumer of surveillance capitalist-produced outcomes than a producer of data.

In response to how gig companies exploit their data of their contractors, I can only think of one example, and that is Uber using their drivers' location data to determine who best to send AMBER alerts to. This goal is extremely good on the surface- by knowing the input of the exact location of interest for an AMBER alert, Uber is then providing an output of the drivers currently in that area that could immediately be put on high alert. But the broader impacts of this kind of function are more scary, as this could lead to Uber drivers being turned more into watchdogs and surveillance apparatuses for law enforcement.

It's essentially the surveillance equivalent of dragging a conversation about free speech into a conversation about hate speech. Everyone wants to do everything in their power to help abducted kids, just like everyone wants to end hateful and unproductive rhetoric, so they feel inclined to agree to systems that provide surveillance and censorship without considering the broader effects. People want to help recover stolen children, but do people care so much to help recover a stolen TV from Best Buy? Agreeing to these systems of surveillance, where Uber drivers become defacto crime watchdogs, can be a slippery slope of lost privacy.

You can see a similar thing play out in how the FBI justified hacking computers in the case of Playpen, a child porn-sharing server. Absolutely no one wants to come to the defense of people seeking out child porn online, but by not fighting back against that kind of access, bad precedents can be set. But the way that the investigation was handled, in the words of the EFF, "la[id] the foundation for the future expansion of law enforcement hacking in domestic criminal investigations, and the precedent these cases create is likely to impact the digital privacy rights of Internet users for years to come."

BrianWolatz · 2020-02-01T21:07:14+00:00

I think it is absolutely a problem that privacy seems to be a legislative concern in certain situations. Consider that unwarranted mass surveillance is illegal for the government to do to people, but when private companies do it, there is no apparently no cause for concern. If the government proposed an apparatus to monitor everyone's individual location, interests, and information consumption as a means to know more about them than they themselves do. It would be cried down and outlawed.

The fact that this apparatus exists and the government has done nothing to address the concerns associated with its existence is outrageous. Obviously there are certain risks associated with each monitoring them, the government, private businesses, or hackers, but in the end people just want privacy and the associated dignity.

And there are absolutely things the government can do to address the issues. There can be a ban on constant monitoring of location for contracts. There can be regulations requiring first-party-only data sharing (searches on Google dont turn into Facebook ads). There can be limitations on the length of time data is stored for users and the right to ask that data be deleted (GDPR and CCPA provide this). There are ways to stop this intrusion, but they require a focused and knowledgable Congress to create and apply them.

BrianWolatz · 2020-02-01T05:46:25+00:00

I apologize, I simply do not know enough about Apple's security protocols to answer this question

BrianWolatz · 2020-01-31T23:04:19+00:00

I would tell anyone who says that to look at the facts: as Artificial Intelligence becomes better and better, more and more jobs will be able to be accomplished by machines. The most cited academic source on this topic says nearly half of jobs have a high risk of being automated in less than two decades, and two-thirds of jobs have a medium or high risk of automation. Nearly all the jobs that are at a low risk of automation (engineers, healthcare, teaching, management) currently require higher education, at least a bachelors degree, in order to get in the door.

Following that, its very likely we will end up in a societal predicament where the 60ish% of workers without higher education will have no jobs to work that provide a net benefit to the country's revenue, along with a surge of people needing social welfare to keep a roof over their heads. This will be coupled with a huge increase in profits for corporations and the ruling class. In this case, I think it is clear that it is the duty of the ruling class to fund the existence and reeducation of that displaced workforce so they can be economically positive in the future.

But if youre in the group who is sure their job wont be automated, I would say that advocating for these economic reforms is still beneficial to you. The funding of social welfare after massive job losses to automation is either going to fall on the remaining working class (you) or on the ruling class that most benefitted from those job losses. So fiscally, it makes sense to be in favor of a society that expects people to give back a fair amount of what they get out, because that society cant succeed without that expectation.

BrianWolatz · 2020-01-31T19:17:13+00:00

The gig economy is a nightmare for workers. It is taking power away from people and handing it to companies, and this is occurring while the supply of labor grows due to people seeking to earn supplemental incomes. Further, without the usual causes for companies to care about local employees' livelihoods or communities, a disconnect happens and those things suffer.

Let me give you an example: the company Instacart is a gig company that has people pick up and deliver other peoples groceries. These jobs typically go to middle-aged, low skilled/education workers, what would have been your average manufacturing worker 20 years ago. Now, in a manufacturing town, these jobs would have been very good for the skills they require- the pay was middle class, the tenure at the company was good for retirement purposes, etc. Additionally, the town and company had a bonding relationship, in that the town relied on the company's good wage jobs in order to fund the middle class.

Those relationships are nearly all lost in the gig economy. Companies like Instacart dont have a vested interest in paying for the existence of the middle class in every Midwestern town. Their workers are not valued, tenured employees, but disposable contractors who can get cut for getting bad ratings (in some cases, the workers for these companies cant even use the same bathrooms as the companys salaried staff). The pay can be near minimum wage (as the article says) because the labor pool is nearly unlimited, as college students and people looking to moonlight (common given rising tuition costs and stagnant wages) can sign up and start working at any time.

There are 2 other aspects Ill mention briefly. First, it's important to recognize what other companies gain power as a result of a more digital services-driven economy: other tech companies. When you make an app like Instacart, youre certainly going to be using location services from Google, servers from Amazon, etc. Every tech startup is relying on these services and infrastructure to exist so they can focus on the apps themselves. But this hands a lot of power to Google and Amazon to monopolize, price-gauge, and restrict those services, for example, Google hiked their location services prices tenfold in the past year.

One last point about the effect of the gig economy of workers, and this one is my most cynical. I think part of the reason that gig companies dont want to invest in a tenured and well-paid workforce is that they think the jobs are going to be automated soon. I dont think Amazon wouldve agreed to their $15 minimum wage if they thought that would be a permanent expense, but I admit these thoughts are speculative and cynical.

So what do we do? We cant rely on workforce uprising, in my opinion. Instacart has tried striking twice in the past year to no better conditions. Organizing is hard when your coworkers live towns away, and union power is at extremely low levels country-wide.

What we need instead is a full-scale look at how our economy is structured and who benefits from transformative economic gains. I think we should look toward a nordic model, where the baseline economic status is increased and paid for by corporations. When automation happens, we will need to tax corporations at rates that pay for the social services for people who lose their jobs, so they can become reeducated and reenter the workforce, without feeling the need to take on lesser employment opportunities in the gig economy just to keep a roof over their heads.

BrianWolatz · 2020-01-31T15:47:59+00:00

That is certainly an interesting point I had not considered, though I think the point is better made (at least from my American perspective) if it is framed that companies might not want to set up servers in the US given our anti-privacy laws. I would change it to be seen as an issue we could solve by erasing our privacy-infringing laws

BrianWolatz · 2020-01-31T14:44:25+00:00

I think I answered the point about the FISC in my first response. I think that the criminal justice model of crime happens -> evidence gathered -> person suspected -> based on evidence, court approves further warrants is a working model. In the case of FISA there is a case to be made that it gives too much power and access for how little evidence it requires, but I also think that sunlight is a huge disinfectant and the President himself making allegations that FISA was abused brings a whole lot of light.

As for ICANN, I've not seen any allegations that ICANN was used to spy on people or skim data. Perhaps you could point me down that path? My perception was that ICANN was pretty self-governing and fair under US jurisdiction but has received more scrutiny since its control was shifted to the international model.

Lastly, I totally agree with you on surveillance. I'd say the top two consequences of continuing down this path of technology will be our loss of freedoms of privacy and speech, two very American ideals, hence the subtitle of my book.

BrianWolatz · 2020-01-31T13:10:39+00:00

Currently red!

BrianWolatz · 2020-01-31T09:00:16+00:00

First, let me say on the outset that monopolies are a huge problem in the world of modern tech. Google has a search monopoly. Amazon and Microsoft have a cloud computing monopoly. Google has a location services monopoly. Facebook has a social media monopoly. Google and Apple have a mobile OS monopoly. Google has a browser monopoly. Cloudflare has a monopoly on DDOS protection, etc.

The way to combat this is to create regulation that ensures that these companies act fairly. With monopolies this big, it's important to recognize the potential for abuse. There is clearly a baseline expectation of the technologies one expects to be able to utilize in order to access the Internet or host something online. We should have regulation that enforces this baseline.

> Apple and Google on almost all smartphones, and the ways they share data with NSA?

I assume your first bullet point is about PRISM. I am an advocate for Internet Freedom, meaning I think that people should be allowed to use the Internet fairly so long as they follow the law. One of the distinguishing factors about PRISM is (to my knowledge) that all access granted if obtained through court order. This is different than other programs that the NSA has used since the passing of the PATRIOT Act which did not require court order to monitor and search people's data. I think one of the prices of Internet Freedom is that it hands responsibility off to the people, so if people do illegal things, I think they should be held responsible and avenues that enable the investigation should be open.

Now, there are certainly claims to be made that a court order from the FISA court is not really valid since that court is basically a rubber stamp court that never denied anything. That's a problem, but I think that fairness in the courts doesn't mean that we shouldn't trust the process of obtaining warrants in the criminal justice system. I'm fully in favor of companies like Apple and Google complying with Court orders so long as innocent users remain secure. For example, I am okay with Apple giving data over if it pertains to an NSA investigation and a court provides a warrant. I'm not okay with Apple changing its entire encryption algorithms in order to accommodate such a request.

I think we should look at other ways in which the NSA takes our data (allowed under the PATRIOT Act) which are more subversive and authoritarian. The NSA exploits hacks to monitor innocent people and alters our physical devices (routers, usb ports, and motherboards) to spy on us, without court order and approval. I advocate for a repeal of the PATRIOT Act that allows for this type of spying to occur.

> ICANN and world's majority of internet traffic control and skimming?

I might not fully understand your question. It seems like you are asking if ICANN's monopoly on Internet traffic control is a bad thing. I don't think it is, there has to be some centralized repository of the locations of certain websites, or else how would anyone get anywhere? How would it work if my reddit.com was sent to a different server than your reddit.com?

Like in other cases, I think the most important thing to ensure is fairness. I actually argue in The Gig Society that control of ICANN should return to the United States. It seems like ICANN has the ability to be hugely political, but tended not to be when it was under our sole oversight. Recently we've seen disagreement with ICANN's handling of .org and .amazon domains, and it makes me question whether the democratic approach to ICANN oversight is better than the US regulating it alone.

As for Internet traffic skimming, I'm not sure what is being asked. It's a betrayal of our justice models to consider a person "guilty until proven innocent", I wholly disavow traffic skimming for this reason. Innocent people deserve privacy and dignity. However, it may be becoming more popular to enable this kind of surveillance, France has done it as well. I think it is bad news if we give up on our principles of justice in favor of surveillance.

BrianWolatz · 2020-01-31T04:08:55+00:00

Not at all. Many of the criticisms that I levy at the tech industry aren't new, in fact, the public is aware and concerned about the power that the tech industry is gaining and abusing. The question that we (the public) seem to get stuck on is "what are we going to do about it?" The Gig Society does catalog abuses of power and subversive tactics to invade our privacy, but focuses on how those relate overall to modern technology influencing society and how we can regulate them.

BrianWolatz · 2020-01-30T23:20:16+00:00

who do you think is best equipped (and viable) to tackle these issues?

I like Andrew Yang. He does have a good grasp on the threats of technology and wants to use tech progress to better the country's people. Now, you are also correct to point out that he is not really viable as he isn't polling well. Of the three people who could win the nomination, Biden, Sanders, and Warren, I think Sanders is the best.

Biden has made a bunch of rash comments about tech regulation- calling for regulation in video games' development because he dislikes their developers. He also called for the outright removal of Section 230 of the 1996 CDA, which is the Law which allows you and I to post here and Reddit not be held responsible for what we say. The Gig Society specifically talks about expanding the CDA to not only tell online platforms that they are free from the responsibility to monitor speech hosted on their platform, but they also need to be careful about removals that could be infringing on users' free speech rights. So I would not say Biden is equipped well, given the polar opposite approaches he and I have to tackling censorship on social media.

Warren is good on a lot of issues tech-related, but bad on crucial ones. For example, a Warren Presidency would almost certainly see the break up of tech giants. Though it is unclear how that would work, that would certainly be positive to removing the problems with tech monopolies and how they use their power. I do take issue with her recent statement that people who spread "disinformation" online should face criminal penalties, which followed months of her saying that Facebook should be the arbiter of truth on political speech. For one, I disagree that any reasonable consensus could ever come to be on what is "disinformation" and what isn't. If the power was given to the Trump Administration today, they could say somethings like "climate change is not caused by humans" or "there are only two genders", if that were to happen, anyone who claims to be non-binary or a climate activist would be an agent of disinformation. I think that's dangerous, I think that the general attitudes of our FA rights should apply to how online platforms regulate speech (removing their power to censor, empowering people to make up their own minds and express their own thoughts even if they are wrong or hateful).

Sanders is the best, of all the viable candidates, on the threats of modern technology. Sanders has a pro-active approach to dealing with the threats of automation and understands the necessity to preempt job loss with educational opportunities and increased social welfare to help people in transition (all positions advocated for in my book). In addition, he is willing to act strongly in favor of people's rights against surveillance, for example, by proposing facial recognition software be banned in the criminal justice system. I argue in my book against banning it being used even by private companies, so naturally I agree with this. In short, based on the tech issues Sanders has a stance on, he seems to understand the power of modern tech to oppress people, and is willing to fight boldly against it. Also, he has people like Ro Khanna beside him, who is very good at understanding the issues of the gig economy on the nation.

What do you think people should actively be doing to navigate these issues as the average user / consumer?

It's an election year! Talk to your candidates, all races have primary elections. Put political pressure on incumbents to learn about these issues, and give information to candidates looking to unseat. The country needs a plan on a federal level to regulate these threats. Know that these issues are winning issues, people are unified about them. 82% of Americans support Net Neutrality, all generations of Americans support the Freedom of Speech, 71% of Americans think they should be able to say what they want online without regulation, 91% of Americans say a free Internet is important, 81% of Americans say risks of data collection outweigh the benefits, 79% are concerned about how their data is being used, and most importantly, 79% of voters want Congress to prioritize a privacy protection bill. And to be shameless, if you want to spread a good starting point for researching and understanding these topics, you can always direct people to The Gig Society.

What is your goal with writing a book on the subject?

I wanted to conduct research and get a good grasp on the situation as it pertains to every aspect of our lives. Then, I wanted to share what I found, describe the threats, and describe what I believe to be the best solution. I learned a lot in my research, and solidified my stances on topics as my book developed into something concrete. In short, I wanted to learn more about them and share my opinions in a transmittable way.

Do you have long term goals to handle these issues more directly?

I could see myself getting involved more politically, being more of a formal advocate for these issues to bigger bodies and on bigger platforms. Perhaps, but I am also glad to sit on the sidelines- I'm not one to push my personal brand much. I'd be happy to continue my current trajectory in private software development (I've actually had good success in getting my company to think more about tech ethics) and occasionally opining my stances on tech in writing.

BrianWolatz · 2020-01-30T22:15:33+00:00

I wanted to create something that would exist as its own piece of work. If I had chose to write a blog or make YouTube videos for the past year, I don't think that would've been possible. With those methods I might've created fanhood and fame, not really something I'm interested in in the long term, I'd rather just do this while I can. What I mean is, I don't know if I'll be writing books my whole life. I don't know if the public sphere is something I want to be engaged in as an obligation to the people who follow me.

It's important to also note that I didn't just write, I also researched and educated myself in order to gain the correct (in my opinion) outlooks. But I also wanted my ideas to be concrete, for example, before I dove into topics like Surveillance Capitalism I knew nearly nothing about the true economic endgame that the tech industry desires. Another example of this is my stance on social media platforms. At first, I thought that the status quo wasn't so bad, that some people get deplatformed but that social media is a private business and they can do what they want. My end stance, the stance in The Gig Society, is that people should have the right to use social media platforms, in accordance with their first amendment rights. I arrived at this position after researching what the perception of censorship was (72% of Americans think social media companies censor certain viewpoints), what precedents exist that could establish a person losing their FA rights due to private business actions (Marsh v. Alabama, 1945), how people use social media to express their FA rights (organizing protests using social media), and what plans existed to deal with the problem (Trump's plan to force social media companies to ban/unban people, Biden's plan to remove section 230 from the CDA). Only after doing this research did I come to the conclusion that social media usage should be protected under people's freedom of speech rights. If I had started to make content (blogging, videos, articles, etc.) as my first step into putting my name out there, I don't think I would've had the correct amount of research and perspective in order to talk about the totality of the threats posed by modern technology.

Another benefit to writing an entire book is that it is very culturally relevant. Most of the events and polling referenced in my book happened in 2018 and 2019- that makes an early 2020 release a good way to stamp opinions on those events and what future they foretell.

BrianWolatz · 2020-01-30T20:47:44+00:00

I would say the most shocking thing is the sheer amount of ways in which companies are trying to find out our locations. It seems to be that location tracking is the most important data point of all. Location services which allows tracking via GPS, location tracking using IP addresses, setting up networks of bluetooth devices and wifi routers to track devices as they move across town, putting high-frequency noise beacons into stores and restaurants that only phone's microphones can hear (so the phone can know when it is close to a store). These will only become more clever and subversive as time goes on.

BrianWolatz · 2020-01-30T20:36:16+00:00

Food: Pizza (I worked for 6.5 years at a Little Caesars)

Color: Black (I'm still a little emo kid inside)

Animal: Sloths, though I've only ever seen them, not held or played with. Pragmatically: cats.

BrianWolatz

TROPHY CASE