Privacy, Power, and Prediction: Reclaiming Control of Your Personal Data, with Carissa Véliz

Episode Notes

Transcript

Debbie Foster [00:00:01 – 00:00:02]

Hi, I’m Debbie.

Zack Glaser [00:00:02 – 00:00:54]

And I’m Zach. And this is The Lawyers Podcast, one of the many ways that we help lawyers build healthier firms, better businesses, and more sustainable lives. Today, I talk with Carissa Valiz about the power of privacy, actually your personal privacy, and how it’s massively, massively beneficial to be thoughtful about your own personal privacy in this data-enabled world. So, but before we get to that though, Debbie, you and Stephanie have been working on a thing kind of in the background, just really, really cranking away at something that I think is absolutely amazing. Y’all have published a new book on leadership that came out 2 days ago on the 28th. Tell me a little bit about that. We have.

Zack Glaser [00:00:54 – 00:00:54]

Yeah.

Debbie Foster [00:00:54 – 00:01:51]

Yeah. So, it’s so exciting. I don’t think— it’s definitely a different kind of hard than launching a child into the world, but it feels a little bit like that, right? I mean, I have been talking about law firm leadership for 2 decades and how critically important it is. And, you know, one of the phrases that I started using a little over a year ago is rainmakers built the last era of successful law firms. And leaders will build the next one. Because I really do believe that, you know, you think about the wild success that law firms have had because they’re filled with great lawyers who attract great clients and they bring in great business. And law firms have been able to rely on that as the key to their success for— since the beginning of time.

Zack Glaser [00:01:52 – 00:01:53]

Right, right.

Debbie Foster [00:01:53 – 00:01:55]

Right? Like, literally since the beginning of time.

Carissa Véliz [00:01:55 – 00:01:56]

1066. Yeah.

Zack Glaser [00:01:56 – 00:01:57]

1066. Right.

Debbie Foster [00:01:59 – 00:02:06]

But now the world has changed. The pace of change that we are dealing with is fundamentally different.

Zack Glaser [00:02:07 – 00:02:07]

Mm-hmm.

Debbie Foster [00:02:07 – 00:02:50]

And being a great lawyer and bringing in a great amount of business, the best clients that pay their bills, isn’t enough to get you where you need to go because of this rapid pace of change in the world. And we need leaders who can look at the operational chaos and say, how do we make this better? We need to pay more attention to our people. We’re not hiring lifers anymore. We need to make great places to work. We need to think about how to attract people to stay longer. We need to think differently about the tenure challenges and the attracting and retaining talent challenges. We need to think differently about how we develop people. And AI is part of that.

Debbie Foster [00:02:51 – 00:03:05]

But there’s also a generational difference that is part of that, right? What, uh, when we think about hiring lawyers a long time ago, they were people who might work at your firm for 10 or 20 or 30 or 40 years.

Carissa Véliz [00:03:05 – 00:03:06]

Right.

Debbie Foster [00:03:06 – 00:04:04]

Now we bring people in and they don’t think about the world the same way. And the way that we lead them is different. And it’s not just lawyers, it’s, it’s our support staff, it is our shared services staff, the people who are doing billing, the people who are on your HR team. Across the board, we have seen how tenure differences— people work there for 3 years or 5 years or 10 years instead of 10 or 15 or 20— have really impacted the culture of a law firm. And that’s where leaders come in. Leaders come in because they can really impact operationally from a talent perspective, from a finance perspective, from a profitability perspective, And just, you know, overall business strategy leaders can really help lawyers. And some of those leaders could even be lawyers, but they can really help think about how the business needs to be shaped differently in the future.

Zack Glaser [00:04:05 – 00:04:38]

That is— I hesitate to say that is a lot because then people think, oh my God, that’s a lot. But that all kind of focuses around this one thing that you were talking about at the beginning, at the beginning, which is We just can’t rely on the brains of the people that have been there for 35 years and the status of the people who have been there for 35 years to move the law firm forward because of, honestly, umpteen different reasons at this point.

Carissa Véliz [00:04:39 – 00:04:39]

Right. Yeah.

Debbie Foster [00:04:39 – 00:04:40]

It’s a lot.

Zack Glaser [00:04:41 – 00:04:46]

Well, so I guess you wrote a book about this.

Debbie Foster [00:04:46 – 00:04:47]

We did.

Zack Glaser [00:04:47 – 00:05:03]

You’ve been thinking about that. And then you and Stephanie sat down and wrote a book. What is the book? I mean, obviously, that’s what it’s about, but what does it do? What does it, you know, where does it kind of fit in how you, how we train these leaders then?

Debbie Foster [00:05:03 – 00:05:26]

The book is about the 4 cornerstones of leadership. And so, that’s something that Stephanie and I really worked on to make sure that we were thinking about every category of things that makes someone an excellent leader in a law firm. And I mean, the truth is, it’s really, really things that make people excellent leaders, but there is a nuance to leading in a law firm.

Zack Glaser [00:05:26 – 00:05:26]

Yeah.

Debbie Foster [00:05:27 – 00:05:52]

And we talk about that in the book, about what that nuance is, that many law firm leaders have a lot of responsibility, but they don’t have matching authority. And so what we decided to do was kind of like take a step back and say, what are those 4 cornerstones? So let’s talk about them really quickly. The first one is leading self. If you can’t figure out and control how you show up as a leader, it’s hard to do all the rest of it.

Zack Glaser [00:05:52 – 00:05:54]

You’re not gonna get started, right?

Debbie Foster [00:05:54 – 00:06:36]

You’re not gonna get started. So it starts with you leading yourself. And then the second piece, which is where a lot of leadership books and podcasts and people who talk a lot about leadership talk about the leading people aspect. That’s a big part of it. And that’s cornerstone number 2. How do we lead people? How do we develop them? How do we give feedback? How do we coach people? And that’s the second pillar. And then the third pillar is leading operations. And that’s all about, you know, I talked about the operational chaos, like how do we bring order and systems so everybody doesn’t feel like they have to strap on a cape when they get in in the morning and be a hero throughout their day? Right.

Debbie Foster [00:06:36 – 00:06:37]

That sounds familiar, right?

Zack Glaser [00:06:38 – 00:06:48]

Yeah. And I’m sure it does for the, for the people listening. I don’t know that before looking at this that I had thought about separating those 2 things out, the people and the operations.

Debbie Foster [00:06:49 – 00:06:51]

Yeah, I think it’s really important.

Zack Glaser [00:06:51 – 00:06:53]

But that’s still only 2 and 3.

Debbie Foster [00:06:54 – 00:07:18]

That’s only 2 and 3. And then 4 is leading forward. Leading forward is all about strategy. It’s about the future. It’s about thinking about where you’re going and what it’s going to take to get there. And unfortunately, Zach, We spend a lot of time on the people side. We don’t spend as much time as we should on leading self because you can’t pour from an empty cup. You’ve heard that before.

Zack Glaser [00:07:18 – 00:07:18]

Right.

Debbie Foster [00:07:18 – 00:07:40]

So leading self is about how we show up, but it’s also about taking care of ourselves. Leading operations, we all have a long list of SOPs or processes that we wanna, you know, get to redrafting and rewriting and documenting, but It often comes last. And then what comes last, last, even more last than operations—

Zack Glaser [00:07:40 – 00:07:41]

Last of the last.

Debbie Foster [00:07:41 – 00:07:55]

The last of the last is leading forward, because who has time for strategy when you’re spending all of your time as a firefighter or a person who’s holding that whack-a-mole mallet? You know, the person who’s just like smacking down all the things that pop up.

Zack Glaser [00:07:55 – 00:07:56]

I mean, I love that game, just not in my law office.

Debbie Foster [00:07:57 – 00:08:11]

Yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly. So, that’s it. Leading self, leading people, leading operations, and leading forward. That’s really what the book is about, those 4 cornerstones, but very specifically what they mean inside of a law firm.

Zack Glaser [00:08:12 – 00:08:13]

Gotcha.

Zack Glaser [00:08:13 – 00:08:13]

Okay.

Zack Glaser [00:08:13 – 00:09:03]

Because like you said, there’s just some different— we all know there’s just some different nuances to operating inside a law firm. There’s just different personalities. There’s, you know, at the very least, different business structures, different requirements for our business structures. So, I love that leading self, leading people, leading operations, leading forward. Well, Debbie, we’re also, over the next few weeks, we’re going to have individual episodes for the podcast on those specific foundations, those specific 4 cornerstones. So, I look forward to hearing you and Stephanie talk about those. here in a little bit, in the next couple of weeks. People can find the book on Amazon as of 2 days ago.

Zack Glaser [00:09:03 – 00:09:21]

Just, I don’t know that we’ve even said the name of it. It’s Be a Next Level Leader. There it is. Be a Next Level Leader. We’ll drop the link to the Amazon store in the show notes. But yeah, Be a Next Level Leader with Debbie Foster and Stephanie Everett.

Debbie Foster [00:09:22 – 00:09:47]

That URL is also live, beanextlevelleader.com. And there, there are leadership resources, there’s a leadership assessment. We actually have a foundations course that is a 4-week cohort that goes over all of the concepts in the book, Be a Next Level Leader. So it’s a little bit more hands-on experience. It has an amazing workbook, which you can see more about on the URL.

Zack Glaser [00:09:48 – 00:09:48]

Yes.

Debbie Foster [00:09:48 – 00:09:53]

If you go to beanextlevelleader.com. So much more to come on that. I’m excited to record those episodes.

Zack Glaser [00:09:54 – 00:10:17]

Yes. And I love that aspect of this, that it’s not just, A, it’s not just, here’s a book, good luck. B, it’s not just, here’s a workshop, good luck. It is, you know, we recognize that leaders take different shapes and they learn in different ways. And so you can do all or some of those things as well. So yeah, thank you, Debbie. It is beanextlevelleader.com.

Debbie Foster [00:10:19 – 00:10:19]

Yeah.

Zack Glaser [00:10:19 – 00:10:32]

And I really hope to, really hope to see people go there. Well, Debbie, thank you. And I look forward to your, your episodes with Stephanie coming up. But now we’ve got my conversation with Carissa.

Carissa Véliz [00:10:47 – 00:10:56]

Hi, I’m Carissa Véliz. I’m an associate professor at the Institute for Ethics in AI at the University of Oxford, and I’m the author of Privacy is Power and Prophecy.

Zack Glaser [00:10:57 – 00:11:07]

And just to be clear, Privacy is Power, separate book than Prophecy. Privacy is Power is 2022, something like that. You were writing that during the pandemic.

Carissa Véliz [00:11:07 – 00:11:13]

Yeah, that’s a pandemic book. And Prophecy has just been published this year.

Zack Glaser [00:11:13 – 00:11:14]

Okay.

Zack Glaser [00:11:14 – 00:11:48]

I have started to read it. I’ll be honest, I haven’t completely finished it yet, but I’m excited about it. It’s a really good one. Carissa, thank you so much for being with me to talk to our audience about really, we can’t really say privacy writ large. We can’t just say, but the idea of privacy being power, and that’s kind of the flip side of the coin of knowledge being power. Um, let’s start there though with the, with your first book of Privacy is Power. Talk to me about the idea of privacy being power.

Carissa Véliz [00:11:48 – 00:12:27]

Yeah. And thank you so much for having me, Zach. The idea that privacy is power, um, comes from the idea that knowledge is power. And that’s a very old idea and it’s very intuitive and it’s very easy to understand. The more somebody knows about you, the more you are vulnerable to them. And that’s why we don’t give people our Social Security number if we don’t trust them, or credit card number, or our address. And that insight came from, among others, Francis Bacon, a long, long time ago. But after that, a philosopher like Michel Foucault also said that the converse is also true.

Carissa Véliz [00:12:27 – 00:13:15]

The more power you have, the more knowledge you have. Because if you have power, you have the means to acquire knowledge, such as buying books or going to university. But it’s also the case that if you have enough power, you get to decide what counts as knowledge. So if you’re a big tech company, you get to decide what categories people are put in. And all of this suggests that privacy is a kind of power, not only because The more companies know about you, the more they can influence your behavior, the more you are vulnerable to them. But it’s also the case that they decide what counts as knowledge about you. And you don’t get to choose these categories. Often you don’t even get to see them, and you can’t even contest them.

Zack Glaser [00:13:16 – 00:13:33]

The idea that knowledge is power and privacy is power, I don’t know that we completely make the connection of having our information be private is our power, our way to wield our own power. What do you mean by that in this, in this book?

Carissa Véliz [00:13:34 – 00:15:04]

So part of what I mean when I write about how when we give up our privacy, we give up our power, is partly just an individual matter of when you give out your information, you make yourself vulnerable to people impinging on your autonomy. And that’s in a philosophical sense of autonomy, of your ability and right to lead the life that you want to have, to have power over your own life, to decide what values you endorse, and to live according with those values. Why is that? Well, for the very simple reason that when people know about you, eventually somebody tries to exploit that knowledge to their interests and not in your interests. For example, liberal democracies have the secret ballot to protect people from undue influence. Because if people know who you’re going to vote for, they can, of course, try to either persuade you or seduce you into trying to vote for someone else, or in an extreme case, trying to force you to vote for whoever they want you to vote for. So threaten you or coerce you in some ways. And that very important principle of the secret ballot applies to most of life because democracy isn’t only about voting. It’s also about participating in your inner society and having an opinion not only about politicians, but about companies and products.

Carissa Véliz [00:15:05 – 00:15:25]

And where are we going and how should we do this? And so it has this double edge of being an individual kind of power, but also the power of the citizenry. When we as a citizen, we give up our power, we make ourselves vulnerable to political manipulation in a way that is very corrosive.

Zack Glaser [00:15:25 – 00:15:50]

And so in a way, giving away my privacy, my information, my information about me that we get on our smartphones or we get through kind of interacting with the internet is giving organizations, let’s say, whether it’s large corporations or governments or individuals or anything like that, it’s giving them more fodder for being able to exercise power over me is kind of what we’re saying.

Carissa Véliz [00:15:51 – 00:16:22]

Exactly. To influence our behavior, but also to decide what counts as knowledge about us, what counts as the categories that apply to us, even when we might not be in agreement with those, or even when they might be actually inaccurate. Because these are companies, the ultimate goal is not precision or accuracy, it’s profit. And so as long as it’s profitable, and usually if it’s accurate enough, it’s profitable, but it doesn’t have to be super accurate, that’s good enough. But it might be very unfair.

Zack Glaser [00:16:22 – 00:17:22]

And so some ways it’s, it’s the, the power to influence us, um, directly, which is the power to convince us to do something. I, I liked your definition of power, um, in, in the book Privacy is Power. It’s basically the ability to get somebody else to do something. Whether it’s through influence or potentially force, and one kind of leading to the other. But it could be, you know, it’s the power to influence us, but it’s also then the power to kind of like secondarily influence our lives is what you’re saying by putting us into particular categories. If we think about Equifax, and I like using Equifax as an example because I always want to keep reminding people that in the ’70s, Equifax changed their name to Equifax in order to make them look better. Because they had data issues. And then in 2020-something, Equifax had one of the largest and most damaging breaches in the history of— I’m just going to kind of keep it there because I don’t want to get sued for too much.

Zack Glaser [00:17:22 – 00:17:52]

But Equifax is not the greatest player as a— I think you say data vulture. I think other people would say a data collector. But Equifax in saying I have X score on my credit is influencing my life, is affecting where my life can go. So that’s the other side, is being able to categorize you as straight white male or likes baseball also.

Carissa Véliz [00:17:52 – 00:18:53]

Yeah. And those categories might seem quite innocuous, but when you actually look at the categories that these companies use, They’re quite frightening. They include things like people who have lost a child, people who have suffered rape, people who suffer from all kinds of sexual conditions. It gets really personal. They look at your vulnerabilities and exploit them. And you’re right, we see this pattern over and over again, and it just seems like we don’t quite learn the lesson because Collectively, we have very short memories, but companies often have data scandals and then they change their name as if a change of name is anything other than a change of name. And we saw this with Meta, right? Meta changed their name in a very crucial moment in which they were being attacked and criticized. And then they have, lo and behold, more data scandals.

Carissa Véliz [00:18:54 – 00:19:14]

One of the things that concerns me is not only the very poor practices that we have in general regarding personal data, which is something that is very sensitive and that it’s in the Declaration of Human Rights for a good reason. Because, you know, during the Second World War, people learned that personal data is sensitive because the Nazis used it to find people.

Zack Glaser [00:19:15 – 00:19:15]

Mm-hmm.

Carissa Véliz [00:19:15 – 00:19:24]

But that even, even worse, that we’re trusting our most sensitive data to companies that have proven themselves to be untrustworthy time and again.

Zack Glaser [00:19:24 – 00:19:52]

Yeah. I want to think about, or at least ask you about this idea of, we think of private data or personal data being my address, my sexuality, my gender, things like that. But when we’re talking about private data in this sense, and I really want to harp, I really want to make sure that we make this point, we’re not just talking about things that would be considered personally identifiable information.

Carissa Véliz [00:19:52 – 00:19:52]

Right.

Zack Glaser [00:19:53 – 00:20:09]

or medical records. We’re talking about the stuff that we create by interacting with, with the apps on our phone and our computer. Can you, can you talk to me a little bit about some of that data being personal to us?

Carissa Véliz [00:20:09 – 00:21:14]

It’s surprising the degree to which your data can identify you, and data you couldn’t imagine might be sensitive can be sensitive. For example, It turns out that only you in the world has the kind of phone that you have and the exact apps that you have and uses those apps in the exact way that you do. And that creates a pattern such that just by analyzing how fast your battery drains, you can be identified. And so something that might seem like it’s not interesting data because it’s not interesting to you can be very interesting to the right institution or the right company. And part of the challenge is that sometimes we give up data that we intuitively think is not that sensitive, and we don’t realize the inferences that are being made from that data. So, for example, you can share the kind of music you like, and that sounds pretty innocuous. But when companies use that to try to infer your sexual orientation, which you might have not wanted to share, then it gets tricky. That’s why I wrote Prophecy.

Carissa Véliz [00:21:15 – 00:21:57]

Because I realized that the whole machinery of surveillance is at the service of a machinery of prediction. If we didn’t want to predict, for example, people’s sexual orientation or how they’re going to vote or what they’re going to buy or where do they hurt in general and how are they going to react in some cases, we wouldn’t be surveilling them. And so that’s why it’s so important to keep these 2 concepts in mind. And I think You know, you haven’t, you haven’t gotten to that point, but at the end of the book, I write about surveillance and prediction as the 2 original sins of digital tech. They were— these systems were designed to surveil and predict, which are 2 fundamental methods of social control.

Zack Glaser [00:21:58 – 00:22:32]

Because, I mean, that’s, that’s kind of the point of collecting this data. Why would we collect any of this data? Why would anybody care about where my— what cell phone tower my computer, my cell phone connects to at a particular point in time if they don’t want to surveil me, if they don’t want to. And then in surveillance, and I think that is an important point here, in surveillance is obviously kind of, again, 2 sides of the coin is prediction and then influence. You know, we want to predict what somebody’s going to do and then we want to influence what somebody’s going to do. Yeah.

Carissa Véliz [00:22:32 – 00:23:25]

Exactly. And going back to the case of companies that, for example, score people on financial matters, as you said, this is really important for someone’s life. Your life can go a lot better or a lot worse depending on that score. And we don’t know what data they use. We can’t contest it, not really. And one important legal concept that I want to talk about here, because, you know, this podcast is, is kind of the perfect place for it, is the idea of fiduciary duties. So already these are a very well-known legal mechanism to protect citizens. And in cases of medicine, and so of course doctors and lawyers and financial advisors, we ask these people that they put the interest of their client first.

Carissa Véliz [00:23:26 – 00:24:14]

Because there is a financial conflict of interest. So a doctor might want to perform surgery on you because they’ll win a bonus. A lawyer might want to advise this or another because they have another client or because they have their own agenda, or a financial advisor might want you to invest something very, very risky because if you lose money, you lose money. But if you earn money, they win a bonus, right? So, and we don’t allow this. We ask them to put your interests first. And it seems to me that the same should be true of personal data in general because it’s so sensitive, but especially with these kinds of scores and with these kinds of decisions that are, that are so important to people’s lives. And by the way, they’re all based on prediction. It’s not about facts.

Carissa Véliz [00:24:14 – 00:25:03]

It’s about the prediction about whether, for example, you will pay back a loan. And one of the problems with prediction is that if I deny you an opportunity, say a loan, on the basis of a fact, because Zach, you don’t have X amount of dollars in your bank account, and I tell you, you know, this is what you need to have, then either I’m right or I’m wrong. If I’m right, I’m right, and you know what to do to change my decision. And if I’m wrong, you can contest it. You can tell me, no, I actually do have this money and it’s here, and you can show me. But if I deny you an opportunity on the basis of a prediction, how are you going to argue against that? There’s no way. Predictions are unverifiable, unfalsifiable. And we are going against the very important tenet of due process in democracy when we make decisions on the basis of predictions, which are in turn based on surveillance.

Zack Glaser [00:25:04 – 00:26:20]

And just to kind of push that even further, predictions have been unverifiable since the beginning of time. They have. I think that’s one of the interesting— that’s the point I’m at in your book right now is talking about the the Oracle of Delphi and the history of predictions. But I want to talk about how predictions aren’t— the power that is prediction, the idea of prophecy, the reason that we use prophecy, the reason that we use predictions is not to generally tell the future in a benevolent way. It is also used to influence the future here. And so what you’re saying, I guess, and I maybe I’m getting pretty long-winded on this one, but what you’re saying is essentially that the people who have this data, the people who have the power to predict, we could potentially put some sort of fiduciary duty on, on them, on these data brokers. I do like to call them data vultures. We could put some sort of fiduciary duty on them as we do lawyers and doctors and financial advisors.

Carissa Véliz [00:26:21 – 00:27:15]

Yeah. Essentially, if an institution wants to use my data, first of all, I should consent and I should have knowledge of exactly what data they’re using and for what and how. But secondly, They should only be allowed to use that data for my benefit, because otherwise it’s just too easy to use it against my interests. And it’s bad for democracy because it jeopardizes democracy in the same way that buying or selling votes would. So the 2 measures I think that are most important is to ban the trade in personal data, because it shouldn’t be the kind of thing that you can buy or sell, for the same reason that we don’t buy or sell votes or organs or many other things. or people for that matter. And whenever that personal data has to be used, for example, in medicine, that it only be used for the benefit of the patient. If you’re not gonna use it for the benefit of the patient, then that’s a problem.

Carissa Véliz [00:27:16 – 00:28:15]

And then there’s a further issue of prediction because even if you have those, there’s still an open debate to be had about what kinds of predictions are acceptable and what kinds of predictions are unacceptable. And it’s incredible to me we’re not having that debate, that we’ve been using predictions since the Oracle of Delphi to make the most important decisions of our life. And there are thousands of books about how to predict, and there are academic journals, and there’s not one book on the ethics of prediction. Are you kidding me? It’s kind of incredible. But in history, you see these blind spots that we have. So researching this book was fascinating. And One of the things that blew my mind was that it took us hundreds, if not more, years to realize that when we play dice, 7 is the most common number. Just nobody had noticed.

Carissa Véliz [00:28:16 – 00:28:24]

And sometimes that happens. You know, we have blind spots. But yeah, as you were saying, we tend to associate predictions with knowledge, and they have very good PR, predictions.

Debbie Foster [00:28:25 – 00:28:25]

Mm-hmm.

Carissa Véliz [00:28:25 – 00:29:03]

But actually, When you analyze predictions, you realize that they’re never facts. A prediction can be a lot of things. In the best case scenario, they’re an educated guess. But more often than not, they’re power plays in disguise or wishful thinking or marketing. But whatever they are, they are never a fact. And that is crucial to understand because democracy in some areas depends on facts, and we should be relying on facts, like in the justice system and in contexts in which fairness is paramount. And in those contexts, statistics is just not good enough.

Zack Glaser [00:29:03 – 00:29:38]

I think one of the things that struck me so far, again, in the Prophecy book is this idea that we didn’t have statistics at some point. This idea that if the gods were making everything work in in the way that they want it, it’s either going to happen or it’s not. And so, all we could do was read into prophecy. And that kind of takes the wind out of statistics in a way. It kind of takes that divineness to statistics out of it, which I thought was fascinating.

Carissa Véliz [00:29:39 – 00:30:13]

Yeah. And later on, even when we developed statistics, for a long, long time, the most knowledgeable people in society tended to think that statistics was just the second best. It’s what you use when you actually don’t know what you should know. And, you know, eventually statistics became an explanation. Before, it was never an explanation, it was a suggestion. So it was a correlation, and then we had to look for causes. And now we’ve just become, in, in some ways, lazy and sloppy. We just stop at correlation.

Carissa Véliz [00:30:13 – 00:30:33]

and don’t go further. And in some cases, that’s good enough when it comes to marketing. But in cases of justice, that is not good enough. And I’m not— I don’t think society has reflected on the implications of the overuse of prediction for democracy.

Zack Glaser [00:30:33 – 00:30:59]

Which I think is really relevant now because of artificial intelligence. Because of the, the fact that artificial— when you wrote Privacy is Power, we were talking about, um, AlphaZero. We’re talking about AlphaGo. We were talking about the ability to feign intuition in certain scenarios, provided we created the algorithm very specific. So winning at Go.

Carissa Véliz [00:30:59 – 00:31:00]

Okay.

Zack Glaser [00:31:00 – 00:31:33]

But now we’re using Claude Cowork. Now we’re, we’re using AI for facial recognition all over the place when people go to protests. And so, I think this has become more important to have this conversation at this time. And I think your books are even more pressing, or what you talk about in these books is even more pressing, just because of the heightening advancement of what we can do with this data and with these prophecies.

Carissa Véliz [00:31:33 – 00:31:46]

Yeah, that’s absolutely right. And on the one hand, You might think that Privacy is Power is outdated because it was written before ChatGPT, but actually, sadly, it’s not.

Zack Glaser [00:31:47 – 00:31:47]

No.

Carissa Véliz [00:31:47 – 00:32:10]

Because ChatGPT, for all its disruption, is just more of the same. It’s a different scale, but it was trained on vast amounts of data, much of which was arguably acquired in unlawful ways and certainly questionable ways.

Zack Glaser [00:32:11 – 00:32:12]

Certainly questionable.

Carissa Véliz [00:32:12 – 00:33:07]

And it is great as a tool for surveillance because, yeah, you might think that ChatGPT is giving you information, but actually you’re giving it more, much more information than you can imagine. And it’s profiling you and it’s inferring things from you, from how you use language and at what times do you connect and what are you asking. And so in a way, nothing has changed and it’s just more of the same. But what makes large language models very dangerous is that they just make it that much easier to sift through large quantities of data and surveil people. And but it’s the same pattern. So and I make this point in Privacy is Power that if you go back to East Germany, about between a third and a fourth of the population were being surveilled. But it was very effortful to surveil someone. You actually had to hire them to follow them or to listen to their conversations.

Carissa Véliz [00:33:07 – 00:33:14]

And today it’s become so cheap that it’s almost cheaper to surveil by default than not to.

Zack Glaser [00:33:15 – 00:33:24]

Yes. Yes. And that’s frustrating. So frustrating is too light of a word for that, frankly.

Debbie Foster [00:33:26 – 00:33:26]

My—

Zack Glaser [00:33:27 – 00:34:07]

when I was about to do this, this podcast, my wife asked me what my favorite part of Privacy Is Power, um, is. And I told her hope. Getting into this book, reading it, it scares the shit out of you. And it should. Um, it really does because the— It does a very good job of detailing how minuscule data about us can be. and still be important. But I want to talk about the hope. Talk to me a little bit about how we can push back against this and ways that we could potentially take our power back as individuals with our own privacy and our data.

Carissa Véliz [00:34:08 – 00:34:48]

Yeah, there’s a lot we could do. And we tend to forget that these companies depend on our cooperation for their thriving, that if we stop cooperating, they really don’t have much to do about it. And the first thing to note is that there are alternatives. Instead of using Google Search, use DuckDuckGo or Startpage, or there are others. Instead of using WhatsApp, use Signal. Instead of using the usual suspects for email, use ProtonMail. And full disclosure, I’m part of the board of the Proton Foundation, which is the majority stockholder of Proton, the company, but I’m there because I believe in it and I’m not paid for it.

Zack Glaser [00:34:48 – 00:34:52]

To add to that, I have my email is Proton. Oh, fantastic.

Carissa Véliz [00:34:52 – 00:35:37]

Yeah. Use a VPN and more generally, just try to look for opportunities and remember that everything that matters is analog and that if you want to have a really good conversation, then drop the phone and keep the microphones and cameras off. If you want to have a really good party, ask your friends not to take photos or upload them. It makes a difference to have spheres and spaces in which we are free from surveillance. If you like hope in Privacy Is Power, you’re gonna love Prophecy because there’s a lot more of that in there. Because Privacy Is Power, I wrote at a time when people were still excited about technology. And the book was like, hey, but have you thought about this? Like, there’s a really dark side of this that I don’t think we’re seeing.

Debbie Foster [00:35:38 – 00:35:38]

Yeah.

Carissa Véliz [00:35:38 – 00:36:08]

And this book is the opposite in a way. I wrote it in a moment in which there’s a lot of doom and gloom. And people are afraid of AI for good reason. And it’s partly a book to remind us that there is still a lot of democracy to recover and to cherish and to, and to take care of and to grow. And that there, it isn’t a coincidence, I think, that democracy is faltering at the same time as the rise of digital tech.

Zack Glaser [00:36:09 – 00:36:09]

Mm-hmm.

Carissa Véliz [00:36:09 – 00:36:35]

But that most of what matters is analog and the analog world is still there. You know, the trees outside your window, and your favorite bar and your favorite coffee shop and the people you love and the roof that is protecting you from the rain and the natural world and everything in between. All of these things are analog and we should do much more to value, but also to take care of that world.

Zack Glaser [00:36:36 – 00:37:30]

I love that. But one thing I do want to highlight here that I got out of your book as well, out of Privacy is Power specifically, is that When I, just being very candid here, when we talk about things that are bad in the world, we talk about, and in your book you talked about CFCs and the ozone deteriorating, things like that. A lot of times we have to take giant steps that are extremely uncomfortable to right the ship. And it would be really easy to think that I have to go get a flip phone. And I have to completely unplug in order to protect my data. But that’s not really what you’re saying. You’ve said there, there are other ways to protect your data because these companies don’t need your data in order to survive. They just want it.

Zack Glaser [00:37:31 – 00:37:31]

Yeah.

Carissa Véliz [00:37:31 – 00:37:43]

So it depends. I mean, there are companies that do need your data in order to survive and, and, and we should not give it to them because then they will figure out a way to survive that is with a less toxic business model.

Zack Glaser [00:37:43 – 00:37:44]

Right.

Carissa Véliz [00:37:44 – 00:37:49]

But, but there are the function that you’re looking for, whether it’s email or search. Right.

Zack Glaser [00:37:49 – 00:37:50]

Thank you.

Carissa Véliz [00:37:50 – 00:37:50]

Yes.

Carissa Véliz [00:37:51 – 00:38:23]

Had without surveillance. And that’s the important thing. And you’re right, you don’t have to be perfect and you won’t be perfect and that’s fine. But this idea that if you’re not perfect, then it’s not worth making an effort is a bit like saying like, well, you know, I know sugar is bad, but there’s no way I’m going to quit sugar. So I’m just going to Eat buckets of sugar from like the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep. There’s you know there’s a difference. The more sugar you eat, the more you risk your health. And in the same way, you don’t have to be perfect, but every time you choose privacy, it matters.

Carissa Véliz [00:38:23 – 00:38:53]

It matters because you send the right signal. It matters because companies and governments are much more sensitive than you might imagine to what people want and what they signal. And even when just five to ten percent of the population change their patterns slightly, it gets noticed. And it matters because you never know which data point is the one that’s going to lead to identity theft or to a different kind of bad experience. And the more you protect your privacy, the more your chances that you’ll be safe.

Zack Glaser [00:38:53 – 00:38:55]

And the more we protect other people’s privacy as well.

Carissa Véliz [00:38:55 – 00:39:10]

That’s right. And also, it depends on who you are. So, I’m an author. And, you know, I wish I lived in the times when an author could get away with only writing. Today, if I want my book read, you know, I need to share more than I’m comfortable with.

Zack Glaser [00:39:10 – 00:39:14]

You have to do this type of thing and get on TikTok and yeah.

Carissa Véliz [00:39:14 – 00:39:44]

Yeah, exactly. Um, but if, you know, you’re, I don’t know, an accountant or something or whatever, if you have a career in which you don’t need this kind of public exposure, then you might, you know, have the luxury of being a lot more private. Or if you’re a journalist and you are researching dangerous topics in dangerous countries, then it’s a different kind of setting and you better protect your privacy for your own safety and the safety of your sources. So it depends a lot on context and who you are.

Zack Glaser [00:39:44 – 00:40:05]

Well, I could, as you can imagine, talk to you about both of these books forever. I would sit down and pick your brain for a very, very long time, but unfortunately I can’t do that. If listeners remember one thing from this conversation, though, about their privacy, power, and prediction, what would it be? What would you like to leave them with?

Carissa Véliz [00:40:05 – 00:40:31]

So let me leave them with a couple of ideas. For privacy, that privacy matters because it protects us from possible abuses of power. And as long as people are people and institutions are institutions, there will always be the temptation to abuse power. So it’s a matter of power. For the citizenry to be strong in democracy, we need privacy. And for prediction, this idea that predictions are never facts, and more often than not, they’re power plays in disguise.

Debbie Foster [00:40:32 – 00:40:33]

Hmm.

Carissa Véliz [00:40:33 – 00:41:15]

But they only work if we believe the prediction. A prediction can only become a self-fulfilling prophecy if we buy it. If we don’t buy it, it has no effect. So if Oedipus hadn’t freaked out about the prophecy that he would marry his mother and murder his father and try to avoid it, he would’ve never made it come true. So next time you hear a prophet, you know, one of these tech executives telling you that the future is gonna be so-and-so, just pause for a second, realize that it’s a prediction, it’s not a fact, and say, no, I don’t think so. That might be your future, but it’s not gonna be mine because this is what I’m gonna do to make sure that that’s not the future of my society and my community. We have the power to write our own future because the future is unwritten.

Zack Glaser [00:41:15 – 00:41:27]

I love that. Let’s leave it there. Um, Carissa, thank you so much for being with me and for talking to me about these things. I think it’s very important. I know we’re, we’re talking about privacy. Um, but where can people find you, um, in order to connect on like LinkedIn and places like that?

Carissa Véliz [00:41:27 – 00:41:59]

The most important place is a bookshop. Um, because if you, when you buy a paper book, there’s no surveillance. Nobody knows what you’re reading. Nobody knows how fast you’re reading. They’re not collecting your data. And it’s just you and me having a conversation human to human in the, in the world of ideas. But failing that, um, Blue Sky, LinkedIn. And as an author, I also want to thank readers who read books and who reach out and who you know, tell you a story about their lives or, um, their opinion about books, but also who leave reviews.

Carissa Véliz [00:41:59 – 00:42:16]

It’s kind of an irony, but there’s no other way to beat the algorithm. So if you like a book, please support authors and leave a review. Talk to your friends about the book, give it as a gift, because it’s partly how we build democracy together. Democracy is a conversation.

Zack Glaser [00:42:16 – 00:42:22]

I love that. Democracy is a conversation. That’s fantastic. Well, Carissa, thank you so much for being with me. I really appreciate it.

Carissa Véliz [00:42:23 – 00:42:24]

Thank you so much, Zack.

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