Ex-CIA Officer: Your Phone Might Be Listening to You - Joe Rogan and Mike Baker

This is something that just came up and we were trying to figure out if it's nonsense or not. My friend Adam was here the other day and we're talking about Toyota trucks. And he didn't Google Toyota trucks just discussing it. And he said, since then, his mentions have been filled with these little advertisements for Toyota trucks. How does that work? Well, you know how you talk to Siri? Yes. Yeah. It's simple voice recognition. It's a carryover from the old days of optical readers and how we all thought it was incredible that you could take a piece of paper, put it into a system and it would take that information that was on that piece of paper and now it was on a database that you could access and manipulate. And so voice recognition is no different in the sense that... So if, for example, if I had this switched on and it happens to people, I'm sure all the time walking around their house, they'll say something and then all of a sudden Alexa will come on and go, oh, I couldn't find a result for that, but do you want to listen to Ella Fitzgerald or whatever? It's always on. It's always listening. And you can do that with anything. Like this TV right here, if you wanted to, if I knew that TV was going to go into the office of the deputy foreign minister of a country hostile to our interests, I could turn that thing into a receiver, obviously. Right. And if I could get my hands on that before delivery, that's a wonderful thing. Now I've got this in there and it's like the old days when you would have to go in on an entry operation and use silent drills and put a device in the wall. Now we've delivered a TV. Now I get a video to, hey, good for me. So shit's always on in a sense. So a regular phone that you get, if you just buy an iPhone and you have Siri turned on so you can say, hey Siri, and it turns on, that phone is always listening to you. Well, now we're getting in over my head, but it could be. I mean, is it possible? Is it capable of doing that? Yes. Could you do that as an intentional operation? Sure. Is it happening because Apple wants to do it and they want to get better understanding of consumer preferences and things? I have no idea. That's above my pay grade. But I will say from an operational perspective, sure. Yeah. From an operational perspective, right. But it would kind of be scandalous if we found out that Apple is listening to everything that you say and then they're sending the information to these companies and then they're trying to sell you whatever you were bringing up. Yeah. But it's really, if you think about it, it's only one step above what they do anyway. Right. Which is, I mean, if I go in here and I search Toyota, I'm in the same situation. I'm fucking inundated with Toyota mentions, right, after this. Right. Of course. So, it's like the next iteration of that. And I suspect that people would... Some folks would be outraged, but I'll bet people would just live with it. Yeah. Right? We seem to be willing to give up a lot of shit. As long as we don't think the government's doing it, right? Right. If it's Google or somebody, we seem to be fine with it. But if it's that, fuck it, if it's that NSA, then now we're best. But that's not who's fucking making jack off of these things, right? Right. Yeah. It's Amazon and Google and all these companies that are using it to sell your data to make a lot of money. Anyway. What do you got, Jamie? Senators call for investigation of T-Mobile, Sprint, Verizon, AT&T for selling location data. Phone companies know where you are. Lawmakers want them to stop selling that information. Until they can figure out how to tax it. Yeah, that seems... But what do they sell on that location data for? They want to know how many people are in certain areas? Is that the idea? That's the thing I was telling you, where you can buy that information and find anybody's location. Or a phone's location. Right. But look, they do these things now where there's a billboard. They'll put a billboard up in a square, right? And you'll walk by and the billboard has the ability to see where the eyeballs are. Right. What? So you'll look and they'll say, oh yeah, it's looking at me. That billboard's looking at me. So that's a success, right? I've scored a hit or a view. And that was the old days, it was like, how many clicks or how many views? The billboard's got a camera? There's an ability for that billboard to sense. And again, I go overboard if I start talking technical and someone will call me out and say, well, that's not exactly how it works. But in simplistic terms, yeah, it's an ability to monitor pedestrian traffic, to understand people's interests and to further refine so that they can sell a shit better. Make your outdoor advertising interactive. This is putting your phone directly up to it. This is like you committing that. But there is also what he's talking about too. What this guy's talking about. What's his name again? So this, you walk up to a phone that's in the photo, you hold your phone up to it, it sends a signal to your phone. It seems like it's always Samsung though. Is it only Samsung phones? Maybe it's a Galaxy ad. This average. Yeah. I have a song for you. These are Galaxy ads. But if you can do a one-way transaction, that transaction can be two-way easily, obviously, right? And it has to be to some degree because there has to be an exchange of, you know, sort of a handshake. So. I didn't know that billboards are staring at you though. Yeah. No, it's pretty crazy shit. Look, I mean, this, you can, tracking now, understanding where people are, right? As an example, you know, I used to be putting a beacon, right? Investigations, you know, you put a beacon on a car, right? And it was a little clumsy, but it got better and better as you go along. You know, now it's pretty remarkable. But you can also think about the electronics that exist in a current vehicle, in a new vehicle. You can, every one of those has a unique signature. So whether it's the tire pressure indicators, you know how you get in your car and it says your left front tire is low, right? Well, that's a particular signal. If I know that signal for that car, I'll bet I can find that car, right? And it's like, it's the same with all the other electronics that exist within a vehicle or just in the shit that we carry around. They've all got some kind of signature. So I, but again, I think, you know, most people are willing to give up a surprising amount of privacy for whatever reason, maybe because they're getting accustomed to it and they're not shocked by shit anymore.