YouSaid · the spoken record

Gabe Weinberg

lines on the record: 94
first: 2019-05-27
most recent: 2019-05-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“It was weird. I literally had to have it. I didn't buy it, but I was close. Close. Close, but not quite so close. Anyway, thank you so much, Gabe. This is Gabe Weinberg from Duck DuckGo. Thank you all for coming.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Predictiveness, which is something a lot of people are talking at this site. I mean, I don't use Instagram, I don't use any of these services, by the way, but it was on Instagram the other day and I was like, I must buy that strange little object that they're saying. I don't know what it was. It was some bra that was better than other braz and it was not. But it was like weird. And I don't know what it was doing to my brain.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Here's an interesting argument. There was another New York Times article from Brian Chen who left Facebook and he saw his, it's one anecdote, but it was interesting, he saw his purchases go down by 50% on his credit card. And so you can say, well, he wasn't seeing a lot more ads, right? Because he wasn't on Facebook seeing all the ads. And that's definitely part of it. But some part of it was also because the ads. He wouldn't have spent otherwise from being manipulated.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or change law or change the way we do antitrust law. I think that's really interesting people like Lena Khan and others that are talking about how to change the idea of what a monopoly is and it doesn't have to cause consumer harm. In fact, it could have consumer good. You all like all the freebies you get from all these companies. You really do. That's the problem here. It's not harmful to consumer skeptic. It is. It's harmful to society, but it's not.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's another legislative question we didn't address, but that one's an argument for treating it as a utility at that point if it's such a natural monopoly that nothing can really compete with it. You need to regulate it as a utility.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a good question. It is one category which didn't hit on that doesn't have a great answer, honestly, right now. And there are great sites to put your video on. So Vimeo is a good example that I use for privately with my kids videos. But unfortunately, if you're a creator, all the eyeballs are on YouTube. It's another network effect. And so there's to break that network effect is very difficult.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and Amazon. But if it's broken up a bit and contextual is back, there can be other ad networks that aren't Google and Facebook.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, it's right now they don't have a lot of choice because all the audience, if you want to reach billions of people, you've got to go to Google's and Facebook.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the question is will these big advertisers? The problem is the big advertisers are also getting disrupted by an Amazon, like Amazon selling all their Amazon goods. Yes, everything. Yeah, we didn't even talk about that. Yeah, I”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They've also given up their relationship with the consumer. I had a really interesting conversation with the CTO of Ford, and I said, what's your biggest problem? And he said, well, the internet companies want to suck every bit of data and chomp it back out. And we want a relationship with the consumer over time. They have a very different mentality towards their consumers because they buy things from them. Essentially, Google and Facebook are pass-throughs. They don't care about you. They just care. So it would be interesting to see if they can regain power because you're right. It's not effective for PNG. They do start to realize this. Yeah, yeah.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, I agree we need empirical evidence a lot, but I think once they realize that they haven't been getting much for what they've been paying for, they're totally happy to embrace contextual advertising again.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, data is starting to come out about this, and the data so far is that they're paying for a lot more for not much. Behavioral advertising has not been that effective.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can work with Axia and you can get look-likes, you can deliver them digitally or traditionally. And so the issue, I wonder, is also the advertisers, the PNGs of the world, who are game and they're going through a subsidizing and encouraging this by...”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How are we going to help The advertisers who are getting progressively more and more addicted to data. Have built these really robust data sets even without the Google's and the Facebooks of the world.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, you know, they're not going to change that. But the line from the movie about the social network is the internet's written in indelible ink. So it's an excellent question. I just don't think because of the First Amendment that it will ever get any traction here. I think every single thing you do online, every drunken college picture is going to stay there. I haven't heard anyone.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To change the First Amendment. That's not happening. But the idea is whether you want it or not, too. Can people take bad information if a bad person can take bad, there's good information about a good person, a bad person can take down good information about them? And so it gets into really thorny issues. The same thing around editing tweets right now. That's their excuse. There's lots of ways they could do it, by the way.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have the right to be forgotten, and should we have the right to be forgotten? We currently don't in the United States. It's part of GDPR and it's something we comply with. It's an interesting question of where to draw that line, and it hasn't been one taken up very much in the US yet.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pre even having a company, and I was going to start something, and I was like, that's a cool name and didn't know what the company was.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I agree with your premise that they're trying to copy the tracking business model everywhere, right? To compete. And if it's outlawed some one place, it should be outlawed everywhere.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. Well, you saw that Tom Cruise maybe minority report, right? They clicked his eyes and then it says, hello, Mr. Nakamura. Would you like more fleece culots or whatever the heck you wanted last time? Yep. Well, they want to get the same information Google gets. Cable companies and telcos now are able now to get the kind of information because they're like, if they can get it, why can't we get it? And usually telcos were prohibited from getting that kind of. But now, and the point is, you're right, if they get it, why don't we get it?”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, so in a sense, it is digital because the streaming, the conversion from analog to digital on TV is a digital conversion. It doesn't feel digital because it doesn't look like you're brand new.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I don't. I think it's totally unintentional. It was a result of the algorithm, and they were questioned on it, and they were basically like, oops, and kind of the answer was, when we created these magic keywords where Omni was less popular at the time, it was a year before. And that just happened. But it was probably a tiny change that no one even knew about that had a big impact.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so all these people search for Romney and Obama, and there were tens of millions of extra Obama results inserted across the country for that entire election. And we don't know what that change, but I presume it actually did change a lot because people were searching just random issues that they wanted to hear about and they were just getting Obama's take on it, not Romney's take.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I worry that you're basically saying they intend good, right? And it's like the road to hell is paved with good intentions. And I believe like we did this filter bubble study that they did influence the 2012 election. Now a lot of people on the left liked the outcome. And what we found, by the way, was when you search for stuff, We found this thing called magic keywords where if you search for something and you search for something subsequent, you would get extra results inserted based on the previous search. And so Obama was a magic keyword. So if you search for Obama and then gun control, you get three gun control results in the results. Romney was not a magic keyword. And so all these people...”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so a line I wrote was at least Microsoft knew they were thugs. Google pretends they're all happy with their funny balls and their crazy eating habits and their weird clothes and stuff like that. But they're still as adorable as they are. They're still just as evil as Microsoft was. And so I was making that point, and I think it was Erin Schmidt who called me up and said, that's really mean, like, that you say we're thugs. And I said, well, I think you're worse than thugs because you don't know you're thugs and you are thugs and therefore you're worse than thugs. And he was like, we're not thugs. We're really good people. We're really good people. And I said, I get that, but I can't imagine a world where you have a company of this much power over information. What if someone, you know, and I, of course, it's like three clicks to Hitler, but that's what I said. It was like, what if Hitler ran Google? What if someone who wasn't so nice? And it was like, well, they don't. And I was like, guess what? What if they do? And they said, what if they don't? And so are you...”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And less vision, are you worried about who runs these companies at some point? Because one of my worries has always been many years ago I wrote a story about Google trying to take over Yahoo's search. I think I've talked about this before, and they were going to try to, it was going to get them 90% of the market at this point. Yahoo was still a substantively large search, did substitutive large search business, and Microsoft was the third one. And I was very much, you know, I was struck by they can't have 90%. Why isn't our government stepping in to do something about that? That's a ridiculous amount of market share.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, well, that's because there has not been a great alternative, right? People don't necessarily believe or want to believe the healthyness of quitting. But trust itself has eroded. And so I think trust could erode in these other companies as well.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Facebook trust in Facebook has precipitously dropped in the past year. And so I don't think it's inevitable that trust is always at high levels, even if people kind of like”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But given that the amount of money they have, the amount of money they make, and the fact that consumers like them, like using them, I think one of the issues around all these tech companies is Amazon's so great about delivery, even though they're ruining the lives of retailers across the country. I'm sorry about that, or causing people to have jobs or their contractors are treated badly within the stores. But gosh, they delivered my iced tea really quickly and it's delicious. Or Google, they're a horrible monopoly, and yet, wow, they were fast on giving me that answer if so-and-so is alive anymore or whatever they decide.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. But it's not like their answers aren't good, right? And so if the market opened up a bit, these companies could thrive more. And we use them and put together good search results just based on all these other companies. And so I think that the idea that there are this magic kind of magic AI that no one can compete with, I think is false. Because if you look around in all these categories, there actually are good alternatives.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I do. I think if we have these structural changes, I think you could see the market open up. We are a small company, right? And so we're only 65 people. And so you're like, well, how do you compete? And I mentioned earlier we use Apple Maps, right? And we could debate how good they are. But in each of these verticals, there are actually really good answers. So Yelp for restaurants, which we use, we use Wikipedia just like Google does for Yelp.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Crazy. This is another area, it's just bias in algorithms in general. But this is to your earlier point is that I guess the central point about regulation is there's been no regulation for 20 years, right? So there's just a dearth of regulation. And you're not going to solve it in one shot. And so this bias in algorithms probably needs to be a separate bill, right? AI in general, this area, facial recognition. We need to tackle these problems separately. There are the biggest problems. And so we should be doing it year after year. I worry that there's going to be a checkbox like we pass something and then it's going to be done to keep the pressure on.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah. So they took webcam live webcam footage that was just on a camera and just put it up on Amazon with their facial recognition off the shelf stuff and then were able to de-identify a bunch of different people and then called them up and was like, I saw you walking here. And it took $100 and like three hours.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not at all. The privacy project at the New York Times, so you know you're aware, there was a really interesting story like two weeks ago where they took, I don't know if you read that one, they took cameras.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“More minor things. I forget what it was, but you can put aluminum foil or something that freaks things out. Okay. But I'm not recommending that. You don't see me wearing it. I think the problem with facial is you're going to need laws. It was some of this stuff. And so San Francisco's great starting the trend there.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Facial recognition is hard. There are ways to actually change where things and change your face so you don't get captured by the cameras. But I think that.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He had his aud Yeah, absolutely. People conflate privacy and security a lot, but I totally agree. So on the security side, you should definitely have a webcam cover and use two-factor authentication, you know, that thing that texts you all the time, you should use that for all services. So most services that you have, your email is the most important, but you can set up this two-factor authentication much better because most of the hacks that have happened, a lot of the identity theft, has all been from phishing on your email. And you click on someone, type in your password. And two-factor authentication is just another layer that prevents that from happening.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Those are the top ones because I don't want to scare people that it's difficult. It really is. You spend a few minutes on this and you can be out. I think people think it's such a gargantuan thing to leave these companies. I don't think that's actually true.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Gripping everything, changing basically doing all the opt outs you can do, which we have a list and you can run through the settings, and then switching off of these services, kind of voting with your feet.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What else should So, in the devices themselves, there's a bunch of privacy settings that actually matter. And we have a blog at SpreadPrivacy.com with device tips that we just education wrote it all up. And there are things like you can turn off the ad tracking on a lot of, on Apple, for instance. You can use encryption end-to-end. You can basically encrypt your Apples by default, but you can do your laptop. These are things that take like an hour, but you run through the checklist and then you're a lot more private.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I've been out for a long time, but it's totally productive. I mean, you just click it on different app on your phone. They're all on your home screen. You go into a different one.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In docs, there's things like Zoho. They're not all super private like us, but they're often paid but cheap alternatives that put privacy first. And so I would leave the services because the idea that alternatives don't exist is just nonsense.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just leave it. Yeah. For Google, there are actually alternatives in every category. So we're in search, but there's alternatives in emails, alternatives in...”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Facebook is an interesting challenge. I mean, I haven't been to Facebook for a long time, and there's plenty of studies that show that's a healthy choice. But there aren't great alternatives to it. And so that one, I think you should leave and a lot of people have.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Saddened by what's happened in California, because I think that's slowing things down. But what I haven't heard anyone talk about, which is interesting, is that got started by a ballot measure for people who don't know.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think you're seeing that because all of their announcements have just been centered around privacies, right? They're feeling this as a real thing at this point. Maybe Scott and Meeley's still saying that, but everybody else is now embracing at least the word privacy, whether they mean it or not. I think you're going to see the tech lash continue until people think there's some meaningful change. I worry about the breakup because that takes a really long time historically. And some of these other things can be done much quicker. And so I'm hoping that something will get done quicker. I'm a little”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think not letting them buy things would be good Anything that gets at, if you're talking about Google and Facebook and the digital advertising market, anything that gets at the data monopoly would be good. Of those, breaking up could do it, Chinese wall could do it, do not track could do it. All of those would do something.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Two zeros, yes, that would do it. But the concept is finding them, taxing them is another way. Regulatory guardrails is another way, and break up antitrust action for presumably breakup, and then not letting them buy anything.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Law, and then they took five years to update it basically. And so we're just getting started this year. So there is some amount of time that it will take. That's one reason we propose this legislation, because you can do this right now. This is an easy thing you could do. Solving a lot of it all at once is difficult. I'd prefer to do it a little bit in piecemeal. As opposed to just one thing and then be done. That's the other thing I don't really like about our government system is we pass something and then we don't touch it for 20 years, which is... What happened to the CDA, it would be better if we passed something every year or two and kind of tweaked it.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, so to answer your first question, I mean, there are very smart people there, and just like running a company, they hire staff and there's lots of senators who've hired really good tech staff, and there's a handful of maybe five to ten. And they're trying to write some of this legislation. So I don't think you need the whole Senate writing it, for example. And so I'm actually pretty encouraged on that regard, the level of thought that's been going into some of these proposals. I think that writing something like GDPR is complicated. It did take your, it was a Europe was doing it for 20 years. I mean, it was an update of a 1995”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT