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

“So, how do you look at our legislators? Is there more strength elsewhere in the world or in this country? Let's talk just about this country, because I think most people saw the Facebook hearings. And Mark looked great in that hearing, and he's not the most articulative people. It's largely because most of the legislators looked so bad and looked so ignorant. And so when you say Mark looks so good, it was because it was such a low, low bar that it was hard not to. I think they could have put a ham sandwich there and it would have looked pretty good. But that said, I do have talked to legislators who are quite smart. There's a lot of them in Washington, especially in the regulatory agencies and elsewhere. What's the problem from a regulator? Is it the money these companies are throwing at lobbyists at them or is it just a lack of will or is it ignorance? How do you change?”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it manages individual probably at some threshold that's significantly high. They make the argument, oh, this is just like TV, our disclosures are going to be like TV. Well, you can't target, well, you might be available eventually, which also should be outlawed. But in TV, you weren't targeting down to the individual person.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Goes down the brain stem. Right. And that kind of stuff should be probably outlawed, especially for political advertising.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, like a thousand people or 10,000, you pick your cutoff and then say you cannot target ads at a population less than that amount. Because what's happening now is the behavioral advertising is just targeting you, right? Or a very small amount of people. And it's manipulative in two ways. You can manipulate the targeting so I can select just the three or five people that I think would totally be triggered by this. And you can also do A-B testing and change words and images to get the perfect manipulation. Tristan Harris has better words for this, for you what he says, but the brainstem.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, not this part. There's this disclosure, but arguably there should be a ban on behavioral advertising to some level of people. Just blanket for political advertising.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's right, for government. Another good example, which isn't talked about that much, is political advertising on Facebook.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's why I believe you need government regulation in it. And to your point, you can look at China as an example. And so not only should you push things back to contextual, but you probably should have some lines, bright lines, that you can't cross in behavioral. You saw a San Francisco ban it the other day.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And when you have behavior, do you think that's even possible? Because the idea is adding more, with AI is adding more and more behavioral data in order to track you. And in countries like China and other places, they're using that behavioral data. They're using a lot of it, including facial recognition. The companies here, I think, are just dying to get into facial recognition and know the controversies around it. So it doesn't seem like backing away from behavioral, they seem to be doubling down in behavioral.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I really think you have to get to the core of this data monopoly. That's the key. And I think part of the problem actually has been that market definition is like people think of it as search market, social network market. It's what you saw in Congress too, but it really is a digital advertising market. That's where the domination is. And so you have to change the digital advertising market. You can do that by having putting more Chinese walls between companies. You can do that by doing something like do not track, which would force companies to be more contextual. And so all of a sudden, you'd be steering the industry back to the contextual from the behavioral because 25% of people now would advertise on contextual behavior will be outlawed for them”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which is amazing if you think about that. And there's a reason because why do it? And for the rest of it, I think it's just Snapchat correct. And he's the chief product officer for Facebook right now, as far as I can tell, because they steal all his ideas. So how do you then shift that? How do you stop that? Just separating them, which are the ways you think should happen?”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, in the digital advertising market, absolutely. There's a, the debate's kind of out on inter to opt durability, which is what that is. It may help in the social network space. It's less important in the search space because, as I was saying earlier, you actually don't need these profiles to do good search results. They're really using search to do ads on YouTube and Gmail and all these other places. And so it could help in social networks to help someone start a social network and be able to switch all your friends. A little quicker, but it probably wouldn't solve Google's problem.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And that's why it should have been rejected in the first place. But at this point, one thing you can do is legislate, and it was part of our proposal, is that if you go to that site, you can't share data back to the other sites. And so that would effectively add more competition, less power in these decisions.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I look at it structurally, and I think that on the consumer side that we've talked about, there needs to be a way to opt out, which would lower the power, right? On the kind of structural business side, at the core of this problem, at least the one that we were talking about here, is data monopolies, right? It's the collection of data profiles. And there are ways to split those up. So some people are talking about extreme measures, which I'd be in favor of the spinning off companies. But there are other ways to do it, such as not allowing data to be shared between You know, different business units. So if you're on Instagram and you are browsing something, that data cannot be shared and used on Facebook or WhatsApp”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And people don't realize that. And so, in addition, we found that it varies a lot by location. And so if you take that to the extreme, let's say that voting districts are getting different results for candidates or issues, it can skew the polarization of that district very easily over time because people who are undecided are actually searching for these topics. And people generally click on the first link. And if you're controlling that first link in that district, that's what people are going to learn about.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's the idea. Well, first of all, that percentage is very high, so I like that. But it's the idea that for search in particular, as an example, when you search, you expect to get the results. If you search for gun control or abortion, you expect we search at the same time right here, you would expect to get the same thing. But that's actually not what we found when we did a study in.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's been interesting We try to educate people about privacy and that they're alternative. Our main issue is just not everybody knows about us. There's 20% of people that we think would be interested in switching to Duck.go, but it's hard to kind of convey all these privacy concepts. I'll give you an example. We've been talking about the filter bubble for years. In 2012, we ran a study on Google that we think influenced the 2012 election. That's how long ago it was. But nobody, we had to speak for 10 minutes to explain what the filter bubble was back then. But after 2016, in the last two years, now we can talk about the filter bubble, just name it, and people know what it is generally. How many people know what the filter bubble is? Just curious.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the mentality is around because of the lobbying that it would distort the advertising business model. And I would love it to be opt-in by default, but in a realistic way, I think if it was operationalized as a way to opt out, I think that would be effective because, as you said before, the other argument is some people don't care, and that gives people really the choice.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, why do people have to opt out? You don't have to opt. Why do they have to opt into it, I guess, opt into it? Because you don't have to opt into clean water. You don't have to opt into, like I think I'd like my water clean or dirty. It's kind of crazy this stuff that consumers have to do in order to protect themselves compared to almost any other thing they use. You don't, again, opt in. I'd like the tires that don't fall off. Opt in. I'd like the food that isn't tainted, please. Why is that mentality around?”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because there's no, if it's all DFENG, there's no pressure to pass something that preempts it. And so one thing that, but still all the people in the country really want something past. And so one option here is this would be a much simpler thing to pass. Just give a do not track mandate for no tracking for that setting much easier than comprehensive legislation. The other thing is that any comprehensive legislation that gets passed do not track can be the mechanism. So we're hoping that it gets added to any larger bill as the mechanism to help people opt out.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No worries. I think people will opt in. I think people will opt in if they have the opportunity and they can opt out of this tracking. And so what we're hoping is, there's kind of two things. One, as you said, California is getting defanged, the California bill. As that happens, the pressure for a federal bill is going down this year.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is a debate whether it should be default on or default off. I would love it to be default, have to opt out of it, but I'd be happy if it was opt-in as well, because I think people will...”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's no national bill. We really should have a national bill like GDPR. But one of the problems with GDPR is how it was operationalized is a lot of consent dialogues. And that's called notice and consent. And people just end up clicking the consent. And so we think a better mechanism is this thing that I was talking about earlier, this do not track setting in the browser that tens of minutes people have already put on. And the fact that consumers have already adopted it and it's in the browser is just an amazing legislative opportunity, just give it teeth. And it's actually a better mechanism for privacy laws because once you have this setting and it works, you don't have to deal with all the pop-ups anymore. You just set it once and then sites can't track you.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just to understand, we do not have a national privacy bill in this country at all. Other countries do and much more stringent, like GDPR in Europe. But we don't have one. We have one in California that's about... About to come online, but the lobbyists are trying to defang it rather substantively. There are 10 others in states across the country. I don't know where they, there are certain states that are doing them, I think Louisiana has one. There's all kinds of states.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, there's kind of two answers to that. One is philosophical in that privacy is a fundamental human right. And so you don't need to care or hide anything to exercise your rights. You wouldn't say that for speech just because you have nothing to say doesn't mean you shouldn't have a right to free speech. So that's kind of on the philosophical side. On the harm side, there are some that people don't realize. A lot of people really don't like the creepy ads flying them around. Some people seem to be fine with that. At a more deeper level, there's this thing called the filter bubble, which is that recommendation algorithms and in particular search results are tailored to you. And that means that you're not seeing what everyone else is seeing. And that actually distorts the democracy. And that's a real harm to individual people and society. And then there's just the general identity theft and data breaches, which is happening over and over again, which is one of the main drivers for adopting stuff like that.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, one of the things a lot of people do bring up with me still, though, is well, I don't really care. I don't have much to hide. I don't know what's, doesn't matter. I get that all the time. Like, who cares if they know if I went to Best Buy and then bought a, like whatever I bought? Talk to why that might be not the best way to think about it”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About it, you were okay with it because you didn't realize it was so invasive. But as after Cambridge Analytica and all the stories about the tracking, that number just keeps going up and up and up.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Over our privacy, you have no privileges. I mean, so we track this national surveys very closely, and it's increased again and again and again of people once they understand what's going on, they want to take action. And so there is a setting, which is part of the legislation that our legislation is based off called do not track. So in your browser, in most browsers, if you delve into the settings, into the privacy settings, there's something that says do not track. our measurements, and it's not just us, because Gizmoto measured their sites between 10 and 25%, depending on what you look at, people have enabled that setting. So they've actually kind of, people are like, no one ever goes into settings and looks at privacy said, it's not true. Literally tens of millions of Americans have gone into their browser settings and checked this thing. And so people do care, and that has just climbed up and up and up as the knowledge of the tracking that's going on. Because before you knew it,”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. It's harder to block stuff on mobile. You get location much more granular. Some of these are sending hundreds of data points a day. You get a really robust profile of view. And then when you go to now a website that has advertising for one of these networks, there's a real-time bidding against you as a person. And there's an auction to sell you an ad based on all this creepy information you didn't even realize people captured. And I think that's what people are finally starting to realize. And they've been going on the idea that they were just interacting with this one's website. But once they find out that all these tracking is going on, they become incensed, effective.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When this occurs? I mean, essentially, these trackers exist across the web. So when you go to a website like Recode even, there are trackers hiding behind it. So you think you're just interacting with the site you're on, but really there are companies like Google and Facebook and many others kind of slurping up your information browsing history. And so through these various mechanisms, they're getting purchase history, location history, browsing history, search history. And when you add all that together,”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I think it's the specter of any regulation, right? But the idea that there would be no regulation on digital forever is ridiculous. I mean, every other area of technology has regulation, a pullback some of these externalities. So I think it's inevitable. It's just a matter of what it looks like and when.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. Talk about 230. Do people know who Section 230 is? Well, those who don't, it's that Communications Decency Act, which I wrote about for the Washington Post 109 years ago, was an act that they put through, most of which was stripped out. Most of the act was deemed, it was started by people who were worried about dirty stuff on the Internet, essentially. And within the Communications Deceased Act was Section 230, which gave internet companies broad immunity from anything that happened on their platform. And it was designed so that these companies would be able to grow and not be sued to death, essentially. And their businesses wouldn't be able to. They were small businesses at the time, and it continues to protect big companies like Google and Facebook, YouTube. And when you mention the idea of, now there's been some eking away at 2.30 around sex trafficking and some other things, but essentially, if you mention the idea”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's strategic for their companies because if you think about their position, they're the ones with the data monopolies. And so if they are going to run an ad network, they should run it based on behavioral because no one can compete with them on that. The real reason why that's enabled is because there's been no real regulation in tech that would have prevented it.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One before that. And then they acquired Doc Lake in 2007. And so slowly, publishers kind of seeded some of their page over to it. And then Google ended up having all this behavioral data. So if you search for something, you could then follow people around with that search. And those advertisings became more lucrative and then slowly”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What happened was you had publishers selling the biggest inventory, so the top of the page banner advertising, and then they still wanted to make some more money. So they had seeded the bottom of the page to ad network so they didn't want to sell. And Google's was the biggest. It was AdSense based on a company they actually acquired.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of advertising, and I think it helps to explain the current market. And so it used to be the case, as you're saying, and the internet started all the way up until the mid-2000s, this contextual advertising was basically all advertising. So on search, it's just the context of the page. But it was also the case on publisher sites. I'm sure you remember, like, sites used to sell their own ads. They would put advertising based on the content of the article. And then the mid-2000s, it switched to behavioral advertising, which is creepy ads, the ones that kind of follow you around the internet. And two companies dominate that because they have all the data on people, Google and Facebook. But there's been no real proof that that is really better, and it's arguably way worse for the publishers who then have seeded all sorts of money to Google and Facebook.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Adopt that. So, talk about contextual advertising because this is just a basic business if you type whatever. And a lot of ways if you think about a Google or what you are searches like sort of a database of human intentions.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the second thing is you don't need to actually track people to make money in search. So Google still to this day, and there's been congressional testimony, actually the hearing that I was at, the representative from Google said this, they still make most of their money off the same way Dr.Go makes money, contextual advertising, nothing to do with following you around. It's keywords on the search page. Car, you get a car ad. And you can do that without tracking anybody. And so what I realized pretty quickly is that's a better user experience and just made the decision not to track people. At the beginning of that, that wasn't the main differentiator because we weren't as aware of all the privacy harms. But as time has gone on, it's become the main driver for people to adopt.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I have a tech policy background, so my graduate degree is in tech policy from IT. And I originally got into a search actually because I was interested in search. But immediately after launching it, I started getting privacy questions. This was well before Snowden, still 2008. And so I did my own investigation and found two really interesting things. One, searches are essentially the most private thing on the Internet. You just type in all your deepest, darkest secrets.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so we force you to go to the encrypted version, which helps your ISP is not from tracking you. So it's all one download that just helps you escape tracking on”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're expressing Google and Facebook are the largest purveyors of these trackers, but we block hundreds, trackers from hundreds of companies. And then we also enable more encryption on the Internet. So when you go to a website, there's an HTTP HTTPS version. Sometimes sites have the unencrypted version and the encrypted version, but they send you to the unencrypted version.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so DucteGo is a general internet privacy company at this point, and we help you essentially escape the creepiness and tracking on the internet. We've been running this non-tracking search engine alternative to Google for 11 years. We're doing about a billion searches a month. It's about 1% market share in the U.S. now, fourth largest search engine. And then we also operate mobile browser and browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox that block trackers across the internet.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I Why Got That Why should we do that? Why do we need to do that? And I said, Well, because if you have recorded. You'll have it recorded Search for Nobody else can do it, and then you'll dominate it. Was like, uh-huh. And I was like, that's wrong to do that. And he was like, okay. And we moved on. And it was a really interesting moment for me that they really were super interested in owning every piece of information on the planet. It was really a revelatory moment for me About what we have now, talk a little bit about Duck DuckGo first, about what you're trying to do, because you have been a search engine for how long So talk about what you do precisely and how it contrasts with Google.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right, so Gabe, we were just talking about inequity and wealth and stuff like that. Let's talk about inequity of information because that's really what's happened. We have given over control of our information to one company, really, in this world. And I'm going to tell one quick story before you start so you get a sense of it. I was walking in the early days of Google with Larry Urserge. I often can't tell them apart. And there was a room full of televisions like a circuit city. I looked in and it was recorded.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're going to very quickly bring up Gabe, come on up. Gabe Weinbarg. He's from Duck Echo. We're going to talk about the awfulness of Google now. Mrs. Gabe, he's the founder and CEO of DuckDuckGo. This is another search engine. You do have a choice in this world, whether you know it or not.”
2019-05-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT