Sandra Matz
Appearances
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Yeah, so that's in a way that the most interesting part of this entire field of research is like, yeah, we can identify you as a person, we can know that it's Shankar based on your data. But for me, the more interesting part is actually that we can dive into your psychology. So we can take a look at what's going on inside your mind.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
And so the study that we did when we try to predict someone's income was essentially relying on their Facebook data. So what is it that people talk about and post on social media? And I think there were some really interesting, sometimes quite uncomfortable truth that we discovered.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
But overall, the bottom line was that just by looking at what you talk about on Facebook, we can have a pretty good sense of your socioeconomic status.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Yeah. So when you, when you start opening the black box, um, what you see is some of them are like, some of the cues are relatively obvious. So you can imagine that people with a lot of money, they talk about the vacations that they're going to take. They talk about expensive luxury brands, um, a lot more often than people who are struggling to, to make, um, ends meet.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
But there's also these more subtle cues that I found, um, even more interesting, which is for example, that lower income people, um, they talk more about themselves and they talk more about the present. than higher income people. And in the beginning, you might be wondering, why might this be the case?
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
And I think it's just that it's really damn hard to think of anything else other than how you make the present work if you're struggling to make enough money to put food on the table. So those are all these little, I think, secrets about what's going on inside our mind that we can uncover in the data.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Yeah. And I think that's the distinction between identity claims and behavioral residue that I think is so interesting, right? So again, you might post about this luxury vacation, and it's a very clear signal to the world that you're having a great time and you can afford going on this vacation.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
But then all of these more subtle ones where you talk about yourself, you're more focused on the present, that's certainly something that we don't necessarily intend to reveal.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Yeah, so behavioral residue are all of the traces that we essentially inadvertently leave as we go about our life. In the offline context, you could imagine, again, that's like the bin overflowing, that's your socks not being organized, that's the bed not being made. And in the digital world, it's all of the traces that we generate without really thinking about it.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
So that could be your smartphone, for example, captures your GPS records pretty much continuously 24-7. And you're not intentionally sitting down to create a record of where you went and what you did there. But still, those traces exist.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Yeah, that was really, so the research by Youyou Wu, I would say was one of the pivotal studies in this field because it showed just how accurate the predictions that we can make about someone's psychology really are based on relatively little data. So she was studying the Facebook pages that people follow. So let's say CNN has a Facebook page, you can like it.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
And what she showed is that just by looking at your Facebook pages, an algorithm can actually predict your personality more accurately. than our co-workers could, than our friends could, than our family members could. And mind you, those are people who know you pretty well, right? Those are your parents, those are your siblings, those are your kids.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
They've spent a substantial amount of time with you. And it was slightly inferior to the judgments and the predictions of your significant other. Now, this was a study that was done in 2015. It was only based on Facebook likes. So you could imagine that if we get access to
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
all of your digital traces and apply slightly more sophisticated machine learning that we could probably outperform even your significant other.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Yeah. And I think what is astonishing to me, and I think a point that is important, those models aren't perfect, right? So I think any prediction always has a certain amount of error. And what we're talking about are averages. So on averages, these models are really accurate, as you just said, with a comparison. However, we still make mistakes at the individual level.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
So one of the things when we kind of make these comparisons and predictions that I want to highlight is that don't take it as a truth, right? It's a prediction. It's a probability. It's pretty damn accurate on average, but we're still going to make mistakes at the individual level.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Yeah, I think of it as like this puzzle that we're putting together of a person. So you get a piece here that's their social media and then you get another piece that's their credit card spending and another piece that's their smartphone sensing data. And gradually you kind of see this person behind the data emerge. And what I think is fascinating about this combining data sources is essentially
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
A lot of people always say when I talk about social media that, well, isn't it just like this curated identity of who we are? It's just like who we want to be. We all like matcha lattes and amazing vacations. We're never sad. So it's just like the self-idealized version of who we really are. That's true for some of these identity claims, right? Social media.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
But if you wanted to, let's say you wanted to pretend that you're more organized and conscientious than you do really are, maybe you can do this on Facebook for a couple of weeks. It's really, really difficult to do this across all data sources and across like months and months and months.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Yeah, so I think part of it might be bias, right? One of the things that we're limited by as humans is we have only a sliver of experience and we have our own perspective on the world. And that's influencing every judgment that we make about other people. Now, we also have a lot less data to work with, right?
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
If you look at the prediction of models that we build, they are looking at millions and millions and millions of data points. all integrating them at the same time, there's just no way that we have access to millions of millions of friendships that allow us to then judge someone's personality based on their behavior.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Yeah. Let's imagine it's like Sherlock Holmes with a million Watsons. Yeah.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Yeah. So Google searches, if you think about that, Google is probably the closest confidant that we have, right? We ask Google questions that we don't even dare to ask our closest friends, our partners. So on some level, it's not surprising that whatever we search for on Google actually reveals a lot of what's going on inside. And that could
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
be anything from mental health to truth about society that we might not want to see. So one of a close friend, Seth Stevens Davidovich, and what he did is he looked at search data. So all of the searches that people make, and he was trying to uncover some of the relationships between what we search for and really kind of truths about society. So that could be anything from
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
What do people search for when they search for sex? Do people look for abortions more often than we actually see in the official data? Do people search for racist jokes more often than people would admit in public? So I think Google is really the source that captures what's going on inside our mind and stuff that we don't want to share with anyone else.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Yeah, that's right. And I think, again, if you look at the official polls, nobody wants to admit that. So those are correlations that you don't necessarily see showing up in survey data, but you do see them show up in these more hidden cues.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Yeah, so this was a study that we did where we looked at what's driving populist voting. And what we were particularly interested in is affect. So to what extent is this negative affect, and not just like the more aggressive negative affect like anger, which you oftentimes see talked about in the media, but also the more subtle ones like sadness and depression.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
To what extent are those emotions as they show up on social media linked to people voting for populist candidates? So one of the elections that we looked into was Brexit in the UK. So people voting to leave the European Union or the 2016 US presidential election.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
And what you find consistently is that in areas where there's a lot of this negative affect showing up on social media, people are also more likely to vote for these populist candidates and causes.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Yeah. And you have all of these predictive models, right? So you have all of these predictive models trying to project what is the outcome of an election. None of them really consider tone or emotional valence based on social media.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Yeah, so sometimes I think it's like the behaviors that you show, right? Shopping and Whole Foods is probably a proxy for some of the more psychological variables. That could be anything from openness, which we know is associated with being liberal, could be associated with socioeconomic status.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
And the same way that negative emotions, for example, is associated oftentimes with a desire for change. And in that sense, it's not necessarily surprising that those people who feel currently bad about themselves are Want to vote for a candidate that promises change?
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Yes, happily. It's a village of 500 people in the very southwest corner of Germany. As you said, there's two restaurants, no shops, one church, I should say. That's very important to the people living there. And it was really like a small community.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
So the idea here was that if we could make saving more appealing to people to make it more personally relevant, could we help them put that money, the extra money to the side? So we teamed up with Save a Life, which is a fintech company in the US. They are trying to help low income families save for a rainy day.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
So the people that we work with were people with very low levels of savings, so less than $100. And our goal was to get them to add an additional $100 to their savings account over the course of four weeks. So we teamed up with the creative team of Save a Life and we essentially asked them, well, come up with with saving messages that try to encourage, say, people who are very agreeable.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
So people who care about other people who care about their social relationships and maybe tell them that if you manage to put some money to the side right now, this is a great way of making sure that your loved ones are protected.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Now, if you're talking to someone who is much more competitive and critical, which is the other side of the same personality trait, maybe you want to highlight how just putting this money to the side gets them ahead of the game. So we kind of came up with this different type of messaging for all of the big five personality traits.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
And then we just sent out the messages over the course of four weeks. And we looked at how many people eventually managed to save an additional $100. What did you find? So what we find is that essentially if we target people with the messages that were tailored to their personality, about 11% of the entire sample managed to put $100 to the site.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Now that's certainly far from perfect, but ideally we'd want this to be closer to 100%. But if you think about it, it means that someone is doubling their savings over the course of four weeks. And what's more important is that it was also much better than the existing messaging that Save a Life had been using up to this point.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
So they had been trying to perfect their messaging over a couple of years, and we were still 60% better than the gold standard that they were using at the time.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Exactly. And you can think of it as essentially this is what we do all the time in our offline relationships. Pretty much any type of conversation that you have is to some extent tailored. You don't talk about the same things or in the same way to a friend or to your kid or to your boss.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
So we're trying to replicate this at scale and just say, OK, what is it that you might care about and how can we make saving more appealing to you?
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Yeah, so this is essentially research that we did with GPS records. So again, your phone tracks your GPS records pretty much 24 seven. And what we were interested in is whether we could tell whether someone might be suffering from depression or not, just based on these GPS records alone. Now, if you look at the content of some of these traces that we observed, they actually make a lot of sense.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Yeah. I must have been, I think, eight, nine years old. And I had this pet rabbit or bunny called Schnuffel. And he was living outside. We had built him this house outside, my dad and I. And one day the neighbor comes and says that they found him in their garden, feasting on their vegetables and salad. And so they tried to
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
What we found, for example, is that if you don't leave your house as much anymore as you typically did, or there's much less physical activity, you don't travel to as many places as you used to, those are all small indicators that there might be something going on.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
It's certainly not a diagnostic tool, but it means that maybe we could be raising a red flag and say, hey, might be nothing, but why don't you check in with some support?
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
yeah so i don't think it's a deterministic diagnostic tool but it could be incredibly helpful for people for example who know already that they're suffering from depression right so it's like one of these mental health challenges that just pop up time and again and it's really difficult to find your way out of the valley so once you enter the full-fledged depression it's really hard to come back and so if we can get these early indicators of well
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
maybe it's nothing but here's like a warning system that might alert you to well again there's like these changes in your behavior you're deviating from your typical routine why don't you reach out to someone and see if there's something to it
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Yeah. And you can do this in real time. And technically what you could also do if you're really thinking about this as a support system for the person is not just alert the user, but maybe I can give you the opportunity to name two people, loved ones, someone that you want to know that you're having a hard time, even if you're not in a position to tell them.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Yeah, so this is actually one of the projects that I personally care a lot about because there's still so many students dropping out with enormous debt that they never recover. So what we were trying to do is to see if we could predict early on, once people joined university in the first semester, whether we could see if they might be struggling integrating into the system, right?
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Maybe they're not finding the information that they should be finding. Maybe they're not embedded in the cohort as much as other people, and they're somewhat on the fringes, not really connecting to the community as much. So we kind of, again, teamed up with a company called Ready Education. They had like a sense of what are the activities that students attending?
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Are they talking to other students? Are they part of groups? Are they sending messages? Are they receiving messages? So we looked at all of these data traces. And again, once you combine all of them, you actually have a relatively decent sense of whether someone might be struggling and whether they might drop out at the end of the semester.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
catch him already but unsuccessfully and so they were trying to get more manpower so now my entire family is up their entire family is up we're trying to get him and I don't know if you've ever had a bunny or let alone try to catch one they're really fast So they zigzag around and it's almost impossible to catch them. So we must have looked like clowns running around.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Yeah, and for me, what I love most about this is essentially it creates a path to help students. And at the very bare minimum, what it allows administrators to do is identify at risk students, right? So if you see that there's some students who have a higher likelihood of dropping out, maybe you allocate more resources to helping them.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Now, for me, the even more interesting part is that we also get a sense of what is predicting dropout for each individual student. So it could be that I, for example, when I started university as a first-generation student, my problem was that I simply didn't know where all of the information was sitting. I didn't know how to get the literature. I didn't know where to search for information.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
And so for me, if that was the prediction that the algorithm had made, administrators could have gone in and said, here's the information that you need. You can pop it up on my app. You can send it in my email. Just make sure that I see what I need to see. Now, there could be other people who know exactly. I know that most of my friends, when I started, knew exactly what they were looking for.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
But some of them probably had a harder time integrating with the community and finding the friends and making these connections. So for those people, if we see that that's what's happening based on the algorithm, it's a totally different intervention. So then we're trying to see if we can get you involved in events more. Is there a way to ask other people to connect?
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
So the moment that you understand why someone is predicted to be a dropout, you can also adjust the approaches that you use to help them.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Exactly. It's the same as targeted advertising, right? So we kind of try and figure out what each person needs at a given point in time. Same for student dropout.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Yeah, so there's really two things that the data has to offer. And I think of it as tracking and treating. So on some level, just all of the data that we generate says a lot about our physical activity, our physical health, but also about our mental health, right? Again, we talked about GPS records that say something about whether you might be suffering from depression.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
There's a lot that we can learn about your mental health from what you post on social media, right? So this is the tracking part. But then what I think is really interesting, and it's currently being developed, so I think we're really early stages, is more of the treatment part.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
So can I use your footprints to not only surface, let's say, the most relevant interventions to you, the same way that Amazon recommends products and the same way that Netflix recommends movies, can actually an algorithm who knows you based on your data recommend the best treatment for you suffering from depression?
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Yeah, so this is a really tragic story of a woman who got into an accident, got severely injured, lost the bakery that she was running. She was self-employed, which also meant that she couldn't afford a car anymore, couldn't really provide for her family. And you can imagine that all of this takes a pretty big toll on someone's mental health.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
And that certainly didn't go unnoticed. So very soon into our hunt, I think the entire street really was involved. So we had someone was managing the traffic because the bunny would just kind of run from one side of the street to the next. And then we had like, it really felt like a command center.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
now with no car no money there's no way that you can either find a therapist let alone drive to a therapist for like your weekly session so what she did is she started using um an app that's called wiser which is really trying to interact with you give you advice ask questions about how you're feeling um gives these little prompts and little challenges maybe you go out to nature and maybe you try and meditate for a little bit and i think the way that she tells the story
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
is that it was very weird in the beginning talking to a bot about your mental health struggles, but at some point you adjust and you get used to it. And from using it once in a while, I think she started using it multiple times a day.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
So in her case, I think it significantly improved her mental health. It certainly didn't fix all of the problems, right? And there's still a lot of effort that you have to put in as a human being. But it felt like there was a support system that she otherwise couldn't have afforded.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Yeah, so I think if you have access to a human being, blood and flesh, who can be your therapist, that's probably preferable. However, there's this huge gap in terms of how many therapists there are and how many people are seeking therapy. So then there is a really huge need for people to get at least some support in cases where they can't get hold of a human being.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Oh, yeah, that's it's one of my favorite applications. But the idea here is that it actually offers this what I think of as like a magical echo chamber swap machine. And because it's really difficult for me to figure out, well, what is the reality of, let's say, a 50 year old guy in the middle of Ohio? I just don't have direct access, right?
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
So people were strategizing about whether we should set up a trap for the rabbit or whether we should just try to lure him in with a treat. Eventually we caught him, but it was certainly an adventure for the entire neighborhood.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
It's really difficult for me to step into their shoes and see what does their day-to-day look like. Same for, let's say, a single mom in the suburbs of Chicago. But Google knows, right? Google knows exactly what those people see every day when they search for something specific. Facebook knows exactly what their newsfeed looks like every day.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
So instead of keeping me in my own echo chamber and just feeding more of the stuff that I already know, they could actually allow me to hop into the echo chambers of other people.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Yeah, so it could be an explorer mode, right? And the explorer mode at the very basic level could be, well, just do an echo chamber swap with someone. So maybe someone is happy to let you access their Facebook feed and you give them access to yours. At a more sophisticated level, they could build an engine that allows you to specify exactly which echo chamber you want to hop into, right?
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
I can say, here's the demographics of the person, here's the preferences, here's the age, gender, whatever you want to see, and then you can hop into the echo chamber. Now, I don't think we're going to use it all too often, right? The argument by Google is nobody would use it because it's so comfortable in our own echo chamber. And I think that is largely true.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Most of the time, we probably love to not have to go to page two of Google because we find what we want to see on page one. But I at least want to have the option. See, well, what is the search result for like immigration that someone with a totally different political ideology than me and a totally different part of the country sees that I would never otherwise get to see?
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
I think that's absolutely true. And in all fairness, some of it is human nature. So the reason for why these algorithms work and the reason for why companies craft them in their effort to make profits is because we love to see stuff that we believe in anyway. It's very comforting. It's very reassuring to see stuff that is aligned with our worldview.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
So that's why I feel like this explorer mode is just one option that allows us to at least get some collective oversight. So even if we're not using it as much, it still means that we have an option to see what's happening on the other side.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
It was a dramatic moment. So it was actually one of my neighbors who leaped and caught him on the back leg. And I just remembered the rabbits screaming. I didn't even know that rabbits could scream that loudly. And then all the kids were crying because the rabbit was screaming. And so I think the adults were just happy that we got him. But it was certainly a dramatic capture.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
it feels much more of a burden and a responsibility that we're not really equipped to take on.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Yeah, so it was, I still remember it. It was like a red Suzuki Bandit. And it was, I thought it was beautiful. So I was 15, he was a bit older. And we would just take it from one village to the next through the hills and up and down the serpentines. And I loved riding it, but I was usually in the back. So at some point I think I got really tired of being in the back.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
And I knew that I would have to wait for another three years, because in Germany you get your license at 18 at the earliest. So I kind of try to sneakily convince him to let me just try. I found this abandoned airfield and I just told him, let me just kind of ride for a few meters. You're going to get the bike back. It's all going to be good.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
He was a bit skeptical at first, but then agreed to let me try. So we start and I don't know exactly what happened. I think we must have kind of moved to the grass and I was trying to pull the bike back. But suddenly I think I just turn on the gas. And the bike rises. My boyfriend falls off the back and I just speed away. So I have no idea what I'm doing now.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Suddenly I'm alone on the bike without any sense of like how to handle it. I'm trying kind of going left and right and left and right. And at some point I essentially crash on the side. Luckily it was still going slowly, but there was my first experience riding the bike myself.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
But in a way that wasn't the worst part. For me, the worst part was that I would say the minute we dropped the bike at the shop, everybody knew. So people knew about me asking my boyfriend to drive the bike, me crashing the bike, which was even worse. Otherwise, it could have potentially been a cool story, but certainly wasn't. So everybody knew what had happened.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
And just I was punished for weeks after with people asking me about it.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Very, I mean, very different. So some neighbors actually just went back to their own childhood and they were like, oh, that's like such a brave and fun thing to do. And they just recounted their own childhood offenses. Others were like, how could you ever do this? We thought that you were actually one of the good kids on the block.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
So, but it was just one conversation after the other that was all about me crashing the bike.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Certainly. I mean, I think that maybe not the bike surveillance. I think this one was a hard one. But generally speaking, the fact that my neighbors knew everything about my business also meant that there was a community that I felt safe in. So it was a community of people who knew me, who tried to help when I was looking for advice. And I've never quite experienced anything like it ever since.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
I think so. I mean, some of them were just trying to interfere with my life, but some of the advice I got was incredibly helpful. So one of the ones that I still remember is that when I was finishing high school, I was thinking about doing a gap year. It sounded like a dream to me. I was like, well, you can travel the world, you can take a year off, don't rush into university.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
But I remember being quite torn because not many of my friends were considering it. And I was, very ambitious, I would say at the time. So I was like, well, maybe it's just a waste of my time to spend a year traveling. I could start university, get a job. And luckily, a lot of my neighbors told me like, look, you seem like someone who's been always craving to leave this village to see some
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
some of the world. Why don't you do it? Like you can work for many, many years after you should really consider it. They helped me even find a job to scrape together the money. So I think that was one of the times that I felt very much supported.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
In some ways, I would say so. Because I think it was a slightly less biased and maybe self-critical version of myself.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Yeah, it's a funny story because I remember entering the apartment and you know, you meet someone for the first time, you have no idea who they are. And I entered the apartment and it's pristine. It's first of all, it has this huge library, which I loved and had books in Hebrew and English and French. So I was like, oh man, this is a bookworm. I love it already.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Walked to the kitchen, it's sparkling clean, which I cannot say of my own kitchen. So I was highly impressed in the sense that everything had its place. The knives were perfectly organized. I got some glasses for us and they were perfect. No marks, no watermarks anywhere.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
And I just kind of started building this image of like who the person living in this apartment, the guy I was dating at the time, who he was. And it just felt like he was this curious, book-loving person with almost like an OCD sense of order.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
It does feel like Sherlock Holmes. And I think we do this all the time, right? We meet someone new. We look for clues of who that person is. Could be their apartment. Could be what they're wearing. Could be what they're saying. It's really we're kind of trying to piece the puzzle pieces together in a way.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Well, it worked out really nicely. He's now my husband and we have a 10-month-old.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Very accurate. So I think he I would say he's probably the most curious person I know. He loves podcasts, loves reading, loves to learn everything about the world. And he also I have to say is a little bit OCD in a good way.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Yeah, so this is actually work that inspired all of my research in the digital space. So Sam Gosling was one of the first people to try and figure out how good are strangers at judging our personality if they just take a look at our bedrooms and our offices. And he distinguished between these two types of cues that you can find.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
So he said, well, some of the cues that you find in someone's office or bedroom
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
are the intentional identity claims that we that we put there right so we put up a poster um of lady gaga because that's the signal that we want to send to the world of well we're into music and this is the type of music that we like and but then there's also all of these other cues that we don't really think about right so the socks are disorganized the bed isn't made um it's the opposite of my husband it's just like probably a little bit more disorganized so what sam gosling really showed is that if you combine all of these things
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
you get a pretty good sense of who the person living in these places is.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Yeah, so in a way, right, so I could take a look at your office or your bedroom, or I could see what my neighbors are doing. But on some level, I think we all now live in this, what I think of as a digital village. And so we all leave these traces, these digital traces all the time. That could be anything from, The stuff that you post on social media.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
So again, relatively explicit identity claims to the data that is captured by your smartphone. So GPS records, where do you go? Your credit card, what do you buy? And the same way that we could put the pieces together from someone's bedroom, we can also do that in someone's digital space.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Yeah, it's actually one of my favorite studies that was coming out of MIT. And what they showed is that it's very easy to identify someone based on your spending records or your GPS records. So you can imagine, as you said, there's millions of people in New York.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
And even if we, say, got access to all of their credit card spending, anonymized it so we don't have names, we don't have any personal identifiers, it's very easy to reverse engineer the data. You can imagine that, let's say, you
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
go and get a matcha latte at Starbucks on 72nd Street in New York at 7.20 a.m., then you have lunch in a certain place, and maybe you take a cab downtown at night, there's at some point only so many people who have exactly that same signature. So you can almost think of it as a fingerprint that is made up of your data.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
companies now actually have to step it up, right? So they have to say, well, if I want to get your data, I better make sure that I show you how my product is much, much better when you're giving me access to your personal information than when you're not. And you can think of it as like YouTube, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
So YouTube has this option where they're not using your history and what you've looked for, searched for before, what you've watched before. And you can actually see the value decrease. So you can see how every time you have to find something new, it doesn't remember anything. But if your privacy is protected by design, now companies really have to live up to that expectation.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
So collectively, you can actually ask for a lot more when it comes to the design of products and services.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
coming up next on passion struck companies now actually have to step it up right so they have to say well if i want to get your data i better make sure that i show you how my product is much much better when you're giving me access to your personal information than when you're not and you can you can think of it as like youtube right so youtube has this option where they're not using your history and your like what you've looked for search for before what you've watched before
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
And that kind of then erodes some of the connection I think that you were referring to.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
I love that. So the puzzle metaphor is, I think, one of my favorite ones because it really tells you how this world works. If I ask people, how worried are you about your smartphone sensing data being out there, about your social media posts being out there, about your credit card spending being out there, oftentimes people are not even that worried because it doesn't seem super intimate.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
If I think, okay, maybe someone knows where I work, maybe someone knows where I live, Maybe someone knows that I got a Starbucks coffee. Maybe someone knows that I went to a vacation because I post about it on Instagram. In isolation, those traces don't even seem that intimate and intrusive, right? Because it's like this one insight into what we do.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
But then when you put them together, that's really when this kind of holistic picture of the, you mentioned this in the context of Lowe's, emerges, right? Almost the life of the person play out. You see their routines, you see their habits and like the stuff that I'm, I've been working on for the last 10 years is you can also zoom into their psychology and that becomes really intimate, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
So I think the reason for why, for example, Cambridge Analytica blew up so big in 2016 was that suddenly people understood it's not just data, it's not just individual data points, but they can predict whether I might be impulsive or they can predict whether I might be neurotic.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
And so even though like political campaigns or companies have been using data for many years before and oftentimes were celebrated right, for helping understand consumers, helping understand voters and talking to them about the things that matter.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
I think suddenly people realize that, well, wait a minute, if I can take all of this data and translate it into something that I think is really intimate and that I might not necessarily want to reveal to outsiders who I have no connection with, that might be like a bit of a red flag.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
And exactly for the reason that you mentioned, it's not just that we're poking around in your private life, but we can also use it to, in a way, control your choices or at least nudge them in a certain direction. I always talk about how like psychological targeting, that's the term that I use for that is like we predict your psychology from data and then we use it to influence your behavior.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
It's not a wonder weapon, right? So we're not going to completely flip your identity just by understanding that you're extroverted and showing you a few more extroverted ads, for example. But still, most choices that we make in life don't require an identity change, right? It's okay, should I go on this vacation or this vacation? Now I can probably shift you to the one that I want you to go in.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
Or if you're an undecided voter and you don't know if you want to go out on election day and cast your vote, well, maybe then understanding your motivations and dreams and fears actually just gets you across that line to actually go and cast your vote. So for me, that's the crux is that kind of controlling behavior doesn't require this deep identity change.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
It just means making some options more likely than others.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
Yeah, it's such an interesting question, because I do think that there's a difference now coming back to the old ways of the village and the new ways of the village.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
Because back in the day in the village, there was something that would essentially say, if you give up part of your autonomy, right, so you buy into this idea that we're a collective community, you give up some of the agency, you give up some of the ability to just do whatever you want.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
that created a lot of sense of connectedness right because suddenly we're in it together and suddenly it's not just my decisions and my choices but it's the collective decisions of the community so i think back in the day there was like almost like this back and forth in negotiation of like how much am i willing to give in response to how much i'm getting and i think that kind of trade-off has been broken a little bit more that negotiation in the digital world because right now
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
The way that it typically works is, right, it's not a mutual conversation that we're having. So in the village, I knew something about my neighbors. I could connect with them. I could also influence them and vice versa. But now it's essentially big companies or it doesn't even have to be a big companies, but anyone who can collect data about us, as you said, a lot easier than it should be.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
it's a one-way street right so someone is collecting data trying to passively influence us that means they're in a way taking our autonomy without our control or consent but it also means that by doing so they potentially disconnect us from the people around us because now again we're not seeing the same thing anymore so i think back in the village this kind of trade-off between autonomy and connectedness was actually something that we benefited from
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
I think in the digital world, it's like the same infrastructure, the same system is in a way taking both. It's taking our autonomy. And at the same time, because we don't see what other people see and because we're kept in our little echo chambers, it also takes away some of that connection and meaning.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
It's a great question because I think so far and the way that I've spoken about it probably sounded relatively negative overall, but I do think there's incredible opportunities, right? So like we've talked about like this understanding in the village of, well, they could give me the best advice ever because they knew who I was. I think one of my favorite examples in this context is mental health.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
So mental health is still one of these areas where it's incredibly difficult, especially because we're now a lot more disconnected. In the village, if someone was struggling, the chances that someone picked up on it from the community was actually much, much higher than, let's say, I live in New York right now. Nobody would notice.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
I know my neighbors a little bit, but they certainly wouldn't necessarily figure out that I might be having a hard time emotionally. So here, this is something that technology can actually help us with.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
If technology can understand, for example, from your smartphone sensing data that you're not leaving the house as much anymore, there's much less physical activity, you're not making and taking as many calls anymore, maybe it's nothing, right? Maybe you're just on vacation and you're having a great time, but it could be an early warning sign that maybe something is off, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
So your behavior starts to deviate from your typical routine. Maybe now is a good time to use the powers that we have to, first of all, help you realize that something might be going on and then also give you the resources that you need to get better before you even enter this value of depression. So I think
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
there's a lot of incredible opportunities that technology has to amplify some of the positive sides that we experience in the village of like under using the understanding of who you are to help you accomplish the things that you want right so like savings is another example where like it's just it's a top it's like a behavior that's extremely difficult for the human brain
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
Because it's like you have to give up something in the here and now for maybe a potential benefit in the future. Now, again, back in the village, there was probably someone who could try to help you by motivating you in a certain way. And the same is true for technology.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
So if I can understand your preferences and your, again, motivations and needs, yeah, I can use it to get you to spend more, but I can also use it to get you to save more, for example. And then the last one, which I think is actually very nicely ties into this topic of connection that I've been thinking about a lot, is could we also use technology
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
Almost to accomplish the opposite of keeping you in your echo chamber and having us become increasingly disconnected, but as a way to actually experience the world from different viewpoints, right? So the example that I always give is if I wanted to understand what the reality of, let's say, a 50-year-old Republican farmer in Ohio looks like,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
almost impossible for me to do right now because i only have one kind of view in the world right and one perspective and that's my own it's based on my experiences everything that i've seen everything that i've experienced and it would be really hard for me to understand what that reality looks like like right i would have to go there i'd have to talk to a lot of people maybe shadow someone and see what their day looks like ideally get a sense of how they process
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
Now, with technology, we could have something I call it like a perspective exchange or like an echo chamber swap, where the big companies know exactly what that reality looks like. So Google knows what that person sees when they search for something on Google. And Facebook knows what their newsfeed looks like. What do they talk about? Who are they connected with?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
So there is a way in which those tech companies could actually give us access to the reality of someone else so that we are...
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
Instead of being isolated and kept in our own echo chambers, we could actually use it as a tool to expand our view on the world and become potentially connected to people who look very different to us and have totally different life experiences and that we would otherwise never get to see. And I'm talking about it in the context of the US right now.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
You could imagine I could step into the shoes of someone who lives in Thailand, someone who lives in Chile and see, okay, what are the topics that they actually care about? What does their daily routines look like? What are some of the things that they might be worried about? What are some of the things that they dream of?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
And I think if we talk about connection right now, because we're so focused on personalization and optimizing for profits, yeah, we're stuck in our little echo chamber. But the same technology has the potential to actually broaden our view on the world in a way that we've never seen before.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
And it's a topic that I've been thinking about so much because it's not trivial. So the risk that you always have is, If, let's say, I get to see what is the newsfeed, like the Google searches of someone who has like totally different political views than I have, looks like I might actually become so appalled that I dig in my heels and even deeper, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
So there's always the challenge that you have when you expose someone to a different worldview that you just elicit reactance. But I actually think that's something that we could also work on with technology. Because as you said, what we want is to get a holistic understanding of the person.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
So I remember back, I think it was in the context of the 2016 election or 2020, I can't remember, but the Wall Street Journal had this Red Feed, Blue Feed website where they just showed side by side, here's what the news story, same topic, let's pick immigration or gun laws, looks like from a more Republican versus a more Democratic stance.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
And I think, first of all, not that many people were using it. And I think what it somewhat led to was that people were like, just, oh, my God, look at how crazy the other side is. And the reason for why I think people were not as receptive is exactly as you mentioned. This is like a super abstract concept. like dehumanized way of showing it, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
So it's here's a group of people and this is what they see. Tells you nothing about the people behind it, right? Like why is it that a Republican, for example, is more worried about immigration? Maybe they just have something that's happening in their life that makes them think that way.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
And so what I had in mind when I was thinking about this echo chamber swap or perspective exchange is you really want to see the entire life of someone. And maybe we could even complement it with some kind of,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
AI assistant right so that tries to help you figure out as you walk in someone else's shoes of like here's how this might all come together here's why they might have a certain view on immigration and what we know for example from research on it's called moral reframing and which is essentially if I can talk about an issue with your own moral lens of what is right or wrong in the world I can actually get you to be a lot more open to an argument so there's like these five
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
like moral dimensions of fairness, care, loyalty, authority, and purity. And we know that you all have, everybody has their own profile, right? We can, there's like a little bit of a distinction between like Republicans, for example, or more conservatives, and they care more about authority, purity, and loyalty. So those are the driving factors
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
kind of forces of like how they make decisions about what's right or wrong and liberals are more focused on care and fairness now typically when we make arguments as humans we just make an argument from our own perspective right because that's what we know but you can imagine if i can try and say look here's
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
someone who's more conservative and maybe i can craft an argument um around immigration that's focused on um loyalty more than care and fairness because they might not care about this as much that's one way in which you can actually get them engaged in the conversation and i think this like the same principle could apply to these echo chamber swaps right if i can first of all see
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
here's what this entire life of the person looks like, not just what they see, like what the news that they read. And I can also have someone help me, in this case, probably an AI, understand, okay, here's where they're coming from. And here's maybe one way you could think about this from your own point of view, from your own moral campus.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
And I think that's like a way in which we could hopefully avoid some of the reactants and really get people to humanize the people behind these digital footprints.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
It's a great question. Probably from everything that we've talked about so far, you can probably already tell that my point of view is like, it should probably not just be left to companies, right? Because the incentives are just terrible. So I teach in a business school and it's all about what are companies incentivized by? And right now the incentive is,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
personalize as much as you can show the content that's most most engaging right because it's all about attention so if those are the market incentives companies are going to do that because it's really difficult to move away from that and say we're just going to do the ethical thing right everybody else is is not doing that and i even hear that from friends within those companies right i have a
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
a lot of friends in companies like Apple, Meta, Google, and so on. And I think they oftentimes complain and say, we would love to have strict regulation that allows us to do the ethical thing, but also make sure that everybody else is doing that. So I think that just leaving it to companies in the current incentive structure is really difficult.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
now the second part that i was for a long time very much in favor of and still am but in a slightly different way is well why don't we just give control to users and consumers right so there's if you look to europe with them general data protection regulations which is one of the the strictest data protection regulations that we have similar to what california is doing and their foundation is
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
transparency and control so if we want to manage that landscape and we want to have people decide for themselves right we're not all the same you might be willing to give up your data for a certain service but i might not so why don't we just explain to people what's happening and then let them decide and this solution has a lot of intuitive appeal right again we're not all the same we're empowering consumers to make their own choices but the problem with these approaches in the absence of i think
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
better regulation and some technological solutions that I can talk about in a second and changes in how we govern data is that it's just an impossible task to do, right? Think about it. If you wanted to manage your data properly across all of the products and services that you're using, That would be a full-time job.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
And you can actually see the value decrease. So you can see how every time you have to find something new, it doesn't remember anything. But if your privacy is protected by design, now companies really have to live up to that expectation. So collectively, you can actually ask for a lot more when it comes to the design of products and services.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
So first of all, it would mean that you have to read all of the terms and conditions constantly. You have to be constantly in the loop of how could your data be used today, tomorrow? What are some of the new technologies? What are some of the inferences? How could this kind of infringe on your autonomy and self-determination?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
So even if you knew everything about technology and could keep up with the speed at which it evolves, it would still be like 24 seven, right? So nobody has to time to do that. I hope that people have better things to do than just reading through all of the terms and conditions. Share a meal with your family rather than doing that. So I think just pushing the responsibility to users
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
is like it's much more of a burden than it actually is a right however i do think it's the foundation of something that we can use to to make it better right because at the end of the day it would be great if you could have control if you also have the mastery to to exercise that control and there's a couple of things that i think and we can do there and they actually fall some of it falls under regulation some of it i think falls under new forms of data governance so
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
Most basic thing is make it easier for people to do the right thing, right? If I now have to go, if data tracking is the NOR, is the default, and I would now have to go through all of my terms and conditions, all of the permissions that I have, the settings for all of the apps that I'm using, all of the websites that I'm browsing. and I constantly have to opt out, nobody's going to do that.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
Again, nobody has the time and energy to do that. If regulation said that the default is an opt-in, no data is being tracked unless you say so, that would totally change the entire system, right? Because now companies really have to convince me that they can create value by having my data, and my data would be protected by default, then I can change it. So I think that is one thing.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
But then the other thing, which when you think of regulation, it's like risk mitigation. So regulation tries to protect you from the most egregious abuses, but it's very much average and it doesn't help you maximize the utility that you can get from your data.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
There, I think what we need, again, coming back to this notion of control, is to have a support system that allows you to exercise your control wisely. And what I mean by that specifically is that there's these forms of governing your data that's in the context of data co-ops and data trusts. So the idea is that instead of having to manage it all by yourself, you actually get together.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
And now we're coming back to this notion of community and connection. You get together a group of people who are willing to share their data. and who come together to manage it for their own benefit. So just to give you an example that I really like, healthcare is one of these, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
So there's a lot of rare diseases, for example, that are poorly understood because to understand it, you need data from a lot of people and all pooling it in the same place, ideally as much as you can in terms of like your genetics, your medical history, your lifestyle, your nutritional choices. If we had all of this from everybody in the world in one place,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
we could understand disease much better we could understand treatment much better because we can now see okay here's the treatment that works for person x but not for person y why is that what else could we do for them and but it's like a pretty big ask to have this in a central server without giving it to pharma companies right but if you could have a community of people
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
let's say people suffering from MS, which is actually a real example in Switzerland, a data corp in Switzerland that exists. They just get MS people to share, people suffering from MS to share all of their data. Now they can generate insights that are much, much better than anything that you could do by yourself, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
If you're only one person, there's only so much you can learn from your genetic data. And so they generate insights generally about the disease, but they also then use it to benefit you directly. So if you're part of the data corp, it's called MyData.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
If you're part of the data co-op and you share your, again, genetic data, healthcare data, and so on, you get like personalized recommendations that are sent to your doctor in the hospital of like, here's treatments that might work particularly well for you. Here's something that you could do to help with your symptoms. And that's a totally different way of giving control to people, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
Because it's really empowering. So it's not just saying you're in charge. It's saying, we're going to give you a support system of people who have the same interests and also expertise. So data co-ops, the real benefit here is that once you have many people with the same interests, you can actually hire like experts and management who knows what they're doing.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
And you can say, okay, this might be a great company to collaborate with because they are really driving insights. They're very much research focused. And here's like some of the data structures that we can put in place to make sure that your data is being protected. And it's not just you anymore. It's like you and an entire support system.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
So I think if we think about how do we change that and make data work for us, I wouldn't leave it to companies. I think we need regulation, but I think it's not the only part because it's slow and it just protects us from the basic abuses. I think what we need is like these more community style forms of data governance that are resting on this notion of control.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
I think, so for me, privacy by design just means make it easy for people to do the right thing, right? So if the, again, the default is set to relatively high standards of data protection, you're not just giving away your data every time you sign up for a service or a product, That just means that, first of all, it leverages our laziness.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
It's essentially most of the time we're not going to change the default because we have other stuff to do. That means our data is most of the time protected. But it also could mean that companies now actually have to step it up.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
So they have to say, well, if I want to get your data, I better make sure that I show you how my product is much, much better when you're giving me access to your personal information than when you're not. And you can think of it as like YouTube. So YouTube has this option where they're not using your history and what you've looked for, searched for before, what you've watched before.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
And you can actually see the value decrease. So you can see how it's like every time you have to find something new, it doesn't remember anything. But if your privacy is protected by design, now companies really have to live up to that expectation. So collectively, you can actually ask for a lot more when it comes to the design of products and services.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
It's funny because I think nuclear waste is a good analogy. You could also think about it as nuclear power, right? Because nuclear power has the ability to destroy, but also to actually give energy to humanity. So I think there's actually those two sides. But one of the things that I like about this analogy, as you said, is that once data is out there, you're never going to get it back.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
And I think people oftentimes... Forget that. I teach this class on the ethics of data, and there's always people who say, well, I don't care about my personal data being out there because I have nothing to hide. And I, in some way, understand that sentiment, right? Because it feels like it's, first of all, an impossible task. There's not much you can do.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
And it might be true that people in that moment really don't worry too much of their data being out there. But it's a very privileged position to be in. But if you don't have to worry about your data being out there, that means just that you're currently in a really good spot. And it's certainly not true for everybody.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
Think of the fact that we can predict your sexual orientation just from your online digital footprints. That still comes with a death penalty in many countries. Think of mental health still stigmatized in many parts of the world. And I think the fact that even if you don't worry about your data being out there here now doesn't mean that couldn't change tomorrow.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
Like I think the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe versus Wade made that somewhat painfully real for a lot of women in the U.S. Because suddenly the fact that we can track your Google searches, we can track your GPS location so we know potentially where you go. We can like this like period tracking app.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
So there's like all of these data traces that we never really had to worry about suddenly was like, well, now I don't necessarily want someone else. poking around in my private data because it could have like implications that are very detrimental. So this is like what I mean by
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
it's like nuclear waste it's long lasting and you're never going to get it back the way that i like to frame it is like essentially data is permanent but leadership isn't you just don't know what's going to happen tomorrow and you mentioned the deadly piece so that the point that i think or like the example that is it's driving home this point for me every time it just gives me goosebumps every time is actually the history of the the country that i grew up in right so if you think back to
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
Germany in 1939, democracy 1939, it essentially wasn't anymore. And one of the things that we know is that a lot of the atrocities in the Jewish community within Europe depended on what data was available. So some of the European countries had religious affiliation as part of the census data. So it was sitting there in City Hall, and it was extremely easy for the Germans to come in
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
find the records and go find the members of the Jewish community. And what we know, again, is that the rates of atrocities across European countries was very much associated with that information being available. Now, fast forward to now, you don't need City Hall anymore. You can just go into someone's online profile and you can, with really high levels of accuracy, predict
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
that religious orientation, religious affinity, let's say, again, something we kind of suddenly discriminate against a different group of people, it's certainly going to be predictable from the data that is out there. So this notion of I don't have anything to worry about today might not be true tomorrow. And for me, that's a really important point.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
No.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
I couldn't agree more. I think it's actually coming back to some of the things that we talked about earlier. Because most of the time when we think about data, how do people take control of their data, it's very much focused on the individual. Well, you have to manage it. When I think about systemic changes, I think about something like privacy by design. That's what we talked about.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
I think about something like, can we create these data co-ops that, again, create a system that supports you where you can come together and it's not just you. And there's also technologies that I think will drive some of the systemic change. Because right now,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
you oftentimes have this trade-off between, well, I do want personalization and I do want a value that comes with data, especially in the context, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
Some of it might just be, well, I need to find a movie on Netflix and I don't have like my entire life to find the one that I want or I have to buy headphones on Amazon and I can't now spend the next 10 weeks trying to find the ones that are most relevant. But it can also be something in the context like healthcare.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
It's like, yeah, I do want the insights into disease and I do want some personalized recommendations for how to be healthier and happier. But I don't necessarily want my data to be out there with the big pharma companies all in one place where it's at risk for security breaches and abuse when it comes to manipulating us in the future or exploiting us for profits. So there is now technology
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
that essentially is trying to overcome this trade-off by saying well how do we protect your data but still give you the insights the value the convenience and the service it's called federated learning and the idea is essentially instead of you having to send your data to netflix for example to train their models to send your data your medical history genetic data to a pharma company
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
and then just trust them that they're going to use it for a good purpose, you can ask Netflix to say, send their models to your phone locally. And instead of you sending all of your viewing data to Netflix, they just send their model to you based on the movies that you've watched, they update locally, and then you just send the intelligence back. So instead of
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
The original model that said, well, we're just going to send our data to a central server. You never send your data. So the data never leaves its safe harbor. What you exchange with the companies is essentially intelligence. So you have Netflix ask questions from the data, and then you can send back the intelligence.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
Thank you so much, John, for having me.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
Or you can have a pharma company ask questions from your medical data, and then you get personalized advice based on the models that they create. And so for me, this technology is really... one that kind of creates systemic change because it eliminates this trade-off that we had to grapple with all this time.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
And I think if you, again, if the trade-off is I can get great service convenience here and now, or maybe I can protect my data, my privacy and so on here and in the future, most people will gravitate towards the immediate one, right? So I think that's another good example for where systemic changes is necessary just to
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
make us live up to the expectations that we have and become the best versions of ourselves.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
Well, so the book has a website, mindmasters.ai. I also have a personal website, sandramats.com. And we recently, together with my husband, actually set up a center. It's called the Center for Advanced Technology and Human Performance. I think it's human-performance.ai. But essentially, it's trying to integrate everything, see how we can empower people with technology.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
Thank you so much.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
Yeah, I was super happy. I love them, so it was almost a dream come true.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
I was going to say, it feels like the bestseller list that matters in a way. So I would feel you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
The missing rabbit, yes, I'm happy to. So yes, I grew up in this, it was really tiny village, 500 people, even though my parents keep reminding me that since I left, it's grown to a thousand people, which I can assure you does not make much of a difference. But so my experience there was really the fact that it was like a very tight knit community.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
In fact, everybody knew everything about everybody else's lives. Kids running to the bus and maybe they're just not the most organized ones. Or you see who's dating whom, what people are doing on the weekend. And that just means on the one hand that it's just like the sense of community, connection, and security that I've never experienced anywhere else, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
Those neighbors who know you that well, they're the ones who can give you the best advice possible. They can connect you to opportunities. They can set you up with people that they think you might like or jobs that they think you might be interested in. But it's also, it feels very intrusive in a way, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
Because they, again, observe everything that you do and they poke around in your private life sometimes, right? manipulating you behind the scenes in ways that I at least didn't really appreciate. The story with the rabbit was essentially, I think, a nice example of just like how people in the village, by observing everything that's going on, can come together and almost like create value.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
So this was, I don't know, I was still pretty young, but I remember it was the weekend, we're still sleeping at some point, like one of our neighbors knocks on the door and telling us that my pet rabbit had escaped apparently. So they were living outside. We had built them like this amazing cage together with my dad, but apparently we left it open overnight.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
So rabbit escaped and it was just hanging out in their garden, eating the salad. They had already tried to catch it. So difficult. So now suddenly it's my neighbors trying to chase the rabbit. My entire family gets up trying to chase the rabbit and they're really fast. So they zigzag around, like you see it in the cartoon movies and it was just impossible to catch it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
And like word gets out, word spreads pretty quickly. So I think just a few, like maybe half an hour and the entire street is involved. So we now have someone managing the traffic because the, the,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
rabbit keeps running across and like back and forth across the street and we have like people planning how to catch him there was like this entire like the entire community came together to help us solve the problem we eventually um caught in by someone leaping um onto the rabbit which was a dramatic moment in and by itself but again it's just like there was someone who knew before we even did that the rabbit had escaped and everybody came together to catch it yeah it was like a tight-knit community
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
Yeah, you're really hitting all the pain points here. But that's true. This is one of my low moments in my village career, I would say. So I had a boyfriend at the time who was a bit older. And he had a motorcycle. And we loved riding the motorcycle around. And it was usually him driving because he was the only one who had a license. I was still 15.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
And I was at some point, well, I want to at least try. I don't want to wait another three years until I can get my license. So why don't we just go to an even more remote place than the village? So we found an airfield that was abandoned by the time. And I was just like, let me try. You sit in the back. And we'll take it step by step. You walk me through how stuff works because I have no idea.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
And which was like a really nice idea in theory, did not plan out in practice. So I don't know exactly what happened, but I think I just pulled the bike back and just turned on the gas and let the clutch snitch. So we just... Rise like a horse, the front goes up, boyfriend falls off the back, and I just keep driving away. No ideas.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
At some point, I crashed on the side, luckily, and nothing really happened because I was still going relatively slow. But you can imagine that the moment that we come back, because my dad had to pick us up, the motorcycle just wouldn't start anymore. The moment we come back and drop it in the shop to get repaired, everybody knew about it, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
So I think for the next couple of weeks, I just constantly got caught in conversations about, I'd be so stupid to do this, and then someone else telling me about their own childhood offenses. Yeah, the news spread really fast in that village.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
Very much. And I think it shapes both like the sense of mattering, but it also shapes the choices that you have available, right? And the decisions that you make for yourself and others.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
So I was the daughter of a local police officer, which didn't help with a motorcycle accident, but also meant, for example, that people that I wouldn't get invited to some of the cool kids parties, but I would then get invited to all the community stuff where you could help out and organize things.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
So that what people think about you and who they think you are really matters in terms of how they interact with you, the opportunities that they create. So I think for me, it was both the sense of who am I and what are some of the opportunities that are available for me.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
and then also on the flip side in terms of just getting the support so we all just there's certain things that are extremely hard right so like when i try to figure out what do i want to do after college there's so many things that you could do you've not been there right because you just get out of high school you don't have that much experience so you need people who've seen more of the world to guide you in some way and obviously the more that people know about again your dreams your hopes and so on ambitions
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
they can really customize the advice that you give. So I think that the mattering expressed itself in, it was nice that there was someone who understood what I wanted. And then in those moments when they used it to my advantage and in my best interest, that felt like a really strong support system.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
I think it's such a great question because so for me, if you go back to the analogy of the village, right, there were essentially two components. One is that someone was snooping around in my life and they understood who I was, what I wanted and so on. But for me, the more important part was always the second part.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
is they use that knowledge to then potentially influence my behavior for better or worse.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
And so the same way I think about this online, right, so there's now with all of the data that we generate, anything from what you post on social media, your credit card spending, the fact that your phone tracks your whereabouts pretty much 24-7, knows who you connect with, knows what conversations you have, and those are all very intimate insights into your psychology.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
But then the second step of, well, once companies and third parties have access to those insights, they can essentially, again, shape your behavior in certain directions that sometimes might be extremely helpful. If I can figure out, again, what might be jobs that you're interested in? Can I understand whether you might be struggling from mental health issues and support you?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
So there's a lot of helpful use cases, same way as in the village. But then there's obviously also these other use cases where I get you to do something that you don't want to do. Maybe like the least problematic one is probably I'm just going to sell you stuff that you don't need.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
But then once we go into, I'm going to get you to vote for someone that you otherwise wouldn't vote or not vote at all. It's this entire second world where suddenly your choices are no longer your own. And Because you mentioned connection, I think where we see this materialize in the context of social fabric is that the more and more we personalize, the less and less connected we are.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
The less and less we actually have this sense of shared reality because we're all seeing the same thing. So I think a lot of people are talking about this in the context of echo chambers, of filter bubbles. But the convenience that we get sometimes by seeing some of the stuff that's relevant, that's really tailored to us in our psychology,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
Also means that what I see might not be at all related to what you see now. We don't even have the same conversations anymore, right? And there's also no checks and balances in terms of what news are out there. Are they actually factually correct? Are they potentially slanted? Or like even these cultural references that we use to have like these fun conversations, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Sandra Matz on The Silent War Hijacking Your Free Will | EP 578
We talk about a movie or an ad that we've seen together on TV and everybody sees the same thing. So it creates this bonding. And I think the more we move to an online world that's trying to emulate and simulate some of the ways in which we've traditionally customized content and communication, it just means that we don't see the same thing anymore.
Something You Should Know
How You Are Being Psychologically Targeted & The Extraordinary Power of Curiosity
Every person, every hour generates about six gigabytes of data. So that's an enormous amount of data. And it's incredibly cheap to get hold of. But for me, the really big question is not just who collects what data, but really what do they use it for?
Something You Should Know
How You Are Being Psychologically Targeted & The Extraordinary Power of Curiosity
Yeah, so that very much depends on which entity you're thinking about. If you're thinking about governments, easiest thing to do, because with facial recognition, it's extremely easy to pick up, even if you're wearing a mask. That's one of the things that we've learned. And it's extremely easy to pick up who you are using these cameras.
Something You Should Know
How You Are Being Psychologically Targeted & The Extraordinary Power of Curiosity
And then by mapping it against the database, and there's data brokers out there that are selling these databases to commercial entities as well. So it's not just governments. It's extremely easy, right? It's like, I need your face, I need a name, and then I connect it across the board.
Something You Should Know
How You Are Being Psychologically Targeted & The Extraordinary Power of Curiosity
Yeah, so there's different business models. So the one that I just mentioned, data brokers, in my opinion, is actually the worst because they are not creating any value. The only thing that they do is they collect your data and they make a profit by selling it on to third parties. Now, the other business model is essentially trying to see, well, how can I use the data that I collect about you
Something You Should Know
How You Are Being Psychologically Targeted & The Extraordinary Power of Curiosity
to either capture your attention, keep you on a platform, provide service that is better than anything that I could do without the data. And there you could at least make the argument that there is value being generated by saying, I understand you much better. Think of Netflix, right? Like if there's just no way that you can get through all of the context on Netflix or Amazon,
Something You Should Know
How You Are Being Psychologically Targeted & The Extraordinary Power of Curiosity
without some kind of filtering and some kind of recommendation. So in this case, the business model is essentially saying the more data I can collect about you, the better I understand you, the better the service will be that I offer. And obviously then the business bottom line is the higher the profits, but also hopefully the better the user experience.
Something You Should Know
How You Are Being Psychologically Targeted & The Extraordinary Power of Curiosity
I think we should absolutely be worried about it. And it's funny because I teach this class on the ethics of personal data. And there's always someone who raises their hand and says, well, I don't care that my data is out there. I have nothing to lose. I have nothing to hide. And to me, that's a very privileged position to be in. And it's also a little bit short-sighted.
Something You Should Know
How You Are Being Psychologically Targeted & The Extraordinary Power of Curiosity
If you're not worried about your data being out there, that just means that you're currently in a really good spot. But there's the saying that I have is that data is permanent, but leadership isn't. So you have no idea what this is going to look like tomorrow. I think in the U.S., the Roe versus Wade Supreme Court decision made this clear.
Something You Should Know
How You Are Being Psychologically Targeted & The Extraordinary Power of Curiosity
painfully realistic for almost half the population in the US, right?
Something You Should Know
How You Are Being Psychologically Targeted & The Extraordinary Power of Curiosity
So overnight, suddenly women using period tracking apps, searching stuff on Google, just having their smartphone with them, tracking their GPS location, had to worry about someone knowing about some of the very intimate aspects of their life, whether they might be pregnant, having an abortion that they otherwise wouldn't have wanted to share just based on their data.
Something You Should Know
How You Are Being Psychologically Targeted & The Extraordinary Power of Curiosity
So for me, this idea that, well, we've given up is a really risky gamble, right? And I think there's better ways in which we can deal with this.
Something You Should Know
How You Are Being Psychologically Targeted & The Extraordinary Power of Curiosity
Yeah, it's one of my favorite comments that I oftentimes get when I give talks. And it's almost impossible, right? Unless you live out there somewhere in the woods and grow your own vegetables, you're going to generate data. So we talked about credit card swipes. There's a reason why the mafia uses cash, because you can't trace it. It's not true for credit cards. It's not true for payment apps.
Something You Should Know
How You Are Being Psychologically Targeted & The Extraordinary Power of Curiosity
You carry your smartphone with you pretty much 24-7. There's very few people I know that don't have a smartphone. And that means, again, I can know so many things about you. It's like a stranger. Think about the offline equivalent would be a stranger walking behind you, looking over your shoulder 24-7, knowing exactly what you do, what you buy, who you meet and so on.
Something You Should Know
How You Are Being Psychologically Targeted & The Extraordinary Power of Curiosity
So I think most people think of like these social media platforms when we think about the data that we generate, but it's almost impossible. And even if you were to leave all of the gadget at home, coming back to the topic that we talked about when it comes to facial recognition, there is someone who will be able to observe you and what you do across the board.
Something You Should Know
How You Are Being Psychologically Targeted & The Extraordinary Power of Curiosity
Yeah, and it's incredibly cheap. So I think one of the most shocking discoveries that I made when I was really just starting with this is how cheap your data records are. It's usually like a couple of cents to get really intimate insights into who you are. Sometimes maybe a dollar if you really want to get into something like medical records.
Something You Should Know
How You Are Being Psychologically Targeted & The Extraordinary Power of Curiosity
But what that means for me, and this I think is also part of the solution, is that ideally, you don't want this data to be collected in the first place. Now, currently, the trade-off that we have to make is, well, either you can get better service, convenience, or you have to
Something You Should Know
How You Are Being Psychologically Targeted & The Extraordinary Power of Curiosity
But if you want to get that, you have to give up your privacy, self-determination to some extent, because you sign away your data. And there's a risk that this data is going to be used. But there are these new technologies that I don't think enough people are talking about yet that kind of eliminate this trade-off. So it's called federated learning.
Something You Should Know
How You Are Being Psychologically Targeted & The Extraordinary Power of Curiosity
And the idea is that instead of us sending our data to these companies, they can send the intelligence to our smartphones, which are really these super powerful computers. It's how Apple, for example, trains Siri, so the voice recognition software that they have.
Something You Should Know
How You Are Being Psychologically Targeted & The Extraordinary Power of Curiosity
Instead of collecting all of the user data in a central server, they just say, wait a minute, why don't we send our Siri model to your smartphone? We capture all of your data there. We improve the model. We make sure that we can understand what you're saying and respond appropriately. And then,
Something You Should Know
How You Are Being Psychologically Targeted & The Extraordinary Power of Curiosity
We're going to send the intelligence back to Apple so that the model gets better, but your speech data never leaves its safe harbor. So your speech data stays on your phone and it never gets submitted.
Something You Should Know
How You Are Being Psychologically Targeted & The Extraordinary Power of Curiosity
So this, for me, is one way in which we can say, well, we still get the benefits from better service and personalization, but we don't have to worry, just as you were saying, that my data is now sitting somewhere in a server, it's being sold on to other companies, or it's being abused in the future because we don't know what leadership looks like tomorrow.
Something You Should Know
How You Are Being Psychologically Targeted & The Extraordinary Power of Curiosity
so when when my credit card company sells my data to somebody somewhere in the fine print did i agree to that you did agree to that to some extent exactly so and you're absolutely right it's in the fine print that nobody reads right and there's just it we don't stand a chance if you were to really read all of the terms and conditions which is usually just a bunch of legalese that would be a full-time job and hopefully most of us have have better things to do than doing that
Something You Should Know
How You Are Being Psychologically Targeted & The Extraordinary Power of Curiosity
I'd much rather spend a meal with my family or my friends than again going through the 50 of the terms and conditions. But you're absolutely right is that oftentimes the way that this is currently set up is by default we're signing away most of the data that we generate without really understanding what we're doing.
Something You Should Know
How You Are Being Psychologically Targeted & The Extraordinary Power of Curiosity
Yeah, and most of the time, I think users are just not aware of that. Most of the time, we don't even have the capacity to now go and try and compare. But you do see, and I think that's interesting, because you do see companies now playing in that space.
Something You Should Know
How You Are Being Psychologically Targeted & The Extraordinary Power of Curiosity
So Apple, if you walk through New York, most of the Apple ads that you see plastered across the city are all about, well, Apple is all about privacy. So Apple has made it part of their value proposition that says, well, compared to some of the other phones that are on the market or other gadgets, we're the ones who care about your privacy.
Something You Should Know
How You Are Being Psychologically Targeted & The Extraordinary Power of Curiosity
So protect our data for me means is actually, I think of it in two ways. One is you want to make it much easier for consumers to do the right thing. But if I now have to go through all of the terms and conditions and opt out of data tracking, nobody's going to do that because humans are lazy and we have better stuff to do. So some of it could be regulation that says privacy by design first.
Something You Should Know
How You Are Being Psychologically Targeted & The Extraordinary Power of Curiosity
And that means you have to opt in to data tracking. So now the onus is on companies to convince you that they're really creating a lot of value for you. And it's like, you now have to become active to have your data tracked instead of becoming active to not have it tracked. And the second part is really these technologies like federated learning, where it's not even a trade-off.
Something You Should Know
How You Are Being Psychologically Targeted & The Extraordinary Power of Curiosity
You can get the same quality of, let's say, Siri if the data is processed on your phone versus it being processed in a central server. And now you have to trust Apple to do the right thing.
Something You Should Know
How You Are Being Psychologically Targeted & The Extraordinary Power of Curiosity
So I think about this pretty much every single day for the last 15 years. And still, there's so many times when I mindlessly accept the terms and conditions because I just don't have the energy to now go through all of the cookies. So there's maybe a few things that I do differently because like especially with a phone, I am a lot more cautious when it comes to permission.
Something You Should Know
How You Are Being Psychologically Targeted & The Extraordinary Power of Curiosity
So oftentimes when you download a weather app or your banking app, They ask you to tap into your microphone, look at all of the pictures that you have on your phone, collect your GPS records continuously. So those are things that I might be a little bit more mindful of.
Something You Should Know
How You Are Being Psychologically Targeted & The Extraordinary Power of Curiosity
But generally speaking, I think just observing my own behavior is why I'm trying to push for these regulations that make it easier for people. Because I think it's this uphill battle that we just can't win by ourselves.
Something You Should Know
How You Are Being Psychologically Targeted & The Extraordinary Power of Curiosity
Yeah, I 100% agree. And I do think that it's actually a narrative that's been carefully crafted by Silicon Valley. This idea that, well, first of all, you have to give us all of your data to get the amazing perks that we offer. And there's nothing that you can do anyway. So I think that's been almost like bombarded. We've been bombarded with this message. And I don't think this is true anymore.
Something You Should Know
How You Are Being Psychologically Targeted & The Extraordinary Power of Curiosity
So I think there's this wake up call that, no, there are ways in which we can benefit from our data in a way that's a lot more protective.
Something You Should Know
How You Are Being Psychologically Targeted & The Extraordinary Power of Curiosity
Thanks so much, Mike. It's been a pleasure.
Something You Should Know
How You Are Being Psychologically Targeted & The Extraordinary Power of Curiosity
Thank you so much for having me, Mike.
Something You Should Know
How You Are Being Psychologically Targeted & The Extraordinary Power of Curiosity
Yeah, so the way that I think of psychological targeting is essentially the ability of algorithms and computers to read our mind.
Something You Should Know
How You Are Being Psychologically Targeted & The Extraordinary Power of Curiosity
So taking all of the data that we generate on a daily basis, anything from your social media data to your credit card swipes, the sentences that are embedded in your smartphone, algorithms can take these data, translate it into really intimate insights of who we are on a psychological level, and then use these insights to influence our behavior.
Something You Should Know
How You Are Being Psychologically Targeted & The Extraordinary Power of Curiosity
The classic example there was Facebook in 2015 was essentially accused of predicting whether teenagers, so really part of the most vulnerable population, was potentially suffering from something like depression, low self-esteem, anxiety, and then they used those insights to try and target them with ads to sell them out to advertisers. You could also imagine the complete opposite.
Something You Should Know
How You Are Being Psychologically Targeted & The Extraordinary Power of Curiosity
But if you can figure out that someone might be deviating from their typical behavior. They might be sliding gradually into a depression. Why not connect them with some of the support that they would need? Why not reach out to some of their loved ones, their caregivers to say, hey, something seems to be off. Why don't you reach out and try to try to provide some support?
Something You Should Know
How You Are Being Psychologically Targeted & The Extraordinary Power of Curiosity
So for me, it's really a question of the insights that we can get about people's psychology has really these two sides to it. On some level, we can use it against people, right? We can use it to manipulate and exploit. But for me, the bigger question is what if we use it the other way? What if we actually use it to help people?
Something You Should Know
How You Are Being Psychologically Targeted & The Extraordinary Power of Curiosity
For me, at the fundamental level, psychological targeting is really a way of understanding people. So the same way that in an offline context back in the day when it was just us living with other people, we always try to understand who's on the other side. We don't talk to a three-year-old the same way that we talk to our spouse or the way that we talk to our boss.
Something You Should Know
How You Are Being Psychologically Targeted & The Extraordinary Power of Curiosity
So any offline conversation is on some level customized and tailored. We try and figure out which topics might be the most interesting. We try and figure out how we talk to people and Even kids know that, right? Kids know exactly how to talk to mom to get something versus dad to get something. And for me, psychological targeting is essentially taking this idea to the online space.
Something You Should Know
How You Are Being Psychologically Targeted & The Extraordinary Power of Curiosity
So it's trying to understand people and then using these insights to potentially influence their behavior and persuade them to do something. And sometimes that is in their best interest and sometimes it's not.
Something You Should Know
How You Are Being Psychologically Targeted & The Extraordinary Power of Curiosity
The way that I would think about the example that you gave is much more of a behavioral targeting approach. So I take a very specific behavioral cue. So in this case, you searching for a ski jacket, and I use that to predict future behavior. So that's a very behaviorist assumption of like, well, your past behavior directly predicts your future behavior.
Something You Should Know
How You Are Being Psychologically Targeted & The Extraordinary Power of Curiosity
The psychological part comes in when we try to make sense of you holistically. So instead of saying, well, you're interested in... in a ski jacket, and maybe you've visited a certain restaurant, maybe there's something that you've posted about on social media, and we take those cues in isolation, what psychological targeting does, it's trying to put together these puzzle pieces.
Something You Should Know
How You Are Being Psychologically Targeted & The Extraordinary Power of Curiosity
So instead of saying, well, it's just a ski jacket, can we learn something about maybe you're being very adventurous, maybe you're being very active, that kind of almost brings out the person behind the data.
Something You Should Know
How You Are Being Psychologically Targeted & The Extraordinary Power of Curiosity
That's a great question because generally speaking, the data is out there. Every person, every hour generates about six gigabytes of data. So that's an enormous amount of data. And it's incredibly cheap to get hold of. That's because there's all of these data brokers out there. There's a lot of first party data that companies collect, that obviously governments collect.
Something You Should Know
How You Are Being Psychologically Targeted & The Extraordinary Power of Curiosity
But for me, the really big question is not just who collects what data, but really what do they use it for? And that's also what I think recent regulation are trying to put a lot more front and center.
Something You Should Know
How You Are Being Psychologically Targeted & The Extraordinary Power of Curiosity
Yeah, so at the very basic level, it is really just these individual data points, right? And that is already a lot. So that could be anything from, again, what you post on social media, but also every time you swipe your credit card. That gives us a very intimate insight into not just your routines and habits, but also like, where are you? Who do you potentially meet?
Something You Should Know
How You Are Being Psychologically Targeted & The Extraordinary Power of Curiosity
Same is true for smartphones, right? They come embedded with a gazillion sensors that make sure that your phone works the way it should, right? But it also means that I capture your location with the GPS records pretty much all the time. I can see who you're talking to, who you send messages to. Phones showing up in the same place gives me a sense of who you're connected to.
Something You Should Know
How You Are Being Psychologically Targeted & The Extraordinary Power of Curiosity
So at the very beginning, all of these data points just float out there in isolation. Now, that's where AI and machine learning comes in because we can translate these individual traces into psychological profiles. And it used to be the case that you needed your own model to do this. Now, with generative AI and all of these models like ChatGPT, you can essentially just take Mike's
Something You Should Know
How You Are Being Psychologically Targeted & The Extraordinary Power of Curiosity
social media data and ask ChatGPT, hey, based on all of these traces, based on what he talks about online, who do you think Mike is? Just give me a sense of his personality, of his values and so on. And these models do a remarkable job at translating data into psychological profiles, even though they've never been explicitly trained to do so.
Something You Should Know
How You Are Being Psychologically Targeted & The Extraordinary Power of Curiosity
It's a double edged sword. Right. So the moment that I have the ability to peek into your mental health and potentially change it, that means that I can use it the way that I just described to help you. But it can also mean going back to the previous example, as Facebook was was trying to use it to say, well, here's.
Something You Should Know
How You Are Being Psychologically Targeted & The Extraordinary Power of Curiosity
a teenager who's clearly struggling and who might be the most susceptible to the ads that you're showing them. So it very much depends on how you use it. And for me, the challenge that we have right now is that it all rests on the assumption that users can essentially make their own decisions.
Something You Should Know
How You Are Being Psychologically Targeted & The Extraordinary Power of Curiosity
The idea of a lot of the data protection regulations are like, well, just explain to users what's happening with their data and then just give them the control to decide whether they want to do it or not. but it's an incredibly complicated space, right? Like if I really wanted to manage my data all by myself, that would be a 24-7 full-time job.
Something You Should Know
How You Are Being Psychologically Targeted & The Extraordinary Power of Curiosity
And it would mean that I would have to continuously keep up with the latest technology. So for me, shifting towards this, how do we amplify some of the positive use cases while also kind of trying to protect us from abuses just means that we have to do a much better job at protecting consumers. And that could take different forms.
Something You Should Know
How You Are Being Psychologically Targeted & The Extraordinary Power of Curiosity
An hour, it's six gigabytes. So this is, I think I at some point calculated that it's like half a million times more than what the computer used that we used to, that we launched the Challenger rocket to space had capacity for. In just one hour, we generate that much data. So it's absolutely insane.
Something You Should Know
How You Are Being Psychologically Targeted & The Extraordinary Power of Curiosity
And for me, that's actually the interesting part, because most of the data that we generate, we don't intentionally create it, right? So in psychology, there's this distinction between identity claims. So this is all of the data that you know about. This is you putting something on social media because you want to send a signal that you're maybe open-minded, extroverted, and so on.
Something You Should Know
How You Are Being Psychologically Targeted & The Extraordinary Power of Curiosity
There's a second category of data, and that's what we call behavioral residue. So those are all of the traces that you leave and create without really thinking about it. So again, take your smartphone, for example. There's so many sensors embedded in that. So every kind of second, I get a snapshot of where you are based on your GPS record. Again, it might not seem super
Something You Should Know
How You Are Being Psychologically Targeted & The Extraordinary Power of Curiosity
intrusive or intimate if I know the specific location that you're in, but I can easily infer where you live. I can easily infer who you meet. And then there's all of these other things like credit card spending, the fact that we have cameras now on every corner.
Something You Should Know
How You Are Being Psychologically Targeted & The Extraordinary Power of Curiosity
I think in New York, you can't go from lower Manhattan to the Upper West Side of where I'm based without being seen by a camera, unless you swim through the Hudson, which I don't recommend. So there's all of these data points that we generate without really thinking, and that just accumulates to these six gigabytes.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
also didn't turn out to be connecting the world. So there's that.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
It's just mind-blowing. So to start with, the average person generates about six gigabytes of data every hour. That's just already the sheer volume. And then when you break it down, it just really taps into all of these different parts of your daily routines in life. So if you wake up in the morning, probably what most people do is they grab their phone, which means that now...
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
Just you unlocking the screen means that someone knows you probably woke up. The phone was stationary. Maybe it was dark, so no ambient light. You didn't open it. The moment that you unlock it, someone knows that you're up. Then you're checking websites, you're sending messages, so you kind of know exactly who's connected to whom, what you're interested in.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
My morning routine is essentially just going to the deli, getting a coffee, which means that I swipe my credit card. Again, someone knows that I've been out buying something in a specific location. If you have a Fitbit or some kind of tracking device that counts your physical activity, also sees when you deviate from your routine.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
So if you have a typical routine and sometimes you don't do the same thing, people might have a sense that something is up. Even if you don't have a Fitbit, take your phone with you on the walk or on the way to work. There's cameras and with facial recognition, someone again knows what you do, where you go and so on. So there's all of these traces.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
Your car now has like sensors in it that track anything from your speed. Maybe you're going over the speed limit. Maybe you're not a great driver. You're going from A to B. So this idea that it's just social media that is really tracking us and coming back to Facebook is there's just so many data traces everywhere.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
It's a great question. Some of it is you don't even need to store everything. But if you think about GPS records, oftentimes what you want is you want to extract the insights and you don't necessarily need to store the longitude, latitude. What you want is, yeah, I kind of get the places that you visit. Maybe I can map it against Google and see what happened in these places when you were there.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
So a lot of the companies that extract insights that can then be used to tap into your psychology don't require the storage of the raw data. But then there's also other companies who have these massive servers. So still, I think even with that amount of data, like storage is so cheap that it pays off at the end of the day.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
And you might be deleting it at some point, but just the longer you can keep it, the more of these behavioral trajectories you can actually generate and create about people.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
And you can even store where there was a deviation, right? So even knowing that, So if you know here's the typical and now there's something that seems off, now you can trigger more data collection. So there's also ways in which you can say, we see that it's a repeat pattern and we're going to just break the data collection at the point that we see that it deviates.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
I think by now there's this estimate that there's more points of data in the universe than stars. To me, it's just insane.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
How did they count? That's already intriguing.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
That sounds like me. My husband keeps making fun of me for that. Total impulse buyer. But yeah, if you think about it, it's Facebook, but also Google. You type questions into Google that you don't feel comfortable asking your closest friends or sometimes even spouse.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
It's not so surprising to me that all of the digital traces that we create can paint this picture of who we are in a more accurate way than the people around us.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
Yeah, I still remember when I was doing my PhD, we had this one guy who was doing research on porn websites.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
And I remember his seminar talk where he wants to open a website and just pulls up and it's all porn websites. So, yeah, you got to be careful on what you type into that search bar. And now generative AI, right? People ask these large language models, the most obscure.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
Chat GPT, it's amazing because people don't even ask questions. It's just statements. I think there's like some research. People just say random stuff to chat GPT because they want to get it out of the system, right? They just need to tell it someone and they don't want to tell it to the people who they think might be judging them after.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
To me, it's fascinating because if you don't feel comfortable asking another human being, that's one person who has to keep a secret. But you're asking a server. You're asking essentially open AI. Now your question sits there for all eternity on a server. It might be passed around. And I think that's something that people don't realize.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
Somehow this intimacy of the screen feels like it's just not a person on the other side. If anything, it's probably more intimate and more dangerous to ask a question there.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
Makes a lot of sense. You're just probably going to be nice to people or cynical.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
Now you told them on the podcast.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
No, but you're absolutely right. And it's coming back to this distinction between identity claims, right? So you liking something, you posting something about your vacation, you're following a certain page that you want other people to see that you follow. And those are all these explicit identity claims. But then there's all of this other stuff that they capture, right?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
all the way from how much time did you scroll through the specific ad that they're showing you or a specific piece of content to here's like some of the more subtle nuances in the way that you use language. So coming back to this topic of depression, for example, it's not just you talking about symptoms and feeling down and maybe having these physical symptoms.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
Even like the use of first person pronouns is a sign of depression. And that's not something that you put out there intentionally, right? It's like, It's hidden in some of the cues that you generate either by you posting or by you just browsing the website. Now, Facebook goes a step further because they also, first of all, buy third party data. So they also buy extra data to know you even better.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
And they even have data on people who are not using Facebook to contrast and see how they could potentially bring them in. So Facebook really goes far beyond you liking or not liking the vacations of your friends.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
Yeah, it's actually one of my favorite examples in that space. It's essentially the use of first-person pronouns, which is I, me, myself. What we know is that is empirically related to depression, so emotional distress. And I remember when I first heard about this, I was like, I don't understand why this makes sense. I would have assumed it's narcissism, as you mentioned, right?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
If you talk about yourself and your vacation and what you've been up to, it's probably self-focused and maybe you're a narcissist. But what we know is that it's a signal that you're currently very focused on why am I feeling so bad? How am I going to get better? Am I ever going to get better?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
And because we have this inner monologue with ourselves and we can't constantly control it, that just creeps into the language. So people who are suffering from any type of emotional distress, they're just much more focused on the self and that leaks into the language. And again, in your post about
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
vacation and everything that's going on, you don't explicitly intentionally use first person pronouns more when you're not feeling great. It's just something that leaks to the other side and leaks into your language.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
Yeah. No, it's also talking in real life. It's a pretty substantial effect. I think 40 times more than when you're not feeling depressed or emotionally distressed.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
It's 40%. It's not 40 times.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
Yeah, it's just like this passive listening into not just what you're saying, but how you're saying it.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
It's so little, right? So I remember when my colleagues published a study, I think the average, and this is 10 years ago now, the average number of likes was 230. So back in the day, the computer was already better than everybody except for the spouse. And you can very easily project into the here and now where you have a lot more data, you have a lot more sophisticated models.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
So by now, the computer is probably better than the spouse. And again, it sounds so intimate, but then if you think about the fact that a computer has access to the entirety of your digital life and some of the aspects that you're potentially trying to hide from other people you don't necessarily intend to signal, it's not as surprising.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
So in this case, it's actually you complete a questionnaire. So you tell us, here's how I think of myself when it comes to personality. And it's all kind of asking you about behavior. So how often do you enjoy socializing? To what extent are you making a mess of your environment? And then the spouse completes the same questionnaire. So on your behalf.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
So I think Jordan would answer strongly agree to the question. I make a mess of things. Not sure. Hypothetically.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
And you also have a certain bias. There's like certain ways in which you want to see your spouse. So once you have a certain way of seeing them, the way that you integrate new information is just almost aligned with the perception that you have anyway. So it's much harder for humans to update just because it's in a way functional to stick with the impressions that we have.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
Yeah, so like psychological targeting is in a way taking all of the digital traces that you leave. So that ranges from what you post on social media to you swiping your credit card to your smartphone, capturing all of these very intimate things like where you go based on GPS, like you making, taking calls, and then translating those footprints into meaningful psychological characteristics.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
Uh-huh. That's actually how they learn, right? So machine learning is called that way because they learn by trial and error. So the way that we train a model, for example, to predict your personality from, say, Facebook likes, is we give it a lot of data where people completed a questionnaire giving us answers of here's how I think about myself in terms of personality.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
And then they have access to all of the likes and they just play the trial and error game. So maybe if you like the fan page of Lady Gaga, maybe that makes you more extroverted. Did I get it right or wrong?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
got it okay i'm going to update my belief of what lady gaga actually means same for the fan page of cnn maybe that makes you more conscientious and organized and reliable so essentially you just throw a lot of data at them in the beginning they're just randomly guessing and over time they become a lot better because you give them feedback you tell them yep that was a good guess no this was a terrible guess
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
So anywhere from your personality, your values, your political ideology, sexual orientation. So really painting a picture of the person behind the data.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
I love it as an example, just to explain machine learning. So there's like a profession that is essentially, it's called chick sexers. That's their name, which is amazing, right? I imagine you going to the conference and they ask for your title and you just say like, I'm a chick sexer. I mean, that's a life goal. on your bucket list.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
But anyway, the point is that in hatcheries, you very quickly want to determine whether a chick is male or female. Because for all the vegetarians out there, you're onto something. The males, they get shredded pretty much right away because they don't produce eggs. So they mostly keep the females.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
And it's really difficult to tell whether a chick is like male or female because they're generally tiny, right? It's like a tiny baby chick. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
Exactly. It must go through a bank.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
Thank you.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
Yeah. And it's funny because Apple is one of these cases where they shut down the third party tracking, but they still collect all of the data. So at the end of the day, they benefit because now they're holding the monopoly on the data that they capture.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
Thank you.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
Thank you.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
,,,,,, ,,,,,, ,,,,,,, Back in the day, you're like, man, this is like maybe one of these moments where I should take a second one just in case. Now you have 10 by default.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
And also, it depends on what you turn off, right? You might be able to turn off the GPS. You still need to be connected to a cell tower. Otherwise, your phone doesn't work. The fact that you turn off GPS doesn't mean that you're not trackable.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
That's what you capture.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
Yeah. Just as a memory. The good old days.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
Yeah, I do.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
And it was also informative. I think like right now we're just posting, first of all, anything and like pictures of food. And so it's lost its appeal. And it's not just Facebook updates, right? You can think of Facebook status updates as the same of like you posting on Twitter, even in a way Instagram. Pictures that we take in a way tell the same story, right?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
Can write about you going on a vacation or you can post a picture of you on vacation. There's a lot that we can learn. So we already talked about emotional distress, depression, depression. all of the personality traits, and some of them are really obvious. Oftentimes when people talk about machine learning, AI, it's just like magic in a black box and we don't really know what it's doing.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
If you talk a lot about going out and parties and weekends, you're probably more extroverted than the person who talks about sitting at home, reading, gardening, and interested in fantasy novels. So those are the obvious ones. Sometimes there's the ones that are a little bit less obvious and maybe more interesting for psychologists, for example.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
This is like one of the topics that I study is can we predict someone's income, someone's socioeconomic standing based on what they post? And again, you see the obvious ones like the rich people post about luxury vacations and brands. Yeah, that makes sense.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
But you also see that people who have lower socioeconomic status or lower levels of income, they are, first of all, much more focused on the present. And they're also much more focused on the self. And it's not that they're, again, like these narcissists that just only can focus on the here and now.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
It's just freaking damn hard to think about the future in anything other than how do you make your ends meet if you don't have that much money. So there's these subtle cues that we can parse out when we look at what they talk about that are actually interesting beyond just prediction.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
I mean, I actually feel like that if we use labels, labels matter. And I know why people don't like them, but it's most of the time I think you don't like them because they make them feel uncomfortable. No, you should feel uncomfortable because there's people who are poor and it's just a freaking hard life.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
Yeah, some of them are more subtle, right? It's oftentimes the opposite. So if poor people talk about the present, you might be like more future focused. So it's always a contrast the way that these models work. Even the fact that you talk about going to the Seychelles or like an exotic place just means that you don't have to be bragging about going to the five-star hotel on your next vacation.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
The fact that you can afford to fly outside of the country, which most people haven't done in a lifetime, that alone is an indication that you're doing pretty well.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
And probably if you're complaining about that, it gives you an extra boost in socioeconomic status.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
That's a real research finding. And it comes back to what we talked about earlier with face signaling potentially parts of your identity on a psychological level. So we talked about testosterone kind of being related to aggression. This idea that like your environment responds to you in a certain way, right?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
If you're kind of this beautiful kid, perfectly symmetric face, blue eyes and constantly smiling, people around you are probably going to be a lot more kind of appreciative and they're going to talk to you and they're going to approach you a lot more often.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
And the fact that those kids then grow up to be somewhat more social and extroverted and craving the social affirmation and social stimulation is not super surprising. So it's like one of these ways in which actually who we are interacts with our environment and that in turn, again, influences who we are.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
The interesting part is also, I think the way that we oftentimes think of personality is like it's the static, like you're either extroverted or you're introverted. But it's actually a lot more dynamic than I think even personality psychologists assumed a couple of years ago. So it's not just that you can develop over the lifespan. So most of us become nicer, less neurotic.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
So there's like these trends that we see when people get older. But we also kind of very much fluctuate across situations. So like your son, depending on what the feedback is, might be kind of more reserved or more extroverted.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
So I think there's also something that when we interact with our kids, and I just had a kid, so he's like one year old, I just constantly think about how do I expose him to these different situations? where sometimes I tell him like, look, it's totally okay to be quiet and sit in the corner and kind of just think for yourself for a second.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
But then also I want him to have these other situations where he can be a lot more outgoing. So I almost think of it as like this repertoire where you have a certain tendency, right? There's a pretty substantial genetic component to personality, but then there's also you being able to adjust to different contexts.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
Oftentimes people take it even a step further, right? Well, I'm not using social media, so nobody can really track me across the internet. It's so short-sighted because obviously you use your credit card, your smartphone, and there's CCTV on pretty much every corner. So people will find you. It's hard to escape.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
And I think that's something that we can teach kids and even tell them, look, if you behave differently across situations, that doesn't make you hypocritical. that can still be like this authentic version of yourself. It just means that you're adjusting to whoever is on the other side or what the context requires.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
Yeah, absolutely. And for me, really intrusive part is that it's not just the ability to make inferences about who you are, right? You mentioned China. The reason for why the Chinese social scoring system is creepy in a way is that it also influences what you can do and what you cannot do. So it doesn't stop at, I want to try and understand who you are.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
I'm also going to influence the path that your life can take, maybe the choices that you're making. So in China, if the government predicts based on your data that you might have a higher likelihood of voicing dissent or protesting, you're not allowed into Beijing. I teach this class on the ethics of data, but that's what's happening in China.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
What do you think here kind of companies decide whether you might get a loan or not, whether you might get credit or not, what your insurance premium is or not? It's very similar. We try to understand how you might behave and then we shift the offerings that we have. We might try to sell you something that you don't need.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
So I think this notion that it's not just about privacy, it's really about the second step of people then interfering with your ability to make your own choices. For me, that part is almost creepier.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
And they might all be related to some of the protected categories, right? If we know that some of the behaviors that we show are related to you having low socioeconomic status or to your ethnicity or to your sexual orientation, then you don't need to capture that category because it's like somewhere embedded in the traces that you leave.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
To some extent, I think on the global level, when we try and understand what are these models doing and are they potentially discriminating against people, I still think that there's something that we can actually do to probe. Oftentimes people say, well, we don't know what the models are doing because it's like these complicated neural nets and we just can't open a black box.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
It can still look at the output. If you're thinking about, are we going to give people a loan or not? And you just see that none of the women are getting any loans and none of the women are getting hired into technical roles. Maybe then that's something that the model is picking up on. Right.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
So even if you don't fully understand what it's doing, you can always look at the predictions and see, is there anything that we see among the categories or the social demographics that we want to protect? That seems to be off in terms of how often we do the thumbs up that the person gets the loan or gets the job.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
Yeah, totally. And it identifies your different levels, right? So the example that you gave, like the three data points, that's coming from this notion of even if we anonymize data, but even if like I got all of the credit card spending from everybody in Manhattan and we say, but it's anonymized because we're not using any names, we're not using date of birth, we're not using an address.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
Because your spending signature is so unique, right? Almost like a fingerprint. That it's very easy. If I know three things about you, I can just easily identify you in there. And then you're absolutely right. It's like if you think of identity at the next level, it's not just that I know, well, it's Jordan.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
Now I can also make inferences again about maybe you're like the impulsive person because you're constantly paying attention
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
It is a tiny, tiny town, so 500 people. My parents keep reminding me that it's grown to 1,000 now.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
late fees and maybe you're not the most organized one it's again something that might or might not show up in my own spending record so it's also like one of these things where like oftentimes people say well your online selves they're so curated right and if you wanted to be like a more organized and reliable person online you can do this because you just control everything
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
Yeah, that's true for some of them, but my phone is still running out of battery and I'm still paying these late fees. And if I wanted to be someone completely different across all of my different kind of digital traces, I would probably actually become that person at some point if I was changing my lifestyle entirely.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
It doesn't make any difference because it still meant that everybody knew everything about me, right? Who I was dating, what I was doing on the weekend, which music I was into. And what village neighbors do best is then make inferences about who you are. They saw me running to the bus every morning. They probably figured out that I wasn't the most organized. And then it doesn't stop there.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
Like a personality psychologist would say, there's no good or bad traits. There's just some that are more socially desirable, right? Take it to the extreme. If you're like super extremely organized, you're turning into my husband who is super sweet, also borderline OCD. We just moved and there's a gazillion boxes in the apartment. It's just like everything is completely disorganized.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
And all I want is to be able to walk from the bathroom to the bedroom. And I opened the drawer of the cutlery and it's perfectly meticulously organized. I'm sure he spent two hours sorting the cutlery where there was still like 100,000 boxes in the apartment.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
So where I might be going through the boxes a little bit more quickly and maybe a little bit less thoroughly, but maybe a bit more efficiently. So no inherently good or bad traits.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
Oh, my God.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
Yeah, very accurate. So I met him. We were actually both giving a talk at a conference for digital happiness, but he showed up late. I was about to go on stage and the organizer comes and says, hey, the person who's supposed to speak after you, he's not here yet. We've no idea where he is. We can't reach him. Could you just take the entire hour? I'm like, fine.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
And then midway through, he shows up and they usher me off the stage. Fast forward, it doesn't take that long for me to realize that he's smart and hot. So we go out after the session and we actually end up in his place. And he kind of has these huge bookshelves and they're perfectly sorted by here's the topic. Here's the height of the books, all perfectly aligned. Cutlery is perfectly sorted.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
I remember trying to put down my glass on the table and he freaked out to put a coaster on him. It was like an intellectually curious and somewhat borderline OCD and late. And that was still spot on today.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
And that's actually, it's funny because that was a lot of the inspiration for the work on digital footprints from the physical space. So there's all of this work on... If you snoop around the bedroom or the office of a stranger and you just pick up on all of these cues and some of them the same way that we post on social media are curated.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
You have a poster out there and certain books on the shelf that you want other people to see. But then a lot of them are also like very subtle. What is in your bin? Are your glasses sorted in the way? Do they have watermarks?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
So I think a lot of the work that we've been doing in the digital space was actually inspired by the physical space and the way that we make these inferences about strangers all the time as humans.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
What were they hoping to find?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
Village neighbors are not just there to poke around in your life and your psychology. They then try to meddle with your life. They are not really trying to figure out who you're dating. They want to influence who you're dating. And sometimes that's really helpful because they know you and you get this feeling of there's someone who truly understands me.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
Humbling experience.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
Well, I'm sure he played it cool.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
Yeah, it's a great question, because I think if you looked at the media, it's like totally black and white, right? It's like either it's this warfare tool and it's like changing your mind and it's changing your core identity. That's probably not the case.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
So I always think about it, if that's something that you couldn't do in an offline world, if you think about your hardcore, diehard Republican uncle, and by having long conversations with him, you can't convince him to take on a certain view on the world.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
You're probably also not able to do this online with like algorithms, even though you can target them repeatedly and maybe you can send them down a rabbit hole. Changing someone's core identity takes a lot more than just like a couple of ads and maybe even repeatedly. But the thing is that... It usually doesn't even need that, right? Oftentimes it's like our choices are kind of small ones.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
We're not even aware of what's the cereal that you choose. What are you deciding to wear today? What are the news that you're trying to read? And where does that take you in terms of how you think about the world? So Oftentimes, when I think about influencing behavior, it's like these small changes and the same way that we do this in an offline world, right?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
Coming back to kids, humans are born to do this. Kids know exactly how they talk to their mom to get the candy as opposed to their dad. And it's not that by doing so change who the other side is. It just makes it more likely that they behave differently. In a certain way.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
And for me, it's like taking what we've been doing for centuries in an offline world and we're just applying it at scale and in a way that's no longer bidirectional. It used to be the case that I do this to you and you do this to me. Right now, this is mostly happening from big companies to influencing your behavior.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
And when they have my best interest at heart, they're going to give the best advice that I can possibly get. But also oftentimes it felt a lot more manipulative behind my back without me necessarily having control or appreciating the support that I was getting in any way.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
So did you swing an election and you convinced a diehard Hillary supporter to suddenly stay at home and not vote? Probably not. But could you maybe have influenced some of the people who were not sure if they wanted to go out and vote? And maybe you caught them at the moment where they were really scared about immigration and you changed them from a Democrat to a Republican. Probably.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
I think that the point of Cambridge Analytica is it wasn't necessarily even something that political campaigns have been using data for a long, long time. And Obama was celebrated for the use of like, well, there's someone who's trying to understand their constituents and try and see what they're interested in. But what do they care about? How do I talk to them?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
I think what Cambridge Analytica does. more distinct from the previous attempts, at least in the public mind, was that people could suddenly make sense of it. But even if they had the data, everything before, we don't think about ourselves in like these separate data points. I don't think of myself as here's my browsing history and here's my social media and here's my credit card spending.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
I think of myself as this holistic person that's impulsive and maybe a little bit neurotic and curious. And I think once you told the public that there's a company that can predict what's whether you are emotionally volatile or whether you might be introverted, outgoing. I think that's what resonated with people. So do I think that they won the election by doing this magical brainwashing?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
Probably not. Could something like psychological targeting swing an election when they're on the margins? Probably yes. Do we need psychology for that? Again, not entirely sure because you can make very similar predictions with kind of skipping that step.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
Yeah, it's something that I've been super intrigued by. And who knows if it's going to plan out. But I always think of it as a technology, right? The technology at the core is trying to say, can I understand where you're coming from? Here's your point of view. Here's your view on the world. Here's your values. Here's your personality.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
And now you could imagine using that to explain to you, here's how the other side sees the world. I can convince a Democrat to kind of understand, here's maybe why a Republican is more opposed to immigration, more opposed to abortion, not in a way that a Republican would try to convince you, right? Because they're coming from their own perspective.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
But in a way that Democrats think about the world, that's oftentimes a much more promising way of convincing the other side, or at least making you a bit more receptive to arguments of the other side. And this is proven by research, by the way. It's essentially this idea of, can I tap into your own moral campus to make you think about the world in a slightly different way?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
Yeah. And now you have to stop me because it's one of these topics that I could talk about forever because I hear this question all the time. So, again, in the classroom, when I talk about here's what we can do with your data, there's always at least one person who says that. And in a way, I can even partially relate to this because it feels like, well, I tried everything.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
It just feels like an uphill battle that I can't win. So I might as well give up. But it's a very privileged position to be in, first of all. So the fact that you don't have to worry about your data being out there just means that you're currently in a really good spot.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
If I can predict your sexual orientation, your mental health from all the traces that you leave in many parts of the world, it's not just preventing you from going to Beijing. That could mean the death penalty still in a lot of countries. So it just means that you're currently in a good spot. And what I think is even more true is that you don't know what it's going to look like tomorrow.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
If you don't have to worry about your data right now, that might change entirely in the U.S. I think the Roe versus Wade Supreme Court decision made that painfully real for many, many women. But suddenly overnight, you had to worry about your Google searches because maybe you're looking for kind of some pregnancy related, abortion related advice.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
Maybe you were traveling across states, taking your phone so I can see you're traveling to another state. Maybe again, based on your GPS records, here's exactly the location. Maybe you went to a certain clinic. Maybe you came back and you were suddenly no longer looking for certain things on Google and Amazon.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
So I think this notion that data is permanent and leadership isn't should make all of us kind of worried. And maybe that's the government changing, but it could also be just the leadership of companies going from one day to the next.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
I think it's a little bit less, but it's like still many, many more countries than you would imagine. Yeah.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
It's like one of the most compelling examples of like why data can become extremely dangerous. Like what we know from like Nazi Germany in the Second World War.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
is that religious affiliation in parts of Europe was part of the census, which made it extremely easy for the Nazis to come in and say, well, we're just going to go to City Hall, quickly check the record and see here's person A, B, and C. They live in this place. Now let's go and find them. Now fast forward to today, and we know that atrocity is very vastly based on whether the data was available.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
And today you don't need part of the census because you can just passively predict it from all of the traces that you generate and from all of the data that you create. So for me, this notion that We just don't know what tomorrow is going to look like. It's just a good reminder that you probably should care about your privacy.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
Now, actually, two things that most people do, right, if you then show them the offline equivalence and you say, OK, look, your smartphone tracking your whereabouts 24-7 is like a person walking behind you, observing your every move. That's the stalker that goes to jail. The person reading your messages, like Google, and that's the mailman opening your mail. Again, a person that goes to jail.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
So when you give them these comparisons to the offline world, I think most people actually wake up to like, oh, maybe I do care about my privacy and maybe I just haven't figured out how to protect it better.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
Yeah. And it's actually led to legislation. It's like a very interesting example. There's this case of a judge in New Jersey whose son was actually tragically murdered. by someone that she persecuted before.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
And they found the data online, got it for like, I think a couple of dollars from a data broker, found her home, had like this entire dossier on her and her family, murdered her son because she wasn't there. And that led to legislation that's now protecting judges from their data being out there being sold by data brokers. And to me, it really raises this question.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
If we think that judges should be protected based on their data, why not protect everybody else, right? I think there's many other people who you would be worried about people getting their hands on your data and then tracking you down.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
Yeah. Anyone, right? You're a surgeon, you make a mistake. There's always the worry that someone at some point has beef with you and is trying to track you down. So I think anything that we apply to a part of the population where we worry about data, I think should apply to everybody.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
I think of it as a puzzle, right? So if we think about what can I learn about a person based on their data, we talked about social media just being this curated one, and then your smartphone sensing giving us a different angle. And you can imagine that once you put all of these pieces together, you get a much more accurate reading of who that person is.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
So if you're a company who can fill every single letter in the alphabet with a subsidiary, you can imagine that they hold pretty much this entire picture of who you are. So one And I'm certainly not the first one to suggest that, right?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
Scott Galloway, Tim Boo have been saying this for years, is if we could break up the tech monopolies, at least be a way of not having them capture this entire picture of who you are. I think that's probably a hard sell. I think there's easier ones where there's now technologies that allow you to...
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
It's so idiosyncratic. It's actually what I find fascinating about the shift to the online world is we're doing it a lot more systematically. So your neighbors, they had their own biases. They had their own perspective on the world. And they were filtering all of the data that came in through their own lens and their own incentives. Algorithms don't have the same incentives.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
provide the same convenience and service and personalization, but without having to collect the data in the first place. And for me, that's something that you can implement from today to tomorrow.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
It's both owning the data and then collectively managing it. So the idea of data co-ops is saying there's people who have a shared interest in using their data. That could be like my favorite one in Europe is one that looks at patients suffering from MS. So it's like one of these diseases that is so poorly understood. It's determined by genetics, your medical history, your lifestyle.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
So you need quite a lot of data from patients to understand what might be driving symptoms and how to get better. And oftentimes what happens in the medical space is you send it to pharma companies. And in the best case, it takes years for them to develop a drug. And then you're paying like thousands, if not millions of dollars for that. What MyData does, it's essentially owned by its members.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
So it's people who suffer from MS coming together. under this kind of legal entity of a data co-op. So it's member-owned and it's legally obligated to act in the best interest of their patients.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
And what it can do is it can essentially say, we better understand based on research how the disease works, but we can also now communicate directly with your doctors in almost like an Amazon recommendation style and say, we've seen patients with similar symptoms and a similar trajectory respond really positively to these kinds of treatments. Why don't you try this as well?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
And then the doctor can give feedback and make the system even better. Thank you very much.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
Thank you. Thank you.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
They essentially do whatever you tell them to do. They optimize for the goal that you set for them. So the way that I've been thinking about essentially that we live in this digital village where algorithms now replace our neighbor. with essentially a digital neighbor who takes all of the data traces and makes the same predictions.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
Thank you.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
Facebook in 2015 was actually accused of predicting whether teenagers on their platform were struggling from anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, and then they were selling them out to advertisers. So this is like someone at their most vulnerable state. Not only are they suffering from anxiety, they're also teenagers. They're still figuring out the identity.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
And for me, the important part, and this is coming back to something you said, is it used to be the case that what happened in the village stayed in the village, right? So maybe it travels to the next town. But if I wanted to escape, I just moved to Berlin or I moved to a bigger place, New York, and that's it. But it's no longer true for the digital space.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
Once your data is out there, everybody has access to it.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
The thing is that even if you don't explicitly put this out there, right? So as psychologists, we think of data in two categories. One is these explicit identity claims, which is like posting on social media, right? That's you telling the world, here's the person who I am, here's how I want to see myself, and here's how I want other people to see me.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
Now, that's a very intentional signal that you're sending. But then there's also all of the other traces. You don't have to post about you buying a gun. I can just by tracking your GPS records, figure out that you probably went to a shop where most people buy guns.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
And if you do this repeatedly or you go to a shooting range, then my assumption is with like a high percentage accuracy that you probably own a gun. And for me, that's in a way the very intrusive part that we oftentimes forget is that it's not just this explicit signaling. It's like all of these behavioral residue that we create without really intentionally thinking about it.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
Yeah, I think it's data-sensitive.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
I think it's global, yeah. It's an insane amount.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
So the moment that you tap into this vulnerability, the damage that you can do, I mean, it's very obvious.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
Of course. What else would they be doing?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
It's not a hypothetical. So Facebook in 2015 was actually accused of predicting whether teenagers on their platform were struggling from anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, and then they were selling them out to advertisers. So this was a slide that was actually circulated. And you can imagine, right? So this is like someone at their most vulnerable state.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
Not only are they suffering from anxiety, they're also teenagers. They're still figuring out the identity. So the moment that you tap into this vulnerability, the damage that you can do, I mean, it's very obvious. Then there's also potentially beneficial use cases of that kind of tracking.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
A hundred percent. And I was recently talking to a mother whose son attempted to commit suicide and it's traumatizing. And for me, we actually have this opportunity there to catch it early. Because as you said, typically how it works is you enter a full on depression, which first of all, even for an adult, when you commit to it, it's really difficult to get out.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
Because that's the point when you're inward turning, you're not necessarily seeking out help and it's really hard to work your way out. What you would ideally do, and this is where the tracking actually comes in handy, is you catch it early. And what you can do with your phone, for example, is just looking at your smartphone sensing data.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
Maybe you're not leaving the house as much anymore as you used to. Maybe there's much less physical activity. You're not taking as many calls anymore. So there's this deviation from your typical baseline. And again, it might be nothing. Maybe you're just on vacation and you're having a great time. But it's like I can send you this early warning signal that says, maybe two people you nominate.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
Maybe if I know that I have a history, which is oftentimes the case, suffering from depression, and I see this coming in the future, I could say, I'm going to nominate my spouse. And when this happens, I want you to notify me and I want you to notify my spouse. It's not a diagnosis, right? It doesn't replace a clinician coming in and going through all the questions.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
But it's at least one way of saying, Just look into it. Maybe it's nothing, but to be on the safe side, why don't you try and get some support? And I think that's a total game changer.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
I'm not sure if Facebook were to offer this tomorrow. I still am not sure if I would want that. So I would rather have a dedicated entity that's not Facebook. Facebook has like all of these market incentives it's committed to. And you don't know what the leadership looks like tomorrow. There's this saying in the book, data is permanent and leadership isn't.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
So even if you had a CEO who kind of today thinks we're going to use it to help people, Who knows, the data is going to be out there and they could use it in very different ways tomorrow. So I'd much rather have a dedicated entity that doesn't even have to collect my data.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
There's now ways in which you can track locally on the phone and you just send your intelligence that says, if these patterns show up, you alert locally on the phone and I never have to even collect the data initially. Now, that's not Facebook's business model. Facebook's business model is grab as much data as you can and then you see how you can commercialize.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
So even if Facebook offered that, I personally would not trust them.