Are

there conversations among lawmakers or regulators about cracking down on this kind of behavior? Absolutely.

So in the United States, we do not have a comprehensive federal privacy law. The best we have at the federal level is the Federal Trade Commission. So in the FTC Act, there is a prohibition against unfair and deceptive business practices. So if a company is taking your data and they don't tell you, or they tell you they're doing something else, that is both unfair and deceptive. And so the Federal Trade Commission has gone after a number of companies under this law, but it's not perfect. It's not something that applies to all cases where our privacy is violated. There's also state-level laws, but the bottom line is we need a better, comprehensive federal privacy law to protect us. So

as a regular person using the internet, it almost feels like the conclusion here is maybe more concerning than if my phone were just listening to me. Like, that would be an obvious answer. I put my phone in the other room. But instead, it's that these companies are sort of surreptitiously gathering all of this other data about us. Is there anything that people can do if they're uncomfortable with their personal data being collected and packaged and sold to advertisers in this way?

There's sort of different levels of advice, right? You mentioned putting the phone in the other room. Of course, you can go extreme. You can put on your tinfoil hat. You can throw your devices in a river. Go live life as a hermit in the mountains. I

think about that sometimes.

Yeah. I mean, I think, yeah. Unfortunately, the more you learn about this stuff, the more you feel like this might actually be the practical option, but it's not for most people, including myself. So in terms of practical advice, some things I can say that most privacy advocates would also say is try to engage more privacy-protecting settings on your devices. Don't share locations with an app when it's not needed. If you have to share a location, usually you have the option to share an approximate one instead of the one that says exactly where you are within a few feet. Generally install only the apps you need. Give them the least information possible. Maybe that flashlight app that's asking for your location is not the best thing to use. And

for users of the big platforms, the Facebooks, the Googles, is that perhaps where you recommend starting? Start with those big platforms and look at your settings there and then work backwards? Because as you said, there's so many different places where we're sharing this information. But for people who are just learning about this, is that where they should start? It's

not a bad place to start for sure. Meta, Google, Amazon. These are all companies that collect a lot of data. They're what we call first-party data collectors. So we interact with them directly. And so they see a lot of what we're doing online. They don't sell that data to others. But because they're so big, they are, of course, also advertisers. So they enable the kind of targeted advertising that creeps us out and makes us think that they're listening to our conversations. of course, is that the settings are often hard to find. They're kind of complicated. And bottom line is, it's certainly better than nothing. But I do want to put it out there that, you know, for your average consumer, if this feels overwhelming, I get it. Like, I also feel that way when I have to deal with these privacy settings. So it's sort of do the best you can, but, know, ultimately understand that this is not your fault. And we're in a position where we're kind of all doomed to fail at some point of letting some data collection happen. But that said, I mean, there's plenty of people who can learn to think in terms of privacy.

We talked, too, about the smart speakers and the refrigerators. Are there settings that people can turn off on those devices, or do you just recommend that people try to opt not to use them? It's going to

be a little bit of column A, a little bit of column B. So you can turn off certain things. Like, for example, on smart speakers, there's a hardware mute button. That just means that there's a button you push. It'll light up saying that, you know, it's like a microphone with a line through it. And that means that those devices are no longer recording. Both in my own lab experiments and other researchers have shown that those buttons work. They're not lying, they're not made out of software. It is hardware, it is something companies can't stop from happening. So that's a good example of a privacy control that someone can use. When it comes to the TVs, you can turn off automatic content recognition and they will stop watching what you're watching. You can also just not connect the devices to the Internet. Just because your fridge or your microwave or your TV can connect to Wi-Fi doesn't mean you have to connect them to Wi-Fi. And if they can't talk to the Internet, then that's going to really limit any kind of tracking that they can do.

Awesome. Well, Dave, thank you so much for doing this. This is really terrifying, but really interesting. And

thank you for having me.

Thanks again to David Chaufnes for joining us. We'll link to his research in the show notes. Now, here's a quick reminder of some practical tips if you'd like to keep your personal data more private and reduce the likelihood that you'll be creeped out by online ads. First, pay attention to what apps and online services you're using and check your privacy settings. In many cases, you can turn off access to things like your location or the history of what ads you've clicked on to make it a little harder for those services to track you. Next, when it comes to the connected devices in your home, like your fridge or oven, think about whether they really need to be connected to the Internet. And if they don't, disconnect them from the Wi-Fi. Finally, if you're worried about all of this, David recommends calling your representatives to let them know that you care about privacy legislation. And as for that weird Instagram recipe ad I got the day after making it, I came up with a theory based on my conversation with David. So I called him back to run it by him. Hey, David. Hello. Okay, so I got all the ingredients at Whole Foods the night that I cooked this recipe. I scanned my Amazon code at Whole Foods because sometimes there are deals for Amazon members. And I'm wondering if it's possible that Meta might somehow have access to that Amazon data and knew that I had all the perfect ingredients lying around for this recipe. And that's why it showed me this ad.

So in general, that's a good theory. In practice, Amazon doesn't sell its data or share its data because they don't have to. They already have so much information about individuals. And the same with Meta. So they don't usually talk to each other. There's other possible reasons. One is you make this recipe a lot. Maybe they just know that and it was coincidence that you just happened to see an ad for that recipe because maybe you looked at it before and they decided you hadn't looked at it recently enough. And so they're showing it to you to do it again. If the New York Times is placing the ad, they know that you've looked at the recipe. And so they could retarget you based on

that.