It. Why is it that when I make videos about keeping myself private, I have to have someone make a comment about what is it that you have to hide? Why is that when I make you aware that someone else is always watching you, that some commenter will call me paranoid or a conspiracy theorist? I've repeated this often and I will repeat it again. My motives are quite simple. 

I just want to be left alone. That's it. Leave me alone. I don't think I'm the only one who thinks this, and certainly I don't feel that I have to justify why to regular folks. I don't have to have anything to hide. But that's not anyone's business either. I really believe that there is no reason for someone to collect data on me or have mass surveillance conducted on me. 

I just think it's none of the business of government or big tech or some hacker or some stranger to mess with my life. If you're one of those who think you have nothing to hide, then run along now. This video is not for you. Now there are serious threats that really justify why I think like this. Those of you who have a gut feel that something is wrong should listen to me on this because your gut feel is correct. 

I don't have to concern myself with the bulk of the people who behave like NPC. If you're instinctively concerned about privacy, stay right there and let's discuss why there is serious cause for concern. It goes way beyond discomfort. If you live in China, then privacy has become a completely alien concept. Just to give you some imagery of the reality for a typical chinese citizen, let's start with the financial side. 

Most transactions in China are now in the form of a digital currency. The mechanics of this is through the widespread use of the WeChat app for payments. This is completely controlled by the state so that every transaction can be monitored. The WeChat app is interesting as well. Each person is monitored for behavior. When you walk the streets of the cities, facial recognition instantly tracks your location. In addition to the WeChat app, if you ever deemed to complain about the government, then you would be marked as socially undesirable. 

And this comes with some immediate penalties, like restrictions in travel. For example, since all monies are exchanged via this WeChat app, there could be an almost immediate financial shutdown with complete centralized control. In China, your Internet activity is completely monitored. In fact, vpns are banned. And the reason for the ban is that vpns can actually hide your ip address and encrypt your interactions. So with a VPN this means that government proxy servers cannot track your exact activity match to your exact ip address. 

That is not allowed. Everything you do has to be recorded and tracked. Even the email addresses in China are numeric, just like an id card. They all have to be identified to a firm identity. And of course all email traffic has to be recorded by the state. The population there accepts this. Of course, there's not really a choice. Accept it or go to jail. If you believe that a central communist government, which you really cannot un elect, has a right to dictate everything you do and really shape your every thought, then you can ignore me. 

Now, basically, what's happening today in the western world is headed towards the exact same direction as China. Yes, it is decorated with seemingly pretty ideas about free choice, but in reality, there's no difference than what has happened in China. We're just a little bit behind, and it is accompanied by a lot of flourish to make it appear benign. In the 1990s, when I started to do programming on Internet projects, I instinctively realized that someone has the capability to track everything. 

Even something as basic as a very identifiable ip address attached to every Internet activity was an obvious issue to me. I recognized even then that sending email back and forth in plain text was problematic. I've always known that email can be read, but today the average person doesn't even realize that. And if you bring it to their attention, they just think, oh well, nothing to complain about since it is common. 

Well, that's how it started for the chinese citizen as well. So slowly, these kinds of tech thorns are readily accepted and no one has the guts to question anything. Today, every regular phone is tracked with a location record. Twenty four seven. I don't know how many times I have to repeat this. Since 2022, the iPhone can even track you even when the phone is off. There were a lot of community disruptions in the last few years. 

Riots, violent protests, damage to private property. But amazingly, although the tracking tools exist, including street cameras, license plate readers, phone geofencing, and even Stingray MZ catchers, the only attempts to prosecute criminal behavior was in the January 6 Capitol riots. I actually think that the powers to be thought this was a good move. I imagine that they were careful where to use these surveillance powers, because if it is used widely, then the people will lose trust and rebel, and it is not yet time for that. 

Right now, you are all made to believe that you can loot a department store and no one will make an attempt to track you and prosecute you. Now, in China, you'd be instantly identified and if not sent to jail, your digital currency would suddenly be inaccessible. So the muted government response to criminal behavior in the US serves to encourage everyone to believe that there's nothing wrong with the current way of things. 

The surveillance infrastructure does not really affect you. Phones must not really track you, and you are not really monitored on social media, though amazingly, there are specific groupings of people with various beliefs that are clearly marked on Google's databases with an exact location and Google id, some labeled as violent extremists just based on a Google search. If your actions threaten the people in power, then the hammer will come down on you. 

So far, that hammer has come down only on the January 6 Capitol rioters. I'm not aware of any mass use of data collection. Otherwise someday you could be a target. You see, it all depends on who's in power and if your actions could threaten them. I question the ability of big tech to collect information about everything I do, and each day the detail to the data collected gets even more and more refined. 

And just to give you some food for thought, go to your privacy and security settings on Chrome and look at the section called ad topics. That's Google showing what they tracked about you for third party use. Understand that for third party use, what they know is extremely more detailed every click on the Internet. But that information, ad topics, is what they share with advertisers. This stuff is going out of control. 

Lately there has been this urge to basically remove any chance of endtoend encryption again, something that many average people will ignore until it is too late. There won't be any successful end to end encryption, especially today on Apple devices. If your device can pre scan your content before encryption even happens. This was quietly added to iOS and Os and it remains there. Laws were being considered to make this a permanent fixture on all of our device experiences, even on non Apple devices. 

Have a government or platform scan your devices to make sure you conform. Now China doesn't need client side scanning since they can see everything. Web encryption is a completely theoretical concept there since the government proxy servers can overcome that encryption. But in the western world, client type scanning is the new silent tool to monitor us. Some of the stuff we operate under on the Internet is so subtle that most people are just npcs and unable to comprehend what goes on. 

Does the average person realize that once you log on to Google on a computer and phone, that all your Internet traffic is now identified by that Google ID and Google has a record of that? This is so incredible and such an obvious privacy threat, and yet the average person will label me a conspiracy theorist because of it. What is the theory in this? Every website runs Google Analytics and Google Ads and can detect the Google ID. 

Every device is logged into Google all the time. And even at times when a phone is not logged into Google, Google can recognize the device identifiers like the IMEI to always have a 100% match. This is worse than any three letter agency surveillance. Every click on the Internet is tracked. How is this accepted as normal? Of course, the worst part is that because three letter agencies know this level of data collection exists, they just partake in the data collected by Google. 

Those January 6 capital ride people, they were tracked from data in the Google sensor vault, shared with the state. Of course. Understand. The only difference with China is that we are given the illusion of freedom. People think that it is normal to share every portion of their lives on the Internet. On TikTok, on Facebook, on YouTube Vlogs. There's no cost to doing this. Hey, many people have gotten rich Kardashian style just from sharing their lives publicly. 

So that's a good model to follow, right? The problem is that whatever you share on the Internet is captured and made permanent. I have people come to me asking for help in deleting Internet data. I cannot help you after the fact. The only help I can give you is prevention. The knowledge I'm sharing here gets worse. There are now discussions about how more efficient the world would become if the AI knows our every thought. 

It would be an extreme form of democracy. There would be immediate feedback on every planned action by a government or platform. This would be fantastic. No need for market research or focus groups. Instant marketing knowledge, instant political research. This brainstorming about the use of AI in this way is being pushed by some really smart people with tons of knowledge of technology and cybersecurity. But so naive. Before I discuss why this is so naive, think about it. 

The data for the AI already exists. The AI already exists. And we're not talking about global human knowledge here. We're talking about knowledge of you as an individual. If Google can recognize every action you've taken on the Internet with every click, then think forward. Here. The AI will know that, too. The public AI that Google has revealed is called Bard. Like Chat GPT, bard is a language model and is used to access the collected knowledge of people based on Internet data. 

Knowledge, of course, that Google has unique access to because it runs the two most popular search engines, Google and YouTube. But does the common person understand the effects of an AI, which I will call God eye? If God eye can see every thought of every human being. What could it do? Is it really as simple as being able to react to our every whim? Okay, this shows the naivete of so many people, including technologists. 

Why would some platform controlling a God eye AI stop at recognizing every individual whim? Wouldn't the temptation be there to begin to influence those people, to change their thoughts, to cause them to conform? Which, by the way, Google's already doing. Hey, it's a new world order. Conformity leads to stability. And let's have the AI manipulate the minds so that the only messages seen by the average person pushes a certain narrative. 

And this new world order can automatically wipe out dissent. The AI controls the information flow. It can make contrary ideas disappear. And then the AI will make an even better communist China. While the current chinese government has to rely on people doing searches for non conformists, an AI could instantly react. Block access to social media. Block access to central bank, digital currency, CBDC, which is coming, by the way. 

Block free speech. Those of us who have the instinct to protect our privacy are lesser known to the various collected databases and may be invisible to God eye. Those who protect their Internet identity can still have some freedom of speech because no one is certain who they are. Unfortunately, I am now known and I am always the subject of a lot of attacks. My message is not acceptable to many entities, including those that seek to control us. 

But hopefully the knowledge I share empowers you to retain your real freedom, not the imagined freedom of the average TikToker. I want to make sure you understand, to the chinese citizen, it is already too late. They are a 100% manipulated population and potentially a dangerous one because their thoughts can be directed against anyone by that state. My job is to make you recognize that you don't want to be like them. 

It may be too late for many, but it is not too late for all. Some of us can be the beacon of privacy and in the long run also be the beacon of freedom of real choice. So if the NPCs, which are the majority of the population, calls us names and taunts us for what appears to them as weird behavior, I will not waste my time responding. After all, it would be a waste of energy to respond to an NPC. 

I started a company to provide privacy solutions to the average person instead of just talking about problems. It is not too late for those who are aware today, the primary solution is still the use of a degoogle phone. A degoogle phone operates on the Internet without the tracking of a Google id. It is also immune from geofencing. This is what makes you invisible on the Internet. Check that out. 

These phones are around $400, so they are cheaper than normal phones. I explained in the video as well that a VPN protects you from mass surveillance and even hackers doing man in the middle attacks. They also protect your ip address. We have the BytesVPN service, which I started a few years ago. We have worldwide coverage and a known entity providing the service. Me. Hopefully someone you can trust. 

We have a Brax mail service that hides identity information from your email. We offer unlimited aliases, seven domains, and webmail. Check that out for $50 a year. All these are on my store on Braxme. Sign up on there and you will not be asked for personal information to sign up you. Thanks for watching and see you next time. .