The Security Circle
An IFPOD production for IFPO the very first security podcast called Security Circle. IFPO is the International Foundation for Protection Officers, and is an international security membership body that supports front line security professionals with learning and development, mental Health and wellbeing initiatives.
The Security Circle
EP 196: Ant Examines My Phone — The Hidden Risks Inside Our Everyday Apps with Ant Davis Security Awareness, Instagram Influencer & AI Enablement Practitioner
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EP 196: Ant Examines My Phone — The Hidden Risks Inside Our Everyday Apps
What do WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok, Waze, dating apps, QR codes and fitness trackers really know about us?
In this highly engaging episode of The Security Circle, Yolanda is joined by Cyber Security Awareness and AI Enablement Practitioner Ant Davis to examine the technology we use every day—often without giving a second thought to the information we are sharing.
The conversation culminates in the brilliantly revealing “Ant Examines My Phone” round, where Ant gives his immediate cyber reaction to the apps and technology sitting on Yolanda’s phone. Along the way, he reveals why free apps are rarely truly free, how Instagram monitors our behaviour without secretly tracking our eyes, and why Waze users may be sharing more with Google than they realise.
Ant also exposes how easily dating profiles can be investigated using basic open-source information, why moving a conversation to WhatsApp can be an early warning sign of a scam, and how fraudulent websites can appear above legitimate businesses in sponsored search results. He explains the danger of QR-code stickers, how fitness trackers can reveal where we live and when our homes may be empty, and why even security professionals can be caught out by curiosity and misplaced trust.
The episode also explores the extraordinary opportunities—and risks—created by artificial intelligence. Ant reveals how AI can now reproduce a convincing copy of a website within minutes, placing increasingly powerful tools into the hands of both legitimate creators and cybercriminals.
Funny, accessible and packed with surprising revelations, this episode is not about telling people to abandon technology. It is about helping us understand the invisible exchange taking place every time we tap, scroll, scan, share or accept.
After listening, you may never look at the apps on your phone in quite the same way again.
“All the things that are great about us being human are also what make us vulnerable. We’re curious, inquisitive, creative and emotional—and that is what scammers exploit.”
— Ant Davis“That’s the frightening part about AI: for everything we build for good, someone else can find a way to use it for harm.”
— Ant Davis
https://www.linkedin.com/in/antdaviscyber/
Instagram = antdaviscyber
Security Circle ⭕️ is an IFPOD production for IFPO the International Foundation of Protection Officers
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Speaker 2Hi, I'm Yolanda And welcome to the Security Circle Podcast, produced in association with IFPO, the International Foundation for Protection Officers. This podcast is all about connection, bringing you closer to the greatest minds, boldest thinkers, trailblazers, and change makers across the security industry. Whether you are here to grow your network, spark new ideas, or simply feel more connected to the world of protection and risk, you are in the right place wherever you are listening from. Thank you for being a part of the Security Circle journey..
SpeakerI've got a very special guest. Uh, I started hitting up Instagram actually for incredibly good content creators, uh, for that, uh, vitamin shot for the security brain. But I first encountered this man in the most appropriate place possible, Instagram. He was talking about cybersecurity, but it didn't feel like a cybersecurity lesson. It was interesting, understandable, and actually entertaining. Ant Davis, welcome to the Security Circle podcast. How you doing?
Speaker 2I'm good. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.
SpeakerI, I know. I can see it all over that. If you, if, for those of you that don't know Ant, you've got to look him up. He's got a great big ginger beard. He's absolutely fantastic looking and totally unforgettable. But I obviously, you know, save a lot of listeners from the grace of really how people do look with, uh, this being an audio podcast. But look, l- yesterday, uh, you posted an absolutely fascinating post about LG TVs, and the listener will know I have a little quirk with my own television, which isn't an LG. I do have an LG, but this is a Samsung. And, uh, I've always said that I, I've always been rather puzzled that it just turns itself on in the middle of the night. Now, I, I know that you're gonna go into something super interesting here, but I've got these little LED strips that you stick to the back, so when it comes on, the LED comes, the, the LED lights come on, my room kind of glows mauve and green, and that's how I know it's come on. Otherwise, I wouldn't have known that there's a power ignition. But your stuff on LG last night was stunning. Take us away.
Speaker 2Yeah. So, um, it's funny, I've also got an LG TV and for a long time, LG was the brand that I would recommend. I suggested my mom buy one, and she did, and my in-laws as well. Um, and there was a report done by an incredible team on YouTube called GamersNexus that, um, spent 500, something like 500 hours and £70,000 looking at LG's top tier of TVs and looking at the data and the way they work. And es- they essentially discovered that, um, they are listening to everything you do, recording everything you do. So they have voice commands, and it listens out for a tone And then after you've given it a voice command, it keeps listening for a short while, and then keeps a transcript of that in plain text on the device that it then sends off. And the whole story, it's a two-hour-long video, and it goes down all kinds of journeys. Like if it was, if it wasn't technical and about TVs, it would be Channel 4 quality stuff, you know, if it was about humans. But what's amazing is that nobody really realizes that these devices are listening. And it's not just LG deny all of this, which is important to add, but there's a lot of fact and evidence and research in the video. And then I posted this on Instagram in a really simple way just to say like, "This is what they've done," because I get different coverage. My reach on Instagram is very different. It's very varied. People in the comments are going, "Oh, all TVs do this. Samsung does this," and it is, it's clear. And the interesting part about that is 10 years ago, a 65-inch TV cost £6,000. Today, I can walk into my local supermarket and buy one for £300. Yet PlayStations have gone up and every, everything else has gone up in price Uh, so then you have to think how are they making their money? And as I said in the video, the ad team, the advertising arm of LG, has made money and made money and keep making record profits, whereas the actual TV manufacturing and sales side don't make money. So it's, it, the business shifts from making TVs for everyone to an advertising company.
SpeakerAnd it's the same- So it's become, it's become a vessel then to basically make money through advertising. Basically. Yeah, through analytics.
Speaker 2And then it, and then you look through everything else and consider every other thing that collects data on you. And I, I found myself having this conversation with other people. In the era of vibe coding that we find ourselves in, so many more people are building amazing tools 'cause it's so much easy and it, it's accessible now. And then the conversation goes, "Oh, well, now I've got all that data, what could I do with it?" And that's exactly where these companies were. Like, we're in every house. Someone's like, "Why don't we watch what they're watching? And then we can, like, target adverts, and then the adverts are better, and they will enjoy the adverts more." And it might have started with good intentions, but eventually it all comes back to money, and data is currency, isn't it?
SpeakerSo even when you get information from the, the, the source that says, "Look, this isn't happening, this isn't true," blah, blah, blah, 'cause we know how damaging it is for them to come out and say, "Yeah, you know, okay, well, hands up, you've called us out." Yeah. Uh, you know, i- you gotta follow the money, and what you did was you followed the money, and so therefore that in itself, it doesn't become conspiratorial. It becomes more factual, doesn't it, when you follow the money?
Speaker 2It's hard to believe that it doesn't happen when you see, like, when you look at the paths and you see where it's happening. You see that the advertising side of the business makes more money and the TV side doesn't. And manufacturing companies, like brands don't make TVs anymore that used to make TVs because there wasn't the money in it. Um, or JVC, Japanese Victor Corp, which was like, you know, one of the big electronic companies years ago, Currys in the UK now license the brand. So if you buy a JVC TV now, it's actually a Currys own brand TV. Because people have dropped out of the market because there wasn't the money in it anymore, but the money is now in the data and the platforms. And it goes beyond TVs, let's be honest. It's, it's pretty much everything. You can't buy a dumb TV anymore though, like a computer monitor. That's the interesting thing, and I wonder, well, if monitors are next. That's the scary thing.
SpeakerOh, Lord have mercy because, oh, that's a whole, oh, let's go down that rabbit hole another time. I wanna talk a little bit about your, your past. Yeah. Was there a moment when you realized that, you know, cybersecurity didn't necessarily have an information problem, it had a communication problem?
Speaker 2Yeah, I think so. I, and I can pretty much remember when it was. I, um, I used to work in the IT helpdesk before I moved into, uh, cybersecurity, and before that I'd done years and years of sales, cars, houses, online advertising, websites, all kinds of stuff. And I moved into IT, and part of the helpdesk, in my mind, was all about helping people, and the years of sales at sales jobs had helped me learn how to talk to people and listen to people just as importantly. So moving into IT, the, the company I was at then spun up an InfoSec team, uh, and the, they got a head of information security, and I went up to him and said, "Can I join your team? This sounds really interesting." So I joined the information security team as employee number one, and very, very quickly, um, realized that my skills and passion was on the human side. Someone else joined and started building up all the back infrastructure and SIEMs and all, all of, everything we needed technologically to keep people safe. And I was like, "Okay, are we delivering training and are we doing phishing simulations? Yeah, we are. Okay. They're not
Speaker 3really,
Speaker 2they're not
Speaker 3really
Speaker 2engaging. Like
Speaker 3they're k- they're kind
Speaker 2of a bit boring. You know, is this actually gonna keep people safe?" And all the things I had in how to communicate and talk to people, the training and the, the phishing and the whole approach wasn't doing that. It was very tick box, checkbox exercise. And here I am, like 12, 13 years later, and I still find myself having conversations about people that are where I was all those years ago because it's still kind of, for many businesses, you know, just a checkbox exercise. So yeah, it's that point when I joined, uh, the InfoSec, it really very quickly became clear that this wasn't actually gonna make us more secure. This was just ticking boxes.
SpeakerLet's start with the phone in everyone's hand.
Speaker 2Yeah.
SpeakerWhat does the average person, um, misunderstand about the relationship they have with their apps?
Speaker 2Oh. So, oh, this, this, this is a, a whole conversation in itself. I think behind all of the big... Any, any app that has some serious money behind it, that app, any social platform, shopping platforms to a degree, they are designed to make you interact with that app as long as possible. And this isn't just AI or algorithms or anything like that. This is essentially, they'll look at how you interact, and then they'll try and give you the information to keep you there. It's the same as, it's the same as any brand really. You know, we might buy Nike shoes because they're comfortable, but then we also buy Nike shoes because of who we see wearing them. And if all of a sudden a controversial figure aligns themself with that brand, people will stop buying it. It's happened in cars over the past couple of years. A really popular car brand, sales dropped because, um, you know, someone did some controversial things. They're designed to keep you engaged as long as possible. Why are they designed to keep you as long as possible? Because they want you there. So social platforms want you there because the more you interact, the more information you're giving them about how you interact and what you like and what you engage with, and that is currency to something like Meta, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok. The apps are free, right? And I've said this for years. Many people say it. When something is free, you are the product. But it happens on shopping apps as well. A popular retailer I know in the UK that does online shopping, when you go to your basket, you then have about four or five screens on the checkout journey before you can check out, and it's really annoying. But the reason it's there is because the science and the data tells them that those five screens make you buy more. You'll go, "Oh, I wanted that. Oh, that's cheap. Oh, that's on offer," before you actually get to the checkout. And Amazon have started doing that as well. They used to have a really short checkout walk, but now there's a screen going, "Have you missed these?" And that's all because we are the product. They want us to hang around, and it's all data that they can feed in.
SpeakerSo it's like the equivalent of, I remember in the '90s, my family had a Hoover company come into the house, and that's what they wanna do. Salesmen, we've both got a sales background. You get in the house, you've got a higher chance of selling being in the house, right? And so you had this kind of, "Don't let them in, don't let them in," because if they come in, we just know we're just gonna be ending up spending some money. And so what the apps, the app retention, uh, element is doing exactly the same is keeping you there. You've almost got to think of it like that old-fashioned technique
Speaker 2It's exactly, I remember, used to have Tupperware parties. People used to come around and the conser- I Just a few years ago, I had someone from a conservatory company come in, and they were here for two hours. And it was like I had to virtually push them out of the door at the end. And, and it's that age-old question, what do I have to do to get your business today? Like, that's the As a salesperson, that used to be I remember someone stood over me going, "Say it. Say it. Say it." Like, waiting for me to go, "What do I have to do to get your business today?" But that was kind of, from a salesperson's perspective, that was like, I, I'm not winning. This is like, it was like your Hail Mary pass. This is the last throw of the dice. What do I have to do? And it's exactly the same on shopping websites. I was looking at something the other day, and then a couple of hours later in my inbox, I get an email going, "Have you forgotten something?" And I hadn't even realized, I don't think, that I'd signed up or I hadn't actually gone all the way through to the checkout. But then I get a nudge in my inbox going, "Have you forgotten something?" And I'm like, "Ah, God, no, I don't want it. Ignore." But then it keeps coming, and it keeps coming in the hope that it will eventually convert me into a sale.
SpeakerYeah. It, it bugs me when I see a picture of my ex come up on Facebook and he's set up another Facebook page. And because I've already blocked the first one, and he's sent me a friend request And, and, and I'm like, I, I don't ignore it. I leave it there because the less likelihood of him trying to connect with me again, right? Once you- Yeah Right. So I did that, and then Facebook seems to think incorrectly that I just wanna see his face pop up a lot- Yeah to remind me that he's there, and I haven't yet accepted his friend request. This is where Facebook's getting it wrong. I am not stupid. If I have left something in my trolley, it's probably because I'm having a think, you know? Yes. I don't need a nudge to say, "Oh, by the way, uh, have you forgotten to pay for this?" But you, you triggered me a little bit about Amazon because I've started to become suspicious about their pricing. Mm. And this is only a suspicion because I've noticed that the things that I started to buy with them regularly seem to be generally getting a little bit more expensive and there's a price creep. And I'm just wondering if they have become that good at their algorithms that they have worked out what I'm likely to buy and have put a markup on it
Speaker 2I would imagine so. I n- like, if you think about, if you think about the science behind that, you regularly shop with Amazon, and they know that you're aligned with one product, like Fairy washing liquid-
SpeakerIt's cat food,
Speaker 2Ant Oh, obviously. It's, it's
Speakercat food It's cat food. Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 2So you like your cat food, and you like the convenience of which Amazon can get it to you.
SpeakerYeah.
Speaker 2And it's inconvenient to go and look for that cat food elsewhere, and elsewhere might take two or three or four days to get here, whereas Amazon can get it to you tomorrow, and you're probably only looking because you've just used one and gone, "I've got no cat food" in the morning. So it's, and Amazon know this, right? So they can, the chances are you're not gonna look at the prices elsewhere, and they can squeeze the price up. They could squeeze the price up and put a discount on it and all sorts. It's, um, that kind of science behind the pricing structures and the way people buy. I, I, I have Amazon Prime, and quite often I don't look elsewhere when I'm going to buy something. Agreed. I'll just buy it on Amazon. I have recently, a couple of things, actually, I've gone to eBay-
Speaker 3Mm-hmm
Speaker 2and found stuff on eBay, and I've gone, "Wow, that's so much cheaper," and I've bought it on eBay. Um, but not often, and there's the inconvenience. eBay takes three, four, five days, whereas Amazon will be here tomorrow, you know? Yeah. So you do kind of pay for the convenience, and I think that Amazon and some other retailers know this.
SpeakerWe, we know, we're becoming more familiar with the fact that when something's free, we are the product.
Speaker 2Yeah.
SpeakerBut there's more to it than that, isn't there? Because we're not just talking about our data. We're talking about our behaviors. Yeah. What have you seen emerge recently that really consumers should be aware of?
Speaker 2I think the, the persistence of which some of these retail companies, not even retailers, social networks try to get us to engage is concerning. Um, and there was a amazing viral post that went... A, a really small content creator posted a post the other day about, um, how they uploaded a photo and then Meta AI was asking them to do all kinds of stuff. It was like: "Would you like to do this? Would you like to do that?" And it create-- And then it pulled up a photo from, like, years gone by that they thought they'd deleted. So it's, it's only at times like that you kind of realize how much data these platforms have on us. Does any of it ever get deleted? Who knows? And even to the point where I, I, I'm actually in the process of, of writing a webinar at the moment to give to some people about the platforms we forgot existed, like Flickr and Tumblr and LiveJournal and MySpace, all of which are still live, all of which we used to use heavily. You know, w-we're talking hundreds of millions of users on LiveJournal and on Tumblr, but many people haven't been on there for years. But, like, that data's all still out there, and it all makes a lovely picture. I
Speaker 3haven't written a biography.
Speaker 2I don't know if you have. Have you written a, a biography?
SpeakerI write for a, a security publication every month, but, uh, and that's where I get to sort of tick that box for, for my head.
Speaker 2But there isn't the life of- No Yoyo Tamblyn out there? No. No.
SpeakerNo.
Speaker 2Well-
SpeakerOh, well, there is on Facebook, I think. I think Facebook would really be able to give a- And- very good- This is
Speaker 2it
Speakerdiary of my life. Yeah.
Speaker 2This is it. Yeah, and if you put all those social platforms together, as many ki- you know, quite often data aggregators will collect all this information- Yeah and it'll live out there. You can almost get a wonderful biography of someone and build a story of their life, and we're now talking about the people that can have Facebook accounts have lived their whole lives on Facebook. Like n- now someone could have been, th- mum and dad could have met, child could have been conceived, labor's been documented, the birth, first day at school, all their birthdays, secondary school, and now that child is old enough to have their own Facebook account, and then they log in for the first time, and Facebook probably in all its wisdom goes, "Here's your life." And it's, uh, there with a big red book going, "This is your life. Here's where your mum and dad met," and it, and, and, and could probably tag you in every photo retrospectively, which is, which is- True frightening. And, and, you know, at what point did that person consent? They didn't. I- Their parents did, n- naively 'cause we weren't as aware of all this. It wasn't this big evil thing. You know, several years ago we were, everybody was on it.
SpeakerIt was wonderful. Yeah. It was really wonderful because I had family all around the world, Ant. Yeah. And even when people started to become very skeptical and say, "Oh, you know, look at all the data it's collecting on you," yeah, we had to be mindful of what we w- we were putting out there in public and what w- and then the security restrictions and the, the, the boundaries of, you know, privacy were becoming established. But, you know, I had a bit of a heart attack yesterday, Ant. I realized that there's an awful lot of my life and purpose in my iPhone photo storage.
Speaker 3Mm.
SpeakerAnd then I realized, uh, with 60,000 photos, which I am more than happy to pay for storage for, 'cause that's an insurance, I realized, wow, supposing that just disappeared in one flash.
Speaker 2Yeah.
SpeakerI have no way, because even if it was a pound f- per photo or 30p per photo, 60,000 photos, m- I felt all of a sudden very vulnerable in terms of preserving that history.
Speaker 2Mm. It's, photos is a really interesting one because if you think back before we all had decent cameras on our phones, we were quite happy taking 24 or 36 photos a week or a year for a special, "Oh, there's a birthday coming up. I'll go and buy a roll of film," you know? And then you get, even on the Insta- instant camera it was 10, you know? So you would get 24 little snapshots or 36 little snapshots of the event and, and that was fine. Whereas now, 'cause we can take unlimited amounts, we're taking, you know, a birthday party or a night out might have 50 or 100 photos But they do all mean something. And what do you do with that? You leave them in Apple. I also sync mine to Google Photos, so there's, there's a kind of- Backup backup. But there's also another layer of exposure. So, you know, I, I now could get exposed in two places. And then y- some people would say, "Oh, well, buy a local storage, buy a, a NAS or something, and store them locally." But then when that drive fails... And that's all money, and it is all, it's And it, this is the psychology behind the behavior, isn't it? Because we used to be happy with very little, but now we've had a lot The idea of losing a lot seems really painful. Like if I said to you, "Go back at every birthday, every special, how many weddings have you been to? How many birthdays have you been to?" Right. Note them down and then choose 24 photos from each event and just print those off. It sounds like a genius idea, and in fact, I might do it 'cause that is really nice. And then if I do lose them, it's not the end of the world. But not everyone's gonna do that. So the behaviors around all of this, and it- it's kind of like life maxing. Um, and this is a conversation I was having with my wife recently about every- about some other stuff actually. You know, all these trends now like looksmaxing and stuff like that. How many of us now are life maxing? Like we have unlimited opportunities to do unlimited things, so we are, we're all using everything to the max. The camera phone, the internet, there's no limits on anything. I
Speakeruse a company called, uh, Photobox, I think it- they're called. Yeah. And you get like a free photo album, but ultimately, you know, you, you pay for postage. Yeah. But why get something that's got, you know, 10 pages when you can get something with 15 and pay a fiver? Yeah. And ultimately it's worth doing. I did a bit of renovation around the house that was significant, so I did this kind of before and the journey and then after. So I've got this memento, and I did one the first day I moved into my, my house I'm living in now. I just went and took photos of everything, and it's just a, it was like a moment in time that was really magical. It felt really great, and I think I am gonna do just that. I'm gonna look at my cats' journeys from when they were very young- Yeah take those best photos, and you can sort of merge quite a few on a page as well. I started to think like that, but that's also one of the reasons you hit the nail on the head. It's one of the reasons why I've never desired to be very wealthy, 'cause I think the more money you have, the more assets you have, the more, you know, tangible wealth you have, the more you have to worry about protecting it and keeping it and, you know. A- and that's, that's, that's, uh, I've never heard anyone articulate that in the way that you did.
Speaker 2I think it's a bell curve. You kind of get to a point where every- you, you are really precious about everything, and then you probably have so much income that you're like, "I can replace everything, so it doesn't matter anymore."
SpeakerI wish.
Speaker 2Yeah.
SpeakerI wish.
Speaker 2Yeah.
SpeakerOh, my Mercedes broken again. I'll just get another one.
Speaker 2Yeah.
SpeakerYou said something very funny. You said sheep are, uh, I, we talked about, you know, the sheep getting out of the pen, uh, you know, trying to get them back in, like, ugh. But you said the sheep are flying, fences don't work anymore. This was a really interesting conversation around data leakage, data- Mm management. Uh, I do think that's an incredibly funny phrase, but if a company is acquired, you, we look at Myspace, which I think is taking a, a, making a resurgence by the way, I did hear, which is interesting 'cause I think about time. Okay. Uh, I think we would love to have a very healthy competition. Um- And it's got a trusted name. But if a company is acquired or like you say, dormant for an increasing amount of time, what happens to all that personal information if users originally trusted it to-- The contract is between, you know, the user and the, the business. But if the business- Mm is sold, then is that a-an automatic assumption, and should we accept that?
Speaker 2There's a couple of really interesting cases that are different on this at the moment. Um, 23andMe, which was the DNA analysis company, you know, you'd send them your DNA, and they would tell you where you came from in the world, you know, what your genetic makeup was. You know, I'm part Scandinavian Viking warrior or something like that. I wouldn't be. I, I would-- No, I don't think I'd be that lucky. Um, but 23andMe went into administration, I think, and the data has been up for sale. The company has been up for sale, and they've actually sold the data, but the idea is that it all needs... There's, it's going through court at the moment. The, the, the access to the data and the way it can be used is all being treated very carefully. But obviously, it's up to the US courts how that ends up. So, um, yeah, it's probably money is gonna decide where that ends up. An interesting one on that, and its corporate identity is Spirit Airlines. So Spirit Airlines in the US, um, went into receivership, and Spirit Airlines corporate data was recently auctioned off, and Google bought it for ten million dollars. Um, and the second, the second p-people to buy it, I think, was an AI-powered HR platform. But the data that was sold to Google, which is all gonna get de-identified, uh, by a third-party company. I'm using air quotes there around- Yeah "de-identified" for our listeners. Um, all that data includes Teams conversations, Slack conversations, email, like with thousands and thousands of email threads. And so all of a sudden, me moaning about Dave in accounts to my mate that sits over there, that's all going into, I think Google. That's all probably gonna get fed into a LLM to understand how humans naturally communicate in a workspace. And it's, and it's gonna be de-identified, but many people question how well data gets de-identified and how it can probably still be identified in some ways. So this is the thing. Data, I, I can't really remember If when a business went bust 30, 40 years ago, people would auction off the filing cabinets with the files in them. Like, I'm pretty sure the data got destroyed, burnt, shredded, whatever, and people would buy the filing cabinets or the Rolodex, but they'd be empty. But now someone's gone, "Well, hang on, I've got all this data and it's probably worth something." So, and that's the thing now, like now we're in a world where data is a currency. It's, it's right, you know, it's out there. You can't keep this stuff in anymore. The sheep, you can't keep the sheep in the field. They're flying, so the fences are now pointless. Do you build an aviary? Like, do you build this massive big thing to keep them in, but then they'll just bust through? It's Who knows?
SpeakerI'm thinking, is the data about us becoming less redundant, but the behaviors that we have becoming more relevant
Speaker 2It's a really interesting one. I think there's a lot in that. I mean, everything, if we go back to What we've talked about on this whole conversation, it is all tied into, it's behavior data. It's all how we're interacting, when we're clicking. And you could, in an ideal world, we would all be random, you know, random numbers. We wouldn't have names or identities and do they need to map that back to who we are? Probably not. It could be user A has this kind of profile, and they normally buy on a Tuesday afternoon, and they buy this, and then they go to this website, and then they go to this social platform, and we can tell that they're in this kind of mood. And you could build that whole... Guy, if you, if you had all this data, this was the really scary thing as well. At one point, I think 23andMe's CEO was married to one of the senior leaders at Google. So it was like hang- Like, I remember having a conversation. It's like, if Google got all this DNA data, the amount of data that Google have on us, they know what we look for, they know everything we do in a web browser, on our mobile phones 'cause of Android, like every part of our life is Google. And now our very DNA they've got access to and is plugged in. And then you think about all the third-party accounts you've got connected in, that you've signed into with your Google account. And it's not just Google, Microsoft as well, and you can sign in with other things now. But if you sign in with a Google account, you've probably got hundreds of different programs, platforms, SaaS solutions that have all got access to certain data in your Google account.
SpeakerYou've led me beautifully there because I was gonna come to that. We know when an Instagram account is hacked, for example, and I use the term hacked generally, you've lost the ability to access your Instagram account, and your Instagram account is connected to your Facebook account. And I know of a particular case where, I can't remember if I'd s- talked to you about it, but a woman lost... Is it you that a woman lost the access to her client-
Speaker 2Yeah.
SpeakerThat's- information because her- Yeah her business Facebook page. In fact, this has happened to somebody in, in my circle as well, and I said that I would ask this question of you. I worry about, and I tend not to use my Gmail account to connect to many multiple devices. And we also know when there's a, an issue with an application, you go onto DownDetector, it can give misleading information if ultimately you're saying, "Oh, there's a problem with Facebook," but actually no, it could just be the, the Gmail account that you're using to access multiple platforms is actually- Yeah where the source of the problem is. And it's good, by the way, for those that don't know DownDetector, if you are struggling with an app or anything, you know, you can go there and you can see if there is a globally rep- or locally reported issue, and it will feed in that data. But what's your advice? Uh, because I personally, I use my, uh, I use an email account, but I have separate passwords for every single app. I make sure that I don't use those interconnected, but I do have backups and multi-factor authentication as much as I hate it.
Speaker 2It's, um, it's really, really tricky. My mom's 80. She comes to me for all of her IT stuff, and I've educated her, or I don't wanna say scared her enough, but I've opened her eyes enough that she now knows to question and knows it's okay to question things if they make her feel different-
Speaker 3Yeah
Speaker 2happy, sad, scared, whatever, um, or if things look unusual. My mom's email account got hacked, um, earlier this year, and, um, I was just going out to take one of my kids to a kids' party, and my mom called me, and she, she, she was quite panicked. And she's like, "And, and, and people have been getting emails from me." And I'm, straight away I was like, "Oh, no." Straight away I knew, right? It was like, oh, I'm just going to this kids party at a village hall in the middle of nowhere with very little data. So, um, it was like there's not a lot of signal there. So while I'm at this kids party, I, I drop my daughter in, and then I'm trying to do all of this on my phone. The problem was I had been putting off setting up multi-factor authentication on my mom's email account forever because of the behavioral change. Because my mom's really good. My mom uses a password book, so she writes down her passwords in a physical book that is somewhere in her house, and I think for her that is the best solution. Many people hate it. There's no reasons to hate it. No one's breaking in to steal her password book. Well, they might do now. I shouldn't have said that, but you know what I mean. I put off the behavioral change piece, and her email account got hacked, and then I had to mop it all up, and then what I had to do in the end was fix the problem and do the behavioral change piece at a time that was really inconvenient. So now what I've done is I'm moving my mom onto a password manager because for her, I think that's the best way forward, and my mom has an iPhone, an Apple. Now I have a passwords app that can do it all for you. So I think using a password manager and moving to a password manager is huge. It's really funny though, because looking at those old services that many of us used to use, many of those will now have multi-factor authentication available or pass keys even. You know, we're in a world of pass keys. But Because we haven't accessed those platforms for ages, they're probably all still sat there with one password. I went to DeviantArt. I don't know if you remember a website, DeviantArt. It was a place, it used to be a website that had loads of cool artwork by digital artists. I wasn't a digital artist, but I used to go there and save some stuff or be inspired by stuff to use in, in, in things. I went there 'cause the site's still up, it's been up and running for decades, and, uh, I was like, "Oh, what was my account?" So I used my really, really old Hotmail account that I never check. You know, I'm a G- I've been a Gmail user for well over a decade. And I was like, "Oh, what's the password?" So I had a guess at what I thought the password would be, and this was pre-security me. This was before I worked in cyber. I got the password right first time, and I was into my account, and I'm like, "Wow." So think about all the services you used 10, 15, where are we? 20, yeah, 20 years ago even that might still be up and running today, and it's, it's mad because m- all of those will have these new security features. None of them are enforced like that. Google did a really good thing of enforcing, I'm pretty sure they've enforced 2FA now and, and even pushing people towards passkeys. Microsoft have been slower to do that because, you know, they've probably got a lot of users that don't understand it, don't want it, and keeping the users engaged and happy is more important than keeping the users secure and safe, so yeah.
SpeakerI think LinkedIn did a forced reset, uh, yesterday for some reason. I seemed to have to authenticate with another device, and I thought- Mm. "Mm, okay, oh." So what does that really mean, though? Uh, for example, a work colleague says to you, "Oh, God, why am I always having to reauthenticate this? I'm having to authenticate that?" We look at the history, for example, around authentication with something like Teams that most of us use in the workplace and, and they've been sort of preset in the past to, you know, kind of like 30, 60, 90 days, and then, oh, if Microsoft detects something like an anomaly, it will just- Yeah automatically require an authentication, and now people are saying, "Oh, I'm having to authenticate like every week," or, you know, "Why did I have to authenticate three times today?" Help people to understand why this is a really effective tool for businesses to use.
Speaker 2You know, I've been in organizations where I've been part of those conversations about how often, how, how long a session lasts, how often it needs to, people need to reauthenticate, and I remember it used to be, there used to be a case where Slack you could install on a personal phone, so corporate Slack you can install on a personal phone. And when someone left, the session cookie th- that had to be manually revoked. It wasn't automatically suspended, so it was like that person left three months ago, and they've still got access to Slack. Uh, and, and it's, you know, this, I... It's not like that anymore, but it's not like that anymore because it was flagged as an issue, right? And it's, it is a real, quite often a conversation between senior leadership that just wants stuff to work, middle managers that just want stuff to work that don't understand the security aspects. You've got IT teams that just want to get it out there and get it done. Not all of them. I think some of... I think there's been a shift, but it definitely used to be like, "Oh, I just want to build it and deploy it. You know, you can fix it later, security." And then the security team that wants this minimum, tiny, little secure window. Somewhere in the middle, and that has been me on occasion, there's like this conversation that it's like, "Look, you want this. You want it, you want them to sign in every second. You want them to never, ever have to sign in." "What's, what's actually usable? What's, what's... Can we meet in the middle, like happy place? What's good for everyone?" The reason why it's important is because 2FA, multi-factor authentication passkeys have made it harder for cyber criminals to get access to accounts. Cracking passwords, it happens, right? But it's not really... The, the, the situation has evolved. We've grown up a little bit. It's like we've solved, not completely, but to some degree we've done a, we've come a long way to solving the password problem. But that just means we've kicked the threat further up. Now, stealing session cookies, which is the little bit of information that's gone, "Right. Can I have your password? Can I have your multi-factor authentication code? Can you match these numbers? Can you check this on your device? Brilliant. I know it's you. Sign in." That little bit that stores all of that data, that's now what they're targeting to steal, because if they get that session cookie, they can just walk right into your account because you've already authenticated, you've already put in your password and your username and your two-factor code. With that session cookie, they put it in and, "Oh, look, I'm in as that person. Brilliant. Now I can do everything I want." So we have just moved the problem up, and in some ways The problems they're harder to communicate. It, it aren't get-
SpeakerIt's always been like that. You move one problem- Yeah even in neighborhood policing, you move one- Yeah one family out, another family will come in. You know, it's that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2Yeah. And- They've just gone underground almost.
SpeakerRight.
Speaker 2Yeah.
SpeakerAnd it was you that said to me, and I love this phrase so much, which is why I follow you, uh, i- is you said, "Banks still get robbed." You know, and I'll- It's- I'm like, yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 2Yeah.
SpeakerUm- Yeah the, I think we, I like the fact of this shift in mindset because I made the shift in mindset. My God, I thought, we can never go back to having, uh, open-ended session times. We have to have, you know, a- we have to just get used to maybe all having to authenticate every Monday morning. But let's take people on a journey. Let's just not switch it to a Because you've got some organizations that are very dependent on information being available, and w- I had one work friend say to me, "Uh, uh, you know, I, I had to authenticate, and then I'd missed six messages." 'Cause I, and I needed those messages. And I think we have to get people's mindsets into maybe the future will be the minute you pick up your phone every morning, you have to authenticate for the day. That could be the future we're heading towards, and I think we just have to take people on a journey, and that's why the why behind what we do and what we recommend and suggest and say is more important than ever.
Speaker 2I think the communication is really important and, like, in the role I do as a security awareness professional, my angle has always been engagement and communication. I, I, I see some peers of mine that g- get lost in the behavioral data and get lost in the, you know, let's look at what everyone's doing and how we can change this and do that. My, my focus has always been let's just tell the story, get people engaged, and help them understand why this is important.
Speaker 3Mm.
Speaker 2And somewhere between the two is probably ideal. But, and any big change like that Getting someone to sign in, in every morning, I don't think that's a massive problem if you educate people and bring them on that journey with you, like you say. It's the same as getting in a car and putting a seatbelt on. It is now instinct. We all know that if we don't wear a seatbelt, there's a real good chance that bad things are gonna happen should something bad happen. Uh, but once upon a time, my brother, when he left school, he became a mechanic. In and out of cars, moving cars around, you know, the garage all day long. To this day, he quite often gets in a car and then doesn't instinctively reach for the seatbelt. It's just like, "All right, I'm in." And then it's like, "Put your seatbelt on, put your seatbelt on." And now, now cars nag us. Like, every car, the minute there's a bit of weight, a bag on the seat, it's binging, it's binging. Yeah. It's like... So it's almost made it impossible to not put your seatbelt on, and, um, it's that behavioral change. People at the moment are moaning about cars pinging when you go near the white lines and grabbing the steering wheel. Trust me, those systems, they need to be tuned a little better, but we're moaning about it now, but it'll become perfectly acceptable-
Speaker 3Yeah
Speaker 2in a few years. That, the whole behavioral change, we just need to... The problem is The systems we have give us the option to not do this stuff. I think that's part of the problem. Like if, if Slack said, "No, you can't have a never-ending persistent session cookie, it maxes out at this," then we're forced to make a secure choice that at least gives us a minimum standard- Yeah of security. And again, bringing us back to the point that people can have too much freedom almost. Yeah. I think that's, we can have too much freedom. If, if security's enforced to a degree, then it's up to us to make a secure choice. Then it's how secure do we wanna be, not do we wanna be secure. And I think that's important.
SpeakerAnd this is why we love phrases like security by design- Yeah security, security by default. You know, we want them embedded, but then let's face it, if that was happening globally and there'd be no reason to have people like you and me saying, "Ooh, we need to have some security controls in here."
Speaker 2Do you know, I've had conversations over the past couple of weeks with many security awareness professionals, and, um, at a summit I went to, I did lots of interviews, and the one thing that I think is becoming really clear is with, with AI over the past three, four years, everybody really wants to be adopting AI, like to the point where no one wants to get left behind. The problem is that using AI securely is an afterthought. Like people are so busy to use it that, and it used to be the mentality, like the startup mentality used to be like build, build, build, build, build, secure it later. But with the A- with, with all the AI that we're putting in everything and we're using to build everything, the securing it later part is gonna be so difficult and so complicated, and actually never, I don't think, definitely not in my years in tech, I don't think secure by design has ever been more important than it is today. I think it is the most important thing we should all be doing today. Let's just slow down a minute. I mean, pausing, you know, for, for thought is always on phishing emails, on everything, like it's something we should all do more in pretty much all walks of life.
Speaker 3Ugh.
Speaker 2But just before we roll out that AI thing or we deploy that AI thing, just pause for a second and think, "Is it secure?" Should it be more secure? And how can I make it more secure? And if you actually, when you're building it, it's so much easier to, to build it securely than it isn't. I'm doing that with stuff that I'm vibe coding. My, my Claude code knows that I have a secure mindset. It knows that I want to build stuff securely. I've built a couple of Chrome extensions, and all the data's kept locally. Other Chrome extensions that I'm replacing with the stuff I'm building have been removed from the App Store because they're doing naughty stuff, and I'm like, "I used to use that. I'll build one." Uh, but I'm building it with a secure mindset. It's not difficult, but you just need to remember to build it securely.
SpeakerBut you're that farmer next to the other farmer whose sheep are flying around in the air. Yeah. All your sheep are in a beautiful pen. They've got lovely wooly coats. They're healthy sheep, and they sleep well at night. Um, but, but if you're next to a farmer where all their sheep are flying around in the air, getting caught up and by drones that are flying without licenses 'cause they're also not being flown with security in mind- Yeah do you see the chaos that's out there? But it doesn't matter if you have order. It's the chaos that's out there is gonna become ultimately unmanageable. And I tell you a little secret. One of the things that I do if someone cuts me up in the road and I know they've got a very modern, flashy car with lots of sensors, I just, like, edge my car, like, really close behind them- so that their sensors are like ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.
Speaker 2Such a great idea because you've got a camera. You can get really close and know you're not gonna touch them.
SpeakerExactly. Well, I don't need a camera. I'm an expert driver- Well, I think, of course don't you know?
Speaker 2Of course.
SpeakerUm, listen, I've got a bit of fun for you now. Okay. This is called the, this is called Ant Examines My Phone Round.
Speaker 2Ooh.
SpeakerSo I'm going to name something that many of us use on my phone. I want you to tell me the first cyber thought that enters your head. Are you ready?
Speaker 2Yes.
SpeakerNumber one, WhatsApp.
Speaker 2Um, meta, just a part of a massive data pool. It's just another way they know everything you do.
SpeakerRepeat the last answer. Um, Instagram. Instagram's a funny one. I saw a video, just to digress, I saw a video on, um, Instagram yesterday from some app that bricks your phone. It's like a, you know, to, to stop you getting that dopamine hit. And, uh, it was going, "Instagram has an infrared cam- Your phone has an infrared camera, and Instagram tracks where you look on the screen." No, it doesn't. It can't. It, it- The infrared camera on the iPhone is secure, and if from that distance it would be accurate within centimeters, it can't tell where you're looking. Instagram, every single touch interaction you do and the time you spend on every video, they're using that to be- give you a better Instagram experience, but also forcing all kinds of new features on you. Yeah. It's-
SpeakerUh, TikTok.
Speaker 2Hello, China or America, depending on where you are. Um, again, TikTok is frightening and, I mean, not even getting into the whole social thing, all the platforms and the, you know, I worry about my kids using these platforms and stuff like that. That's a whole separate conversation. But yeah, TikTok is just there to... You are the product. It's getting your data, everything you're doing. It's scary.
SpeakerTemu.
Speaker 2Cheap, affordable. Um, Temu, I don't think Temu's a, a... Some people would scaremonger about Temu. Temu is just Amazon shipping from somewhere else, and yes, the data's stored somewhere else, but do you really know where any of your data is? Temu, Shein, AliExpress, you know, I've shopped at all of them, and I'm not really worried 'cause I do that knowing that my data's going somewhere and my shopping data, but I use a credit card, and I try to use it through a safe process like Apple Pay or something like that.
SpeakerAmazon Alexa.
Speaker 2Alexa's not listening 'cause I don't have any Alexas. I am firmly a, a Google house. But Uh, I don't like Alexa personally, but it is all... It's, again, it's just Amazon. Swap out the tech company, and it's just another way for them to scoop up your data, what you're asking it, what it can give you, and they're cheap, really cheap. You think about the tech in those. They're cheap because you are the product completely.
SpeakerRing doorbells.
Speaker 2I don't have a Ring doorbell. I used to, um, and then there was a big thing, uh, not so long ago about how the doorbell camera footage. They had a pet Sentry watch that basically meant it could track lost pets. What else is it tracking? If it can follow a pet from house to house to house-
SpeakerOh,
Speaker 2shoot what else is it tracking? I have a Tapo, a, a controversial choice. I have a Tapo doorbell that's made by TP-Link, which is a brand that the US government have tried to ban. My Tapo camera stores all the data on the SD card, not in the cloud. It keeps asking me to put it in the cloud, but it stores it locally. There's probably still data being transmitted, but I feel safer using a Chinese company called TP-Link than I do an American company called Amazon for my doorbell.
SpeakerGoogle Maps.
Speaker 2I, Google Maps, uh, is Google Maps is a brilliant... How is it free? Like, think about it, right? How is it free? Google Maps is brilliant. Waze got... And loads of people don't realize this. I did a video about Waze a few months ago. Waze were purchased by Google in 2013. So Waze used to be Israeli, I think. Waze is now owned by Google. No. The two products have been kept separate. So if you use Waze, all of that information is also feeding into Google. Oh. Waze also uses Google's data. Sure. Um, but, like, it's the best. I've t- I do a lot of driving, and I've used Apple Maps, I've used Waze, I've used Garmin, Google Maps. Waze is my preferred choice. It, it does it really well, but that's feeding into Google. And Google Street View, Google Maps, there's nothing like it, and I saw a car driving round the other day. It took a picture of me twice. So Google have got my face and the car I drive. Damn it. All of that's gone into Google's servers. This person was here at this time, and they were driving this car with that registration number, and they had someone that looked like that in the passenger seat that, because of Google Photos, we know is probably his daughter. And like, yeah, it's scary.
SpeakerYou worried about them, that camera being broken and
Speaker 2Do you know inter- Well, just as a complete aside, I have a 5G mast near my house, and where I live is an interesting place. I, like, live in a nice area, but there's areas that, you know, the house prices are a little less. And, um, the 5G mast got put up a few years ago, and it got burnt down, and then they put another 5G mast up, and it got burnt down. This was d- like, probably people thought it was giving them COVID. So there's a 5G mast now gone up that has got some black wireless solar-powered cameras halfway up the mast, and I've got no idea who owns those cameras. Mm. No idea where those cameras are going. But those cameras are outside a school, not pointing at the school, but they're outside a school pointing at the road, watching everything. And I've got no idea, but they're clearly there to see if someone burns down the mast, who burned it down. But yeah, I've got n- uh, and I don't think it's a Flock camera 'cause I'm, don't know if Flock are in the UK, but it's a camera that someone's watching, and I don't know who.
SpeakerDating apps.
Speaker 2But where do you meet someone if you don't have a dating app these days? You know, that's a, the, the, the-
SpeakerAsda
Speaker 2pe- Asda.
SpeakerOr if you're me- Have a check out if you're me, it's a bit of Marks Spencer's, mate.
Speaker 2Oh, nice. Yeah. Well, you get a higher quality, you know, higher quality date there.
SpeakerHigher quality single basket men walking around.
Speaker 2Oh, d- I dropped that in your basket
Speakerby accident. Sorry. Oh, hello.
Speaker 2Oh, I like what you've got there. Oh, where did you
Speakerget that? Uh, I'd love to know that shelf number, that aisle number. Um,
Speaker 2look, dating apps are fine, but catfishing and everything, you know... I know people that have used dating apps. Someone I know used a dating app and met someone that they were over the moon about. And I was like, "Give me their name and a photo
SpeakerYou sounded a bit like Arnold Schwarzenegger then, "Give me your boots, your motorcycle."
Speaker 2Give me your name, your photo. Well, I found out this person was married, and then I found out where his wife worked.
SpeakerOh.
Speaker 2And I was like, "If you want to go and meet her, she works there." Michelle. You know, the power of... And this is, this isn't deep, like, OSINT. This is, like, just using a photo, a backward image search, a name, finding it. I found pictures of where they were married. You know, the, the table decoration. They were married here. Here's what the head table looked like. Here's a holiday they went on. Here's where the wife works. And And yeah, she didn't know he was married. Um, he'd told them that they were separated. So dating apps are great, but you, like, find a friendly person that's half decent at IT to just verify the person you're meeting, um, man or woman. You know, I think there's Men, men, men can noti- m- men are notorious for being the dirty dogs. Um, there's probably women out there that are just the same.
SpeakerOh, a few. A few, yeah. Yeah. But only with good reason. Um- Yeah.
Speaker 2But in dating apps, don't give too much away. Keep it very, you know, don't trust the chat, and if they try to move the chat to WhatsApp, proceed with caution. So many things. The fake phone calls. "I'm calling from Indeed Recruitment Team. Please add this number to WhatsApp."
SpeakerI had one this morning. "I have a part-time job for you." And I'm like, "Dude, I'm busy enough with the full-time job."
Speaker 2I know. That part-time job will be fake Booking.com reviews, 'cause it always is. Go to Booking.com, fill in a review for a place, and for each one you get X amount. I found a screenshot that I had on LinkedIn from a recruiter, and with no profile picture, and this was something that happened a little while ago. I found the screenshot yesterday. And within, like, they, "Oh, I've got a job that I think you'll be perfect for." And I was like, "Okay, what is it?" And they're like, "Oh, add me on WhatsApp." And I'm like, "Can you give me the details here on LinkedIn?" And they're like, "Why are you worried about WhatsApp? It's just a messaging app. Here's the number." And I'm like, "Oh, goodbye." Like, everybody wants to get you to WhatsApp. It's-
SpeakerYeah
Speaker 2Meta. Meta. Hello, Meta.
SpeakerYeah.
Speaker 2The, um, Meta itself, how much money does Meta make off, like, fake ads? Millions.
SpeakerBillions. Too much. But I also found out that Google are making a lot of money off, uh, fake websites and- D- you know, mirrored websites.
Speaker 2Do you know the l- podcast I used to do, we were live on air, and as we were looking for something, ads.google.com, right? We were looking for Google Ads. So we Googled Google Ads, and the top result, we found this live on air, the top result was a Google page. We, we clicked on it, and it looked like Google Ads, but it was a Google site, sites.google.com, that looked exactly like the Google Ads-
Speaker 3Yeah
Speaker 2page, ads.google.com.
Speaker 3Yeah.
Speaker 2And it was a sponsored listing. Google have made this worse for themselves. It was a sponsored listing, so it was at the top of the search results that someone had paid for. We did the research. It was Sydney Zoo. Sydney Zoo's ad account had been compromised. The people had created a fake Google Ads account to chuck this thing at the top of Google Ads. So we, we reported it to Sydney Zoo. We reported it to Google. But then you find them all the time, and Google have made this problem worse because they've got rid of ad blockers And ad blockers used to hide, so they've made the internet less safe-
SpeakerThey
Speaker 2have for the normal person-
SpeakerYeah
Speaker 2because they need more money, 'cause it's all about money.
SpeakerIt's like looking at a western town in the old movies and, and knowing that bank robbers are gonna come into town and just saying all the sheriffs, uh, take a day off. You know- Yeah it's, it's horrendous and all the banks are there going, "Well, hang on a minute. Uh, w- we're vulnerable to being, uh, uh, robbed." Um, I- The sheriff's taken
Speaker 2a backander and has gone out of town for the day, you know?
SpeakerRight. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And, and I discovered also, certainly last year I became aware of this, where you've got reputable businesses are having their website domains kind of copied with a little- Yeah quirky, like a little something different, where certain folk might not see the difference straight away, and they're not really aware they should be looking for those differences. They go into the website, looks like the exact authentic business. They're sending money, paying money, they're doing, spending a lot of money and then you discover that Google have identified that they think they're a reputable business because they have a reputable setup. They're a rogue organization acting and defrauding, but because they are set up to present as a regular business and they're paying Google for premier listings- Mm through the fraud, that is obviously very lucrative. And sometimes you've just got to look when you do your gurgle, gu- gurgle, you Google, so maybe we should call it gurgle. Maybe, uh, Google search you should just check that you are actually on the website. And I think a lot of tech companies right now are certainly am falling foul of this myself. I made a bank transfer the other day, and, uh, because it's something I do regularly, I pay my credit card off, I kind of went through the motions. I wasn't really in the mindfulness and- No I realized that I was like, "Did I pay that? Did I, did I do that?" Because we're just processing automatically.
Speaker 3Yeah.
SpeakerAnd I think I had to teach myself a lesson there. Do it mindfully because, you know, you, you can't then realize that money's gone somewhere else and then think, "I don't remember what I did," because they're making the processes so much easier now.
Speaker 2Yeah.
SpeakerRight. Um-
Speaker 2S- so much of what we do is on autopilot.
SpeakerRight.
Speaker 2And
Speakerit's- Shopping even.
Speaker 2Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, I, I had two camping chairs turn up yesterday that I-
SpeakerYou ordered twice, didn't you?
Speaker 2I ordered... Well, I ordered twice. I'd, I'd watched a camping video, one of my favorite YouTubers, gone on eBay, had some money left from some stuff I'd sold, and I bought them and they turned up. I'm like, "What is this? Oh, did I buy that?" And it was like- late at night and I bought it without, 'cause it was so quick. I looked at it and within two clicks it was ordered and then I moved on. Interestingly, you say about cloned websites- AI making things easier. We, I s- I saw something... I did it again, another video I did a few, couple of weeks ago. There's a new GitHub thing where, um, someone had created this thing that can clone websites easily. Websites have always been able to be cloned, right? And people in the comments were like, "You've always been able to clone a website." Yes, you have, but now anyone can clone a website well. And the AI takes a screenshot of the website, it goes away and builds the website, and then it compares it to the screenshot to make sure that all the styling, all the fonts, that everything is exactly like it. And then it goes, "Yeah, I've made you an exact clone." And it's not a clone because you'd then do naughty stuff with it. You'd make the payments go elsewhere or whatever. But it can make an exact copy of a website in minutes just by giving it a URL and going, "Copy this with this one skill." And that's where AI's amazing, right? I use it every day.
Speaker 3Yeah.
Speaker 2But AI is also, some of the things we're making, you need to think, okay Is that good? Yes, it is good, but how can it also be used for bad? And so much of what people are building can be switched and be used by the bad guys just as much as it can be used by the good guys. And it's, it's... That's, that's the frightening part about AI. There are no guardrails in what we're building. There's too much freedom. Like everybody can do too much and send every... I, I can, I can get a video out now, and that video can be filled, can be viewed by n- as, people as if I'm stood in the middle of Wembley Stadium. One video I got has got over, like, two million views across two platforms.
Speaker 3Yeah.
Speaker 2And it's frightening. Like, that makes my wife uncomfortable when she's like, "Two million people have listened to you." And I'm like, "I know, right?" Where else? When was there ever a time that little old me could get that much exposure and people would hear my opinion? Now, what I was talking about was sensible, but what I was talking about could have been very, very dangerous, very, very dark, or very, very controversial, and that's part of the problem we have now. For all the good, there's just as much bad, and it's all ungoverned. Anyone can do it within minutes.
SpeakerQR codes in restaurants.
Speaker 2Um, I hate, hate u- I don't use... Do I? I don't use QR codes anywhere. What's wrong with a URL? QR codes are so easily... Even today still, parking meters in Canada, in Australia, QR code, people are losing money to QR code stickers. It's just URLs can be, can be easy, can be simple. What we need to stop to help the QR code problem is we need to stop people just buying a domain and not using it. It, it, there should be some rule if you buy a domain and you don't use it in X amount of time, it's up for sale again or something, 'cause I'm struggling to buy decent domains for stuff, and I hate QR codes. They're convenient, and what they were created for by Dentsu back in the '90s, I think they were used for, like, packaging, helping stuff through, um, processing, like factory production systems. For that, tracking and goods and stuff, perfect. But the minute you start using it in advertising or stuff, anyone can walk up, shove a little sticker over it. And I was on a train to York, to Leeds, and there was a QR code on the back of the seat saying, "Do you wanna join the Wi-Fi?" And under it, I thought it was brilliant because underneath it said, "This QR code takes you to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." I was like, "Oh, that's really clever. It's telling me what I'm gonna see." So I scanned it, and it took me somewhere else And I was like, "Well, now what do I trust?" Like, j- just, well done for the message, but the message doesn't match what the c- 'cause they're changing... Yeah. So I don't use QR codes. And if you are gonna generate a QR code, I think you can do it in Google, Claude can do it. Find a QR code that goes straight to where you want it to go. Make sure it doesn't go through a third-party service, 'cause people end up getting charged to keep their QR code. You get business cards printed with a QR code. That QR code goes through myqrcode.com- Yeah that then goes off to your... And then myqrcode.com will go, "You've had 50 scans. If you want another 50, it's gonna cost you this much." I don't know if myqrcode.com is a thing. I just made that up, so if they're a legitimate business, I
Speakerapologize. Good name though, Ant.
Speaker 2Yeah. Yeah.
SpeakerI went to a, a little local AI seminar near to me at Bletchley Park, and, uh, they had, uh, this QR code up on the screen. So as we're all entering the room, it was like, you know, go onto the QR code. So we're all going to the QR code. And oh, it doesn't really work. You gotta put a password in, so give it a password. So you give it your... What are you gonna do? You're gonna give it a password that you use all the time, right? And so we were like, "Oh, it's not working." "No, put the password in again." "Oh, it's not working." "No, it's not working." We're all there going, "Why is it not working?" Like this. And anyway, it w- the whole thing was a, a setup. Clearly we all fell for it. We all went in there with an expectation of trust, and they just said, "What on earth possessed you to think it was okay to go in and just put this random QR code in your phone and tell it a password?" Right? Do,
Speaker 2do you know where I used to work, I, one of the last things I did before I left, and it was pr- actually, I'm so glad it was one of the last things. It was kind of the icing on the cake. I, um, did like a summer raffle. So I had a poster on the wall that was like, "Sign up for the summer raffle," and put some prizes on, and a QR code. And I s- put this poster up in like seven places, and this is after COVID, right? So not many people were in the office, but it was just a bit of fun, really cheap to do, print off six pages, off it goes. Anyway, the next day- There is a public, there is a message on the whole team Slack, on the channel that the whole team are in, from one of the senior people in SecOps, in our security operations function. "Next time you're doing a phishing campaign- can you please notify SecOps?" He'd fallen for it, hadn't he? He'd scanned it 'cause he wanted to do the raffle, and then he's angry that he's fallen for it. He's like, "Next time you're doing a phishing campaign, please ensure you tell the SecOps team so we know not to look at the alerts." And I'm like, "You scanned it. Come on now. You're angry 'cause you scanned it. You fell for it. I got
Speakeryou." Well, that's SecOps to a T. That is- That is hilarious. I mean, they don't like to be in the wrong. Do you know what I mean? No. I get that. They are, they are the police. They're the police of the polices. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. They're Oh, God. Um, don't get me wrong. I used to- But
Speaker 2they're just, but they're just as fallible. Like, they're human. That's what the wonderful thing All the things that are great about us being human are what makes us vulnerable. We're curious. We're inquisitive. We're creative. We're emotional. We, we have em- not all of us, but many of us have empathy and, and, and things like that. And all of that in, it is amazingly what makes us human. But all of that is what makes us vulnerable to all the people trying to scam us and, and that's why so much now I've, I One thing I've been harping on for years is you can have all the technical controls in the world. You can have seat belts, lane departure warnings. You can have, you know, automatic braking and object detection in a car. But you still crash your car. Yeah. And you still crash your car or someone crashes into you, and more often than not, it's human error. Some- planes, planes in the air flying, safety is paramount. You know, they have a thing, you drop one bolt in an engine, and that whole engine has to get stripped, rebuilt, and that's okay 'cause safety is above everything else. But planes still crash because checklists get missed or human error, technical errors happen still as well, but not often. Human error, you know, we are, for all the things that make us good, they're also the things that make us a risk.
SpeakerLastly, fitness trackers.
Speaker 2So fitness trackers.
SpeakerShould we talk about- I'm going on a run this morning at 6:20 AM. Yeah. And, and I'm going to be running here.
Speaker 2Should we talk about the military base whose location- Yeah the secret military base whose location was exposed because many, many soldiers were running around the outside? Or, I mean, we could talk about the aircraft carrier. I think it was an aircraft carrier. The secret location in the Mediterranean was exposed 'cause someone went for a jog around the deck with their Strava on and the GPS on, and they posted it publicly, and it was like, how come you're running a lap that looks a bit like an aircraft carrier-
SpeakerIn the ocean.
Speaker 3in the ocean?
Speaker 2Oh, and then I know that you're a, you know, cadet or whatever. Yeah. Um, but even to the point, Strava, I don't know if they have Stra- so apps like Strava, let's not just say Strava because other, other fitness trackers are available. Strava obviously can tell your starting point and your finish point, and if you have that data public, which it used to be by default-
Speaker 3Yeah
Speaker 2and you publish your Strava because you're proud, and we've been engineered to share this data to get other people to use it, and you know that going back to all the social platforms, I share my... I don't. I don't, I don't go for a run. But people that run share their Strava with other people, and it can tell where you start and where you finish. Where do you start and finish? Probably your home. And if you do the same route at 7:30 or 8 o'clock every night, and it's getting to a dark winter, then someone could be in a bush very near, or someone might know that you live by yourself when your house is empty for this long when you're out for a run. So Strava has an option to hide your l- start and finish location, but they still know Where you're gonna be. Like, again, we're just, we're just, we've been conditioned behaviorally to share all of this information. So many countries now are talking about their sovereignty, data sovereignty, taking back their data, and I feel like we need sovereignty personally. Like schools, my daughter's school should have a school social network that parents can parental control, the kids can connect with their kids. Maybe they can put requests in to join kids from other ones. Maybe there needs to be a local town network. Another video I did about the local doctors, AI scribes, right? GPs are using AI scribes. My vet uses an AI scribe now to take medical notes.
SpeakerHoly moly.
Speaker 2My mom called the doctors, and the doctor asked if she was all right with AI, like, taking notes, and she said yes. And I said to her, "But," This was after I'd made the video. I said, "Mom, do you know what taking AI notes means?" She's like, "No." I'm like, "Was it explained to you what you were consenting to?" She's like, "No, I've got no idea." And I'm like, "Do you feel you could have said no?" "Oh, well, if I said no, it might have Like, what would the doctor do? The doctor might find it difficult. They might..." I'm like, "So that's kind of forced consent," and that's, that's the problem with, uh, AI notes. Some of them end up in Sweden. Some of them end up anywhere, but why do they have to leave the doctor's practice? Why does that voice recording, why can't there be a box in the doctor's that processes it and it's then stored in the system that the NHS uses? Why is it using third parties? Why is the
SpeakerNHS- Yeah, 'cause they're providing, 'cause they're providing cheap pr- proof of concepts initially. They're, they're offering cheaper services, and it's much cheaper to subcontract the data retention out. Are they purging the data and deleting it when they say they're going to? How are they really using that data? And this is a question a lot of cybersecurity professionals are asking now.
Speaker 2When that company goes bust, is that data gonna be de- de-identified and then sold off to the highest bidder, like Spirit Airlines? It's all of th- Yeah, all of this data as a currency is terrifying. Can you escape it? I don't know if you can. Like- Yeah we could all go back to being a farmer, but then at some point you'd be forced online to audio feed or something like that, or you'd want a weather app to check the weather. You know, you can't turn on BBC and get your local news in the morning that tells you the weather in your county by the guy recording in the nearest county town. You know, we've all blown up so much, and it's amazing all this information that's accessible, but it all comes at a cost, and that cost is us. We're all paying, and we- it's not being handed down. Zuck- Zuckerberg's rich.
SpeakerTaking.
Speaker 2Bezos is rich. I'm not elitist at all. Like, they've built these things, they deserve to be rich, right? They've done it. They've built amazing things that have changed lives-
SpeakerYeah
Speaker 2for good and for bad. I'm not against that. People should get rewarded for what they build. I'd love to be. But- It comes to a limit where all of that, okay, if you're actually using me as a product, what am I getting in return? I'm getting a product, all right. But how about like reinvest in or, or think about building safer solutions for this? Like, I don't- I'm not against AI scribes. Doctors are busy. Again, probably could all be tied back to that, but doctors are busy and they're doing too much, so make their lives easier, but make their lives easier securely. If people wanna go for a run and share it, let them share it, but let them really make the choices and let places... Like, if you're on a battleship, why is that even a thing that could be tracked? Surely there's something that could be made to block that kind of app working on that kind of... There was another one. Someone posted a Bluetooth tracker, like a Apple, you know, like an Apple AirTag. Someone posted a Bluetooth tracker to a naval ship in a postcard 'cause they knew that postcards didn't get scanned. Parcels got scanned, X-rayed, but letters and envelopes and postcards didn't. So they sent this cheap, this Bluetooth tracker to a ship. I think it was Dutch, um, uh, it was, or Scandinavian. And of course, when it's there, the battery lasts a year. When it's there, it's designed to connect to the Bluetooth devices it can find. If it's an AirTag, I don't know what it was, but if it was an AirTag, it would just connect to an iPhone and then send a signal home, so it was pinging the location of this naval ship.
SpeakerIt's phenomenal because part of what I do is to try and bridge that gap between the technology and the design of the technology and the purpose. But when you look at boards and executive level director teams now, and they're looking at AI, it's like putting a whole load of really, really juicy donuts in a, in a room and just watching how many people just go straight for the donuts without thinking, "What's this got in it?" Yeah. Is it even drugged? Uh, is it laced? Uh, you know, is it gonna put a- an inch on the waist? And that's the attitude. It's the dive in 'cause it looks so good before you, you think about the consequences.
Speaker 2I think, I think cigarettes is a good analogy as well. Like, we used to think cigarettes were good for us, right? Advertising used to say that they're healthy and you looked cool. You look at some of the old movies and they stood there with a cigarette out of their mouth and like, "I wanna look like him. That's amazing." And even the women with like the long holder and the smoke and it's like all sultry and everything. Smoking kills, right? We know that now. Smoking kills and many people have died from, um, lung cancer and all sorts. But is, is AI... Like, without talking about the water and stuff, like I, I... That doesn't really... It should, but it doesn't phase me as much as it does some. But Just the way we're using AI so nonchalantly and carelessly- Yep without thinking about the impact socially, emotionally, and, and, uh, uh, the way it's impacting our lives from a data perspective. No one's really talking about that argument long term, I don't think. You know, we talk about the amount of water that the data centers use and the noise of the data centers. I wouldn't want one near my house. But, you know, there's many other places in the world that are still burning stuff they shouldn't burn, and, like, I recycle at home, but it's such a tiny portion compared to w- the damage somewhere else in the world is doing.
SpeakerIt's a whole bigger, bigger conversation that I think we should have. Um- Yeah one, one thing I was gonna say is I think, uh, we definitely need to get smart about the use of water. We're a planet surrounded by 70% water. If we start finding very cheap, efficient ways to desalinate water, there's no reason we should be using drinking quality water for washing our cars and for, you know, powering data centers. And, and nuclear power, remember, does also need an extraordinary amount of water. I think we should be- Mm we should be a lot more sophisticated in terms of how we use water and what quality. We should have grades of water. And, and just find cheap, efficient ways to desalinate it. We're not This is why I think they don't care. I think it's coming down the line. I think they already know that. They're just like, "Oh, we'll let everyone have their moan now."
Speaker 2At some point, Google, Amazon, OpenAI, someone will make an investment into a water company- Yep or they'll buy a plot of ocean. Then
Speakeryou'll know. You'll know.
Speaker 2Yeah. And then you'll know where we're heading. Yeah. And it's, it's If there's a way to monetize it, this is the problem. If it was able If, if they can find a way to make profit out of it. You're right, grades of water. You know, someone told You've got cats, I've got cats. There was a time when I used to flush the cats' litter box, just, just not the actual gravel, but the content of it- down the toilet. And then someone told me, "Oh, you shouldn't do that," because the pro- waste processing at the water plants aren't equipped for feline feces. They're equipped for human feces, but felines and animal feces is different. It needs different chemicals apparently. And then I watched a documentary on the TV about the state of our waters, and the water companies dumping sewer water straight into the rivers and stuff like that. And then you hear about how the quality of river water is at an all-time low. And then there's millions of people around the world that don't have drinking water. And then I saw an advert on the telly yesterday telling us to think about the way we use water. And I'm like, "We're on an island surrounded by water. Why is this Yeah, we shouldn't be putting what comes i- through our toilets out into the ocean. No. That's terrible. We shouldn't be putting it in rivers. And the water companies make millions and millions of pounds. Why haven't we got... You're right. Why haven't I got two taps at my house, one that's drinking water-
Speaker 3Yeah and one that's water your garden-
Speaker 2Yeah wash your car with it? Because it doesn't, it doesn't need to be drinking grade. But, and it shouldn't have feces in it, but it doesn't have to be drinking grade. Yep. And at the same, yeah, it's,
Speakerit- It seems illogical to go to the car wash and that water is drinking quality. Yes. That the cat I have that drinks the water out of the tap has better quality water than many countries in Africa. And- I think it's, it's a privilege that I think we forget we have
Speaker 2If the water companies, I mean, we're not having a lot of rain at the moment, but if they want us to save water properly and think about the way we use water, let's look at changing behaviors. Let's bring this all back to behaviors, right? Why aren't the water companies giving away free water butts and doing free gutter inspections? Oh. 'Cause if they actually went, "We'll come round and clean your gutters. We'll make sure your gutters are effective. We'll give you a water butt that- Mm-hmm all the rainwater goes into, and then you can use that rainwater to wash your car, to water your plants, and we'll give every house..." How mu- If you bought, how many houses in the UK? I don't know. If you bought, like, 5 million water butts, think about the bulk buying discount you'd get on that, and you could probably get eco water butts 'cause there'd be, like, all the plastic. You could look at eco ones.
Speaker 3Yeah.
Speaker 2Get it sponsored by OpenAI or Goo- get their little, their logo on everything. Think about that, and then, okay, OpenAI are now saving water. Like, the PR angle on that, if they use this Altman, Zuckerberg, if you're listening, I want some credit for this, okay? Water butts. If they gave water butts out and did, like, all of that, just say like, "Yeah, we're using a lot of water. Here's how we're gonna give back." Collect the water. It's kind of like carbon- Offsetting offsetting your carbon, wa- offsetting your water, and it- Imagine
Speaker 3that
Speaker 2yeah. But- Imagine that it's that kind of thinking. W- they, I get it, and it's, yeah. But I don't, I d- I, we need to be careful about the water, but AI, it's there, right? Is me stopping using it really gonna make... No, 'cause I just-
SpeakerBecause
Speaker 2already the- I'm a needle in a haystack the sheep,
Speakerthe sheep are flying, right?
Speaker 2The sheep are in orbit. And- Like, those sheep are going into stellar now. They've got little space helmets on. Um, and I want my sheep in a nice little pen with Jeremy Clarkson coming around telling me that they look lovely. That's what I want.
SpeakerAnd let's look at the septenarians. Is it septenarians or the octogenarians, the, the 70s and 80s? They're loving AI. You know, they are using AI to generate brochures and leaflets for their tea parties. Oh. You know, they're using AI to complain about poor customer service. They are embracing it, and we're all a little bit addicted to our own language learning model that we have adopted.
Speaker 2OpenAI was the number one fastest downloaded app on iPhone when it came out.
SpeakerMm-hmm.
Speaker 2And the second one that might have even taken over was Sora, their video generation tool, that they've now retired, um, probably because they couldn't keep it in the box. I'm pretty sure they retired the app. But, like, the fact that that went to number one, and you walk into your Tesco's- Yeah you look at the community notice board, you can tell straight away. I made a little app called Poster Prompt, and it's designed for security awareness professionals. They can basically click through, choose a design theme, and it will give you a prompt to give to ChatGPT that will make a poster that doesn't look like every other poster.
Speaker 3Cool.
Speaker 2Because, because it is easy. It's conve- And this is the thing, people just think, "Oh, yeah, that looks cool," without really thinking, does it stand out? Does it make a difference? Because AI is changing the way we talk. Like, even the vocabulary that humans use has been modified by the responses of ChatGPT and the language that ChatGPT chose. It's been tracked, like, the- we're using certain words we're using more than we ever have done because that's what OpenAI likes in its writing. And you can tell. I used to use AI a lot for writing, and I've been quite transparent about when I have used it, and I use it to help me in my process, but everything is still authentically me.
Speaker 3Yeah.
Speaker 2I- ironically, one of the videos I recorded without any help from AI, someone then called me an AI creator, and I'm like, "I didn't use any AI anywhere in this. This was literally me talking to camera with... I haven't even put the thoughts through AI to help me conceptualize them," and that's the one I get called out on. It's like, wow, it's, you can't win. I,
SpeakerI always say to people, "Don't feel embarrassed to admit you've used AI. You are the creator," right? You are the originator. It's your ideas. And, you know, a lot of the time, you know, it does great job of working out the notes that I've scribbled down, and it will put it into some really sensible... So I know what I wanna say. I know the sentiment. I know the feeling that I want that to evoke. I, I am the creator, so I think you have to empower people to say, "Yeah, okay, so I, I used a language learning model to help me orchestrate the sentences, so I didn't have to spend the time working on grammar and full stops and commas and construction of paragraphs, and I, I got it to, to build it for me, but I created it. It's my idea. It's me. It's who I..." And I think the more you tell it in terms of what you want it to do, the better it is. Like, I've just set up a neurodiversity, uh, employee relation group, an ERG, and it's called Ultraviolet, 'cause ultraviolet is a ray of, uh, light- Mm that's rather magnetic, and you can't see it by the, with the human eye, and it's nice that neurodiversities, it mirrors very nicely to, you know, they can't be seen. Yeah. And I just said, "Look, I want a minimalistic, white, you know, um, you know, feel clean, clinical, very few words," and it's kinda like the power of positive minds or the, or the creative minds, different perspectives, different thought processes. It's a lovely thing, and it just put it together and got it out, slam dunked it the first time round. I have a logo. I have a poster. Perfect. That's it. And I think I am the creator. I told- Yeah it to do that, you know? So I think you're ultimately just going into a library and being able to access every single library in the whole world, and I th- I, I view it like that, in the sense- It's- it's just making good use of my time.
Speaker 2So much, I mean, who hasn't been inspired by someone else? Musicians, you know, it's like-
SpeakerMm
Speaker 2how many musicians did The Beatles- Inspire. You know, you listen to so many different acts, so many cover versions of The Beatles, like they're the most covered artist. Yesterday, I think is the most covered song. You listen to Oasis, you listen to anyone, there's elements of The Beatles in there. Are they stealing? Are they not creators? You know, yes, don't get me wrong, if they did a song in exactly the same style as The Beatles, tr- mimicking The Beatles completely, yes, there's no originality there. But I kn- it's, it's, y- you got that right first time, which does happen. It's very rare that quite often, I mean, I c- converse with my AI. I will tell it off. I will swear at it on occasion because it doesn't get things, it doesn't listen. Um, but eventually we'll get there. You're right, we are the creator, and I've spoken to people that do security awareness that have been worried about AI taking their jobs and stuff like that, and the general consensus is that, and I think this is the same with anyone, it's the person that uses AI to level themselves up. That I do more now. I can do more. I'm building stuff that I could never have built before because I use AI, and it, that's gonna benefit me-
Speaker 3Yeah
Speaker 2rather than someone that, like, "I'm not using AI. I'm doing it all myself." And it's like that's fine, and I'm sure someone will appreciate that, but I'm now doing more than I ever was able to do before because I'm using AI.
SpeakerAnd just ask your language learning model to make it so it doesn't look like AI. Yeah. I mean, don't be that person that goes onto LinkedIn and says, "Look, I'm gonna build this myself. I don't wanna use AI. I don't want it to look like, you know, the regurgitated AI crap," which is, you know, we can spot it. We see it, and it's fun. It's like, "Oh, you've been using AI." Uh- Yeah just ask it to create something with the simplicity that it looks like it's been made by humans. Lastly, if you could persuade any person listening to become curious about just one aspect of their digital life, not frightened, just curious, what would you want them to examine? And I can only think about the doctor's surgery again. I'm using AI notes. Are you okay with that? Clearly, there was the lack of the ability to say, "I am uncomfortable, but I don't know why I should be uncomfortable with that." But what would you suggest?
Speaker 2I think, I mean, I think the, having the confidence to ask is a really, really important one That situation, I mean, that's, that situation's really difficult, right? Because you only get like seven minutes for a doctor's appointment or eight minutes or whatever. Yeah. So if you're spending three of that asking about the AI, and you're worried that you haven't got long enough to talk about your ailment, really, I think there should've been a whole... If a doctor's surgery is using AI, contact every customer, inform them in a nice accessible way, not, not, not like, "Click here to read the terms and conditions." Yeah. No one reads the terms and conditions. That should be made illegal that reading the terms and conditions is okay. Explain it in a nice easy way, and then ask them properly, "Do you consent?" You know, "Click here to consent. Click here not to consent." But it needs to be informed. Flights, if you fly... Flights is a really interesting one with this about communicating clearly. If you fly on Ryanair and you fly on Virgin or BA, like the safety briefing, if you fly on Vir... A- again, this is, money's made it different. If you fly on Virgin or BA or another premium airline, you've got a screen in the back of your seat, and the screen, whatever you're doing on the screen before takeoff, the screen plays a video. On BA, it's a lovely like period comedy drama. On Virgin, it's animated Wild West type thing. Um, and the audio plays through, and if you've got the headphones in, the audio play through your headphones. You kind of have to pay attention 'cause it's there right in your face. If you're on Ryanair, you're sat there in a tiny little seat, and then someone 50 feet away is going, waving your arms, pointing, whilst you can barely hear the instructions, and they're looking disengaged because they've done it a billion times. So am I actually safe on Ryanair? No. I'm, I would s- argue that I'm safer on BA and Virgin because I've... my, uh, uh, attention has been captured in an engaging, thoughtful way. On Ryanair, it's compliance. Ryanair, they're doing that 'cause they have to, and it's, they're there looking uninterested, holding up a life jacket, putting it over their head, and I'm looking at the menu and trying to get the air conditioning right. I'm not paying attention. So that's like captivating, working out, do I really want someone? 'Cause it takes money to s- for the doctor's surgery to send that email of consent and from Virgin and BA to put a screen in the back of the head, back of the headrest costs money. So actually, again, it all comes to money. We, we need to be able to understand what we are saying yes to, what we're clicking on. It's okay to question anything. You know, terms and conditions should be made accessible. Cookies, everybody just blindly clicks through cookies now because they don't actually know what it means, and every site asks, so they've become no- blind to all the notifications. I think There needs to be a whole shift in everything. I'm not sure compliance, European government, Schrems, all, all the, you know, GDPR, it's not really enough. Um, there needs to be a massive shift, and I'm not sure it'll ever happen. So I think the only way it can happen is if us as individuals stand up and say, "Why do you need this?" We, we don't care about the inconvenience anymore. We, we actually think, we actually worry about our data and where it's all going, 'cause we're all important. We're all a target. Everybody has something that is of value to a criminal, be it a bank account, an email address. My 80-year-old mum, when her email account got hacked, they were sending emails out to all of her contacts, including some she was trying to avoid, all of her contacts basically saying, "I've got laryngitis. I can't talk on the phone. My niece has cancer, and I need some gift cards. Can you go and buy me some gift cards?" How many emotional triggers? I've got laryngitis, so I'm unwell. I can't talk. Oh, that's such a shame. My niece has cancer. Oh my God. And, and like, there's, it's just loading it on, and p- two people fell for it. Two people were like, "How can I help? Give me the details." Um, so yeah, it's okay to like, we need to take, we need to take control back. We need to say, "I'm not okay with that. Can you explain why?" We, and before we roll these solutions out, businesses, organizations, we really should be considering asking properly for consent, because at some point we're gonna have to. And it would be lovely if some organizations, what great marketing, we actually care about our users' consent, so we're the first people that are actually gonna explain it clearly and ask properly. And if you say no, that's okay. You'll get exactly the same service. We guarantee you'll get exactly the same service, and if you don't get the same service, talk to us. That really needs to be explained, 'cause my mum, she struggled. She didn't know what the AI was. She was worried she wasn't gonna get the same service, and she didn't want to burden. There's the empathy. She didn't want to burden the doctor with more
Speakerwork. @davisciber is the handle if you want to find out more. And what can I say? Uh, uh, the most wonderfully engaging conversation about all the things we just need to know around cybersecurity. Thank you so much for joining us on the Security Circle podcast.
Speaker 2Thank you for having me.