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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Remote learning 10:00 AM to noon. That's what we try to do around here. Now let's audit a section of the class of NYU called Globalization and the Internet, specifically a lesson about internet privacy, and the recent news surrounding Apple. Here's the background reading if you didn't do it over the weekend. Kidding, by the way, we didn't assign any homework. A new update on your iPhone is now giving you the option to opt-out of being tracked by individual apps. When a user opens, let's say Facebook or Amazon, they're asked "Allow apps to track you or not," but wait, apps track us?

Well, it turns out that for several of your favorite sites, maybe many, chances are this is actually a significant portion of their business model and revenue. What may seem like an innocent prompt has very expensive complications and implications for most companies. Joining us to discuss is Professor Robert Squillace, professor in the Liberal Studies Department at NYU. He teaches a senior seminar called Globalization and the Internet. Professor Squillace, thanks for joining us. Welcome to WNYC.

Professor Robert Squillace: Thank you. It's my pleasure.

Brian: By way of background first, I see that in your class you talk about the internet as the digital interchange between the local and global, which might go over the average non-senior seminar attendees' head. What does that mean? What do we even mean in 2021 when we say the internet?

Professor Squillace: Well, the internet is the physical infrastructure that connects computers to each other. All of the fiber optic cables that stretch around the world, the routers, servers, the Wi-Fi hubs, the internet is the way that our computers connect. They do connect in this global system of networks. The internet is really a network of networks.

Brian: That means the internet is not just another word for the web?

Professor Squillace: That's correct. The World Wide Web is that body of content that's available through the internet using the universal resource locator, the URL, the links that you type into your browser, or that you bookmark or that you go to through an app.

Brian: Again, as a refresher, if these social media sites and search engines are free-to-use for everyone, how do they make their money?

Professor Squillace: They are ad-based for the most part. Most internet companies are either subscription-based, where you pay a monthly fee for the service, or ad-based, or they have a choice between the two, like the music app, Pandora, for instance. Social media apps, people don't want to pay to talk to each other on the internet so they're almost all ad-based in their revenue. They sell space to advertisers on their sites.

Brian: So a lot of websites are essentially selling our personal data to other companies. This starts to bring us closer to this new feature on iPhones. What kind of data, again, this is so basic, everybody knows or think they know that our privacy is just not what it was before the age of the internet and different people have different thoughts about how concerned about that to be, but what kind of data are they really buying? What do they really want to know about us that's most valuable in the commercial sector?

Professor Squillace: Well, what they want is to be able to target ads to the people who are most likely to buy the products that are being advertised and advertising in the broad range. This includes political candidates. This includes cultural and social institutions, not just products like shoes, or soda, or something along those lines. The data that's being collected is essentially everything we do online that's relevant to our habits as a consumer. Everything we click on, everything we look at, all of those clicks are being recorded in one system or another. One database or another. For Facebook, it's everything you do on Facebook and every app that Facebook tracks that's on your phone currently.

Brian: Each of our devices has a unique device identifier which can be paired with other texts such as Facebook's tracking Pixel as I think it's called, which follows users around the web to learn even more about you. My question about that is, how is that legal?

Professor Squillace: Well, that's a good question. The government has been up to this point, at least, very hesitant to regulate internet companies. The internet as we know, it really took shape in the years of globalization that followed from the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in the late '80s, early '90s. The internet really developed in the period between about 1992, that's when probably most people were old enough to remember first using email, through about 2005, when we get broadband and streaming.

That's a period of great deregulation in terms of all sorts of cross-national boundaries coming down, and also the boundaries of what could or could not be tracked online. It was a new technology. I think governments have just been slow to recognize the amount of data that is being compiled through the internet, and what the implications of it are.

Brian: You teach this course Globalization and the Internet and that modern era in a certain respect of globalization started after the communist bloc fell in 1989, 1990 or so, and the internet technology that we know today was rising, and of course, could be at least in theory accessed from anywhere. For you as a professor who's an expert on this, just an opinion question before we get to the news from Apple and where it fits in.

Should we be happy that our feeds are tailored to us individually, like if we're being shown ads that are for things that we tend to be interested in, maybe that's a good thing instead of seeing ads for things that we're not interested in, which would be maybe even a bigger waste of time, but that versus it being predatory in some way that harms us?

Professor Squillace: I think the answer is very different when you look at it from the basis of a single individual and when you look at it at scale and think about its larger social effects. Yes, for me, as an individual, maybe I will be getting ads for cultural institutions that I'm interested in and not seeing things that I'm not interested in, but when you consider the over one and a half billion Facebook users, for instance, just to take one app around the world, what happens there are two dangers.

One is that even the ads create an echo chamber of filtered experience where people start to mistake what their personal wants and interests are for what the world around them is all about. Secondly, it's an incentive towards overconsumption, which is a global problem in terms of sustainability in the environment where people are buying things they don't need. If you think about the 1.4 billion users just on Facebook alone around the world, many of those people may be quite susceptible to buying addictions, to buying things that they don't really need because they're constantly being fed ads that direct them towards that kind of material.

Brian: That brings us to the news with Apple. Can you explain how simply asking users, which I gather the iPhones will now do, asking users whether they want to be tracked across apps affects apps like Facebook, or Amazon, and our experience of them?

Professor Squillace: Sure. Now, I think the major difference, you could turn off some of this app tracking before. The major difference is that while most of the internet for years and years has tried to hide the fact that every time we're online our computer is connected to other computers, and make it feel like it's a one-way experience where we're merely being fed the websites or streaming videos or whatever else it is that we're interested in.

The new Apple iOS will make it obvious every time you click on an app that you need to say whether or not you want this app to track you across other apps. The information you give to that app will still be held by the app, of course, but it won't then put cookies as they're called on your machine to track your progress around other internet apps that you might be using. Most people are probably going to say, "No, I don't want to be tracked cross-apps, why would I want to be?" I think that's why Facebook is struggling so mightily against this innovation by Apple.

Brian: Listeners, we can take some phone calls for Professor Robert Squillace from NYU, as we do a little remote learning here, which is what we do. Remote learning from 10:00 AM to noon. He teaches a senior seminar at NYU called Globalization and the Internet. We're putting the news from Apple that iPhones will let you block apps from tracking you across other apps into the bigger academic concept here, or a bigger academic context of the whole Internet and Society. 646-435-7280, or tweet a question @BrianLehrer.

Professor Squillace, what are the financial implications? From the way that you described, and many of us knew that we get tracked and therefore presented with all kinds of ads that they think are going to be tempting to us individually. If most people now see this option on their Apple devices and say, "Well, yes, no, of course, I don't want you tracking me across other apps," and that feature goes away for sites like Facebook, how big are the economic implications for that company?

Professor Squillace: Facebook isn't going to share that kind of data too readily, but I think we can see from their response that they're a bit worried. I think they would primarily lose their high-end users, people who can afford to own iPhones. Facebook, again, we have to keep in mind is a very global company. They actually have more subscribers in India now than in the United States. The places they're growing faster are in the developing world in Brazil, and Indonesia, and Vietnam. Their people are far less likely to be accessing the Internet through a high-end device like an iPhone, and more likely to be using.

Brian: That's fair. Why wouldn't this become the standard now that Apple's introduced it for all devices, laptops, desktops, other brands of phones, and become a global standard?

Professor Squillace: There's a possibility I think of government regulation that would establish that, but the other major operating system out there is Android. Android, of course, is made by Google, and Google is also very much especially on YouTube and on its search engines driven by tracking, and that's how it also is an ad-based revenue system. I don't think Google is as likely as Apple to institute this kind of a feature, at least in a way that foregrounds it.

Brian: Why did Apple do it just as a feature, a selling point for their brand of phone, because some people would really be attracted to being able to block sharing of the data like that.

Professor Squillace: I think that's part of the motive. They're probably several different motives that are collaborating here. On the one hand, they want to stay ahead of the regulatory curve. Governments are obviously getting more and more interested, especially governments with democratic systems on how data is being compiled and used. Better if a company makes its own regulations before the government comes in and regulates from their perspective.

I think also the major tech giants Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, are very much in competition with each other because they're all expanding their businesses across a variety of different revenue streams. Google or rather Facebook, for instance, bought the Oculus VR system and is becoming one of the leaders in VR gaming, which has nothing to do with their social media platform, but the two are integrated. Facebook also bought Instagram a number of years ago. I think all of the tech giants want to clear the field for themselves as much as possible by damaging their competitors.

Brian: Peter in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC with NYU Professor Robert Squillace. Hi.

Peter: Hello.

Brian: Hi, Peter. It's you.

Peter: Hey, how you doing? [unintelligible 00:14:52] all the time. My question has to do with the difference between an app on a phone in terms of its tracking information that can get as opposed to opening a browser on your phone and just going to that site. I tend to not try to download apps as much for various reasons. Is there a difference if you have an app for, let's say, a store or something on your phone, as opposed to going into the website with a browser on your phone in terms of your tracking information it gets?

Brian: Great question. Tracking of you on apps versus websites for the same thing?

Professor Squillace: Yes. If you go through a browser, Safari and Firefox both prevent cross-app tracking. You're not going to have the same cross-app tracking if you use those browsers. Chrome is moving in that direction, where they are also going to not have cross-app browsing-- cross-app tracking, rather, if you're using the Chrome browser.

Now one illusion about browsers that I want to dispel. A lot of them have private or incognito windows, that only means that whatever you access while you're using one of those windows, is not saved in your browser history. It doesn't mean that your information isn't going to the website that you're visiting when you are in an incognito or private window.

Brian: That's really interesting. I personally did not know that. When you use that incognito function on your browser, you're not actually incognito, you're just not saving it to your list of websites you visited.

Professor Squillace: That's correct. If you shop on Amazon, say while you're in an incognito window, Amazon is still getting and compiling all of the information about what you clicked on, but the next time you open Amazon on your incognito window, you're going to have to log in again, it's not going to recognize that it's you. If you don't log in, you won't see the personalized ads and so forth, but Amazon still has the information of whatever you did from that session, and it would still be associated with whatever device you are on.

Brian: Right. What's the advantage of incognito? If all that you're blocking, if I understand correctly, is you yourself from seeing your list of past websites visited in order, what are you accomplishing?

Professor Squillace: Really not very much in terms of privacy protection. I find that the use of incognito Windows is greater for doing things like being logged into multiple different systems at once, so that when you log in on an incognito window say your university, if you log in on a different incognito window, as a different user, you can do that rather than the university picking up that you're the same person in both of those windows. It doesn't really do a lot in terms of data privacy.

Brian: Could a criminal use incognito to protect himself from-- If his computer was seized by the government investigating him, they couldn't see what websites he looked at. I'm thinking about some very high-profile FBI raids recently that I don't have to mention any former New York City mayor's names about, but for anybody who might be doing up to no good, if they're using incognito names, and they're incognito mode, and their computers get seized, then the websites that they visited would be hidden from view or not so much?

Professor Squillace: I think the government would have the power to get the information from the websites that they'd visited, but it would be harder to track, even harder as if they use a virtual proxy network. That's using logging in in a way to a network that will hide your IP address, the identifier on your personal device. This is what a number of people use, for instance, to get around the Great Firewall in China. They will log in through a VPN.

Brian: Ingrid in East Harlem, you're on WNYC. Hi, Ingrid.

Ingrid: Hey, huge fan. This topic is incredibly interesting. Thank you for taking my call. Is there a difference between when you turn, you go into the app, and the kind of tracking that you get when you can say I turn off my location services versus the app is not open, is it still tracking and sharing with other apps? How does that all work? Because I don't get it and I don't like being this ignorant. [laughs] It's kind of scary.

Brian: They count on us being this ignorant, but go ahead. That's an interesting question. Is that a completely different topic, though? Ingrid is asking about location services and we see that frequently. "Will you allow this app to track your location? In general, at any time only when you're using the app? Not at all," but that's location. That's not what websites you visit, so they know what to advertise to you. Is that completely different? Is that related?

Professor Squillace: There's some relationship. One of the things again to remember is that while it appears that you have a one-way connection, that something is being fed to your computer, being on the internet, whatever you're doing there, always means that your computer is connected to another computer as well in ways that aren't entirely visible to you. A lot of websites use cookies, which is a piece of information, digital information that's downloaded onto your own machine, which is one of the ways that this kind of cross-app tracking happens.

Location services, these are useful for advertisers. I think this is one of the reasons that there's been such a push towards mobile devices. If an advertiser can know not only what you did, but where you were when you did it online, they're going to gain more valuable information and they might know that you pass a Starbucks every day, for instance. Turning off those location services does not prevent the other kinds of tracking that we've been talking about.

Brian: Remote learning 10:00 AM to noon, and we thank NYU Professor, Robert Squillace who teaches a course called Globalization and the Internet. I can tell even from just our callers that people have learned a lot. Thank you for coming on.

Professor Squillace: My great pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

Brian: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Coming up next we're going to follow up on one of the questions I asked the mayoral candidates in last Thursday night's debate about whether a remote learning option should still be available in schools starting in September. Stay with us.

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