2080: Mastering Digital Privacy- The Ultimate Guide to Protecting Your Identity Online with Rob Braxman

Welcome to the show. This is Jason Hartman, your host. And every 10th episode we do something kind of special, kind of different. What we do is we go off topic. So regardless of which show it is on the Hartman Media Network, whether it be one of the financial shows, economics, real estate, investing, travel, longevity, all of the other topics that we have, every 10th episode we go off topic and we explore something of general interest, something of general life, success, value. And so many of our listeners around the world in 164 countries have absolutely loved our 10th episode shows. So that's what we're going to do today and let's go ahead and get to our guest with a special 10th episode show. And of course, on the next episode we'll, we'll be back to our regular programming. Here we go.

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Well, thank you for joining us and welcome to episode 2080 2080. Today we are going to talk talk about a very important subject on this 10th episode show where we discuss things that aren't directly related to financial interest. However, they always seem to impact your bottom line. We've got Internet privacy guru Rob Braxman here with us today. He is going to talk about censorship and big tech and all kinds of really, really important stuff on this 10th episode show. So be sure to listen to this entire episode because you're going to want to hear how to defend yourself against the relentless attack on your privacy. It is just relentless and the attack on your freedom to communicate. And free speech is absolutely relentless all over the world. So this is a very important episode. But first, couple of little tidbits for you relating to real estate and income property. This from the Wall Street Journal. The magic number. 29%. 29%. That's the magic number. How much home prices have risen despite a late dip last year, a minor dip since January 2021. Okay, so mortgage rates have basically tripled and home prices increased by basically 30%, 29%. Now think about it. If you have leveraged these properties, look at the return on investment you've made. It's absolutely in the stratosphere. That's why income property is the most historically proven asset class in world history. Especially because you get to delegate the responsibility of debt repayment to those wonderful people, your customers, your tenants. They repay the debt for you. That's why income property is the most historically proven asset class in the entire world. Couple more quick notes on this. California. California, even California, this bubble market, this cyclical market, a market, my home state, where I spent the vast majority of my life that I would not recommend investing in. But even California, in the face of home sales being down, see, sales volume is different than sales prices. Sales volume being down by 12% year over year. Prices are up by 5% year over year. As inventory declines, housing shortage continues, continues, continues. So remember, sales volume and sales prices are two very different things. Very different things. Sales volume and sales prices. Now, this is also quite interesting and maybe rather surprising to some home mortgage applications. Now, this is for purchases and refinances, right? But I mean, nobody's refinancing with these kind of interest rates. And hardly anybody has purchased at these higher interest rates compared to the vast majority of people that are locked in at the very low rates. Increasing the wealth gap and really changing the course of history and creating a dramatic housing shortage in the United States. But new home mortgage applications surged by nearly 40% in October. That's according to the MBA, the Mortgage Bankers Association, a 40% increase in mortgage applications. That is phenomenal because remember, mortgage applications do not take into account the obvious trend that we've talked about before of so many people paying all cash for properties because they're not getting a mortgage. So they're not even in this stat. Which means sales volume indicated by the mortgage surge. The mortgage application surge is one thing, but it does not include the sales volume due to people who are just simply buying with cash. By the way, I want to mention that we have an exciting, exciting new insurance product Available for income property investors. And this product can actually cover all sorts of tenant damage problems. It could save you a zillion dollars. So if you want to know more about this, we have a special guest on our monthly Empowered Investor Pro Zoom meeting coming up. Those are the first Tuesday of every month. So if you are not an Empowered Investor Pro member, you are missing out. This is the no brainer thing that you must do. Join Empowered Investor Pro. This one thing, just one component of one meeting alone could be worth many, many thousands and thousands of dollars to you. So go to empoweredinvestor.com and be sure to join us for our monthly Zoom meetings. Get the software that's included with that, get the social network that's included, and most importantly, all of the great discounts, like discounts for our other events, like our upcoming Empowered Investor cruise on celebrity cruises. That's gonna be phenomenal. You get huge discounts. Your membership is basically free. Okay? It is the biggest no brainer ever in real estate investing in this world. All right, let's get into it with our guest today, Internet privacy and censorship expert, Rob Braxman. Here he goes.

It is my pleasure to welcome a guest that I've wanted to bring you for a while now. And that is Rob Braxman, the Internet privacy guy. We are going to talk about some extremely important issues and how they affect your life, your civil liberties, and maybe where we're going in this dystopian tech world in which we live. Rob, welcome. How are you?

Thank you for having me.

It's good to have you. So you're coming to us from my hometown, Los Angeles, California. Right?

That's right. That's right.

All right, great. Well, Rob, first of all, I want to just bring Everybody back before 911 because I remember I gave a speech about something called Carnivore that I'm sure you know about. And this was a device they were planning to install in all the ISPs, the Internet service providers, back in 1999, 2000, way back when. And then 911 happened and everybody's, by the way, was outraged about carnivore. And then 911 happened and they had a complete excuse to surveil things.

Right, right.

And then fast forward, you know, another several years and the NSA was the big topic and everybody was freaking about the NSA and that giant, you know, headquarters they were building outside of Salt Lake City, Utah. And now we've just sort of submitted to one level of surveillance after another after another after another. With COVID even more, you know, cities around the world have cameras everywhere. When I was in China, they had cameras everywhere. You go to London, there's cameras everywhere. What kind of world are we living in?

I'm actually thinking that the world is going to have an expectation that you will have data. It's actually. I actually did a recent video on this. I was talking about the Idaho Killer and how the Idaho Killer was. Was found. And what was interesting was that they found the Idaho Killer because he turned his phone off, off during the time of the murder. Now this is different case because now there's an expectation that everyone is surveilled, therefore every one of us have data. And it's getting worse now because they're saying if you have an absence of data, you must be guilty of something. It's like a different. It's a different level. So that's kind of a next stage of worry that I'm concerned about because the expectation of all these cameras and everything and the voice surveillance, the Amazon echoes the series and all that, collecting all this information, which people challenge me and say, oh, they're not doing that. Oh yes they are. So I'm actually thinking it's on another level where behavior is going to be monitored by patterns, including absence of data.

Right.

So it gets worse is all I'm saying.

Yeah. I'm curious though, before you go on, just super quickly, the Idaho killer, I don't know which story you're referring to, but turned his phone off. I mean, can you elaborate on that a little bit? What happened?

So the last December, I believe there was a murder in four. Four murdered students in Moscow, Idaho. And they arrested a Brian Coburger, who's currently in jail, hasn't gone to trial yet. So the cybersecurity people were wondering, like, how did he get caught? And the issue was, I mean, coming from me, I said, well, he has a phone, so that'll be the first thing to track. So they tracked his phone as being, you know, in the area a few times. But right before the murder, the suspect turned the phone off in the wee hours of the morning. Now that's suspicious because why would you turn your phone off at 4am when the murders happen? So that's an example, as I said, of that. And of course there were street cameras. These street cameras captured a car. And then of course they found some DNA and they. He didn't have any direct DNA, but relatives had DNA. So they had, you know, some way of connecting people by, even by relations. I mean, the world is. Is such that you don't Even have to be a criminal. There's information can be found about anyone, of course.

Yeah, yeah. And a phone, by the way, is never really off, is it?

One of the things I mentioned in the video, which was, which I tried to make a point of, is that he must not have had an iPhone, because if you have an iPhone, you turn it off, it's still functioning as an airtag. So a location on an iPhone, it never ends. It's always tracking 247 on or off, unless you put it in a Faraday bag. And Android, if it's off, currently the current version of Android, it is off. So I said, well, given that, then I, I would presume he had an Android just because they couldn't find him. And, and the part that people didn't realize was how they found him because people think, oh, my phones have location permissions, all I have to do is deny permissions and it'll be all safe for those who are semi privacy conscious. They don't realize though that you can't turn off Google or Apple on a phone. There's no way to do that. It's just built in. And that Google keeps all of that data on locations in what they call the Google Sensor Vault. And people actually said, oh, you just made that up. Well, the reason that I know this is because they're court cases discussing that the data comes from the Google Sensor Vault. In fact, during the January six riots, they managed to identify 940 plus people who have been charged based on tracking on the Google Sensor Vault. So they actually found them?

Yeah. Unbelievable. Okay, so let's go back to the broader thing. Let's zoom out a little bit. Why is privacy important? You know, in what ways is it important? If you can give us some examples of that, that'd be great.

Well, you know, I come from the Philippines originally and when I was young I lived in a country that had martial law, where there was no freedom, where somebody controlled the press and somebody manipulated the information so that you actually thought that whatever the government was saying was correct and nobody could question. If you question, you go to jail. So that's the background I come from. Many years after I've been gone from there and I was already in the US there was a revolution and I said, how do you go from Everybody compliant with 99% of the people voting for the one candidate, meaning the president. And yet years later there's a revolution. So they kept it to themselves and they couldn't talk about it. And it just shows that people wanted to speak out and they couldn't. And that's a problem. When you have no privacy, you can't speak out freely. You always have to worry that somebody is watching you and monitoring you. And in the case of where I grew up, you would go to jail. And because of that experience, it developed in me a very strong repulsion to anyone trying to find out what I'm thinking. I don't like that.

And by the way, that's where this is going with fmris, functional mris, we are on the verge of mind reading. I mean, it's getting close. But really, they can read our minds by just analyzing the way we use data, what we search for, what we don't search for. They can create very sophisticated profiles on us with all of this. And Rob, I gotta tell you, I'm sure everybody watching or listening will agree with this, because it's probably happened to you. And it just happened to me again on Saturday. I was having lunch with a friend. We were discussing something. Our phones were sitting on the table at the restaurant. And then after zero searches, I did not search this thing we were discussing or anything. I started seeing Facebook ads about this exact thing we were discussing maybe four hours earlier. Now, it could be just totally random, but things like that have happened to me many times. Just too many times to be a coincidence.

Yeah, unfortunately, having Facebook. Facebook is going to guarantee that that's going to happen. You know, I definitely do not have Facebook on anything.

But it shows you the microphones are hot on the phones.

It could be more than that. See, what happens is your phone is. Is connected to the other party with the phone.

Right.

So it doesn't have to be you that does it.

Oh, that's interesting. So we each go home after lunch, and then the other person sitting there searches that.

Right. And then you're associated.

I was served the ads because they knew we were together.

Correct.

Oh, my God.

You know, you expect the most obvious, which is the phone, the microphone. But because of permissions on phones, I don't think that's going to be likely unless you're using an app with. With access to the phone. But there are so many other ways of doing this.

With access to the microphone, Right?

Yeah, so. So I don't think it's the microphone being hot in this particular case.

Okay.

I think that first of all, the contacts are figured out. In fact, that was my next. That is my next video about contacts. Everyone who uses Facebook or Instagram or WhatsApp have uploaded all their contacts. And then the platform is calling that contact list. Daily seeing who your new contacts are, getting their phone numbers, their addresses, birthdays, and whatever information you have on there. Then there's the Mac address information, which actually can identify if two phones are close by. Okay. And then of course, there's a location. If you have location on, there's all of these things that can connect devices. In fact, early on, many, many years ago, I think I did a video this maybe seven years ago now, where Facebook actually tested out a recommended friend. And what happened was this woman went to a bar and sat at the bar, and then this guy was hitting on her, and she didn't like to talk to this guy and just ignored him. And then she went home and Facebook recommended this guy. Why? Proximity. It was a proximity check.

Right.

This is the danger. And Facebook is actually, basically, they're tracking Mac addresses. So if you're on a network and anybody who has Facebook on the same network will actually share the Mac addresses. So they actually know who's on the local area network. Like, for example, if you're all on Walmart, Facebook will detect, oh, we're all both on Walmart.

Or at a coffee shop or a school, Whatever.

Or whatever.

Yeah, right.

And they do that to say, do a proximity check check. I mean, Zuck is very good at finding ways to beat the system and get these kinds of information that most average people don't even understand is being done.

Yeah, right, Right. Okay. So we're going to go into some varying levels of privacy and security one can have. We're going to go into some solutions and tell people how to beat the system or. And protect themselves. But the first time I ever heard the phrase Mac address, I remember years ago, I had a girlfriend who was very into computers and technology. She was into education software, and she told me what a Mac address was. I didn't even know there was such a thing. We've all heard of IP addresses. So tell us about a Mac address, what that is, why it's meaningful, and then tell us about an IP address, what that is and why it's meaningful.

Okay, so let's take a phone like this, for example. So all phones have multiple Mac addresses and an IP address. What a Mac address is, is a Media Access Control id. It's basically a unique network identifier. It's saying if you're going to go to any network, you need a Mac. So this phone has a Mac address for the WI fi, a Mac address for Bluetooth, a Mac address for nfc.

For near field communication.

Near field. Every device has a Mac address. So Depending on what radio waves you're trying to spot. WI FI traffic, Bluetooth traffic, they have a different Mac address. That's what they were using for contact tracing Mac addresses. Okay. So if you're on Bluetooth, how they announce a Bluetooth is they announce a Mac address. The limitation of a Mac address is it can only exist inside a local area network. It doesn't transmit to the Internet. So, for example, if you're talking to a website like Facebook, Facebook cannot see the Mac address direct. And the reason is it's not part of the Internet protocol for transferring that data, called ip. So for that, they use an IP address, an IP address. It's a protocol for transferring data over the Internet, whereas the Mac address is for announcing traffic inside your own network. Okay. Now, these are different threats. The one thing that is unique about the Mac address is that it is unique to your device. So if somebody finds a Mac address, it's got to be you, because no one's, no one else is going to have the same Mac address. It's so of the billions of phones, each phone has a different Mac address. So whereas an IP address can be reused, if you're in your home and you're sharing with your family, everyone has the same IP address.

Yeah. So. So with IP addresses, I remember when they've come to my house and set up like a cable modem, you know, for the Internet. Right, right. And they'll have dynamic IP addresses or IP addresses.

Right.

And then there's a thing. Whenever you have a problem, sometimes they tell you to click on, renew, lease, sitting at home. Is my IP address all the same, always the same, or does it change all the time?

Well, my IP address hasn't changed in 21 years.

Okay, so do you have a static IP address then?

No, I do not. I have a dynamic. But the problem is that they. They became lazy and they say, oh, we'll just give you a permanent lease. And we don't tell you it's permanent, but it's. It's been permanent. Now, here's something that most people don't understand because they say, can you identify who owns an IP address? In fact, can you identify an exact location? So they go to the Internet and do one of those IP lookup things, right?

Yeah.

And they say, okay, here's my IP address. So you type it in, because you can look at your computer, find your IP address and you type it in. Or you can go to a website and say, what is my ip? And then it tells you the IP and you plug it in. And you say, oh, it says I'm in a Verizon system and I'm five miles away from where I actually am. So, yeah, this is safe. It doesn't matter. Right? That is false. That is completely false. Okay, let me explain. This is very important point. Back in the day, yes, IP addresses weren't all that, except for the fact that it's repeatable, meaning you use the same IP address constantly. No one could actually find the exact location because the location being given to you by what's my ip and all this is the location of the lease owner of the IP address.

The lease owner, not you, meaning the Internet service provider.

Right. And sometimes you.

But doesn't my house have a. If we're both on, say, Cox or Verizon or whatever, does my house have a different IP address than my neighbors?

Everyone has a different IP address per router.

Okay.

So your, Your ISP router will have your. Whatever connects to the Internet, that device will have its own IP address. Unique. It's unique to you. So if you steal content, they will know it's you because they have a record who was using that IP address within this timestamp. Well, this is what changed. What changes? These, these phones. Okay. What changed that you're using apps like Facebook and Instagram and whatever, or even a app like the Weather Channel owned by IBM. And what happened is they started collecting the IP addresses that are on here. Okay. And while the app is running, it's also collecting location. Now you have IP address location. And if they can find some identity like your Google ID or Apple ID or something else, and they have three or four items of identification, they're going.

To triangulate that data.

Well, no, this is what happens. They sell it. They're sold to companies like here.com, skyhook Wireless. There's so many of them. And this are sold as. They're called reverse IP lookup databases.

Right.

And this is actually what Banks used to say, where are you? Are you really who you are? They just go connect to these databases. And anybody who uses any kind of common social app in your house has basically harvested your IP address and location because they didn't care. Now, nobody's done that in my house because I, I use a VPN router to, to block the IP address. So. So they're collecting the IP address of a vpn. Even if they have my location, they don't know who it is. So that's how I'm protecting myself. But my sister comes to my house, and back in the day we just use a phone without thinking about it, go to Instagram and they would have captured my IP address and location and sold it that way for now. Nowadays when somebody has your IP address and your every email you send out has an IP address, by the way. So every time you send out mail, somebody can actually find out where you are exactly. Sometimes within six feet, depending on whether your name is in that database. And that bothers me a lot. That bothers me.

Oh, yeah. As it should. So does this hold true from a, like a laptop computer or desktop as well as a phone? Is it the same?

No. The laptop can also send location, but you can block the location. A laptop doesn't have a gps, so it uses WI fi triangulation. It bases the location on the data provided by the phone. So yeah, you can just turn off the location on your, on your laptop. And computers don't typically have the ability to harvest that, that information. So normally it's a phone problem, but it's connected because they connect the phone to the computer. That's called cross device tracking. This has gotten so sophisticated.

Oh, sure. And not only the phone and the computer, but the watch.

Oh, goodness. Yeah, yeah.

Let's talk about the different layers of privacy and security if we can, going from the most basic to maybe the most advanced that someone listening could implement. Okay, can you, can you kind of take us through that? I mean, I think most people would think, well, the first thing, you know, you do is you've got all your regular computers and phones. You use a vpn, a virtual private network. Right. Is that enough?

Well, I just told you why it wasn't enough.

Well, I know, but I want you to take us through the.

Yeah, I will, I will. I was just going to explain. I was just going to explain.

Tell us what level one is.

Yeah, I was just going to explain that. So the problem is, and some people say, because I have a VPN service that people say, okay, I got your VPN and I. Why is it finding my location still? And that's problem number one. Yes. What a VPN does is hide an IP address. It has nothing to do with location, nothing. So therefore you can't just put the VPN on and not do anything about location. Because they're kind of a pair. I just told you that it's a pair data pair that's collected. There's actually three in this pair. Your Google ID or Apple id, your IP address and your location. Those three things are what identifies everything you do on the Internet. So I would take Precautions to protect all that. So, yes, a VPN protects you on the IP side. Now here's something that's kind of interesting that most people don't realize that if you go on your phone data rather than your home WI fi, your IP address is actually not known by the end site. So let's say you're using your cell data, you're, you're on the road and you go to Facebook. Facebook doesn't actually know your IP address. And that's because of the way the IP addresses are shared on the phone network. So believe it or not, without a VPN you can have protection as long as you don't use your WI fi with your home router. So that protects you from that.

So, so using the phone, there's no IP information when you're on your cellular.

Network on the cell data. Yes. If you're on WI fi, it obviously.

It'S when all bets are off.

Okay, Right, right. So if you're on cell data, which obviously has limited bandwidth, you can't use it all the time, but that's when you need to use a vpn.

Okay, Right.

Basically the rule is if you're at home, use a vpn. Yeah, you don't need to use a VPN when you're not at home. You need to use a VPN when at home.

Now, most people would say the whole reason I have a VPN is because when I'm traveling or at a coffee shop and using a public network and I want to go online to my bank and do something, that's why I need a vpn. That's what most people would say.

That's correct. And that's a different aspect of vps, which is encryption. And that's the value of VPN in that instance is for the encryption side. So if you want to encrypt your data, if a hacker is on a local area network, like a Starbucks, yes, that is important. There or an airport, any public network.

But you're saying to use a VPN when you're sitting at home, most important all the time, just have it always on.

That's probably the most important. Now, next next issue is location. How do you handle the location issue if you have a, a regular device? Well, you're kind of in a hopeless case. If you have a normal phone, this is a Google Pixel. If you have a normal phone or an iPhone, then your location is being tracked. If you're an iPhone, it's been tracked even when the phone is. So to me, if I don't want My location to be known at all times, 24, 7. The first thing I'm going to do is say, is there a device that does not track location? There happens to be one. And it's something I talk about on my channel, and they're called De Googled phones. So this is an example of a De Googled phone.

Now, just to make sure, because I don't think people understood what you said. A De Googled phone.

Right.

A phone that could be made by Google, could be a Pixel, or it's an Android operating system, but it's De Googled. It's got no more Google on it. Right, Right.

So, so basically how that works in a short explanation, is that Android originally, the actual original Android that is on Android.org is actually open source. So because it's open source, anyone can go in there and see the source code and if there's any tricks in the Android code, you can remove it. And so that's what these have. Now what, what happens is, is when you go buy a normal Android phone by contract, these companies then load the Google code with all the secret stuff that Google does onto the phone, and that's called Google services. So when you add Google services, that's how they have to market it if they're going to claim they have Android. So any lg, you know, htc, Samsung, if they're going to say their Android phone, they have to say that they have Google code in it. And once you have Google code in it, it's irreversible. You cannot take it out because it's embedded in the actual operating system.

Sounds like that medicine they were forcing everybody to take over the past couple of years. But I won't mention the name.

Can't take it out. Yes. So anyway, the idea of de Googling is that people like me with the technical expertise, we've figured out that we can take the Android code, which is open source, so you can see exactly what it does, make sure it doesn't have any communication with Google, and then put it on a device like this. And one of the things you will realize is if you use one of these phones, it operates pretty much like a normal Android, but you never log in, so there's no login. And the other thing is, it took off the links to location because location is being reported to Google, but that module isn't here, so it can't report when the code doesn't exist for it to report. There's no code in here to report to Google.

All right, but the problem is Rob what cell phone service do we. Because you're going to say, never log on to a WI fi with that phone, right?

Right. Well, not say never with a vpn, you can.

Okay, got it.

Or if it's not your WI fi, you don't care. But if it's your WI fi, you should care.

Okay. Don't log into your own WI fi ever with that phone without a VPN. Or do it with a VPN. But, you know, VPNs are glitchy. They go on and off. I've noticed it when I'm like traveling and I'm trying to log on to my bank and you know, the VPN will just drop sometimes.

Well, not normally in your home, right? I mean, your. Your home has to stay.

I'm not talking about the connection. I'm talking about the VPN connection.

I'm on a VPN 24 7. I don't. You know, maybe. Maybe you need to have a different VPN service.

Okay. All right.

My network is routed with a VPN router, so the only way to get to the Internet in my house is through the vpn.

Oh, so you've got a piece of hardware that does that?

That's correct. And I sell that product as well. And so what happens is when you come to my house, you don't have to think about VPNs. You just use the network and you don't realize you're going to the VPN.

And you're on a vpn. Okay, got it. So can you move the location for that VPN around? Like, can you say you're in LA or San Diego or whatever?

Right, okay, yes. The only problem is your location is still being emitted by your device. That's a different thing. It's a different channel. So one channel is IP address, another channel, location. So you got to think.

All right, so tell the audience, though, Rob, what level are we at? Because remember, level one, kindergarten was just use a VPN.

Right.

Now we went. You got into your phone device and you got the piece of hardware here. Is that just level two or is there.

Yeah, I'd say that's level two. But there's. There's. The two parts to level two is you.

You.

When you use one of these phones, you basically block location. And the Google id, those two things, which is very, very important because you never really identify. The phone is unidentified. There's nothing. The phone is invisible to Google. They don't see it, they don't know who owns it.

But it's not invisible to the cell Phone provider. So who knows?

No, no it is not. That is a different level. Now you're talking about protecting against the state. Yeah, that's a different level.

The state is probably the actor we really need to worry about the most.

Okay, so now here's the interesting thing and I have to be clear with my audience because when, when I talk to them, they don't understand this and there's a lot of confusion. So if you're trying to protect from the cell carrier, what do you do? Well, the problem is if you're going to use the phone system, meaning the official term is the public switch telephone network or pstn. If you're connecting to other people with a phone number, well, you're done.

There are laws in the United States that that means they capture all that data, who you're talking to and they can wiretap you at will using the CALEA law, the C A L E A Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act. And this was passed before 9, 11, this was before, this was during the Clinton administration. And it took, it took them, I don't know, 15 years to get it to actually be, be in effect. And they put new hardware in now. So now all phones can be intercepted at will by any law enforcement official using the CALEA law. So therefore if they know your phone number, they can intercept. They can intercept people you're talking to, they know who's talking to whom. And this is kept in the FBI DCS Net database.

The concern is about all this stuff is not that you're going to do anything that would offend the state today necessarily. It's how will that be perceived in five or 10 years. We just don't know what the political guess.

Well, we've already seen that today. I've seen people get ostracized just for having a simple choice of vaccination. I mean, goodness, I mean this is a simple choice. Why do you have to be policed for some something that you personally chose? I don't understand. So the protection against the cell service, there's a temporary protection. Temporary protection is to take off the SIM card. When you remove the SIM card, the phone does not communicate with the carrier. So you basically disappear.

You can't do anything.

That's right. So the other thing that you can do is to use voiceover ip, meaning data only. So some people buy a data only card and then they use a voice over IP provider. There are many voiceover IP providers.

Sure, there's VoIP all over. But I mean if we're still using the data or we want to post something controversial on a website, what do we do?

We're still going, this is great. This is more advanced now. Now you're starting to think, think in a bigger way.

This is now what, level three?

Yeah, I'd say this is level three. Okay, but for the consumer level, not, not for the, not for the Snowdens in the world. The Snowdens need to be at you know, level 10.

Okay, so tell us then what's level three?

So level three requires that you start to pay attention to identity. Okay? This is something that people don't understand. It doesn't really matter that your data is being seen. It matters who they think they're seeing. This is very important for me. This is a big thing of what I teach. The reason I talk about the Google phones and how to hide from the Internet and do what I call pseudo anonymity is so that an IP addresses and VPNs and hiding all these in locations is so that you're not identified. If you're not identified you can actually go on the Internet and feel free. You can go on Twitter. Twitter doesn't know who you are. So you can say whatever you want. I mean you could sense that, you can feel it and you can do whatever you want when, when people don't know who you are because you can always come back and it's a different person. That's the level where you start to get into are you using your real name and your IDs are using the same email, are using emails with your full name? Do you have a Facebook account with matching name and on and on and on and then suddenly you're doxable where you, somebody can dox you. So now this is a little bit different. Instead of just sigint signals intelligence you're talking about, you know, op end you're, you actually have to change behavior. So changing behavior is the next level. It requires more thinking and it requires more planning. And when you say okay I'm gonn go sign up to a platform, what am I going to do? Somebody like me, I have multiple IP addresses, I say okay, what identity do I need to be on with this versus if I go to the bank I use my real name identity because it doesn't matter because they have that they got my Social Security number and, and everything else. So but I segregate that. I make sure that the financial side is different from the non financial side. And this is by the way one of the concerns of CDBC because central.

Bank digital currencies yeah, that's. That's the ultimate surveillance tool. And it's coming.

It is coming and it's very scary because now your social side, because the, the idea of CDBC is to link the social media to the financial. And once that connected, you can't break that. Then you're. You're pretty much you're done. And this is the world that we're getting into. And I try every day to separate those pieces. There are parts of my life that I cannot separate because the government requires me. Corporations, financials, banks, whatever payments, credit cards. But if I separate social media and what I do on social media, I can try, and this is an attempt at trying to. To make myself appear to be a different person. And then I feel like I'm more free to talk, as you know, even on YouTube. I'm on YouTube and if I not careful, I say a few words in here and they'll knock my account off. You know that. Yeah, somebody interviewed me last year and after the interview, his channel was blocked. Yeah, no, no, that blocked, closed.

Yeah, no, I know. It's. It's incredibly scary. There's no question about it. It's. It's just unbelievable. You know, ever since January 6th, I said that censorship was the biggest problem facing humanity. Yes, it is even more immediate. That's a bigger problem than privacy and surveillance. But they certainly go hand in hand.

They do go hand in hand.

Well, actually, one helps the other.

Right. You can't have surveillance with privacy. So privacy is the protection against any abuse of your privacy, which is primarily surveillance and censorship. Censorship is also another element of privacy.

So we want to really have actionable content here. So what can people do? We went through levels 1, 2 and 3. One was VPN. Level 2 was the privacy phone. Yes, the de Googled phone.

Right. Level three was actionable items like.

Well, it was really what we were talking about, the cell phone network. Identity, that kind of stuff.

Identity. Basically I was talking about identity, which is being careful about your actions, with identifying yourself and everything you do.

But here's the, here's the thing. How do you pay the cell phone bill? That phone.

You don't hide from the cell phone carrier. If you're on a voiceover IP plan, you don't hide. But the data portion is encrypted. So it doesn't matter that it's open, especially if you're using a VPN over it. They don't see what the traffic is. They know you're going to vpn, but they don't know what's going on?

Right. Okay, got it, got it. So the VPN provider knows what you're doing, but the cell phone carrier or ISP doesn't.

I run a vpn. The fact of the matter is VPN carriers see very little nowadays because everything now is HTTPs, so there isn't much to see other than.

So. So that secure socket means when you connect to the site, they stop seeing it, but they do know what sites you go to.

That's correct. That's the only thing that a VPN could theoretically know is what sites are connected to. In my case, what I did was funnel all of that traffic to a single DNS. So one DNS handles everyone. And. And it actually aggregates it. So you actually don't know how many times somebody went to google.com, you just know somebody got to google.com, but how many times? I don't know.

You don't know which one. Okay, got it.

Right.

Okay, so action items. Give us some quick action items and let's wrap it up of what. What people need to do to ensure their privacy and security.

Okay, so obviously use a VPN when at home. That's one of the first tips. Consider getting a phone, a de Googled phone that would have no connection to Google. And then thirdly, start being concerned about your identity with your email addresses and your usernames to make sure it doesn't show your full name. So those are the beginning parts of the protection.

Okay, Rob, give out your website.

My website is Brax Me And I'm on YouTube, of course. Rob Braxman, Tech Channel.

Yeah, you're on YouTube while supplies last. And if not, you're on Odyssey and all the others. So that's. That's great. But definitely check out Rob's channel. He's got some. Some very interesting topics you can dive into. And Rob, thank you joining us. It was great having you on the show.

Thank you for having me.

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