Leah Feiger: Let’s talk about what you guys do. How do you lock up your cybersecurity? Do you use flip phones? What is your cloud storage? Are you only on Signal? All of these things I’m referencing by the way in the WIRED guide, go check it out. Where are you guys at?
Louise Matsakis: I have most of my conversations on Signal and I have the vast majority of them set to delete every four weeks. I find that that’s a good timescale for normal everyday conversations and then more sensitive conversations delete sometimes in as little as a few hours or a few days. Very rarely have I found that this is inconvenient for my life. Sometimes I ask a friend like, “Hey, that cool Airbnb, you stayed in that I know you already dug the link up to. Can you send that to me again?” But that’s a pretty minor.
Leah Feiger: Small price to pay.
Louise Matsakis: Yeah, small price to pay. I’m really careful about location tracking and then usually-
Leah Feiger: So you are not active on Find My Friends?
Louise Matsakis: No. Although I do track my Boomer mom.
Leah Feiger: Sure.
Louise Matsakis: Yeah. Who won’t listen to this podcast, so sorry mom, I am tracking you. She knows this.
Leah Feiger: The big reveal, actually.
Louise Matsakis: Yeah, but I actually don’t let her.
Leah Feiger: It’s the Louise Global Surveillance blog.
Louise Matsakis: Yeah, don’t let her track me back though. That’s my business. But when you get over the age of 70, your kid is allowed to see where you’re going.
Leah Feiger: Absolutely, amazing. Yeah.
Louise Matsakis: But I don’t use location tracking. I turn location tracking off for most of my apps and then I have a separate blank device and sometimes I bring that depending on where I’m going, particularly when I’m going to mainland China.
Leah Feiger: Yeah, I was going to ask, because you do reporting trips, you have sources all over the place. Are you bringing air gap devices? Is your work computer coming with?
Louise Matsakis: I usually will not bring my work computer. I’ll bring a personal computer that doesn’t have very much information on it and I will bring a blank cell phone. I’ll put various Chinese apps on that phone that I don’t really want. I don’t really want WeChat just hanging out on my normal device for the most part. But those are pretty above and beyond precautions that I don’t think the average person needs to take. But I think just making sure, do you really need 30 apps on your phone having your location? Because to Andrew’s point about all of these data brokers, a lot of the time they’re getting this location information, not from Google necessarily, or not from Facebook, not from these big companies that they don’t need to sell that information. It’s literally often the game you downloaded and you forgot about. It’s like the silly Candy Crush knockoff.
