webXray and the Fight for Digital Privacy

Jacob:

Hey Jeff, thanks for hopping back on the call with me to create a proper introduction to this article.

Jeffrey:

So today’s episode, we are discussing this article that came out in Wired on July 24th, by Brian Merchant, titled “This Machine Exposes Privacy Violations,” subtitled: “A former Google engineer has built a search engine, webXray, that aims to find illicit online data collection and tracking– with the goal of becoming “the Henry Ford of tech lawsuits,” whatever that means, but yeah.

Jacob:

Right, and we’re not going to talk about Henry Ford today and his odd histories. But, the article outlines the really cool inside information provided by Tim Libert, maybe Libert, depending on if he watches Stephen Colbert or Colbert. This [former] Google engineer created webXray, and he has some really amazing insights, which spurred us to want to talk about this article and change the way we are doing things here at Human Friend Digital.

So Jeff, anything else for the intro? 

Jeffrey:

No, that’s it. Stay tuned. Give it a listen. 

• –     – 

Jacob:

 Jeff, today’s episode is all doom and gloom. So, this was brought to you by Jeff Caruso. He picked out this topic, so tell us what it’s about.

Jeffrey:

It’s not all doom and gloom. Yeah, so, an article came out in Wired recently, hold on… let me pull up the date… July 24th, so a couple of weeks ago from when we’re recording, and it’s about this search engine that a former Google engineer has built called webXray. And its purpose is basically just to help users find how their data is being used on the web.

And there’s like a free version for normal people. And then there’s like a premium tier for regulators, or lawyers, you know, if you wanted to go after one of these companies or whatever. So yeah, I just thought it was really interesting and you know…

Jacob:

I thought it was extremely interesting too. And I love how it was kind of like the answer to get better enforcement for privacy, to like help facilitate that enforcement of privacy. So webXray sounds pretty cool. Honestly, operating the tool is not as easy as it sounded. You kind of have to put in a lot of fields of information. So we threw in a lot of …

Jeffrey:

It’s nice that it’s out there.

Jacob:

Yes, I think it’s really nice.

Jeffrey:

In the article… yeah, there’s a line in the article where they basically are saying these big tech companies would rather just pay fines than bother imposing privacy protections. It says, “the cost of doing business companies would rather eat the fines imposed for privacy violations than go through the work of actually fixing them,” which is not surprising at all, but…

Jacob:

No. And I think I really was excited to do this episode today about this article because it kind of gave me a bit of a kick in the pants to like, be better about it, because in the United States we have pretty lax privacy laws because most of them are applied by state. So, if you’re in California, you’re almost on the GDPR, the General Data Protection Rights [Regulation]. Is that what it’s called?

Jeffrey:

Something along those lines. It’s the EU’s version of privacy protections. And then I was doing research… When doing research for this episode, you know, Ohio’s privacy laws are such that the companies have to comply with the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which creates a privacy framework, but on a national level that’s voluntary. It’s just, “we suggest that you do these, adopt this privacy framework, but we’re not going to make you.”

Jacob:

Oh, and what’s it called a “toothless tiger”? No, that’s a “paper tiger”… a toothless uh… they just have no teeth. I mean they don’t enforce anything. They have nothing.

Jeffrey:

Not… yeah, not on a national level.

Jacob:

Yeah. So they have no way… you know, the EU will bring lawsuits against Google. They will do that. That’s not happening here in the United States because Google is a massive multi billion dollar organization. They create Millions of jobs for our economy. So…

Jeffrey:

I guess.

Jacob:

They do!

Jeffrey:

I mean, yeah, but I don’t know that that’s a good reason not to enforce privacy rules against them.

Jacob: 

Exactly. So let’s wind back: you got some questions prepared. Let’s go through some of those things and then that will kind of get our listeners a little in tune to what’s going on with this, why was this article catching your eye/ catching my eye?

Jeffrey:

Sure. So, just first, if you want to go over what cookies are because that’s a big part of this. And we talked about it on our Introduction to Web Analytics episode, but just, you know, revisit it here for us. 

Jacob:

Yeah. So cookies are…  And I’m actually going to reuse the same analogy from that one, because it worked out really good. Cookies are ways that websites can track what you do on them, and large scale web services can track what you do from site to site to site. 

So like Facebook/ Meta, they use a tracking cookie. Google uses tracking cookies, all these things. So “cookie” makes it sound kind of cute when it’s really not. It’s a lot more like on a nature show, they will go out and they will tag an animal– so in the analogy before I said turtle, and I liked that one– because it’s really cool in nature shows when they put a little GPS tracking device on it, some creature that we don’t know a whole lot about.

And we learn all these great facts about their migration habits, where they go to breed, where they go to live, where they graze, all this stuff, which oceans they make it to. You get all this information by putting a little tracking thing on a turtle.

Jeffrey:

Yeahm, you see those sharks that, or whatever, and you’ll look at the map of where they’ve traveled and it’s like, literally around the entire world. It’s pretty crazy.

Jacob:

Yes. That is a physical representation of a cookie. So, when you visit a website and you consent to having cookies on you, you are that shark, you are that turtle on that website. And some cookies go beyond the website itself. Facebook/ Meta is one that is really aggressive on this one. I specifically like to use Firefox in general– I know I’m one of those like 0.05% of the population here– but they have a great thing called Facebook container– it’s like a plugin that comes in with Firefox– and it will pop up in my web browser every time it knows that this website is participating in that Facebook cookie tracking experience, and it will let me know that it blocked it. So I’m not being…I’m not a turtle for Facebook, for instance. 

And so, that is where a lot of the privacy concern breaks down. What was brought up in the article that is so scary about this stuff is that there’s not a lot of regulation about how that data is stored, or how that is accessed, or how that is protected in the U.S. and in other countries around the world. You know, we’re talking about Europe and the United States, but we are not the majority of the world. 

And he brought up one very creepy example is like, let’s say you are a woman looking for abortion services in a state that does not have… that is illegal in your state to have that, can the government request access to information about your cookies that would reveal what you were doing? 

There is a possibility that this is a thing that they could do. They could use your personal experience of the internet and searching around and use that against you in a court of law. Or, you know, bad actors could use that to, I don’t know, blackmail people and do all this other stuff. 

And I’m usually a pretty like… Honestly, I’m easily duped and gullible, from time to time, when it comes to these kinds of scams, so when I read that in the article, I was like, “oh yeah, it could do that! Oh, that’s creepy!” And I honestly just didn’t think about it. I mean, part of it is my privilege being a white man in the world, and not thinking about certain elements of like, that of the government being out to get me. But you know, reading that there right then I was just like, “oh my God, how can I be so blind to this?” So this is one of the reasons I wanted to talk…

Jeffrey:

Yeah. ‘Cause it, well… it goes along in the background. I mean, up until recently, they didn’t even prompt you to accept cookies, they were just there.

Jacob:

Yeah. And I like to see it more and more on websites in the United States that do it. But, you know, again, it’s not enforced. It’s a toothless law. In many ways, it’s just kind of like the CAN-SPAM Act of the late ‘90’s, early 2000’s [2003]. I think it’s early 2000’s.

Jeffrey:

I don’t know what this is.

Jacob:

The CAN-SPAM Act? Oh, the CAN-SPAM Act essentially what it was, was… this is a perfect example of a completely toothless law that you get violated with all the time.

Have you got a spam email this week, Jeff, from someone you didn’t subscribe to? Well, that’s illegal in the United States, but no one enforces it. The CAN-SPAM Act basically said, you have to get the consent of the person to email them, or if you want to do direct communications with them, if they email you first, like fill out a form on your website, you are allowed to send them some communications.

Basically any service out there that does cold email is in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act. So if you do it on a mass scale. Like if I, as an individual, find your email or someone’s email, and then I individually email them a plain text email, which is like, “hey, I want to connect,” that is not a canned spam act violation. If I’m trying to sell you junk and basically spam you, that is a CAN-SPAM violation. 

Anyways, it’s just a classic example of a toothless law. I’ve never heard of anybody in the last decade having that law be enforced, in any way, shape, or form. So cookie consent is in that, in my mind, is kind of like that right now in the United States, there’s nobody really enforcing it. I do think webXray, one of their goals is to help organizations who do want to enforce it– and maybe lawyers and maybe non profits who want to try to make a better privacy focused world– enforce that, and that’s a good thing. 

So, I kind of got off on a tangent there with CAN-SPAM Act, so bring me back to the, bring me back to the line here, Jeff. Where should we go next?

Jeffrey:

Well, I was just thinking, when we were talking about examples of how it can be abused, or whatever, this… I don’t think this was in the article, but I heard– maybe it’s like an episode of This American Life or something– where they talked about something like this, where basically it was like an underage girl who had gotten pregnant and she searched, you know, for something about pregnancy online. And then she got… like Target would send her coupons for baby stuff in the mail. And that’s how her parents ended up finding out that she was pregnant, is by like, “why are you getting coupons for cribs from Target in the mail?” And it’s because some cookie tracked her when she searched for pregnancy stuff, and then sold that information to Target, and then Target was like, “oh, I bet we could get her to buy a crib.”

[I was pulling this from memory, for the full story please see this NYT Magazine Story]

So it’s like, it doesn’t always have to be malicious intent. You know, having all that data float all over the place can have weird repercussions, without anybody trying to do something malicious.

Jacob:

But yeah, they could find the purchasing pattern of that person leading up to– and their website search patterns that they’re mixing that up with– to basically determine that this person was going to probably have a baby. So they were on top of that. So, very creepy and it can happen today. And it’s a great example of do we want that to be a part of our world?

Jeffrey:

And then people will argue, incorrectly in my opinion, but they’ll be like, “if you’re not doing anything wrong, then why does it matter?” And it’s like, well, who decides what’s wrong? Like a couple of years ago, abortions weren’t illegal, and now that they are. So, stuff can change just because you’re not doing something “wrong,” doesn’t mean that someone else isn’t like, “I don’t like that you’re doing this. I’m going to use it against you.”

Jacob:

Yeah. I would say by and large, the legal system is not a moral system.

Jeffrey:

No, yeah, of course not.

Jacob:

The legal system is a rectification of damages. If you use the legal system as your moral guidepost… 

Jeffrey:

You’re probably a fascist? I mean…

Jacob:

Yeah, that’s not… That is not where you should get your moral guidelines from, is the law. The law is useful for damages and damages only. That’s really what it’s great for.

But, anyways let’s go back to one of your…I got, I got like five other questions here from you.

Jeffrey:

Yeah, I was interested, you know, to know… you tried to use webXray?

Jacob:

Yes, I did try to use it and it was difficult to use. They have some prebuilt prompts that were startling. I mean, you click on it and you see all the cookies and all the tracking that’s in there and it’s great. Did you go out and test it out yourself?

Jeffrey:

I did not yet.

Jacob:

You should, it’ll make you feel nervous. It feels like definitely one of those, “oh, this is what big brother looks like in the beginning.” That’s not good.

Jeffrey:

Yeah. So what was your experience with it? I mean, other than it being startling and somewhat difficult to use.

Jacob:

Well I think… I do work with some clients that use a lot of tracking cookies because it’s a part of their marketing efforts to reach out to a lot of their users. I mean, it’s just a part of doing your business. However, to see how they’re kind of… the companies that supply them aren’t necessarily the most trustworthy of organizations, Meta being a great example of that, Facebook.

So they will, you know, put a cookie in people’s websites and you want to know if your marketing campaign did good, right? That’s what you want as a company. You just want to know, “hey, I made an advertisement. I want people to come to my town, I’m using Facebook Pixel on my website, the Meta Pixel, so I can see which app they came from, is my digital campaign working really well? Great.”  In that regard, it’s totally fine. The creepy thing is then when you start realizing how many other places that Pixel is. So a user that came to your website through your campaign, you’re a part of an apparatus for that user to be tracked upon a bunch of other things now. Like, you’re facilitating a tagging process that goes beyond your website, beyond your campaign, beyond just your scope. And I think that was the thing that startled me the most.

Jeffrey:

And so you’re saying, using some of these cookies, like the Facebook Pixel or whatever, you got your little bit of information from it, which was, “is my campaign working?” But it stays with that person beyond just tracking them to your site, is what you’re saying.

Jacob:

Oh yeah, yeah. And I think it was a little startling, as a person who’s doing this all the time and knows how the game is played, it’s a little startling for someone, like in that article, to open up the big can of worms and say, “did you know it was this messy?”

Jeffrey:

Right. ‘Cause you of all people should have known it was pretty messy, but even you were shocked by it.

Jacob:

Yeah, it’s worse than I thought. I mean, I knew it was there, I knew it was bad, but I think it was the stewardship of it. You know, you do want to trust these people and what you need and what they can supply, you know, it’s very helpful for you. Like Google Analytics is a great example of that: It’s super helpful for businesses to have website analytics. It is. And Google has made strides with GA4, their latest version, to be more GDPR compliant. But what we don’t have is like… how should I say this, it’s like the Boeing situation: Boeing regulates itself with the FAA, Boeing cuts corners: that’s basically the story for the last year and a half with Boeing.

Jeffrey:

Yeah, well, I mean, they’ve been doing it for like a decade or more, but now all of that stuff is finally catching up with them because…

Jacob:

…people are dying.

Jeffrey:

Yeah, if you’re chasing profits over the actual quality of your product, eventually it’s going to screw you.

Jacob:

And I think…

Jeffrey:

I don’t think it’s screwed them enough, but we’ll see. 

Jacob:

Yeah, and it keeps getting worse. I mean, with NASA, for instance.

Jeffrey:

Yeah. The spaceship, the Starliner or whatever. And NASA is like, “um, I don’t think that we can even bring this back, like it’s leaking helium…” And then Boeing’s like, “no, no, it’s safe. It’s definitely safe. Trust us. We’re Boeing!” And NASA is like, “uh, no, we’re not going to.”

Jacob:

No, no, it’s a… I mean, that situation– and pardon my old-fashioned sexist line I’m about to say– but man, there’s not enough lipstick for that pig. There’s just not enough lipstick for that thing to make them save face at this point. Anyways, we’re not going to go out on that one, but that’s a great example. 

But the only reason that our eyes are on them is because this is a public damaging moment, that it’s really easy for the public to see. They cut corners, people died. They cut corners, we stranded some of the best people on the planet, which are astronauts. We just stranded them, basically, with their negligence, okay? Like, this is very public. 

The thing about this [the article] that was very startling to me was the lack of internal care at Google, when that guy was working there, the lack of oversight, because what is not happening with this is: nobody’s dying. Nobody’s dying from this. There might be psychological harm that occurs to individuals, on an individual basis, because of certain remarketing targeting, like that baby thing like “oh, we know you’re about to have a baby,” so it would be really bad if all of a sudden you went on the internet and you only saw baby stuff. That is creepy, but it happens on an individual basis. And not to wade into the wars of social justice here, but this is a social justice kind of issue where it becomes an incremental, dehumanization of people

Jeffrey:

Sure. Yeah. And then eventually, someday it’s going to catch up to all of us and it’s going to be like the Boeing thing where people might die.  I mean, take for example, like, I don’t know, a gay person in a non-gay-friendly country, you know?

Jacob:

Oh yeah, that could be true. It could be used against them. I don’t want to get out on the China train here, but that would be a good example of a totalitarian dictatorship that is controlling and monitoring everything that its people do.

I did want to ask, what do you think, Jeff, website companies like me should do about it? 

Jeffrey:

I mean, I don’t know, this is your area of expertise. We were talking before the episode: you said you put up your cookie, what’s it called? Like the…

Jacob:

Cookie consent?

Jeffrey:

Yeah, the cookie consent thing on your website today. And then you were saying how you might switch away from Google Analytics altogether, and use the GDPR compliant Plausible Analytics, which is from like, Sweden or something, or Switzerland… Where are they from?

Jacob:

I’ll double check, but I think it’s Switzerland. I’ll Google that right now, why not? But they are… let me go data privacy…let me find out where they are located…

Jeffrey:

Estonia!

Jacob:

I love Estonia. That can be a whole ‘nother episode. They are so… 

Jeffrey:

Kinda close, but not really.

Jacob:

They are so forward thinking about the digital world in Estonia, so Plausible Analytics is a good example of that.

So, I wanted to put it on you, in that question. You know, you’re an outside person coming into this space, it’d be interesting to hear a little bit more of your general reaction– and I can dive in about what we’re going to do too– but I’d love to hear a little bit more about your, like, what do you wish, if you’re a person who wants a website, what do you want to hear here? Because, I can be a nerd and I can go in and say we’re going to be cookie compliant, and we’re going to do these things… But like, what does a person that doesn’t do this all the time want to hear? 

Jeffrey:

I mean, I don’t know. I want to hear that cookies aren’t being traded around to different companies. Like, if I accept the cookies for one website, I don’t want those to somehow go to other websites that I don’t want anything to do with, you know?

Jacob:

Yeah. That’s fair.   

Jeffrey:

Until we started talking about this a few weeks ago, I didn’t even realize how leaky all that stuff is online, and how much it moves around. Like you said, it was startling to see the extent of it. 

Jacob:

Well, I think that’s a good segue to what I want to say in response to that. It’s like, that makes sense. You just kind of want it done easy, and easy to opt out when you want to. And then, as an advertiser or as a marketing person, you know, we should be guiding our clients away from doing that. 

Like, for instance, Plausible Analytics is a totally GDPR compliant analytics tool that I love, and I often use Plausible and Google Analytics together for clients, or with Google ads tracking, Google Tag Manager, that kind of stuff that’s even more invasive, more cookies, more Pixels, more things.

So it would be smart for marketers to choose a way to adopt a cookie-less future, if possible. And Plausible is a good example of that. They do not use cookies. They use something… they call it “salt,” which is, I thought, kind of funny cause you got sweet and sticky over there, and we’ve got salt over here. And salt uses your IP address mixed with your browser information and device information to create a temporary kind of token for your user on the website. And when you leave the website, the salt basically goes away. It’s washed away.

Jeffrey:

Yeah. It doesn’t stick with you.

Jacob:

Right. And so, I think in a certain way, it’ll be kind of like going old school if I wanted to do that. So like the first company I was at, they actually had a proprietary tracking software that used cookies. They have like their own kind of Google Analytics thing. But to get everything to work with that, they had to use UTM– are these marketing tracking URLs that they would put in campaigns, and then when that link was clicked, it would come here and it would ping that service, that analytic service, to tell people where it came from– and I think that’s really the way that’s going to have to go. If you want to become a fully privacy compliant service, you’re going to need to find cookie-less tracking services, and then when you want to advertise elsewhere in the world, you need to set up tracking URLs that, again, are cookie-less.

Because really what Meta does is making sure that, like, when they come to the site, you can put tracking on there to tell them what is the goal on your website that you wanted them to reach. So they can know that if your ad was clicked on Instagram, they went to that website and the goal of the campaign was to make it to the checkout page or something. The Pixel lets you confirm that goal, but then all of a sudden you’re tagging your customer like a turtle for everyone on the Facebook-end to use for their own advertising gains, as like a habit forming… 

So taking that away from the advertisers, you would then have to piecemeal your campaigns together at this point. You could use the Meta, their analytics dashboard, to know when they were on Meta, this ad was seen by this many people and was clicked this many times. Then you would have to set up a tracking URL, and use something like Plausible that would then complete that journey to be like, “okay, on the Plausible side, I see this many people come through that tracking URL, and these people did X.” And then you would have to basically take two ends of it and plug it together yourself rather than having one service that does it all for you. It’s taking some of the convenience out of it, but…

Jeffrey:

Well, couldn’t just the Meta– you know, it can do all that stuff for you and then just like, get rid of the Pixel thing? Like, you know how  Plausible it goes away at the end, their trackers? Couldn’t that just be the solution? Just make companies not save that stuff?

Jacob:

Yeah, I mean, that would be the ultimate solution would be to force them to not have invasive, sticky cookies, basically.

Jeffrey:

You just don’t think that’s likely.

Jacob:

No, well, it’s really not likely because, I mean, it wasn’t that long ago, Mark Zuckerberg was in front of Congress, and what did Congress get him to do?

Jeffrey:

Nothing. 

Jacob:

Basically, it’s the same old crap every time, and every time he’ll put some lip service on it, they’ll get somebody on a team, and they’re all gonna go blah, blah, blah, blah, blah… They’ll go through the motions and nothing really happens.

Jeffrey:

Yeah. I mean, I was reading in the article, they said, they got Google, their privacy chief left the company, or was fired or something, and Google was like, “we’re just not going to have a privacy chief anymore. Like, we’re not going to replace that position,” and it’s like, what!?

Jacob:

What are we supposed to do with that as everyday people? And I think this is where digital marketing people like myself have to step up to the plate. It’s kind of like that moment when… it’s kind of like recycling, you know? When recycling was taking off when we were kids. Do you remember that? And everyone was getting their recycling bins and people were very adamant about that. And more and more people do that more and more… And even when I had my first apartment in the city of Cincinnati, there was not a recycling bin at my apartment.

Jeffrey:

Yeah, I don’t have one at my apartment. And so I have to take my recycling to the county recycling center up on Taft.

Jacob:

Just so our listeners know Jeff’s in Kentucky.

Jeffrey:

I’m in Kentucky.

Jacob:

I love Kentucky, but I’m…

Jeffrey:

It’s a different rules over here, and they do not require… Cincinnati requires recycling for all the buildings now, but they didn’t used to, and Kentucky still doesn’t. So…

Jacob:

And that is where we’re at right now. The initial phase of privacy is kind of like where you’re at in Kentucky with recycling: if you don’t go ahead and do it yourself and make the extra effort, the government’s not going to move to help you. In Cincinnati, they did move and now everybody, every residence in the city of Cincinnati, they get recycling bins from the city to help facilitate this process.

But this is kind of like what I think digital marketing agencies like myself need to do, is we need to step up to the plate. We need to basically hold ourselves accountable to the GDPR level of compliance, whether we’re enforced or not, because if we all start doing it together, when the day comes– because there will be a day just like Boeing–  there will be a day when this goes off the rails and if you were always there with your clients, protecting them, protecting their users as well, and you were not a part of that chaos, you will be protected. 

I really think after reading this article and having… you know, it was really funny reading that article, and like the next thing I read that day was this Boeing Starliner mayhem, right? And it really just clicked in my head to be like, “oh, oh, Google is going to be Boeing if they’re not going to pay attention to this, they’re going to be the next Boeing.” I don’t know what it looks like for privacy to go off the rails and have  a moment like Boeing did– with their airlines, like doors flying off or people dying from plane crashes– I don’t know what the equivalent of that will be for Google, or for Facebook or Meta, but the moment’s going to come. They’re getting more and more laxed. No one is regulating it. I think that’s my answer right now, is that I’m just going to push all my clients in the next couple of weeks and months to be GDPR compliant with me and say, time to join the bandwagon. And if I can…

Jeffrey:

Well, like you said, it’s in their best interest, in the long term. So I mean, it’s a good thing to do for your clients, as you want to be protecting them even if it means from themselves sometimes.

Jacob:

And I would feel that if you were in the digital marketing world, like I was 12 years ago, or older, and you’ve made it this long, probably the reason you’ve made it this long is because you’ve been a classic white-hat SEO person. And white-hat/ black-hat is like a reference to the old cowboys in the West. Have you heard this white-hat/ black-hat?

Jeffrey:

Yeah. White-hat/ black-hat: white-hat hacker, black-hat hacker. Yeah, I’ve heard it.

Jacob:

So white-hat SEO was basically an ethical stance to take on how to show up better in search engines, how to do websites properly. And almost every single white-hat technique has been backed by Google over that time, and if you just kept doing it that way and you didn’t get into the idea of doing paid links, and you didn’t get out of the idea of doing these like link farms, or these horrible listings and all these things… and there was times over the last 10, 12 years that some of those ideas were very attractive as easy wins, and if you’re still in business today, it’s probably because you never did that unethical crap. So keep doing what you’re doing. And then for anyone listening, I think that’s the way you have to be: you’re going to have to hold your own ethical standards because the government is not going to be holding up your pants.

Jeffrey:

Unless you live in Europe.

Jacob:

Unless you live in Europe then they will make you, and they will actually enforce it. So Jeff, any other thoughts?

Jeffrey:

Well, no, no. I think this was a really interesting one. Yeah, we’ll link to the article. Yeah, and a few of the other things that we mentioned today we’ll be linking to as well.  

So Jacob, you said it was all doom and gloom; hopefully a tool like webXray, giving the power to regulators or nonprofits or lawyers or whatever to start going after these questionable privacy tactics, hopefully that will shift the needle a little bit. So I don’t think it’s all doom and gloom right now, but it’s definitely an eye opening article. 

Jacob:

Oh, absolutely. I really appreciate it. And I have to say, as a person who never takes care of themselves as much as they should, I was very reluctant to read this article when you shared it with me, because I was like, “you are not going to give me homework!” But I’m very glad that I did. And I think it gave me the kick in the pants to be like, “okay, it is time to stop being gray about this privacy stuff. I think it’s time to just pull up my big-boy pants and actually do the ethical work that I think is needed here.”

Maybe I shouldn’t say the word big boy pants. That’s not a great picture. It makes me sound like I’m Mickey Mouse. Got my suspenders, my big gloves…

Jeffrey:

It’s because you have kids.

Jacob:

That’s true. 

Jeffrey:

It’s kid-speak.

All right. Well, we will catch you guys next week. I don’t know what the topic is going to be yet, but we’ll have something. 

Jacob:

As we always do. Thanks, Jeff!

Jeffrey:

As we always do… Thanks, Jacob!