WEBVTT

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Hi. This is my mobile phone.

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A mobile phone can change your life,

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and a mobile phone gives you individual freedom.

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With a mobile phone,

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you can shoot a crime against humanity in Syria.

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With a mobile phone,

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you can tweet a message

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and start a protest in Egypt.

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And with a mobile phone,

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you can record a song, load it up to

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SoundCloud and become famous.

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All this is possible with your mobile phone.

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I'm a child of 1984,

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and I live in the city of Berlin.

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Let's go back to that time, to this city.

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Here you can see

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how hundreds of thousands of people

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stood up and protested for change.

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This is autumn 1989,

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and imagine that all those people standing up

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and protesting for change had a

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mobile phone in their pocket.

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Who in the room has a mobile phone with you?

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Hold it up.

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Hold your phones up, hold your phones up!

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Hold it up. An Android, a Blackberry, wow.

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That's a lot. Almost everybody today has a mobile phone.

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But today I will talk about me and my mobile phone,

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and how it changed my life.

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And I will talk about this.

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These are 35,830 lines of information.

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Raw data.

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And why are these informations there?

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Because in the summer of 2006,

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the E.U. Commission tabled a directive.

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This directive [is] called Data Retention Directive.

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This directive says that each phone company in Europe,

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each Internet service company all over Europe,

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has to store a wide range of information about the users.

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Who calls whom? Who sends whom an email?

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Who sends whom a text message?

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And if you use your mobile phone, where you are.

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All this information is stored for at least six months,

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up to two years by your phone company

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or your Internet service provider.

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And all over Europe, people stood up and said,

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"We don't want this."

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They said, we don't want this data retention.

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We want self-determination in the digital age,

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and we don't want that phone companies and Internet companies

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have to store all this information about us.

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They were lawyers, journalists, priests,

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they all said: "We don't want this."

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And here you can see, like 10 thousands of people

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went out on the streets of Berlin and said,

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"Freedom, not fear."

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And some even said, this would be Stasi 2.0.

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Stasi was the secret police in East Germany.

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And I also ask myself, does it really work?

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Can they really store all this information about us?

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Every time I use my mobile phone?

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So I asked my phone company, Deutsche Telekom,

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which was at that time the largest phone company in Germany,

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and I asked them, please,

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send me all the information you have stored about me.

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And I asked them once, and I asked them again,

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and I got no real answer. It was only blah blah answers.

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But then I said, I want to have this information,

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because this is my life you are protocoling.

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So I decided to start a lawsuit against them,

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because I wanted to have this information.

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But Deutsche Telekom said, no,

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we will not give you this information.

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So at the end, I had a settlement with them.

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I'll put down the lawsuit

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and they will send me all the information I ask for.

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Because in the mean time,

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the German Constitutional Court ruled

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that the implementation of this E.U. directive

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into German law was unconstitutional.

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So I got this ugly brown envelope

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with a C.D. inside.

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And on the C.D., this was on.

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Thirty-five thousand eight hundred thirty lines of information.

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At first I saw it, and I said, okay,

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it's a huge file. Okay.

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But then after a while I realized,

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this is my life.

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This is six months of my life,

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into this file.

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So I was a little bit skeptical, what should I do with it?

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Because you can see where I am,

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where I sleep at night,

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what I am doing.

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But then I said, I want to go out with this information.

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I want to make them public.

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Because I want to show the people what does data retention mean.

NOTE Paragraph

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So together with Zeit Online and Open Data City, I did this.

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This is a visualization of six months of my life.

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You can zoom in and zoom out,

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you can wind back and fast forward.

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You can see every step I take.

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And you can even see

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how I go from Frankfurt by train

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to Cologne, and how often I call in between.

NOTE Paragraph

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All this is possible with this information.

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That's a little bit scary.

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But it is not only about me.

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It's about all of us.

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First, it's only like, I call my wife and she calls me,

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and we talk to each other a couple of times.

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And then there are some friends calling me,

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and they call each other.

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And after a while you are calling you,

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and you are calling you, and you have this great

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communication network.

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But you can see how your people are communicating with each other,

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what times they call each other, when they go to bed.

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You can see all of this.

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You can see the hubs, like who are the leaders in the group.

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If you have access to this information,

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you can see what your society is doing.

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If you have access to this information,

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you can control your society.

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This is a blueprint for countries like China and Iran.

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This is a blueprint how to survey your society,

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because you know who talks to whom,

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who sends whom an email, all this is possible

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if you have access to this information.

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And this information is stored for at least six months

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in Europe, up to two years.

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Like I said at the beginning,

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imagine that all those people on the streets of Berlin

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in autumn of 1989

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had a mobile phone in their pocket.

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And the Stasi would have known who took part at this protest,

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and if the Stasi would have known

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who are the leaders behind it,

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this may never have happened.

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The fall of the Berlin Wall would maybe not [have been] there.

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And in the aftermath, also not the fall of the Iron Curtain.

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Because today, state agencies and companies

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want to store as much information as they can get about us,

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online and offline.

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They want to have the possibility to track our lives,

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and they want to store them for all time.

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But self-determination and living in the digital age

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is no contradiction.

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But you have to fight for your self-determination today.

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You have to fight for it every day.

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So, when you go home,

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tell your friends

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that privacy is a value of the 21st century,

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and it's not outdated.

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When you go home, tell your representative

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only because companies and state agencies have the possibility

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to store certain information, they don't have to do it.

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And if you don't believe me,

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ask your phone company what information they store about you.

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So, in the future, every time you use your mobile phone,

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let it be a reminder to you

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that you have to fight for self-determination in the digital age.

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Thank you.

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(Applause)