WEBVTT

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I don't know why, but I'm continually amazed to think

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that two and a half billion of us around the world

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are connected to each other through the Internet

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and that at any point in time

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more than 30 percent of the world's population

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can go online to learn, to create and to share.

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And the amount of time each of us is spending doing all of this

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is also continuing to go grow.

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A recent study showed

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that the young generation alone

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is spending over eight hours a day online.

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As the parent of a nine-year-old girl,

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that number seems awfully low.

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(Laughter)

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But just as the Internet has opened up the world for each and every one of us,

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it has also opened up each and every one of us to the world.

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And increasingly, the price we're being asked to pay

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for all of this connectedness

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is our privacy.

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Today, what many of us would love to believe

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is that the Internet is a private place; it's not.

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And with every click of the mouse and every touch of the screen,

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we are like Hansel and Gretel

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leaving breadcrumbs of our personal information

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everywhere we travel through the digital woods.

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We are leaving our birthdays, our places of residence,

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our interests and preferences,

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our relationships,

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our financial histories, and on and on it goes.

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Now don't get me wrong,

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I'm not for one minute suggesting that sharing data is a bad thing.

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In fact, when I know the data that's being shared

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and I'm asked explicitly for my consent,

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I want some sites to understand my habits.

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It helps them suggest books for me to read

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or movies for my family to watch

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or friends for us to connect with.

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But when I don't know and when I haven't been asked,

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that's when the problem arises.

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It's a phenomenon on the Internet today

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called behavioral tracking,

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and it is very big business.

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In fact, there's an entire industry formed

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around following us through the digital woods

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and compiling a profile on each of us.

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And when all of that data is held,

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they can do almost whatever they want with it.

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This is an area today that has very few regulations

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and even fewer rules.

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Except for some of the recent announcements here in the United States and in Europe,

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it's an area of consumer protection that's almost entirely naked.

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So let me expose this lurking industry a little bit further.

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The visualization you see forming behind me is called Collusion

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and it's an experimental browser add-on

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that you can install in your Firefox browser

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that helps you see where your Web data is going and who's tracking you.

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The red dots you see up there

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are sites that are behavioral tracking

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that I have not navigated to, but are following me.

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The blue dots are the sites that I've actually navigated directly to.

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And the gray dots are sites that are also tracking me,

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but I have no idea who they are.

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All of them are connected, as you can see,

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to form a picture of me on the Web.

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And this is my profile.

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So let me go from an example to something very specific and personal.

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I installed Collusion in my own laptop two weeks ago

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and I let it follow me around for what was a pretty typical day.

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Now like most of you,

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I actually start my day going online and checking email.

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I then go to a news site, look for some headlines.

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And in this particular case I happened to like one of them

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on the merits of music literacy in schools

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and I shared it over a social network.

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Our daughter then joined us at the breakfast table,

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and I asked her, "Is there an emphasis on music literacy in your school?"

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And she, of course, naturally as a nine-year-old,

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looked at me and said quizzically, "What's literacy?"

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So I sent her online, of course, to look it up.

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Now let me stop here.

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We are not even two bites into breakfast

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and there are already nearly 25 sites that are tracking me.

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I have navigated to a total of four.

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So let me fast-forward through the rest of my day.

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I go to work, I check email,

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I log onto a few more social sites, I blog,

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I check more news reports, I share some of those news reports,

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I go look at some videos,

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pretty typical day -- in this case, actually fairly pedantic --

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and at the end of the day, as my day winds down,

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look at my profile.

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The red dots have exploded.

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The gray dots have grown exponentially.

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All in all, there's over 150 sites

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that are now tracking my personal information,

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most all of them without my consent.

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I look at this picture and it freaks me out.

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This is nothing. I am being stalked across the Web.

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And why is this happening?

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Pretty simple -- it's huge business.

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The revenue of the top handful of companies in this space

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is over 39 billion dollars today.

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And as adults, we're certainly not alone.

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At the same time I installed my own Collusion profile,

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I installed one for my daughter.

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And on one single Saturday morning, over two hours on the Internet,

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here's her Collusion profile.

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This is a nine-year-old girl

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navigating to principally children's sites.

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I move from this, from freaked out to enraged.

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This is no longer me being a tech pioneer or a privacy advocate;

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this is me being a parent.

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Imagine in the physical world

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if somebody followed our children around with a camera and a notebook

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and recorded their every movement.

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I can tell you, there isn't a person in this room that would sit idly by.

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We'd take action. It may not be good action, but we would take action.

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(Laughter)

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We can't sit idly by here either.

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This is happening today.

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Privacy is not an option,

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and it shouldn't be the price we accept

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for just getting on the Internet.

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Our voices matter and our actions matter even more.

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Today we've launched Collusion.

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You can download it, install it in Firefox,

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to see who is tracking you across the Web

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and following you through the digital woods.

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Going forward, all of our voices need to be heard.

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Because what we don't know can actually hurt us.

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Because the memory of the Internet is forever.

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We are being watched.

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It's now time for us to watch the watchers.

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Thank you.

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(Applause)