Bill Thompson

But if you're downloading a free app, it's because you are the product.

They either want to see how you type.

They want to see what you're saying.

They want to.

see how you're thinking about things they want to understand your political biases they want to look at your photos and this isn't because they're a deep-seated nation-state actor they can become that but it's because they're trying to build the best products because the big money is in ai that's where the biggest money is so anytime you're doing any of these things and it's just been obvious to me from the on not from the onset but pretty close to the onset that um

There you go.

So they view – and they can say they don't.

And maybe if someone from there catches this podcast, which they well could, they might put out a statement saying that's not what they're doing.

But I'm telling you as a person who has done media forensics, who has done computer network operations, and who has trained artificial intelligence models, that is precisely what they are doing.

Well, Android will do the same things and Google will do the same things.

It's just that I can root my phone or I can install a custom operating system like Graphene or something like that, which I'm not doing right now.

I had to make a sacrifice when I started my company, Spartan Forge.

And the sacrifice was I had to be the face of this product.

And so I never had a social media until I started the company.

And I didn't upload things to the cloud until I started this company.

And it became just like, I have to sell a product.

And I'm actually selling a product, not people's data or people's photos.

I have to sell this product.

People often don't know who is the company or who is the organizing principle and what do they care about in the company.

And I just made that trade and said, I'm going to have to become a public person and start putting things out there.