Is that ok for you? Yeah, it looks like it's working great. Ok, let's get into this. So um thank you so much for having me, Anna and congratulations on all of this. I think what you're doing is amazing.Um I'll make this full screen so I won't be able to see the chat. So Anna, maybe you can jump in if there's any questions that I need to address. I might have time for questions. I'll do my very best. So I will set this to present and hopefully it will all work. Just jump in if you can't see anything or if anything goes wrong. Interrupt me. Great. So my name is Emerald De Leo. I'm a privacy and data ethics expert. I'm also a lawyer lecturer and board member and I not so long ago gave a TED X talk. So today I will talk to you with very few slides. I want to keep this quite conversational and personal and I believe that technology is really undermining us as people, it should be supporting us and we all want a bright future alongside technology. But from recent events such as Cambridge Analytica, the mental health crisis and the proliferation of hate speech that we've seen online.

It's clear that laws such as the GDPR, even though they're very, very, very good and definitely part of the solution, they're just not enough to safeguard the things that we care about the most. So today is not so much about explaining the law to you. It's more to give you some food for thought about where we are and where we need to go and how we can demand change from the companies that have made these problems that I just highlighted possible. Now, before delving into this further, um I wanted to cover briefly with you why I'm covering this topic because I think your why is super important in my early twenties, I almost died from an eating disorder having grown up in times of heroin chic in the nineties. And of course, in the early two thousands, there was a very, very, very thin beauty standard and particularly for women and it was pervasive and back then it was very much traditional media, but I took it all in thin was perfect and the narrative back then was really enough to be damaging.

And I know I'm not alone in this. Um I'm long recovered now thankfully, but back then, it was a very serious and life threatening situation to be in now with this history and my knowledge of how advertising technology works, particularly on social media to keep you hooked. It made me think about how difficult it is to grow up now and to stay mentally well online and bearing in mind that all of these technologies are designed not just with you in mind, but more so with um for profit for the advertisers. So if you are on social media, it's quite possible you get a notification every two minutes of another perfect body of a perfect person on a perfect beach. Well, maybe not during a pandemic, but you know where I'm coming from. So during this talk, I'll use the term free services or free internet services. And what I mean by that is any service that you use online um such as social media, certain publishers and search engines that make their money from ads as opposed to from charging their users. Now, these services are having a terrible effect on our mental health, our relationships and on society as a whole. And I will also offer some ways in which we might fix. This services are built on your personal data. They make money from knowing what you're going to do next. Think next and what next? They keep you online to extract more data from you and make their predictions more accurate and therefore more valuable to their customers.

The advertisers, you keep coming back to see if you have another like and not just you me me as well or another friend request. So you get a little dopamine hit and you feel good for that split second as the classic social validation feedback loop, they exploit our innate human vulnerabilities and we waste our time distracted from what we truly care about. Now, we should be demanding that these services actually support our goals and not hijack us by targeted our innate human weaknesses. Now, as the technology behind this is actually reasonably complex, um I really like to use a very relatable example. We all shop for shoes. I don't think this is, um, and I think the shoe shopping example does a really great job of explaining to you what is actually happening. So I wanted you to think about the last time you went into a physical store to buy a pair of shoes. Um, you don't want to deal with the hassle of buying online and, um, you just go into the shop to buy them. So you find a pair, you like you go to the till you pay for them and that's the end of the exchange between you and the shop owner. Um, this is the traditional way of buying goods and services.

A similar thing happens when you get somebody to fix your computer or you know, fix your car and they provide a service, they do a good job, you're happy they get paid. That's the end. But these are not the most common exchanges we have nowadays. Now, if we do that example again, but we apply the most commonly used business model of the internet. Um So once again, you're in need of a pair of shoes and you head into a physical shop to buy them. But so you go in, you see loads of shoes, you like, you pick a few pairs out and with the help of the lovely sales assistant and then you go to the till but you find that there is no till. So you're really confused. So you look at the sales assistant for help and they kind of look at you like you're crazy because they go, the shoes are free. You don't have to pay for them. All we want to do in return for the shoes is to put a tracking bracelet on your ankle that you can't take off. So that when you leave the shop, we know exactly where you go and who your friends are, how much time you spend in each location where you work, where you go to school, where you live.

We'd also like to keep track of what sites you visit online and we'll find a few data brokers that might sell us. Oh, sorry guys. Are we still? Ok, audio wise, just checking. Hang on. Are we still? Ok, audio wise. Can you just ask me in the chat? Anyone? I'm gonna continue and hope for the best. Ok. So basically they go to a data broker from which they'll buy some more data about you. Um, such as your spending habits, your political views, your sexual preferences and perhaps even some of your recent financial transactions and the shoe shop owner will then take that really accurate profile of you and sell it to the highest bidder who will be able to show you ads for anything and everything including.

But of course, in classic legal language, never ever limited to more events, shoes and of course, as we've seen recently, um, selling adverts to important political campaigns and referenda, but the shoes are free. No, naturally, that would be really weird, right? Except we find this behavior completely acceptable online. As long as the services that we are being offered are free. This makes me wonder how aware are we of what actually goes on online and if we are aware, why are we ok with this? Now, in addition to the tracking, I think it's really important to highlight the amount of time we actually spend on these services, right? Because time is our most valuable commodity and these systems are designed to make us stay online. Um, they are offered by some of the most profitable internet businesses of the world. Now, on average, an internet user online spends about 6.5 hours a day online. Um, and that's about 100 days per year, that's a lot. But if we extend that average across the entire internet user base of 4.4 billion people globally, we'll learn that humanity will actually spend a collective total of 1.2 billion years online per year. It matters what we do with those hours, those days and those collective years now, this data is based on 2019. So I imagine it's even more now, particularly with the pandemic. But imagine what we could achieve together with 1.2 billion years.

I mean, do we want to be remembered by future generations as the people who face tuned or the people who were so easy to manipulate because they were so distracted or the people who destroy the social fabric because they prefer to pay with their privacy and with cash or the people who chose profiling over a fair and transparent exchange as we saw in that second shoe shop example, I really don't believe that that is who we truly are.

Now. Let's talk about incentives because the famous computer scientist Jon Laer speaks frequently about the incentive problems of the world of free internet services and he is so right. We are facing an incentive dilemma. I mean, during the traditional shopping experience, there's an incentive for the shop owner to provide you with an item at a cost you're willing to pay. If the service isn't up to scratch, you're not going to come back. So there's an incentive for them to do a good job at serving you. Now, in that exchange, it's just two parties, right? You and the shop owner, the exchange that happens on most free internet services is that there's a third party involved, actually, hundreds and sometimes even thousands of third parties. And the exchange of money happens between the free service and the advertiser. You, the user, you're not the customer, you're just an entity that's worth money. When data is extracted from you and you're then targeted with ads. The advertisers are the customers and we now know that ads are not always innocent, it's not that jumper you like that is following you around the internet. It's not just, you know, an ad for a fitness class near you.

It can get really dark really quickly when the ad doesn't reflect the truth and has a political angle to it. Or if it spreads hate speech in areas already prone to conflict or when the ad targets vulnerable people with dangerous weight loss supplements and plastic surgery. The thing to look at here as always is where does the exchange of money happen? The advertisers pay the free services for their product, which essentially is an accurate profile of you and how you're going to behave. So this means that there's an incentive for the free services to give them a product that's worth paying for, which means gathering as much information about you as possible, keeping you online as long as possible and making sure you give up as much of your personal data as possible.

So where does that leave us? The users? Well, in many cases, it's leaving us really distracted, anxious, depressed, lonely, manipulated and exploited. And there's thousands of examples we could look at here. But let's just because I really care about everybody's time and I always want to be respectful of time. Let's just look at the effects of the constant disruptions and notifications which are really important. If we link that back to that 1.2 billion years in a 2013 study, it was actually found that the mere presence of a smartphone can disrupt the connection between two people having a negative effect on closeness, the connection you have together and conversation quality. In another study from 2017, from the University of Chicago. It was found that the mere presence of your phone, even when it's turned off can reduce your cognitive capacity and by taxing the resources of both your working memory capacity as well as your fluid intelligence. Now, I think we can all be clear as women in tech that we want technology to support human flourishing. But instead in many cases, it's eroding our relationships and it's making us less smart. Now, how do we go about fixing all of this? Because we need to think about the world we want to live in, right?

Um I personally believe that there's two components to the solution we saw earlier that we appear to be absolutely fine with the surveillance we experience on the internet, as long as the services we are being offered are free. This brings me brings me to the first part of the solution. When a service you love starts offering a paid for advertising free version of that service if you can pay for it because we can't keep pointing the finger at Big Tech. If we aren't willing to pay them for the really valuable services they provide us with, we must show companies that there's money to be made from their services using a traditional model where the user pays for the service without the need for a third party advertiser. We can't have it both ways. You know, these services are offered by for profit organizations and the money needs to come from somewhere. We need to show companies that we're willing to pay because only that way does the incentive change, we go from being the user to becoming the customer again. The second part of course is a corporate responsibility. I am in no way going to deny that a lot of stuff went badly wrong in some of the bigger tech companies. Recently, from a privacy perspective and an ethical perspective, we need to create ethical technology of which privacy friendliness is a vital component.

But we do need to think differently because it's not just about pointing the finger to a privacy policy or to more control over your data anymore. You know, according to a study which is actually really old. It dates back to 2008. It was found that the average person would need to spend 76 working days just to read all the privacy policies. They are subject to, I imagine it's a lot more today. But to put that into perspective, that's about three years worth of holiday time for the average worker just nonstop reading privacy policies. Nobody has time for this. We need to build technology that takes that into account. Technology should be designed in line with the expectations of the user.

No more surprise tracking and saying, oh, it was in our privacy policy. You know, we also need to reduce distractions and we as founders of companies need to be daring and we need to charge for our offerings. We need to create tech that is so good that people believe it's worth paying for the consequences really have gotten too severe. Now, we need to take action companies and customers have to work together for change because, you know, we are really more distracted, depressed and lonely than we've ever been. And it's keeping us from achieving our full potential. So we should build and spend money on technology that serves us as humans so that we can ensure that we spend the limited time that we do have here on the things we really care about. So I really hope this gave you some food for thought. Thank you so much for having me and enjoy the rest of the conference. Oh, it might be worth mentioning that if you're looking for me, you can find me online. Yeah, you can connect

with Emerald. Yeah, I mean, after what you mentioned about the um I

know it's ironic but it's ok. Well,

you know, it's nowadays for some reason, sometimes it may also look weird if you're not online at all. Right? If I cannot find anything about you, on the other hand, you can't control the information that you are sending out there. When you create your linkedin profile, it's up to you what you say out there, right? But you can mention 12 things. But what I really loved about your talk, the point that you said there is no free stuff. Why is it free? If you have to pay idea, I would need to pay. Why like your comparison with the shoes. So if you can pay for an app, pay for it, right? Otherwise you pay the private data. So and you probably don't, don't. That is much more

expensive. No, it's so true. But I also just want to say, you know, it's not that social media is bad. It's actually been shown, you know, there was research on social media being depressing. Um That's only true if you use it too much, it's not depressing by default. You know what I mean? You know, the poison is in the dose, it always is,

it's about the balance. You know, you can set up a timer like, OK, I want 30 minutes per day to spend on social media. And, but again, now, social media, thanks a lot Emeril.