Welcome!

Good morning, everybody. I was on with Jim Polito this morning and we talked about the Federal government buying data on US citizens that they got from spyware apps. Programmers, assumptions, and flawed logic of Self-driving cars. Also, Chinese spies, Bytedance, Tencent, and Huawei vs the Trump admin. Here we go with Jim.

For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com

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Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

[00:00:00] Craig Peterson: Yeah. And that's been a trip that the feds have been using for a very long time. Now are basically almost since it became illegal. They go to data aggregators and they buy whatever they can. Good morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here. And that was me on with Mr. Jim Polito. We got into these hundreds of apps and it looks like there is a spy.

Software on them that guess who the number one customer or appears to be? Yes, indeed. The federal guy. So we went into that a little bit. We got into this whole problem now that has been disclosed by AAA with these self-driving driver assist systems that have been steering people at full highway speed into the back of police cars into the back of fire trucks.

[00:01:00] Imagine how bad that is. I've been on an accident scene where someone went full force right into the back of a firetruck before. We also got into the latest on this whole China dispute with we chat and Tik Tok. So here we go with Jim,

Jim Polito: One of the most popular guests on the show. It is our tech talk guru and good friend, Craig Peterson. Good morning, sir.

Craig Peterson: Hey, good morning, Mr. Jim.

Jim Polito: Nice to hear your voice. Okay. I want to get into Tik Tok and, uh, some of the other stuff and self-driving cars, but I want to start with this. Hold on, everybody. All of those apps on my smartphone, are you saying that uncle Sam is watching me through those apps?

Because I got page after page of them.

[00:02:00] Craig Peterson: Well, first of all, the best rule, in general, is to delete apps you're not using right now. Now on your iPhone, it's going to automatically remove the app from your phone if you're not using it and it wants the space. So that's a handy thing, but just rule number one, remove it.

Number two. You know this, I think already, Jim. It's illegal for the federal government to track its citizens unless you're part of the Trump campaign, right?

Jim Polito: Wait a minute. Yeah. Define illegal because you know, like a Carter page and a lot of other people would, uh, would really like to have a talk with you about that.

You're right. Members of the Trump campaign. Uh, not only track but unmasked in large numbers.

Craig Peterson: Yeah. It's a scary thing. If the federal government comes after you and it's like this ton of weight, right. They only have what, a hundred thousand lawyers who know. And it's just little old you, losing your house.

[00:03:00] Right. So they're not allowed to track you. So what do you think they do? I spoke about this on my show. I don't remember as long as ten years ago. I had some of these information brokers on my radio show. And what they do is they take what's known as publicly sourced information, also called open source.

So they take stuff that they could find on the internet. They buy things like driver's license records from the state. The many States sell them to make a few extra bucks. I can't remember what the Commonwealth does if they do that or not.

Jim Polito: No, they don't. They don't anymore. They don't anymore. When I used to work in business, I used to be able to buy, uh, public records, license information, address, all that.

I used to be able to buy it. it stopped you couldn't after a while, they said, okay, we won't sell it anymore. But I used to pay dearly to get that information for marketing.

Craig Peterson: Right. It can be really handy. A stage going just North of the new house. I am sure you can off when you go and get registered here car, or driver's license.

[00:04:00] You can say, I don't want you to keep my social security number on file or my photograph on file. So the state doesn't keep it, but most States are not that way. So the government can't track you. So what do they do? They go to these data brokers because it's, he goes for them to buy all the information they want from a data broker.

And that comes to the point right now that we're talking about, and this is a report from the Wall Street Journal. And according to, uh, according to the Journal here, And the report that they released, at least one federal contractor puts in government tracking software in over 500 mobile applications.

[00:05:00] This is a company called Anomaly Six. They are paying application developers, mobile app developers here, to put just this little bit of code into their apps for tracking. So the app developer gets paid a few extra bucks. What the heck Anomaly Six gets all of the information that they possibly can from your phone.

In some cases, everything on the phone, particularly if you've rooted your phone and then guess who buys it from them.

Jim Polito: Ah, so, so the government can say we didn't do it. Well, we like this guy over here did, and we just bought it from him, but we didn't do it, Jim. Yeah.

We didn't do it to you, but it just so happens. There's this data miner, uh, had code like ours, and what would exactly what we were looking for. And then we bought it from them.

Craig Peterson: Yeah. And that's been a trick that the Feds have been using for a very long time. Now are basically almost since that became illegal. They go to data aggregators. And they buy whatever they can.

[00:06:00] And so the aggregators they'll get information from the phone company and just everywhere you possibly look. So any fact, the federal government is probably by doing this, getting more information on you than if they were tracking you personally. So it's very concerning. Yeah.

Jim Polito: Yeah.

Craig Peterson: Yeah. The Wall Street Journal said that they had this information, they have the reports, they know the company, but the company, of course, isn't talking.

And the wall street journal tried to figure out which apps it was in. They could not. So although the report is, this is going on and it makes a lot of sense that it would. W they're not like a thousand percent certain based on what I read in their article, but it's something that we've again, we've got to pull in some rains.

[00:07:00] Jim Polito: Yeah. But let's do that. Speaking of pulling in range, we're talking with Craig Peterson, our tech talk guru all around. Great guy. So tell me about these self-driving cars. Uh, I've got my self-driving car and it will keep me in the lane and I've had the opportunity to drive some of these vehicles with all these latest technologies.

Um, but if you come across a parked car, You may have a problem. What's this all about?

Craig Peterson: Oh yeah. And the poor occupants of that parked car are going to have even worse problems. There are a number of different systems that are being used for driver-assisted driving or computer-assisted driving right now.

So shelf driving not so much exists, but it's still there. They use the same types of technologies. Initially, they were using radar. To try and find stuff in front of them. A lot of them are using LIDAR, which is a very expensive technology, which again, again, is using lasers kind of like radar figure out where everything is, the distance for things moving, et cetera.

[00:08:00] Right. Um, and then you've got Tesla who says, I don't want any of that offensive stuff. I'm just gonna use cameras. So driving down the road, this is a test that was conducted by the AAA and driving down the road. They had a car parked in the lane. Now it was just a balloon car basically. Okay. Parked right there in the lane.

And every vehicle they tested that had any form of self-driving, rear-ended that just straight, dead on into, without even slowing down.

Jim Polito: Why, how so? We couldn't determine. Yeah. Wow.

Craig Peterson: Yeah. Here's how I'm. I'm sorry. Uh, you here's how here's why. Okay. These, the software again, have to make assumptions and to have written, I don't know, millions of lines of code over the years.

[00:09:00] I couldn't say I've made a lot of assumptions about things, and you're trying to cover all of the possibilities when you're writing this code, but apparently. Everybody seems to make the same mistake, which is if there is something that is fixed, in other words, it's not moving. The question is, is that part of the road?

Is that a sign that actually on the side of the road and the software universally appears to be making the decision that well, if it's not moving, it's part of the roadway and I'm probably getting a bit of a false signal here. So let's barrel on and they do. This is a really concerning thing. They have passed this information onto the national transportation safety board, and they've investigated several failed crashes with Tesla, which you have included crashing into parks, police cars, and fire trucks.

That seems to be a little bit about what spawned this whole AAA in bed investigation you're crashing head-on, into a parked fire truck. Now, as you know, I was in emergency medicine for 10 years. I was at a scene once and it was icy, icy, icy.

[00:10:00] It's the only time I've ever seen. A car went straight on into the back of a firetruck and that actually pushed it forward about 10 feet. Cause the guy was doing 80 miles an hour in a 65 zone. Yeah, this is very, very concerning. Again, everybody, you're supposed to have your hands on the wheel, you're supposed to be paying attention to where you're going because these systems are not mature yet.

Jim Polito: Wow. That's something to keep in mind. All right. Quickly before we go. Any new news on Tik Tok and what's the other one We chat. Is that the other Chinese? Uh,

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's called a We Chat. Yeah. Yeah.

Craig Peterson: So the basic news that many people have probably heard is these two apps or out of China.

One of those companies is owned by Tencent, the WeChat app, Tencent, which I talked about a few months ago, my radio show because they have some of the top video games in the world. People absolutely love these Tencent video games out of China again. Why I was talking about it because Tencent is doing something that frankly you should be well, not yet illegal, but no one should ever do.

[00:11:00] They take complete control of your windows machine. They are running with Kernel level privileges, it lets them. See, okay everything on your machine, every file on your machine. So you install this Tencent video game and all of a sudden, no, your entire machine has the remote control on it.

So President Trump said both the owners of We Chat and. Also Tik Tok, uh, has to be basically be sold to a US company at, within 45 days. But in 45 days, no money can go to either one of those companies from the United States. And personally, I think this is a very, very good move on the part of the Trump administration.

[00:12:00] Jim Polito: Excellent.

Well, listen. A good move for all of us would be to get more information from Craig Peterson, our tech talker guru. It's a smart move. As Michael Corleone said in godfather one. It's a smart move. Tessio was always smarter. So be Tessio and be smarter. Craig, how can folks get more information from you?

Craig Peterson: Well, the best way is to get on my newsletter list. You'll get all my show notes. You'll find out about this free training, the lives that I'm doing. Just go to Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Craig peterson.com/subscribe.

Jim Polito: Alright, Craig, look forward to catching up with you, um, next week. And until then, sir, be well, stay safe.

Craig Peterson: All right, take care. And I'll be back, of course, Saturday at 11:00 AM with a little more in-depth stuff. Excellent.

[00:13:00] Jim Polito: Good promo there. Excellent. Excellent promo Craig Peterson, everybody. All right. When we return a final word, you're listening to the Jim Polito show from my kitchen with pops. This is your safe space.

Craig Peterson: I really like that guy, man. And it isn't just because he likes me apparently, but I think we've got some good dynamics. I'm going to be so glad when he gets back into the studio. These delays are a little bit annoying. You probably don't hear them if you're listening to the podcast. Cause I edit them out, but there's like a two, three second roundtrip time here from, uh, from him because he's not in the studio is at, at his home.

Anyways. We made some good progress yesterday. I, uh, I had my video guy in here and we did some more work. Some more practice, shot some with cameras, I've got new, uh, polarizers here, some circular polarizers for my cameras. See if I can get rid of some of the glare coming from my glasses and stuff and the lights.

[00:14:00] And so we're, we're making progress and. I'm really excited about it. So everybody take care and we'll be back tomorrow, as well, by the way. Thanks to Karen. She is getting all, everything caught up after this whole bout that we had. With just a really kind of crazy two months. Anyhow, take care of everybody and thanks for sticking with me.

We'll talk later. Bye. Bye.

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AS HEARD ON - The Jim Polito Show - WTAG 580 AM: Feds Buying Data from App Spyware, The flawed Logic of Self Driving Cars, and Chinese Spys 00:01 Share

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AS HEARD ON - The Jim Polito Show - WTAG 580 AM: Feds Buying Data from App Spyware, The flawed Logic of Self Driving Cars, and Chinese Spys