Can Robots Make Sneakers? Just Ask Nike.
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Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Tuesday, April 22nd. I'm Katie Dayton for The Wall Street Journal. We've all gotten more used to handing over our personal information to companies.

But the profiles that data brokers collect on each of us are growing more detailed, and they're often posted online for all the world to see. We'll take you through deleting yourself from the internet. Then we'll switch gears to investigate a very different issue: why robots really aren't that great at making sneakers.

But first, how much of your personal data are you okay with ending up online? Your email address? Your home address? How about your grandmother's name? When our personal tech columnist, Nicole Nguyen, used a tool on Google called Results About You, she was surprised to find a trove of her personal information on the internet, even when she'd already asked for it to be deleted. Nicole, how did it make you feel when you saw what was unearthed? You

You feel a little uneasy. A home address is something that we think of as private because it's where our physical presence is. But in fact, it's data that appears in hundreds, if not thousands of databases, because every time we shop online, we input our address online.

It's a part of public record. If you own a home, if you have applied for a driver's license or subscribe to a magazine, this information is out there. And these websites, people search sites or data brokers can purchase this information from a variety of sources or resources.

request it from the government. And they collate it in this dossier that includes other information, including your birth date, maybe one site included my grandma's name that I found from the Google's results about you tool. There's a lot of our data out there. Why for you and so many others? Is that a concerning issue given that we all willingly give this out so often?

The everyday example is scam and spams that are coming your way. If you get a lot of phone calls or a lot of spammy emails, that is annoying at best because

At worst, doxing, which is the malicious sharing of personal info, is not only a problem for executives and public figures, but increasingly private citizens. And this is when people find your personal information on the internet and those of your family members and use that personal information to harass you and people that you know. The good news is there are some ways to remove disinformation from the internet.

Could you run us through some of the techniques that you uncovered when you were looking into this story and looking at your own data as well? Google's Results About You tool is a really great place to start because it's free. And this is the low hanging fruit. This is the information that people would find if they Googled your name. There are other services that you can pay to remove your data. And those services do offer free exposure reports online.

Optory and Delete.me are two services that I really liked using and they have strong privacy practices. If you sign up for an account with these sites, they can email you a PDF of places that your information shows up in places where you may not think to look like people search sites or data brokers that you've never heard of.

And if you subscribe, then they can automatically request an opt-out. That means they request on your behalf, that site removes your information. These are subscription services because it's an ongoing process. And when you request an opt-out to remove your info, the site

is not promising to never buy your information again. So it can buy a new set of records and your information can crop up again. Making sure this information doesn't appear online, it seems like a real, real task and it requires time, money, energy. Do you think this is just part of life now? Will it ever get easier? I...

want to believe yes. And that's because some states have really strong privacy laws, like where I live in California, if you request an opt out, or if you request your data to be removed, it has to happen within 45 days. And about a dozen other states have similar privacy laws. But if you live outside of those states, then you're

and removals can take longer or they don't happen at all. That was WSJ personal tech columnist Nicole Nguyen. Coming up, why robots may not be the answer to high U.S. labor costs. At least, not when it comes to making some things. That's after the break. At Capella University, you can learn at your own pace with our FlexPath learning format.

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Supporters of President Trump hope that the tariffs introduced by his administration will kickstart a golden age of U.S. manufacturing. But the cost of labor in the U.S. is high, and it's pushing American companies to turn to robots for help. Well, they might be wise to look at Nike, which spent millions of dollars on trying to automate its production lines, and the cost of labor in the U.S. is high.

and found that's not an easy thing to do. Our Victoria Craig spoke with John Emont, a WSJ reporter based in Singapore, to find out more.

This idea to try to manufacture in America has been sort of a long-running effort by Nike, which began experimenting with it back in 2015. And it had this goal of trying to actually help other companies do the same thing. Talk to me first about Tom Fletcher, the guy who they tapped to build out these factories.

Nike has always relied on contract manufacturers. They took the same model essentially to North America when they tried to manufacture in Guadalajara. And they picked a company called Flex, which...

makes electronics. So they were trying to find some company that would think outside the box, that wasn't going to be hemmed in by the usual standard ways of making shoes, and was going to think about, can we do this in a much more automated way? Because electronics manufacturing in general is much more automated than shoemaking, which is very labor-intensive. And of course, because shoemaking is so labor-intensive, that's made it prohibitively expensive to really produce these shoes at scale in North America. Instead, you go to Asia for that, where labor's a lot cheaper.

So if you want to bring it back to North America, you've got to automate it. And if you want to automate it, the thinking was, well, you go with Flex, which has experience with electronics, including just a couple of years before they had helped Apple set up a Mac Pro factory in Austin, Texas.

So Flex then tried to bring some of those lessons that they learned from Apple and actually apply that to a wholly different product, which is shoes. Alas, it was not to be, was it? Just tell us why. So shoes are a soft good, which means that there's fabric that squinches and expands depending on the temperature. And there's just a lot of variation in shoes in a way that you don't get with an iPhone, where an iPhone is made of metal parts that are very precise dimensions.

And so because of that, it's easier to get a laptop automated because you can just get a machine trained to do the same task a million times with...

virtually identical products. And as a result, it ended up being more labor intensive than they wanted. It was just really hard to get right. We think about automation and we think that will make so many different parts of life and business easy. Clearly, as you discovered with shoes, that's not the case. So just walk us through how shoes usually are made. Is it handmade essentially from start to finish then in other places across Asia? Is that how Nike assembles shoes now? So in a place like Vietnam, which makes about half of Nike shoes today,

It is very labor-intensive. So that isn't to say there's no automation. Of course, machines are heavily involved in producing the raw materials, but there are certain things like stitching the sole to the upper part of the shoe where that's still done by hand usually, and then...

There are certain things, depending on the type of shoe, that can be highly automated. So certain types of shoes can be knit by machines, the top part. But again, still, there's a lot of attaching work and finishing work that is done by hand. I guess then the next question, though, is obviously we know that the point of President Trump's tariffs on all of these companies that manufacture things outside of the U.S. and then bring them back, the idea is to bring the manufacturing to America. But as we've just discussed here, that for Nike is...

a really big hurdle to climb. So what do these tariffs mean for a company like Nike? Yeah, so the good folks at Nike are trying to sort that out and they don't have answers in part because tariff policy changes all the time. 95% of their shoe production is in Indonesia, Vietnam and China. So moving that out would be very, very difficult. Effectively, they're stuck. And obviously what they hope is that the tariff rates will go down.

Tom Fletcher, the Mac guy, he seemed pretty optimistic about the future of all of this. Does he think, or do people in the industry, does Nike believe that the technology could one day be there? It's just, it's going to take a while. Tom came into the project optimistic.

The reality was much tougher than he anticipated. And he said he came away from the project humbled by how difficult it was to make shoes. This is a guy who made Mac Pros, so surely shoes should be nothing. But both Tom and Michael Newton, who was Tom's counterpart at Nike, so the two of them were working together to try to get this manufacturing process up and running again.

They both had similar conclusions, which is this could be done. It's not impossible. You could make shoes in Mexico, in the United States. It would almost certainly be more expensive. But the key thing is you just have to make a lot of design compromises. So currently, the way Nike works, the designers are kings and the designers come up with super creative ideas for shoes. And then they go to their Asian manufacturers who are miracle workers and they say, make it happen. And they do.

What you have to do if you want to manufacture shoes in North America, it has to be really highly automated. Otherwise, it's just going to be way too expensive. So we need to find a shoe that we can make that's really amenable to machines, machine knitting and all this sort of stuff. So we have to really limit the configurations of the shoe. It has to be much more constrained. Maybe it's going to be less interesting. Maybe it won't be as cutting edge. That was Victoria Craig speaking with WSJ reporter John Emond.

And that's it for Tech News Briefing. Today's show was produced by Julie Chang with supervising producer Chris Inslee. I'm Katie Dayton for The Wall Street Journal. We'll be back this afternoon with TMB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening.