Lea Feiger: Let’s talk about what you guys do. How do you protect your cybersecurity? Do you use foldable phones? What is your cloud storage? Are you alone on Signal? By the way, I cover all of these things in the WIRED guide, check it out. Where are you?
Luisa Matsakis: I have most of my conversations on Signal and the vast majority of them are set to delete every four weeks. I find this to be a good schedule for normal everyday conversations and then sometimes the more sensitive conversations are eliminated in just a few hours or a few days. I have very rarely found this to be an inconvenience to my life. Sometimes I ask a friend, “Hey, that cool Airbnb you stayed at that I know you already found the link to. Can you send it to me again?” But that’s a pretty minor thing.
Lea Feiger: Small price to pay.
Luisa Matsakis: Yes, a small price to pay. I’m very careful about tracking location and then usually…
Lea Feiger: So you’re not active on Find My Friends?
Luisa Matsakis: No. Although I follow my Boomer mother.
Lea Feiger: Sure.
Luisa Matsakis: Yes. Who doesn’t want to listen to this podcast? Sorry mom, I’m following you. She knows it.
Lea Feiger: The big reveal, actually.
Luisa Matsakis: Yes, but I don’t really let her.
Lea Feiger: It is the blog of Louise Global Surveillance.
Luisa Matsakis: Yes, but don’t let him track me. That’s my business. But when you’re over 70, your child can see where you’re going.
Lea Feiger: Absolutely, amazing. Yeah.
Luisa Matsakis: But I don’t use location tracking. I turn off location tracking for most of my apps and then have a separate blank device and sometimes carry it depending on where I’m going, particularly when I go to mainland China.
Lea Feiger: Yes, I was going to ask, because when you go on reporting trips, you have sources everywhere. Do you bring devices with air gap? Is your work computer coming?
Luisa Matsakis: I don’t normally bring my work computer. I will bring a personal computer that does not have much information and I will bring a blank cell phone. I will put several Chinese apps on that phone that I really don’t want. I really don’t want WeChat hanging out on my regular device for the most part. But those are over-the-top precautions that I don’t think the average person should take. But I guess just to make sure, do you really need 30 apps on your phone with your location? Because to Andrew’s point about all these data brokers, a lot of times they get this location information, not necessarily from Google, or not from Facebook, not from these big companies that don’t need to sell that information. Literally, it’s often the game you downloaded and forgot about. It’s like the silly Candy Crush knockoff.