Protecting your personal data in the age of Trump

Léa Feiger: Let's talk about what you do. How to lock down your cybersecurity? Do you use flip phones? What is your cloud storage? Are you only on Signal? All these things that I refer to elsewhere in the WIRED guide, go take a look. Where are you guys?

Louise Matsakis: I have most of my conversations on Signal and the vast majority of them are set to delete every four weeks. I find that's a good time frame for normal day-to-day conversations, and then more sensitive conversations are sometimes deleted in just a few hours or days. I have very rarely found it disruptive to my life. Sometimes I ask a friend, “Hey, this cool Airbnb you stayed in that I know you already found the link to. Can you send it to me again?” But it's pretty minor-

Léa Feiger: Small price to pay.

Louise Matsakis: Yeah, small price to pay. I'm very careful about location tracking and generally…

Léa Feiger: So you're not active on Find My Friends?

Louise Matsakis: No, although I watch my mother Boomer.

Léa Feiger: Of course.

Louise Matsakis: Yeah. Who won't listen to this podcast, so sorry mom, I'm with you. She knows it.

Léa Feiger: The big reveal, in fact.

Louise Matsakis: Yeah, but I actually don't let her.

Léa Feiger: This is the Louise Global Surveillance blog.

Louise Matsakis: Yeah, don't let her find me. It's my business. But when you pass the age of 70, your child is allowed to see where you are going.

Léa Feiger: Absolutely, incredible. Yeah.

Louise Matsakis: But I don't use location tracking. I turn off location tracking for most of my apps and then I have a separate blank device and sometimes I bring it depending on where I'm going, especially when I'm going to mainland China.

Léa Feiger: Yeah, I was going to ask, because you do reporting trips, you have sources everywhere. Do you bring air gap devices? Does your work computer come with it?

Louise Matsakis: I generally don't bring my work computer. I will bring a personal computer that doesn't have much information on it and I will bring a blank cell phone. I'm going to install various Chinese apps on this phone that I don't really want. I don't really want WeChat hanging around most of the time on my normal device. But these are precautions way beyond precautions that I don't think the average person needs to take. But I think you just need to make sure: do you really need 30 apps on your phone to know your location? Because going back to Andrew's point about all these data brokers, most of the time they're getting this location information, not necessarily from Google, not necessarily from Facebook, not from these big companies that they don't have need to sell this information. It's literally often the game you downloaded and forgot about. It's like the silly copy of Candy Crush.