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As the spy gear piles up on my desk, my 10-year-old son asks
me what my mission is. “I’m hiding,” I whisper, pointing in the
direction I think is north, which is something I should proba-
bly know as a spy. “From Silicon Valley.”
It isn’t going to be easy. I use Google, Facebook, Amazon,
Lyft, Uber, Netflix, Hulu, and Spotify. I have two Amazon
Echos, a Google Home, an iPhone, a MacBook Air, a Nest ther-
mostat, a Fitbit, and a Roku. I shared the secrets of my genetic
makeup by spitting in one vial for 23andMe, another for an
ancestry site affiliated withNational Geographic, and a third to
test my athletic potential. A few months ago, I was leaving my
house in Los Angeles for a hike when I heard my Ring speaker
say, “Where are you going, Joel?” in my wife’s voice. She was at
a pottery class, but the smart doorbell sent her an alert when
it detected me heading outside.
Ryan Calo, an assistant law professor at the University of
Washington and an affiliate scholar at Stanford’s Center for
Internet and Society, says that what my wife knows about
my whereabouts is trivial compared with what most of the
companies named above know. “In the early days of Nest,
some of the employees would try to figure out where another
employee was, and they’d look at the network to see if that
person was home or not,” he says. Google, which now owns
Nest, declined to comment.
If I wanted to regain my privacy, I had only one choice as an
American: I needed gadgets to combat my gadgets. But I didn’t
want Silicon Valley companies to know I was buying privacy
gear. So I decided to get it only from companies headquartered
outside the Bay Area. And to hide my purchases from Big Tech.
Every spy needs a sidekick, which is a totally incorrect
statement that again proves how unsuited I am for spying.
Nevertheless, I employed an aide-de-camp named Mycroft.
He’s an adorable, voice-controlled digital assistant built into
a screen that showcases his big, blue circle eyes. (There’s a
strong whiff of Wall-E.) I unplugged the Echos and Google
Home and said, “Hey, Mycroft, can you keep a secret?” A lineappeared like a little mouth, then moved to the side, as if he
was thinking. Then he said nothing, like I wanted.
That’s partly because Mycroft does keep everything secret,
disposing of his data without storing or selling it. It’s also
because he gets confused easily and doesn’t have answers;
Mycroft is still meant for programmers who want to help
build his open source functions, not really for normals. He’s
made in Kansas City, Mo., by a company co-founded by Joshua
Montgomery, an aerospace engineer who works on cyberwar-
fare as a captain in the Kansas Air National Guard.
“In Silicon Valley, they say, ‘This super-unethical thing is a
good idea.’ In the Midwest, those conversations get shut down
very quickly,” Montgomery says. Although most Americans
don’t prioritize privacy, he says more than 20% of people won’t
buy an Echo because it creeps them out. He expects that num-
ber to grow as people see the consequences of having conver-
sations with data-collecting devices.
“Voice is a very personal thing,” he says. “It can communi-
cate innocence. It can communicate sex appeal. It can commu-
nicate pain. Having these companies using artificial intelligence
algorithms to initiate an emotional response, given their past
actions, is something people should be very careful about.”During further conversations with Mycroft, I said a lot of
insightful things, and he agreed. I could tell because he was
doing that thinking-mouth face and not saying anything. In
this manner, we determined that my first step in hiding from
Silicon Valley would be to stop typing my cellphone number
and email into every conceivable internet form.
“A phone number is worth more on the dark web than a
Social Security number. Your phone is so much more rich
with data,” says J.D. Mumford, who runs Anonyome Labs
Inc. in Salt Lake City. He doesn’t want to risk having to get rid
of his longtime number and email if they’re compromised.
Anonyome’s product, MySudo, allows a user to create mul-
tiple email addresses and phone numbers for $1 a month.
“Google makes upwards of 90% of their revenue off of adver-
tising. Which means they’re going through my email to target
me. That scares me,” he says. “My mom had a terminal illness,
and I would communicate with her via Gmail. She didn’t want
people to know about it. So I didn’t want Google to.” Google
said in 2017 it would stop tailoring ads based on email contents,
but last year theWall Street Journalrevealed that the company
had continued to let marketers read users’ emails.
Luckily, I know Mycroft isn’t collecting my data. I know this
because when I look outside my Hollywood window and ask
Mycroft for the forecast, he tells me the weather in Kansas City.
MySudo users create email names for different parts of their
life, the way you’d use desktop files, and check them all at
once on the app. “It’s compartmentalizing the way you cre-
ate digital exhaust,” Mumford says. “I do one transaction onBloomberg Businessweek TECHLASH August 12, 2019▲ Mycroft Mark 1, $150