from Tavern on the Green in Central Park, New York. It's theCUBE, covering Veritas Vision Solution Day. Brought to you by Veritas. Welcome to the heart of New York City. We're here in Central Park at Tavern on the Green. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. And we're here covering the Veritas Solution Days, hashtag VTAS, VTAS Day. So Scott Jeteros here as Executive Vice President at World Wide Field Ops for Veritas. Scott, good to see you again. Thanks for coming on. Thank you. So I love this location. A lot of our crew, they've never been here before. It's the way you see Tavern on the Green, it's sweet. Customers love it. So why this location? What are you guys doing with the Solution Days? Different than the big tent event?  Explain that. Yeah, so last year we did the big event and we also did regional events. And it was interesting when we looked at the regional events the input from our customers was they loved the idea of doing something local, a little bigger, so they didn't have to travel.  And so we decided to do 20 of these around the world. We also found out last year that the number of people who were coming to the regional events was very, very large. I mean, some of our events we had four or 500 people coming. So it just made a lot more sense to us is how do we get closer to our customers, make sure they didn't have to travel and be able to touch them. So collectively you're probably hitting as many if not more people. A lot more. It's probably a different type of audience too when you go, so you're doing a bunch in the US and a bunch overseas, right? Correct, yeah, so we've got New York, Chicago, San Francisco, we've got one in Washington DC focused on the Fed and then we have one up in Toronto in North America. So, and then we've got them in Latin America. So you've been a kind of customer success exec all your life and spent a lot of time in New York City. A lot of customers down here, a lot of the more advanced and sophisticated customers here. So what are you hearing as you see digital transformation, big data, cloud, multi-cloud, people are changing the way in which they think about data and protecting data and getting more value out of data. What are they telling you here? The challenges that they're facing and where do they want to go with Veritas? Yeah, the exciting thing is, is that look, we're still the market leader, right? You know, people always say, oh, what's going on with Veritas? We're the market leader we have been for the last 15 plus years. And the people we're doing data protection for today are the largest of the largest. You know, 95% of the Fortune 100 use our technology. 85% of the Fortune 500 use our technology. So we get a lot of information, knowledge, experience from what you would argue, and I would too, the customers here, which are the toughest of the tough too, right? I mean, they're not always nice. They tell you what they think and they're thinking two, three years out of what we have to go do to support those environments. So it's interesting, you know, the big thing going into this year, there was a lot of conversation around compliance. You know, GDPR in Europe was huge. And really, I kind of narrowed down to PII, regardless if you're banking, healthcare or whoever. The whole question around how do you protect data? Where is my data located? Who's touching my data? Has just become a bigger and bigger issue.  And as you said, multi-clouds, no one's using one cloud. All of a sudden your data is spread out all over the place. So how you focus on that, how do you have visibility on that, becomes more and more important. And obviously that makes data protection center of what's going on with customers now. So there are a couple of vectors there that I'd like to explore. One is the idea that we're now looking at data protection and back up to get more value out of it. You talked about GDPR, privacy, things of that nature. So I want to talk about that. But also, the last thing customers want that I talked to, they don't want yet another stovepipe of data protection. And as you go, every cloud has its own backup approach. So I'm curious as to what you guys are doing. Let's start there. Are you putting in some kind of abstraction layer to be able to service all those different multi-clouds? Which cloud companies are you working with? Yeah, so first of all, we support all the major cloud providers. For us, we're very agnostic in the sense of we don't care where your data is located. It can be behind your firewall. It can be in Amazon. It can be in Microsoft. It can be in Google. It can be in a pseudo what we would call more of a regional SaaS type cloud that you support based on something uniquely in your environment. So we don't really care on where it's located. And that's actually one of our big positives. But you're right. One of the big issues customers have today is, okay, they start out and they might use Amazon for test development. And Amazon has their own way of moving data into the cloud and what do you do and how do you protect it? And then you go all of a sudden to Office 365 because that's the Microsoft way of getting it into the cloud. And so now you've got two clouds. Oracle's pushing you to do cloud. So you've got an Oracle cloud probably, right? And, and, and, we can go down that whole list. So everyone's driving a cloud strategy. But the problem customers have today is, they don't want to have six or seven different ways of onboarding data and applications into the cloud. And they also do not want to have different ways of moving data or protecting data. And I think the, so for us, what we do that's very different is that we have software that allows you to move data and applications into any one of those clouds the exact same way. I mean, if you think about it today, when you think about data replication or protecting data, a lot of customers use hardware replication to move data. Well, the problem you run into today when you think about it is that the traditional cloud vendors, and we just listed who they were, they don't use traditional hardware. No one's using EMCSRDF in the Amazon cloud. No one's using, you know, Hitachi's products. So you need a software-based replication tool and a data mover, I'll call it, to be able to do that. That's an area we've invested a lot of time and money on to be able to do it. And more importantly, even though I don't hear this a lot from customers anymore, there was a fear for a wire-off cloud lock-in. I don't want to be too into one cloud. We can move data between clouds also.  So that also makes customers at ease of how do you manage it? But it just creates a whole different environment of what to do and how to do it. So you're not in a technical role at the company, but when you're in this business and you talk to a lot of technology people, you have to be conversant in technology. So I'm curious. So you mentioned the high-speed data mover. That's something that's always been fundamental to the Veritas architecture, but you've done some other things. I've seen some of, I've got briefed and seen some of the videos you guys done on 8.1.2. There's components of that that are really different. I mean, modern software, microservices-based architecture that have allowed you to actually create this multi-cloud sort of affinity. Maybe talk about what's a conversation is like with customers with regard to modernizing your platform. Yeah, I think two things. You know, it's interesting. The two things customers have always asked us for is a new UI interface. You know, now it's interesting, like anything. Customers have used this for 10 years. There's customers who love the old interface, right? But today, when you think about cloud or think about particular workloads, which is probably more important, you know, it's no longer the backup administrator who might have to do everything. When it used to be just the backup person, you know, having the way we used to do it made a lot of sense. But now you're basically grabbing someone who could be the virtual machine administrator. It could be the cloud person administrator. It could be security. And those people don't have a background in data protection. So the question is, how do you give them an interface that makes it easy for them to understand and use to be able to administrate that? So now the backup administrator can actually create groups inside of NetBackup and, you know, allow those organizations to be able to look at their environments and be able to manage it very differently. So, and it's the same thing with workloads. You know, when you think about it today, most of the data growth that we're seeing, it's traditionally not, it's not the Oracle workloads, the SAP workloads. You know, 60, 70 plus percent of our largest customers are creating new database applications on non-SQL stuff. You know, it's Mongo, it's Cassandra. So the new 8.1.2 supports all those environments. We didn't do that before. So that's a great interface for us because those databases don't natively do backup well. Hadoop, you know, data analytics, huge amount of data being created there. It used to be, that used to be a sandbox, a playground, but those applications have gotten to become, you know, important in these customers. And so it used to be, you just used to take a snapshot of this stuff and you'd have about 20 copies of petabytes of data. Now you can do point in time backups using those types of products. So 8.1.2 has that type of support in it too. And we've done a lot of stuff around VMware, specifically focused around, you know, new innovative things that we needed to do to modernize the products. So those emerging workloads, like not only SQL, you know, Mongo, Hadoop, et cetera, that's now native to your stack. Is that correct? Okay, that's different because you've hardened that. A lot of companies in your business, maybe some of the newer guys have to go partner to find those capabilities. So that's, I think, big. The other thing I heard was cloud-like. I think I heard self-service, essentially, for some of the lines of business folks or whomever that you don't want to send them necessarily back to the backup admin. Do it on your own. Here's some policies that make it kindergarten proof. Okay, so that's a trend that you're seeing as well. Yes, yes, completely. Okay, I want to come back to something you said before, this other vector, which is other uses for backup or the backup data than just insurance, because people don't want to pay for insurance. And so you mentioned compliance, GDPR. I would imagine as well when you get things like ransomware, there's also analytics, you guys I knew were applying a lot of AI. You've got the corpus of data, it just so happens that the backup data contains the data of the company. So presumably we do other things with it. What are some of those other things that customers are doing and how are they getting additional value out of the investment that they're making in Veritas? Yeah, I think it's a couple of areas. Before we leave compliance, let me focus on one thing that's been really important is this whole question about where my data is located, this whole visual-ness of data, who's touched at last, all of that, has become a really, really important thing for customers because even in the natural cloud, sometimes you don't know that maybe one of the cloud providers moved your second copy of data into a data center that is a problem for you, right? So- Like physically is in a place that it shouldn't be. Yeah, it shouldn't be in a data center. It moved out of a country boundary for compliance reasons, right? So we've spent a lot of time and energy creating software technology that gives you that visibility. And not just with NetBackup. We also plug in all the cloud providers. We also plug in Oracle. We also plug in box.net. I mean, so a lot of these other companies are also plugged in. So back to your point, we've created this huge data repository of information that now allows us, when you look at our future, and we talked about a little this in the session earlier, you know, data analytics, some capabilities that we should be able to go do because we have the metadata to be able to give customers that visual capability. The other thing that's interesting about that visualization software is it also tells, it finally gives customers a proof point of what we've always known that probably roughly about 50% of their data, and I'm being kind when I say 50, probably hasn't been touched in three, five, four, 10 plus years, right? And we've always known that, but now we actually can show a customer, hey, using this visualization software that you're using for compliance has also now told you where the data located and who's touched it last, and by the way, it hasn't been touched forever. It allows a customer to have two conversations. One, do they need to save it? And if they do, do they move it into a glacier type environment? Or three, do they move it to a software to find storage on the customer's floor? And we can help the customer migrate it after we show them who hasn't touched it, but we also have a software to find storage solution that Gardner just came out and said, we're number one in this space, right? And so it's one of our fastest growing pieces of our business because customers all the time say to me, Scott, our data protection cost is going up. And the reality is it isn't. The reality is his data is growing dramatically, his storage is going up, and oh, by the way, I got to back up my data that sits on the storage, right? So it all kind of combines together. So data protection as a percentage of the spend is not necessarily increasing, but everything's growing. Everything's growing, yes. So the other thing, just a couple of points that you made me think of, the other cloud that you support is on-prem. Yes, it's still big, by the way. So that's another piece of it because you got the three laws of the cloud, right? It's the law of physics. You can't necessarily put everything into the public cloud. You got the law of economics and you got the law of the land, which you were talking about before, that if you're not supposed to leave Germany, you can't leave Germany. Okay, and then, so you're using analytics to help customers determine this. And the other thing is some of the general councils out there don't want to keep data forever. You know, I hear a lot from vendors, oh, you can now keep it forever. Well, the GC says no, we don't want to keep it forever. Okay, so you're using analytics to sort of sift through that data and then surface these clues and actions to customers. Yes, and a new thing also in 8.1.2 is we've come out with a smart meter type technology, which now will let customers know how much data they're using, where they're using the data, any hotspots in the data, and it's very file-based, you know, data focus.  It's not just a benefit to figure out what they're doing, but it also could help them drive cost out. So you've got a big customer base, obviously, probably the largest in the business. You've modernized the- Over 50,000. 50,000 customers. You modernize the software. Just wrap it up, the competitive differentiation. There's a lot of noise in the marketplace. How do you, where do you stand? What's your position relative to the competition? Why veritas? Yeah, well, so for us, when we walk into a large customer, as you can appreciate, they don't want three or four different products back to the cloud conversation. They don't want three or four ways of moving data into the cloud, right? They really want one. And the other issue they all run into is this compliance conversation. You know, not everybody does everything the same and they don't all talk together.  We're the only company out there that can do all those workloads. There are startups and they might do one or two things really, really well or so they say they do. We don't think they do, but they say they do. And that's what they focus in on. But that's not what a large enterprise customer wants. They want capabilities to be able to scale, high performance, ease of use. And 8.1.2 gives that to them and we do more workloads than anybody else in the industry. Excellent. Well, Scott, thanks for coming on. We are here in the heart of New York City, at Tavern on the Green. A lot of customers are going to be talking to some of those customers today. Those customers, they're as tough as Yankee fans, I can tell you. So Scott, thanks again. Good to see you. All right, thank you. All right, keep it right there. Everybody, we're back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE from Veritas Solution Days in New York. Right back.


If you're a loved one has suffered from elephantitis penis, please contact Matthew Maher so that I may inspect thoroughly. Trust me, it's just part of the process. I just gotta hold it in my two hands and I get a magnifying glass out. I have to inspect it. This is how the doctor's office works. Enough! Enough! About women's rights! Let's talk about women's wrongs! Have I done that intro yet? I thought about doing that the other day. Someone sent me that meme on Twitter and I've been thinking about it ever since, but it's all been on my mind. I had a dream about it last night, I think that's what I'm thinking of. Yesterday, the biggest, it was an epiphany. It was like, Matt, start the Wheel of Mott disrespecting women. I'm not even supposed to be recording today. Today was not a recording day. I was not prepped for it. I was not ready for it. And I was like, bro, there's nothing I want more than a good game of Madden. I'm not even kidding. Are you sure about that? I almost never feel like that, honestly. Well, we got a 94 overall team of Wheel of Mott. We're on kind of a hot street, and we're 5 and 3, so there is a chance that we can get booted from the playoffs, and there's also a chance that we can make it right to the playoffs. So, it's coinciding very nicely. We have an awesome team. We've got Kyle Pitz, Phenae Sewell, we've got Jalen Rager, Golden Ticket. Every episode I say I needed a half-back, I don't. Dalvin's amazing. I don't know what I'm talking about. The has been playing pretty good for being a 90 overall, and then we still got some weirdos at D-Tackle of 10. And I don't really like our linebackers either, but I am overall a happy boy. Alright, boys! If we can pray for like a 97-plus linebacker, I'd be in business there. I'd also take a full-back. I do not have a real- Okay, wait a minute. This could be a full-back. It's a jackpot, but they can't have more than 75 speed. Ah, that's not gonna work for full-back. I think all the good full-backs in the game are gonna have like at least 85-ish speed. So you know what that probably is? I think that's a left-end or a D-Tackle. There's a chance we could get like a 99 overall D-Tackle. Let me see what's in the market and how fast 99 overall D-Tackles are. Are they less than 75 speed? Are you kidding? 76? I'm hoping one of these dudes will have less. So, there's DeForest Buckner, 79 speed. Lover's at 84.  That's an option. That could be hilarious. He has 74 speed. I kind of want to do that. There's Zack Martin. We could get 99 Janakowski the kicker. I think we got to go with Vince Wilfork. I think that's the funniest and probably the best option here. 99 overall Vince Wilfork, which I mean, it makes sense. He's an incredible D-Tackle. 540K. Definitely gonna give him inside stuff. This is gonna be awesome. Before I power him up, let's do our second little spin. See if I can get a linebacker. Honestly, I got a D-Tackle. Tommy Harris will get bumped down. So overall, this is a really, really, really good start. Oh, but see, this one is for a fullback. That literally couldn't have been any better. Is there a 99 overall fullback? So there's 98 Lorenzo Neal. I'm gonna be honest. I don't even want to. Bro, I could have CJ Hamm and Alvin Cook. That'd be kind of cool. I'm gonna do that. I would rather do that than get Lorenzo Neal. I know Lorenzo Neal is better. I just, you know, I never personally watched Lorenzo Neal play. I don't have this big affinity for legends players. I think it's kind of silly. See, I did watch Vince Wilfork, though, and I thought it was hilarious. So Vince Wilfork is in, and then Tommy Harris is gonna come in at backup. And my left end can become Deacon Jones. This works out great. Damn, we're a 96 overall. All right, so let's readjust these abilities here. So let's take it off TJ Waugh, and we'll add to Vince Wilfork. We'll see if we stick with that. There's a chance I don't stick with that. I might like my two addressures, but I like Vince Wilfork, so I want to do that for now. Okay, boys, we added Vince Wilfork, and we added a 97 fullback CJ Hamm. Exactly what I was trying to do in this episode. So if I bumble the bag and don't win here, it would be so embarrassing. We have a chance to be one game away, six and three, heading into the playoffs. We have two moral wins in the regular season. Let's get it. All right, so all that leaves is the challenge wheel. I'm gonna be honest. I don't think a pack is gonna do too much for us on this one, but once we get into the playoffs, we can choose our pack. So that's gonna be big. Ooh. Ooh. Ooh. Yo, Saints theme team number one. How many times do we have to teach you this lesson, old man? Number two, I've never gotten this challenge. I've literally never in 65 episodes we will not gotten this challenge. Eight plays per drive. This is an offensive challenge only. I cannot go over eight plays. Now, for example, let's say I'm seven plays deep into my drive and I'm in the red zone. I can either choose to use my eighth play to try to score a touchdown or I could kick a field goal or I can punt. Basically, I can't have low, slung, arduous, clock-chewing drives. So this is play one of eight for my challenge wheel right now. All right, we're gonna try that seam right down the middle to start this game out and I'll look for Rager as a check down. You know, we gotta go deep here. Oh God, that's bad. Who did I just throw that to? Okay. Okay, that's fine. I definitely didn't throw it to the right person, but that works. All right, second and ten. Let's see if he's still in the cover four. I think he is. Um, oh, get over the top. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. He's clamping me. I thought he was gonna go over top of that. He totally did not. Not only am I getting clamped, but that's two of my plays of eight. I gotta get in scoring range. I think he's a D-line user. That's the only good thing we have going here. Third and ten. All right, right over the middle is prime time. That's amazing. That's 11 yards right there. That's my third play. So this now becomes four of eight. All right, first and ten, he is user in Kyle Pitts. Oh, great play, bro. I totally thought he was taking the slant and he came back. That, ladies and gentlemen, is what getting lurked looks like. Let's see how quickly we can hopefully get this ball back. Um, um, okay. I don't know why he didn't throw the open man. So close. We're so close to it. Ah, hey, great play by Night Train Lane to break it up. All right, we're just going to let our boys come off the edge on their own. And we're just going to try and clamp. He's going to look for that same route combo. An angle and a post. So there's the angle. There's the post. No way. I thought he was going to throw a check down. He throws nothing and he gets sacked deep. Not sure what he's looking for here. Looks like he's going to get a timeout or a penalty. Bro, I don't know what this guy's doing, but he's about to lose off of the lay of game penalties. He just got kicked for excessive creeping. So I'm now six and three. All right, we're just going to hop into another one. So that first game did not count. Like I'm not saying my players are locked in on nothing, but I could make it to the playoffs or get booted out right here. Fusion Goat, like football Fusion Goat. Is this guy a football Fusion player? Ah, Ravensteam team. Ravensteam team. Don't even ask me. Don't do the thing in the comments. This is a Ravensteam team. This needs to stop now. All right, second and 10. I think this is a pass. I'm getting to the QB though. I almost picked that off too. That was a screamer and a half. Good start, boys. Pass it. I dare you. All right, he took the dare. There's nobody open. No, where are you? I didn't even flip for so long. I probably can't return that. I wanted to pitch it though. Okay, I'm going to the playoffs. Am I really going to the playoffs right now, dude? I can't do a little bit like this. I just made the playoffs. The playoffs needs its own special episode. I can't just go into another game and I didn't even get a chance to complete my challenge. Does that count as a rage quit? I don't even know. I don't even know if that guy was just griefing. I don't even know if I could call that a rage quit. All right, as consolation, I'm going to open two fan appreciation packs. If I pull anything that I can use on my team, I can use it. I just don't expect a lot, so it's all good. Wyatt Davis does not help me. Sometimes I do have big rings. They're just chants. Oh my God. I don't know if anybody might receive it. It's not, but that's still super good. 97, Isaac Bruce. All right, I'll open one more. And then we're going to chill out for a second. And I'm going to think. Levy on Bell. Jackson, Carmen. Yeah, none of these help either. All right, boys, I'm going to be totally honest with you. I can't play another game in Ultimate Team, but there's one insanely important thing that I need to do. So I'm going to do this and I'm going to leave you guys off with weird real amont, but be excited because the next episode is a playoffs. And it is our last four episodes of Madden 21 Wheel-O-Mot. Wild Card, Divisional, Conference Championship, Super Bowl. Those are the last four episodes of Wheel-O-Mot of this season. So before we get into that stretch, I need to do something. Create a new leaf. Perfect. Obvious choice. I'm going to have to do a little editing here to be realistic here. Put some respect on my name. That's what I'm talking about. We need development superstar X Factor. Use your e-bum. If you know how I feel, why would you say that? This is what you need to see at the helm of your franchise. What are those abilities, baby? What do you got on you, William? Quick draw, tight out, pass, lead, elite, long range, dead eye, and escape artist. Who's getting their cheeks clapped?  It's the Lions. Whatever. I must do this. I must do this for my country.  Take off, William. Oh! Come on. Come on. Come get me. I don't know who's who. Oh my God, that's a laser.   I'm fast as fuck, boy. We need to roll out William. William! William! Laser! Put it in the end zone. Let's hit Y. Let's hit him. Oh, you want that big one, Jared Cook? Yes, sir! Laser, William. Laser, William! Oh, I thought I got it right. We're going to break it out of the record today. I don't care. I don't care how. Laser! Laser! William! Track him down. Mental error. Redemption. Redemption throw.  All right. That's the move, bro. PA Crossers is killing him. Not the Sally I wanted, but I'll take it. Play action. Let's see it coming. Oh, okay. They saw it coming. Get clapped. Get clapped. Literally, easy clap. Touchdown every time. Oh, my goodness. You can't catch me. You're unharmed. Dude, Slant Man is so... Will, throw me another Slant, buddy. All right, Michael. I got you, buddy. One more Slant.  Oh, they do see it. They don't see it. Let's go. Give me some blocks. Nine for 11. 355 yards. Three touchdowns.  I'm those to Camara. I'm those to Camara because my cock's you. Easy Will clap. All right, who wants it, baby? Who wants this tutty? Who believes in themselves enough? Michael Thomas, do you? New NFL record will be held by Will Clap before the end of today's Will & Mot. Yes, this makes no sense. I'm aware. Wait, how do I just give... Oh, is he a bad player? Okay. Okay. Oh, I don't know about that. I don't care that you dropped it. I care that you ruined Will Clap's stats. I don't care about the yards.  You have the... esteemed honor of playing with a God. That's what I'm talking about. Who cares about Will Clap right there?  Look at you. You're an embarrassment to the Clap establishment. First thing goal, 465 passing yards. Let's go, William. Let's go William. Let's go William. Let's go William That route is killing them All right, give me a block. Yes, sir get there who get there well We'll get slant man on his absolute favorite route. We'll give him a touchdown with it slant man slant man slant man Michael Michael Michael Michael Oh my God. Oh, that's an aggro. Yup! Yes, sir! Oh, that's a laser. Back of the end zone, laser! Total tap, let's go! That's the legacy of Will Clap, baby. Let's look at the stat line. It's a mediocre day for Will. He definitely could have played better. 30 for 42, 891 passing yards, eight touchdowns, three interceptions. He rushed for an average of 10.7, seven attempts, 75 yards, and two rushing touchdowns. It's an average day for Will Clap. All right, boys. The next episode is a playoffs. I will see you then. I'm sorry this episode got weird, but I can't control it. I love you guys. I'll see you then. Peace.


the gap between what your soul loves and the amount of time you spend doing it will be the size of your own happiness.


Somebody who had an accident and vegetating, don't think in terms of they died and they were put back, that's not true. It is just that it might have so happened that the life force is so shocked, it is more projected outward than inward, making a decision to be or not to be. Not a philosophical question, a practical question whether the body is fit enough to be or not to be. So if it chose to be, it is not because of medical workers, they might assist. They might assist, but it is the life which decides to stay because body is still hospitable. Maybe the medical workers make the body little more hospitable than what it would have been without their help. Very much possible. So they did not die, they were in a condition of to be or not to be. They were more projected outward than inward. Even now, you're partially outward projected, mostly inward projected. At that moment it might have been so that you are mostly outward projected, partially inward projected. Even after they're dead, not all of it is gone. If you do not know, you've been looking at this many times. Up to eleven to fourteen days, a dead body grows its fingernails and its hair and everything. Because life recedes slowly, it doesn't just jump out. So you cannot spiritually declare somebody dead up to fourteen days after the medical death. So, after doing this to be or not to be Sisa for some time, you said be. But the body is only hospitable enough to lie in the bed, not hospitable enough to get up and walk or do whatever. A man or a woman is expected to do. I'm not speaking this in this regard, but I want you to look at it as a subject, not as an emotional thing because then you will not look at it the right way. So if you call this vegetation, the two kinds of vegetation, one is just a body is gone, but still everything in the mind is active. That can lead to a lot of suffering because they can see, they can hear, they can smell, they can understand, but no ability to do anything. Talking is the last thing on their mind. They want to get up and walk. They're not able to respond. Body has become inert, but mind is still active. There are other kinds of states where body is in a reasonably good condition, but mind has become inert. So body cannot act. Body is in good condition. Mind was active, it would act, but mind has gone. The physical structure that is necessary to house the mind is gone. Something is broken. So mind is not finding accommodation, so cannot act. But the subtler aspects of the mind are still active. Only the mind that you decipher with the mind with which you make judgment, the mind with which you are able to distinguish, that is gone. But the other mind which simply rotates with the unconscious memory, that is still there. If that is not there, the body cannot be alive. So if a person lies down in a place for a very long time without a discriminatory mind, he may slowly become aware of that unconscious rotation of memory that is happening within him, which is keeping everything going, it's very much possible. I haven't spent enough time with such people. Once at wise when I saw, I felt there was something happening. They're not supposed to have a mind, but there's a whole lot of activity happening. So the unconscious nature of the mind might have come into a kind of awareness because the conscious mind is… the distinguishable mind is gone. So the other part may become apparent, which normally most people are not conscious of. So there may be no active suffering, but there may be some kind of a day state, which many human beings enjoy very much. Why people want to drink, why they want to drug, why they want to remain in the bed after the sun has come up is they like that and why they want to meditate. They like that, you know, moving between conscious and unconscious, the borderline. They like to dance on that a little bit. So alcohol, drugs, sleep, lethargy, excessive eating, sexuality, all these things give you that little bit of being in the borderline of neither this nor that. So actually, if his mind is just… the discriminatory mind is just shut out. Actually he may be in a very good place, just hanging out. No hassle, no work to do, no nothing. If you keep his body comfortable, if you make sure he's not getting bedshores and this and that, actually he may be in a very comfortable space. The only one who suffers is, really suffers is, body has become a vegetable, mind is fully alert and active. Now this one will suffer unless he also comes to terms and becomes very meditative within himself. If he arrives at such a thing, it can become a great place for him, spiritually. Because now all these people's problem is, now they're all able to sit and meditate for hours. Their only problem is the goddamn legs and their back. If they didn't have this, they would sit like this for days, isn't it? So those problems have been removed for him. No sensation in the legs, no sensation in the back. If he arrives at it, which I believe they will.  If they arrive at it, it can be most productive spiritually. No body but an alert mind, wow! It's a meritorious dream, isn't it? Body is the one that's bothering you, isn't it? Initial faces, mind is the torture, but once you deal with it, the only problem is, it's the only thing. You didn't have a body, an alert mind. It's a very good thing, but lot of human beings may suffer that terribly because their whole life has been always comparing themselves with somebody else. Somebody's walking, so they'll suffer. Somebody's talking, so they'll suffer. They can't walk, they can't talk, they can't do what somebody else is doing, so they'll suffer. Even now, when everything is well, also people are suffering because somebody has a million which they don't have, they're suffering. Somebody has that, they don't have, they're suffering, isn't it? So that same pattern may continue with them.  Nobody problems, mind is fully alert, we could initiate them. I'm not saying this with any disregard for their condition. Actually, it can work out very well for him. If nothing else can be done by the medical professionals, it could work out phenomenally well for them. Just lying down, constantly alert mind, it could wonders. I'm talking in this vein because I'm only looking at no matter what the hell happens to your life, you must know how to make it into an advantage, not into a disadvantage. Because what may happen to you is not hundred percent controlled by you, but what you make out of it is one hundred percent yours, isn't it? So if such a thing happened, let's make a capital out of that also.


First welcome, thank you everyone for coming, you can see the title of our session just now is Mastering Agency Outsourcing, Strategies for Success in Government Projects. My name is Anthony Fox-Davis, I'm CEO at System Seed, this is Ev, he's our CTO, you might know us or our faces, Quick Intro to System Seed, we only work on social impact work, so that is Government, NGO, Health, Education or Charity, we tend to provide many services pillars including UX, Design, Development, QA, DevOps, Hosting and so we're a trusted partner across all of those services. We've got deep roots in the Drupal community, so we've been in Drupal for about 15 years, we're one of the major contributors. I think we've got 50 modules offered now and another 50 co-maintained, actively maintained, four distributions built, over 6,000 commits, you may have come across this. Why we wanted to run this session, so large government contracts often need lots of staff and there are additional requirements like security clearance, verification, certification, due diligence at the lead project, agency might need to go through and high quality delivery is quite essential, so from the product owner perspective, QA, UX to look at and the lead agency can't just use any agency or freelancers, they have to go with people they trust and obviously outsourcing to an agency, you've got a number of people, you've actually got a more secure business relationship on a contractual level and only one relationship to manage that's often elastic and scalable. It's hard to find agency partners that can deliver high quality results and fit in well with the team, so culture fit is quite important and otherwise you have to end up doing a lot of micr management and running around not doing the actual work. System seed often works as a partner to other agencies on government contracts and we've seen a lot of what works and what doesn't, so we're here to share what we've learned. Ever over to you. Thank you and hey everybody. So let's see what we are going to talk about today. We will introduce you a short case study. We will have to make it unanimised because we have signed an NDA and we can't give you real names unfortunately, but it's all based on the true story. So we will talk about how to select a partner for your project that you are planning to outsource and how to efficiently create a blended team, what kind of strategies you have to embrace. A couple of do's and don'ts that we will share throughout the talk as well as some useful tips and tricks how to get into this straight away. So the case study that we are going to talk about was British central government project. There was a leading agency in London, let's call the agency X for the length of the talk, and they have requested our help. They've previously used some freelancers with very variable quality, with some of them they were not happy at all, with some of them they were like okay ish. And they also had issues with freelancers availability because what sometimes happens when people work just for themselves, they take too much work, they can't handle, and that was not the project which that leading agency could have failed. It was for one of their biggest and the most important clients from the central government. So the company has decided to work with an agency and they needed not just a pair of hands who can do some capacity or help with the capacity overflow. However, they needed a technical leadership who could actually take on the entire project and deliver it for the quality that they usually claim that they do and provide to their clients. One of the key problems that they had was clearly timings and because the project landed for them quite urgently and they had a contract signed to deliver the project in a very short time before they even know what the project was about. And they had absolutely no capacity to deliver that. Well, it never happened and here we go again. So, and they needed the problem that they had with the timings is that they didn't even have time to hire someone and start onboarding those people. Because onboarding is not about just showing developers what the code leaves. It's about the alignment of processes of delivery practices of the processes. So I will hand over to Anthony to start with the tips that we have from those projects. Thanks, Ev. Thanks. So, yeah, that's why agency partnerships are good to work on up front of the actual need. As I've mentioned, the onboarding process, due diligence steps, things like that can be prepared beforehand. You can find the right culture fit beforehand. You can sign NDAs. You can get basic arrangements and understanding, get relationships started up front. So for us, things went well from the start. We just decided to be open and honest so you can ask a lot of probing questions as the agency partner. You can start to open up the conversation. You will understand if it is a good partner agency to work with, the more questions they ask. And the lead agency had to be open and clear about what they needed. So we were open and honest about our day rates which made their plan predictable. The people on the business end of the lead agency wanted to know where their profit margins would be. So the predictability and the day rates being up front was very clear. Showing the specific needs, that can be around text app choices that were already made. We were coming into a project not at the beginning and green field and helping them outline all of those architectural choices, but partway through. The type of skills that they have on the team, so where the black holes are, where you're expected to fill the gaps. Timelines, milestones, high level objectives, the whole thing. We also talked about previous issues they'd had, why they were talking to us. And so, as Eves mentioned already, that was quite important. We wanted them to feel good about our engagement and not repeat mistakes that they'd found with other freelancers and other agencies. So we had to give them certain assurances that that wouldn't happen again. Again, being transparent with the client about our relationship. Obviously you can white label agencies or you can be transparent to say there's multiple agencies in the mix. They each have their time and place, but we were up front with the client. We didn't have to create additional email addresses, disclose our real identity in the communications channel, things like that. Then on the legal side and for security, we had to have those NDAs, non-disclosure agreements. So we're allowed to talk at this level but not mention certain names. We're not in breach, I promise. And mutual subcontracting agreement. So again, the way that you can lay down those foundations for the partnerships. Often the lead agency will approach its agency partners when they need overflow capacity at the drop of a hat. And so if you don't have those additional due diligence and legal steps to jump through at the time when they need it, you can keep the communication going, find out that you've got all of your boxes ticked for let's call it procurement or contracting. And then when they eventually need the capacity, the overflow capacity, they can come to you and you can hit the ground running. That allowed us both to talk openly and candidly safely. And then onboarding was mentioned by Eve, that's quite important. You can't always do that up front. Each project is slightly different. But one of the things we were looking at was security clearance, working for what's called Whitehall, which is central national government in the UK. So that is part of either government digital services, GDS or gov.uk. So we were working on a sub-site for gov.uk. One of the security clearance was BPSS, which is the baseline personal security standard for G-Cloud. Anyone who doesn't know about G-Cloud for UK government contracts, it used to be that central government could only work with people within a very short perimeter around London. And more recently, they threw the gates open to the whole of the UK. And so now there's the same checks and balances but on the whole UK region. So G-Cloud is where you can find more information on that. Find out what due diligence you might have to jump through hoops to clear. And then, yeah, communication systems, common tools, things like working in agile, communication systems like Slack, and just knowing how we're going to navigate all of that as a blended team. Right, so first tip, get things right from the start. I think people understand that if they're in business. I don't know how many people in the room are in business rather than delivery. But if you get things right from the start, you have a solid premise to work on. And for us, that means treat contractors or subcontractors like respected partners. What you're really looking for is to develop long-term relationships. Everyone says people by people. You have to work on that relationships level and set the tone for the rest of the relationship. So use contracts only as a backup tool. As like a backstop in terms of those difficult conversations you might have. But start with trust and openness and flexibility. And that is effectively because if something goes wrong, you want to fix it quickly. And you can only do that if you're in a very open conversation. So open transparency is very important. Only use the contracts. You may have failed at the rest of the job if you rely on contracts to get a decision across a line. So things should be written in a contract, but then that should be backed up by really great operations and account management project product owners and delivery teams. And you can roll back one step at a time if any of those points fail. So just looking at my notes. So trust from the start, be open, stay open and stay in good communication. The agency that we worked with, we had a relationship for five years before any work began. So we were talking to them about their needs, our culture, the fit, the tools, the technologies, etc.  They came to us and we could hit the ground running at that point. You also want to remove any hippos and separas in the room. I don't know if people know the term hippos, but the highest paid person's opinion is not what you want to hear in any of the discussions. You want to have strong management in each of those conversations, so to eradicate those loud voices that you might want to ignore. Zebras is one I just heard today, but there's zero evidence, really arrogant. So hippos and zebras get out of the room. No one wants those in their office. Yeah, but we had to work hard on a positive relationship with the lead agency even before the contracting. So that was years in the making. And it's worth building those relationships and building trust around that you can find the culture fit in those relationships early on. So we didn't actually sign NDAs for years, but we had networking in play. We had the culture fit in play. We were aligned with those other agencies. And sometimes you sow those seeds and they take a while to bloom. So, you know, do that networking and relationship level stuff up front. When they came to us, we believe it was because we had a C level connection. So that is your CXOs talking to theirs. And we moved in the same circles. We knew some of the same people and there was evidence to support our claims. So for us, I think I mentioned at the beginning, but we've done a ton of open source and we refer to that as our raw evidence and data. And evidence that we had the quality and the scalability as well because they weren't coming to us for just one team member. They could have done that with a freelance so they were coming to us for an elastic team. So tip two, build long term relationships with agencies. It's not just about knowing the right people. So our understanding of government procurement and projects helped us to act like a partner and not just a subcontractor. So government procurement is quite particular and it's very bureaucratic. It's very drawn out and it's not always outcomes oriented. So a lot of people talk about output versus outcomes. You don't want to be a feature factory just developing one feature at a time and throwing it over a wall. It's not about output. It's about outcomes and outcomes is really what is the success within the project. And so stay hand in hand or hand in glove as they say and walk that walk with them and deliver on the customer success or the user success. But that's changing. So procurement in government is changing. It is now more agile and it's now more focused on results. So we've got a friend, David Kershaw, who you can see quoted here. He helps national governments make procurement digital and says this about agile, applying agile ways of work to public contracting and using a minimum viable procurement approach delivers better and quicker results for all users, ultimately the citizens and taxpayers, which obviously is great. David was key in the team that put together GDS in the UK that went on to create Gov.uk. And so I think he knows a thing or two about this. Yep, that means to work with governments or contractors to government and help understand you can use the same words that they use and try and be a subject matter expert. People talk about a T of knowledge often, which is a wide breadth and a one deep discipline that you know a lot about. We hear more about a comb shaped knowledge these days and so that is a wide breadth but several different disciplines. And often those disciplines should be both technical and subject matter expertise. So try and keep track of your target market and if you're talking to governments make sure you're talking the same language that they talk and that you have subject matter experts in the room. Also be honest, I mentioned open transparency a lot. To be the expert in the room is wonderful if you're a consultant but know when to stop talking and ask the appropriate questions to the other people. You can seem very arrogant and you'll easily be found out if you try and overstep and try and help people where you're not really the expert in the room. So be the subject matter expert as much as you can but rely on that blended team approach. So yeah, tip three is speak the same technical procurement language. Back to Eve. Give the mic. Oh yeah, it's yours. So moving on, tip number four. Get on the same page. When we started with our relationships with our lead agency, we talked a lot about our processes and about our alignment on tooling that we use methodology that we use and we found out that like 80% of our development and delivery workflow is the same.  You literally create a team, a couple of people from one team, a couple of people from the other team, and then it's one blended team that works together as it usually happens in the companies when the new project is done. Because you always shape a team, right, from the people from the organization. You do the same with your outsourcing partner. Like the same people joining the same stand up events, the same sprint and the agile ceremony and so on and so forth. So operate as one team. So it's the same team. The next one is highlight common working practices, how you show up at the events within the project, how you write stories, how you do testing. All of these commonalities help to find the common ground for this. The next one is highlight common working practices, how you show up at the events within the project, how you write stories, how you do testing. All of these commonalities help to find the common ground for the teams. What we found very important is to establish transparent communication. Meaning that no hidden messages in Slack or whatever tools you use for chatting. So as soon as you have a question, you write it in a public channel. Even if you want to mention a specific person, make sure that everybody else can see this because they may help to answer some of the questions. If that person is not responding or at least be on top of the problem or what's going on. So keep talking and make these conversations public. It's pretty important. That's my favorite tip. It says give more than you get. It's a common mistake to think that when you're hiring in you or just an outsourcing partner, you're hiring them to help with capacity overflow just as a pair of hands. However, your value is in the extra you provide to your lead agency. By extra, what I mean. Here's an example from what we have done. When we started working with them, you've noticed some inefficiencies in their delivery practices. That they didn't do some automation for certain processes or they had a couple of security issues. We started picking them up even though it was not part of our main contract. It happens naturally when you work in an agency that does automation of delivery processes and does quite professional development practices. When you come to an organization that doesn't have some of the things that you have filled in, you naturally start helping them to fix those problems. We ended up, as another example, helping them to open source some of their solutions and create reusable software. Lots of developers are just into the code writing. I deliver this piece of code. It kind of works for the client. We've never been paid for something else. However, having open source experience that, for instance, our system seed has, we've managed to identify where they can create reusable solutions for their own business or to actually open source those solutions. That made them to think slightly different in terms of how they write code and how they reuse those delivered software as the company. Also what happened that is interesting in that relationship is that our team was more senior than their team and we ended up naturally mentoring their staff members to do better job helping fix some of the security issues that they were not aware of helping close some of the annoying, let's call them delivery practices that they didn't know how to fix. They were doing things manually and they kind of used to that, but they ended up spending a couple of days a month on that. Practices that they had no idea how to fix. You actually worked on that project and you were escalated to a technical architect, right? So you ended up leading the team? Yes, that's my only answer I can tell. Eventually it all ended up with them telling us that we were one of the best agencies we have worked with, so I think it paid off. And handing over to Anthony for the final recap. Yep, great thanks, Ev. So that's our short explanation as to how to be a good outsourcing partner for government projects. You can also come and see us and ask questions just to read off the screen. Five tips. Get things right from the start. It's all about relationships. Speak the same language that includes technical and subject matter expertise. Make onboarding easy. You can do some of that up front but not all of it and give more than you get as Ev mentioned. Thank you very much. Please give honest feedback through the app.


Mae hi fel yw'r pryd ynghyd yn ei fod yn gyfodol ar gyfwyrdd. ac mae'r ffordd o'r bwysig twdd ar gyfodol yn gyfodol ar gyfer Ysgrifennu Nofonol a Ysgrifennu Ffarfyn Ffyrdd ydraig mae'r cael ei gilydd yn ei edrych yn ddodol Ysgrifennu Ffyrdd y Llyfr o'r Gweithihyd Ac ydw'r Gweith Genedlau Mae'r Gweith Ysgrifennu Torol Maxwini Mae'n rhaid i'n meddwl, mae'n gwneud o'r rôl. Mae'n gwoes i Arland, yn yr oedd, rydyn ni'n gweithio'r llyfr yn eu gwirionedd ar y gade, ac mae'n deall, mae'n deall, yna'r ysgrifenni. Mae'n meddwl i'n meddwl. Mae'n meddwl i'n meddwl i'r rôl i'n meddwl i'r gweithio. Mae'n meddwl i'n meddwl i'r rôl i'r gweithio. Mae'r ddechrau erbyn ymddangos, Tyrrl has served in a number of positions. Deputy Assistant to President Obama and the Antitrust Division, Domestic Policy Adviser to Vice President Joe Biden on a whole variety of areas like innovation, IP, energy, education, women's rights and in fact other areas as well. She's also been the Chief Council for Competition Policy and Intergovernmental Relations and in 2014 she was appointed Commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission. So you can see with her background she's brought together an amazing amount of experience and expertise to take this position. It's a very warm welcome to you to the Institute at Tyrrl and we look forward to your presentation which is entitled in a very nice title, a US Enforcer's Perspective on Innovation and Technology Policy. We look forward to your presentation, thank you. Thank you so much for having me and that incredibly kind introduction and very warm welcome. I can't tell you how absolutely thrilled my dad was when I said I am going to stop in Dublin and I have an invitation to speak at the Institute for International European Affairs and he said, oh that sounds amazing. I said no so am I. So I really appreciate both the invitation and the exchange of ideas but also the really rich work that you're doing here on these provocative issues and leading the conversation and policy dialogue so thank you for your commitment to that work as well. I think these are issues that we all need to be in a conversation about because they are very complex and they're profoundly important to how we're going to organize ourselves in the digital economy. So I'm going to talk a little bit about what I know which is how the US Federal Trade Commission works in this space. Some of the things that I think are good about it, some of the things that might be not as good and a little bit about where some of the frontiers are that I think we all need to be collectively thinking about and working on together and along with some of the tools that I'm familiar with in the US toolbox that I think might be helpful as well and I think we have time for questions. So I'll try to move through things quickly. I have to start with a usual disclaimer which is that I am a US Federal Trade Commissioner but I am here today giving you my own opinion, not necessarily the official views of the FTC or views that are even possibly shared by my colleague acting chairman Oelhausen. But since we're down to two members of a five member commission I can safely tell you that these are the views of 50% of the FTC. And I would note because we're in Dublin that my colleague Maureen Oelhausen is actually also Irish-American so it's also an all Irish-American FTC which is pretty awesome. So I'm going to start a little bit with the evolution of the Federal Trade Commission. I'm going to review again some of the strengths and weaknesses of the approach the FTC has used and conclude with the frontiers. But first I want to talk a little bit about time. Everybody's probably like, why are you talking about time? Because I want to start there for a second because I feel like these conversations use a lot of words. Some of them very technical. We start making generalizations about technology. We throw around things like neural network and algorithm and data and a lot of other terminology to describe the transformation in the global economy that is underway in this fourth industrial revolution that we're now in. And it's very easy to get confused by those words or to use them, I mean platform, what's that even mean anymore, right? Use them in sort of generalized way. I'll be doing it a lot today. But I think the thing to focus on is actually a very simple thing which is a thing we all have a lot of experience in. One of the key differences in what's happening now versus what was happening before is actually the velocity at which it's happening. And that's a time type of issue. And I think we are all familiar with that because we sense it in our daily lives. We sense the pace of the technology that we're using and the impact that it's having on our own lives. And I think that speeding up, if you will, made possible by all this amazing transformational technology is also one of the reasons we are sensing in a very personal and human way our loss of control of it around us. And I think that's the sort of underpinning of a lot of the policy conversation that we're all having in this space. So FTC, I'll get back to time later, but think of it as the change underway is really one of time, almost literally feeling like it's speeding up and us as humans having very hard time managing that change. The FTC is about 103 years old, which in America is very old, and it's especially old for an independent regulator. We've actually survived longer than any other commissions like us. The rest of them have been eliminated over time. And I think the only older one is probably the Fed. So I think that's cool because the FTC was actually founded at a time in our country where we were very worried about the economic power of these large vertically integrated companies that were owned by a very small number of very powerful individuals and controlled by them too. It's a thing that sounds very familiar in 2017 as a set of concerns. It was given at the time a very broad mandate to protect consumers from unfair competition. And ultimately we were added an additional authority to protect consumers from unfair deceptive acts and practices that didn't actually happen until about 1930. But it came along as an idea of having a generalized consumer protection enforcer who is going to step in and try to fix some of the inequities and imbalances and problems associated with the trusts and oligopolies that were running the economy. And so how did it happen that a commission established for that 103 years ago is now a commission that sometimes is referred to as a federal technology commission that serves as a data protection commission that has an office of technology researchers and holds workshops on ransomware and does all of this technology policy work? Well it's actually pretty simple which is that the FTC I think quite wisely over time focused on protecting consumers from harms in the marketplace and it kept moving with them as they moved from a brick and mortar world into the digital world that we're now in. So that's how the FTC landed where it landed with just a very broad mandate that it sort of used and adapted and evolved. And that is the most fundamental and important part of what the FTC does and why I think it is a very successful regulator or enforcer in the technology space because it also uses the other feature of its design to a very important purpose. Its other feature is that it's meant to study trends and changes in the marketplace in order to inform its enforcement practice. So basically the FTC does this thing over and over again and I think in modern time has done it relatively well just it studies the trends and changes in the marketplace and then it writes reports on things and or it sends warning letters and then ultimately it enforces and that cycle sort of repeats right. So again the challenge of the policy conversation that we're in now and the digital economy is that we have to speed up that cycle a lot right. The study report enforce it has to happen more rapidly and so again here we are with that time thing that I think is really the underpinning of the changes that are underway. I actually think we have a lot to show for our efforts though. So in the last three or plus years that I've been on the FTC we've done a report on data brokers on big data whether it's a tool for inclusion or discrimination on the internet of things. We've initiated our start with security initiative which is about building with security in mind all of these new great devices. We have a cross-device tracking report. We've done workshops on ransomware, drones, smart television, financial technology including crowdfunding, blockchain and digital currency and that's just in the last two and a half years. So that's a lot of activity looking at a lot of these changes and helping to inform our enforcement but also helping to inform the broader policy conversation. So I think it's impressively agile actually for a government agency to be able to do that kind of work and I think that's a really useful quality and attribute to agencies that are trying to keep pace in this environment and I think it's also really important that in learning about how the technology works and one of the things we've also done at the FTC is include technologists and computer scientists in our work now and on our staff so that we have people who are actually experts in the technology we're talking about. We also try to make sure that we're appreciating all the innovation and benefits that are flowing from it rather than focusing always on the cost and the harm. So we want to make sure that we're continuing to balance our understanding of all the great new things that consumers are benefiting from while at the same time we are identifying some of the harms and risks that we want to avoid. So harms is a big part of our work and as an enforcement agency harms is where quite rightly our focus is usually placed. The FTC continues to be very busy in the brick and mortar world. There's plenty of sprods and scams and bad practices going on between people all the time so we spend some of our resources there but in the online world we've also become known as a privacy enforcer and data security enforcer and I think ultimately and I'll get to this towards the end of my remarks I think we need to help move everybody towards information governance which is a slightly broader broader concept. The FTC's first privacy case was in 1998 and it involved geo cities which was unfairly selling users data without their consent and since then we've brought about 500 data security in privacy cases. We've also been given regulatory authority and limited way over children's data so under the US Children Online Privacy Protection Act we actually write rules governing the consent that parents need to give for the collection and use of children's information who are under 13. So our focus is on holding companies accountable for the promises that they make about the information they use and collect and consistently emphasizing the real role of choice and over time the FTC has taken the view that consent which is a really important element of how we approach these issues can be inferred for collection and sharing and use of information within consumer expectations but it has to be consistent with the context of the transaction and consumers reasonable expectations and I think in this in this way we have supported the evolution of frameworks that require often consent for the collection and sharing of information that we regard as sensitive and right now sensitive information which is a concept that I think can evolve with the marketplace over time but right now the FTC regards it as content of communications social security number is very important in the US as identifying information health information financial information financial information children's information geolocation information and recently in a smart television's case that we had we added television viewing information as well so that is a framework that's requiring an opt-in choice around the collection and use of that information now there are certainly pros and cons to the the US's heavy reliance on an enforcement and sector based approach to technology policy making in the interest of time there it is again time I'm going to skip over like literally the hundreds of thousands of pages of scholarly thoughts that have been written about the relative merits of regulation and enforcement and a free market approach to these policies issues I suspect everybody in this room is kind of an expert on them already and suffices today there is like a really good and important debate about what frameworks are best I like to I'd like to argue I guess that a fact-based enforcement oriented approach is very pro innovation and it might be even more pro innovation than a heavy handed regulatory approach to dynamic digital markets because it lowers the cost and burdens on new entrants and maximizes the incentives to innovate so the FTC's focus is economically and technologically informed and is primarily harm based but it's also technology neutral which is a really important component of either regulatory or an enforcement approach and sufficiently flexible as I've just been discussing to keep pace with the rapidly changing marketplace you know I do think there are also these issues that that people study quite carefully of industry capture of regulators and those don't tend to arise quite as much in a broad based enforcement agency but of course there are drawbacks I mean actually our most common complaint is that the FTC doesn't provide clear enough guidance over how and when it is using its generalized authority so the marketplace doesn't know well enough when we are going to bring cases and other critics argue that the agency doesn't confine itself to purely economic harms or that it can't keep pace with innovative and dynamic markets and those who support more aggressive regulation argue that the FTC's modern mandate is confined to stopping practices inflicting concrete harms to consumers in competition so the agency can't really address these broader public interest concerns that are also very important components of the of the technology policy debate so I'm going to pause here for a second and note that of course relying on an enforcement only approach does not solve all of the problems that we're concerned about and I don't want anybody to understand that I am advocating that instead I'm I'm I'm sort of trying to point out some of the strengths of the FTC's approach and of course the reality in the United States that I think has been relatively successful when it comes to optimizing for innovation is that we have a hybrid approach so the FTC is an enforcement agency but we work with expert regulators those those issues of when an expert regulator writes clear x anti rules for something versus when we rely on an x post enforcement framework are really front and center in the open internet debate that we are having once again in the United States and there I would say we're about to make a really big mistake because if you rely on an enforcement only approach to protect the neutrality and access and non-discrimination on the internet then you really are going to end up with a lot of problems because of the market structure of the way broadband works in the United States we don't have a lot of competition in that market so we have these very powerful companies that are vertically integrated with a lot of incentives to prioritize our own content or to engage in this is a technical term hijinks never use that term and and relying on an enforcement only approach is going to tee up some of the real weaknesses of an enforcement only approach which is that it takes us time to detect conduct if we can even detect it at all we may not have necessarily sector specific expertise in in what we're looking at we we would have to do a full investigation and that also takes additional time so you might end up several years after the fact trying to remedy a harm to say an entrepreneur is trying to build a new app with almost no remedy that's very satisfying at that point so i think it's a nice issue to tee up some of the complexities here there are certainly situations in which clear ex ante rules are justified it's particularly true when you're dealing with situations of market failure or you're trying to guard some of these public interest concerns like speech and access and non-discrimination on the internet that are really outside of the harms based framework of consumer protection or antitrust law so um i think move into the frontiers portion and hopefully we still have enough time i don't okay great um i don't have my watch on um and and and just sort of think a little bit about some of the really interesting challenges that we're all thinking about and working on as the array of technology we use in our lives is growing um first i think uh it's important that we remember that all of it's it's difficult to make generalizations all of these kinds of technologies are not necessarily the same and so for both regulators and enforcement agencies like the ftc the starting point should be to make sure that we're understanding the technology that we're talking about before making sort of big generalizations about it and now i'm going to make some big generalizations about it so i'll just assert that i understand the technology i'm talking about which is probably definitely not true um uh not true in that i think it's very hard for everybody to understand all these different things maybe some people are geniuses um so i think the questions we're wrestling with now is it you know how do we make sure that consumers um who want to benefit from all this innovation and who are benefiting from it have choices and transparency within it um are there additional protections that consumers need uh can the notice and choice framework continue to be the paradigm for privacy policy especially when the choices increasingly this take it or leave it proposition where you have to accept terms of use um in order to use a service uh and as the technology gets smarter i think one of the really important questions we're going to be wrestling with is how and when do we protect human agency and decision making um fortunately not all of these issues reside within the ftc thank god they're very hard um but a lot of them do and i think uh the ftc has some very valuable learning that it can use to inform the discussion in this area that it has evolved as it has evolved along with the marketplace so um first i would argue that we need to continue to protect consumers notice and choice and ensuring uh also that the technology is honoring those choices so in our recent enforcement cases the ftc has been particularly focused on technology that is essentially thwarting a consumer choice through some sort of clever work around this might be a critique of a kind of regulatory approach to some of these issues that you write a reg that says this and the technology just moves around it over here right so as an enforcement agency with a broad tool we've been looking at these challenges and in our recent case in mobi involving a company that was providing advertisements in apps we looked at the fact that although you might have shut off the geolocation tracking for the app the technology in mobi was still tracking your geolocation and it was doing that by triangulating off of your wi-fi connection so it was a clever technical work around that allowed them to continue to serve ads that pins your geolocation uh but we said look you can't deceive consumers if a consumer asserts a privacy choice that says don't track me you have to honor that choice and i think this area is an area the ftc has to be very vigilant in um and that we need to continue to work in our case in turn also was very related to that this was a case involving the Verizon super cookie program which was a bunch of tracking uh that was happening that was very hard to get rid of or actually impossible to get rid of and it and there we said look you can't deceive consumers and say that you can eliminate tracking that's occurring when that's not actually the case um and in our recent case involving smart televisions and visio uh we said look you can't present a notice that you're uh monetizing every single second of someone's television viewing um in the uh uh what was it called it was like the it was called the notice was like um we it was like performance and we might be using your information to serve you uh recommendations like that does not capture what is actually going on there especially when american consumers at least were pretty surprised to learn that they were being tracked like that and didn't really expect it so there we have those elements of consumer expectation and context being very important as well so um I think we have to continue to be vigilant and sometimes the vigilance um takes the form of actually sending out warning letters ahead of time so we were actually talking about this silver push you and I were talking about this nail this silver push warning letter that we we put out so this is software that is actually designed to gather your television use by turning on the microphone on your phone and listening for audio beacons that are being sent out right and it would be in like whatever app that's running that scene like I appreciate the laugh thank you it's quite clever um but again we said look you there's not a way that you can properly explain to people that that's happening to them that we think will work here so please app developers in the US don't do this um and again I mean I think in the US system it is flexible enough that if people actually designed a way in which that could be made clear to people we would allow the the conduct and the choice but we need to make sure that consumers really want to consent to that um secondly we've been looking at cross device tracking and one of the areas that I think we need to do a much better job on is making sure that a privacy choice that is made on one device is actually honored across your entire device graph because what is now happening is um it's most of your profiles are including every device that you access and what you access on it you can imagine the scenarios where people are doing things on their home computers that they didn't expect to show up on their work computers um and that can cause some very uncomfortable situations so we want to we want to make sure that that we're developing the technology it doesn't exist yet but I would like it to that would allow a consumer choice to be made across their device graph and I think that we really are in this situation where we're going to need to continue to have the innovation and technology that provides consumers with better controls and choices um and that provides the privacy innovations in this always on always connected atmosphere because that's going to be very very important I'm going to skip over a little bit here just in the in the interest of time um and uh and say that there are a bunch of other laws in the United States that I think are also really applicable to continuing to protect consumers in our digital economy um and they involve civil rights protections for equal opportunity protections against discrimination and we actually have some pretty robust authorities at the FSTC in the form of our fair credit reporting act which are requirements that are imposed on companies that are using consumer information um in ways that um affect uh lending decisions that are being made about consumers that can be a very nice model for what frameworks we want to put in place around consumers um so that they have ample information to know how their data is being used in ways that might affect their actual economic opportunity their ability to buy a house their ability to be employed um their ability um to be free of of discrimination in the marketplace see look at that I skipped a whole page it's good all right um I think I'm going to finish up with some of some of what I think we can actually evolve to without new authority and then some of the areas where I think it would actually be very helpful for the FTC to have some additional tools as well um first uh I want to start with where I think we can all go so um the issues of information and control and economic power and competition associated with the digital economy are far broader than privacy policy I think everybody in the room knows that um we have had an amazing experience in the last year of elections both here in Europe and in the United States that really underscores some of the uh non economic arguably non consumer protection risks associated with technology that's increasingly pushing us into like-minded groups and curating our lives in ways that are hard to to anticipate and and I think those are those are real problems um I also think there's a whole host of frontiers here around the the level of intelligence of the technology that is running algorithms and the impact that that has on the functioning of the marketplace um and the accountability that needs to be associated with the companies that are using that technology so um we've evolved this concept at the FTC and privacy over time called privacy by design we didn't come up with it I'm actually a wonderful scholar did and it's been part of the privacy conversation globally now for some time um the notion being that you can't tack on privacy values at the end of the product development lifecycle you have to build with those values in mind all along because if you push it in at the end the technology won't work like that anyway and in fact um we came to it because we a lot of our early privacy cases were deception cases where someone would say it doesn't do that and we'd say yes it does you can't say that um right and so building with these values in mind helps you avoid FTC liability well we adapted that framework into our data security program so we've brought hundreds of data security cases in which consumer data wasn't properly secured because a company failed to have proper security practice in place and we said look it you you should also have security by design security by design like privacy by design means building all along the the product lifecycle with security values in mind because it's a coders will tell you that all coders don't know security you need to have people who understand cyber security as part of that process right and it also means organizationally you need to have a data security program you need to have the ability to receive and respond to vulnerabilities you need to be testing your products you need to be patching your products right you need to have a whole framework in place around how you're securing a connected product or a connected offering so I think if we can evolve this into governance by design and then ultimately as the technology gets smarter ethics by design we can create governance structures within organizations using technology that are more responsive to some of the public interest values that we all care about and you know we're having a very vibrant conversation all over the world around these and I think there's a lot of consensus about what some of the elements of this kind of framework would look like and it includes transparency and choice and explainability I also think it includes testing data quality and remediation and mitigation strategies when that's necessary and ultimately as we get into increasingly autonomous technology it's going to require human minders that can explain what the autonomous technology is doing because I certainly can imagine problems in the future where some regulator or enforcer like the FTC says well why did it do that and the humans say I don't know right I don't think that's going to be a satisfying answer for anybody in that conversation so we want to be setting up the systems so that there is an explanation for that and and that we can govern the technology I am going to wrap it up there and simply say that it would be I think helpful if in the US we had the ability to write a privacy regulation I've supported that in the past that would be a generalized privacy law that we don't currently have and I think the FTC would be capable of writing that kind of rule I think it would be helpful if data brokers who are creating all these very detailed profiles about us were required to provide consumer access to that information and then we had more notice and choice and consent over how that profile is used and that would require in the US legislation as well I think it would be helpful if the Federal Trade Commission had civil penalty authority we don't have penalty authority we can get redress back for consumers but we can't really find anybody so I think that would give us a bigger stick and I would like to wield it and and I think we have to continue to have a very engaged global conversation around these issues which is why I'm so grateful to be here today because we're in a global digital economy so how we resolve these issues how we think about what the right policies are has an effect on all of us and everybody has a contribution to make