This year I had to renew my passport in 2019.  I mean I've been I've been all over with this. There's Bolivia Belize that was a great trip. There's Where is this? Peru Mexico Guatemala See in lots of stuff. Oh Cambodia so this thing you can see it's pretty large a lot of amazing memories in here and When I got this back, I thought okay now This is something that I want to keep and many of you know that for a while I had literally just a hundred eleven possessions all of which fit in my backpack and then after that I've lived in a tiny house in in Orlando with almost no real material possessions there as well So, you know, I don't really hold on to material possessions or sentimental things, but this Actually gave me that feeling of something that I wanted to hold on to but I really practice non materialism and non ownership and living in the present so I decided I was gonna do something and That is that I wasn't gonna keep this Just as continuing that practice of Not holding on to the past and living in the present. So I decided that you know thing that would make sense to do is just Cut it up but then Just last night as I was planning this video what I was gonna say I thought about it and I thought This actually doesn't make sense to cut up Not because I'm gonna keep it though Because I don't want it But I thought about my mom and I thought about all the postcards that I sent her from these many countries And how much joy that brought her and I thought of ten years of those postcards and those conversations Wrapped up in this passport and I thought this would bring my mom a lot of joy She would absolutely love to have this so rather than cut it up I'm gonna send it to my mom and you know honestly for me. I'd it's a it's The selfish thing to do would be to cut it up because I'd rather just have it not exist and I know that Years down the road. I'm gonna see this again at my at my mom's house. So it won't be completely Removed but it will be no longer a possession of mine And it's a possession that will bring value and happiness to my mom So love you mom and this is gonna be in the mail coming your way Basically the meaning for my mom is much more meaningful to me. So that's where it's going The reason I'm making this video though is that I see this as a great opportunity to Share something with you to talk about Simplifying your life to talk about downsizing. I Get you know so many people that look at my life and they they ask How they can start to simplify how they can start to free themselves from their huge amount of possessions that are tying them down And I see it, you know, I see that it's something that millions of people Want right now, but they're stuck and they they don't know how to Start and they don't know how to get to where they're trying to go so I wanted to share my story a little bit and At the same time give tips on what you can do to get started So I grew up very low income in a house with you know a very small house with my mom and four siblings and Because of that, I believe that I sort of had this thirst for Material possessions. I wanted to fill the holes inside of me that existed because I thought of myself as poor and Different from other people. I looked at my friends that were wealthier and I saw myself as lacking So material possessions were my way to fill that so I was a collector I collect I collected everything that you could collect cards coins Pogs action figures Rocks stamps and my biggest addiction really was beanie babies. I actually had over 700 beanie babies and my mom had I think over 500 we were beanie baby addicts major beanie baby collectors and For you know a large portion of my life I was very focused on material possessions because I saw them as a way to build myself up to to create a Vision of who I was that might have been through having a huge closet of clothes was you know through my car It was through my material possessions through financial wealth but then Something happened and I realized that that's not the life that I wanted to live anymore. I Realized that those material possessions were not bringing me the health and the happiness and the purpose and the passion that I wanted and That maybe my life could be better with less and so One of the early things that I watched was actually the story of stuff and I learned about the destruction that our stuff causes from You know the extraction of the materials to make it to the production of it to the shipping of it to the usage of it to The trashing of it and that was a big wake-up call to me Just realizing that my stuff was destroying the world and that it wasn't bringing me health and happiness and That I was just buying into this corporate idea that I needed their things to be happy and healthy So it was a wake-up in many ways personal environmental Truth justice equality and That's when I decided I was gonna start getting rid of stuff now at the time though. I had a lot of possessions I was living in a three bedroom apartment in San Diego And I actually had the biggest room in the apartment because of my stuff And there was the living room in the closet and the kitchen and it was all Stuff so I had to figure out how to get rid of that and that was a big task and I really wanted to make it clear that where I am today and where I was in the past was not overnight It was because of a lot of work. It was because I made it my full-time job to simplify my life and unravel The mess that I had gotten myself into over the last few decades the last couple decades so I started with an activity and that was that I would The goal was to get rid of stuff that I didn't want that added clutter to my life that didn't add value So what I did is I would I would go through my house and I would look at each item and I would say Does this bring value to my life? Is this making my life better or is this actually Taking away time is it adding clutter which makes the house harder to clean so it takes more time to clean Is it possibly costing me money through insurance or you know constant updating and If the answer was no it doesn't bring me much value and it actually takes away from my life Then the answer was to get rid of it. So that was the big big That was a big starting point and the other question that I would ask is have I used this in the last say six to twelve months if it's not something I was getting used out of then I could Remove it from my life to make space For doing what I really wanted to do. So those are two really helpful questions to me that I would recommend to you now What I did is that I would basically go through my house say every six or twelve months And I would do that exercise over and over and over Over a period of years and so I would half my stuff and then half my stuff again And a lot of the things that the last time around I wasn't able to get rid of the next time that I was so it was a transition And slowly but surely I shrunk my possessions I actually went from the biggest room to the smallest room then I moved into a six by six closet in my house I still had the living room and the kitchen but as far as my possessions I had the six by six closet as my room Then I lived in a the 50 square foot tiny house in San Diego and then I got my life down to just 111 possessions that I traveled for two years with all on my back or on my bicycle So the point is though it took time. It was a transition. It's not something that I could do overnight It's not something that you'll be over able to do overnight You have to start somewhere and that could be with one item and And it's gonna take time for some people it's gonna take it could take five or ten years for me I was deep, but I wasn't as deep as many people with Storage lockers and large houses. I had a three bedroom apartment, but no storage lockers and no garage So it was easier for me, but still took years of Detachment and getting rid of things. So all of these questions were basically like Marie Kondo's question Does this spark joy? but basically a little bit more Practical but going for the exact same essence really I think Now I want to share some other things that I did to help get rid of stuff and Questions that I asked and tips that you can that you can use as well So another thing when I was trying to get rid of things. I would ask myself is Can I rent this instead if I'm not using it very often can I rent it? For example a surfboard if I was only using a surfboard every couple months Could I just rent it instead so I didn't have to store it and have all that space or a car Ultimately in 2012. I decided to get rid of my car and that was a big step for me But I did all the math and I was spending $7,000 a year on my car and I realized if I just wanted to rent a car once a month I could do that so I could still use a car when needed by renting it even better than renting is sharing Talking to your neighbors getting connected to your neighbors talking to your friends Maybe your friends my friends at the time had a whole bunch of surfboards So I didn't really need one since I wasn't going often So it's about you can rent the items and then sharing and sharing can be with friends and family But it can also be the bigger picture the sharing economy. There's all sorts of websites There's there's all sorts of ways to share resources with others the library is a perfect example You can rent tools. There's so many ways to rent or to share and that's something that I would really recommend Another way that I dealt with possessions and that you can as well is if there's something that that you Really like and you would like to continue using but rarely as you can give it to a friend Who would use it way more than you and he would get you know a far better use out of it and just ask them Hey, if I give you this, maybe it's the maybe it's a guitar or maybe it's um, you know A high-power kitchen, you know a blender for the kitchen if they would use it all the time And you would use it sometimes you could say hey, can I give you this and could I Borrow it from you once once in a while. That's a great way to pass something on but still have Access to something that you would need Now what about things that are extremely meaningful to you? I've had a lot of people ask me questions about sentimental items how to Get rid of those and one guy asked me he had a guitar for decades And he loved that guitar and just could not see getting rid of it So what I suggested to him is to find somebody with no guitar Who couldn't otherwise afford or access one maybe a young developing youth and Give them that guitar so that they can love it and they can appreciate it and they can get value out of it Then much more value than it's sitting in his In his living room or in his closet and in that way this possession can bring you more joy By not having it by knowing that somebody else has it and even better you can follow up with that person I told them follow up with that person and and and see the joy that it brings them and if you want to go even further go ahead and be Selfless and purchase lessons for that person and actually help them develop With that guitar so that's another way to deal with sentimental items to give it to somebody where it brings more Value and more sentiment to them and that can bring you joy and that possession can live on in your mind and in your legacy And not be clutter and not be something that you have to feel guilty about that's sitting around and not getting used So a few other things that you can do there's thrift stores, but I do want to Keep in mind that with thrift stores a lot of that stuff does get thrown away The thrift store dumpsters are full of stuff You know thrift stores are great, but just keep that in mind that it doesn't necessarily mean it's not ending up in the garbage And also that it's not creating problems a lot of stuff that we donate like our clothes is shipped to other countries Where there it actually can cause problems it can destroy local business opportunities and local businesses So donating it is definitely a great option But just keep that in mind that that it doesn't that there's there's some realities behind it Another thing that you can do is you can have a giveaway party So it takes a lot of work to get rid of things what you can do is you can have a party for your friends and Anyone in the community if you want and you can have them over and everything that you want to give away can Be obvious whether it's in one room of your house or Labeled within the house and have people come and they can take those things which saves you a lot of work makes a great you know experience and Helps get those possessions to people that can use them. You can also sell Possessions, you know, that's a great way to get the money back. You could sell them on Craigslist you can do eBay you can do yard sales. There's all sorts of websites for for selling possessions So that's another thing you can do. You can also donate it for example to places like materials for the arts So there's organizations that that repurpose things to make Costumes or to make art so you can donate things to organizations like that Get creative. There's so many ways to deal with the stuff and it can actually be fun And it can be enjoyable to let go but I do want to say it is work It's something you have to be intentional about and it is definitely going to take work a couple other things to mention Recycling there's a lot of things that you can recycle so Getting rid of things that way through recycling Some things are probably going to have to go in the trash. I don't feel bad I didn't feel bad about having to put some things in the trash because honestly Whether it's sitting for 80 years in your house or it's sitting in a landfill plastic containers, for example That can't be recycled or something It doesn't really make a difference.  I see people who you know They have all these plastic utensils or plastic cups in their in their drawers or their shelves because they got them Eating out and then they want to use them over and over and over so that they Get more use out of them, but they have perfectly good metal utensils and glass cups It's delusional to think that using that plastic spoon 20 times is in any way beneficial to the environment When you have your reusable ones in the counter in you know there in the kitchen It doesn't make any difference. You're not doing anything more environmentally friendly So you can let go of those things you don't have to hold on to them Filling your space with with junk that really is a delusion to think that using it is Making things better all of those tips were on how to Get rid of things and the idea of getting rid of things isn't so that you have less it's so that you have more It's about making space to do the things that you love to spend time with friends and family to to follow your passions and your purpose to learn to spend your time learning and immersing in the world and For me that's been the big thing. I've gained from having less. I haven't I haven't taken away from my life I've added value to my life. Otherwise. I wouldn't be doing it So I want to talk a little bit about what you can do to prevent more stuff from coming into your life Because getting rid of things is only one part of it. It's easy to accrue more possessions So when you're gonna buy something one thing you can you do is you can ask Do I really need this or do I just want this and? Is this just a passing feeling in the long run? You know, will I be fine without this? That's a basic question that you can ask in order to not accrue stuff if the answer is I don't really need it Then you can not buy it Another thing you can do is you can be okay with saying no being okay with saying no to other people when they want to give you something and Just explain that you know You're trying to live a life with less possessions and more simply and that you value them and you value their desire to give You something but it's just not something that you need right now be soft be gentle and also Explain that you can share Experiences if people want to give gifts you can tell them that you'd rather have the experience of a dinner together or or going To an event together or something like that a big one is Not having a car or driving the car a lot less or if you're a multi car family having fewer cars And one of the big things is when you don't have a car You don't have a trunk when you don't have a trunk It's harder to buy things if you ride your bike locally to the hardware store or to the grocery shop Go to the grocery store or whatever it is. You don't have a trunk to fill up with stuff So not having a car or driving the car a lot less is a great way to end up buying a lot less to accumulating a lot less another great thing to do is buy Quality items that are gonna last not things that are gonna break and then you have you know them sitting around so buying quality items and then buying items that are multi-purpose so things that can be used for many Different ways a multi-tool knife is a perfect example. It's got many tools on it It's a small thing But that can go to to many different things whether it's in your kitchen or your living room or your bedroom buying multi-purpose items that can be used in many ways I Mentioned earlier sharing, but I can't say that enough times just sharing things Not everybody needs to have one of everything in the neighborhood if ten people have a blender But most of them are not using it very often. It's just completely unnecessary So sharing with neighbors a lawnmower is a perfect example of that Ten houses could definitely share one lawnmower, which saves you a ton of money a ton of storage space You can split the costs also of maintenance and things like that So sharing as well as through the sharing economy all the websites that exist your public library. There's libraries of things car share programs bike share programs sharing is incredible and Then connecting with your community one of the best things about all of this is that This is a way to actually get you more involved with your community get you out of your house get you more Social bring that value to your life through community and again, none of this is about it's not about Suffering it's not about living without it's all about Living in a way that we can live with our purpose with our passion with our actions and alignment with our beliefs So my hopes is that you know through this video. You've gotten some tips. There's a lot here So I'm sure you now have what you need to get started to get going and remember it's gonna take work It's gonna take time. It's gonna take effort.  It's gonna take work, but This video hopefully gives you those tools to get started to inspire you and empower you and now it's about starting that journey So if you got a lot out of this video if you got inspiration You got some education and you think that this is a video worth other people seeing then I encourage you to Share this video share it with your friends that you want to help downsize Like the video or click that thumbs up that'll help get it out there across YouTube to other people comment ask questions, I'll try to answer most of the questions and That'll help spread it as well and I can share some more information with you And if you haven't already definitely subscribe if you want to see more of this So it's been great sitting down with you and sharing how you can simplify your life to live with more and I love You all very much and see you soon


Hello, everyone. This was a bit nerve-wracking, but fortunately the slides are working now. I don't know about you, but we're definitely very excited to be here. I want to thank the organizers again for having us here. We're from Germany. In case you were wondering about the weird accent and we're going to present the project we did last year. So I'm Andreas and I'm a data scientist. I did the data analysis for this project and I'm working as a data scientist for the German cybersecurity organization as well as for seven scientists. And I can now relax a bit because Svia will do the first part of the presentation. Thank you. I'm Svair and I'm a journalist mainly doing investigative reporting on tech topics. And yeah there was a topic coming up and just before we dive into it, I want to explain why exactly we are here. And this spring I've heard about a severe decision you have had here in the U.S. It was the U.S. Senate who voted to eliminate the broadband privacy rules that would have required ISPs to get consumers' explicit consent before selling or sharing web browsing data. And in the research we did just half a year earlier in Germany we learned in a very concrete and very shocking way what it means if somebody is selling your browsing data. So I just, yeah, went to take you with on that journey. Maybe you can imagine by yourself what you think if somebody is showing up on your door and saying, hey, I have your complete browsing history every day, every hour, every second, every click you did on the web for the last month. So that somebody was me. And at first, before I explained how I got that information, I wanted to tell you how we got the data and what else was up with that. I first want to show you a reaction from a person I first confronted with her data. She's a member from German parliament, she's a politician. And yeah, and I was sitting next to her. It's a video, so I'm not sure how this is working. Oh, I would love, yeah, you can hear it in German when she's speaking. So she's not happy. Yeah, it's okay. So that's what she's saying basically. Sorry guys, can we get the video rolling here? Can somebody help me for the next, because I need it? Okay, so this is what I showed her. This is not a video, this one, but the next one because we want to scroll and dive into her life a little bit more. So what you can see here is her browsing history. You can see that exactly what she was doing on the 1st of August. And you can see that she likes to get up early and one of the first things she's doing in the morning is banking and banking. And we can go through her whole browsing history and that's a video now. Let's try if we can get this rolling. Because what you are seeing here, oh, that's bad, because what you see here is her tax declaration. It's in Germany, it's called Elster. And you can do it online. And it's typically that you do it in August because then the deadline is running out. Can you help us with the video? Because I think it would miss so much. Is that the play button? No, that's the next. That's the next one to the right. Okay, this one is over there. Okay, that's okay. So what you think might be all my tax declaration, maybe that's bad. But what's even more worse, especially when you are in a higher position is if you are searching for medication. And that's exactly what she did on a day in August sitting in front of her computer, she was searching for medication. When do you take, when you feel dizzy or when you have a tinnitus? So yeah, what was it like for her when I was sitting next to her and showing her her browsing history and saying, why do you, why, why you have been searching for timonine? And she said, I don't know why I was searching at the time, but this is a really bad thing to see something like this, especially if this is connected with your own name. So this went on this story. So we basically had this data from three million German citizens and a lot of politicians or better, most of their employees were also in this data. And this even went up near the chancellor miracle where, yeah, where we had the data from, from this guys. So how we did this? Did some shady hacker criminal came and give us this, this data? No, it's way more easier. You can buy it. So this landscape, what you can see here is all the companies who are having contact with, with this very sensitive or very personal data. It's a business universe for itself with hundreds of thousands of companies making millions with data. And what some of them do is just watching the web and they sell the analysis of, of their watching as a product. And usual, this is for competitors analysis interesting or for user analytics. And some of them exchange the data under each other. Some take them all by themselves and a very few sell it. To who? To who you might ask, here comes the social engineering part. So first of all, you need a very convincing business partner that was Anna Rosenberg, hi. And this research, this was my, or our alter ego and Anna worked and Tel Aviv for, because I like the city very much, for a very promising startup. And after a while, she even had more than a hundred business connections nobody we actually knew, but so many people are just accepting her friend request without checking, took us two weeks. So that's the promising company Anna is working for, took us two hours. It's a website and the company was made, meets technology because technology meets creativity. So it was just many nice pictures and some marketing buzzwords. The story was easy. Our startup had developed a self-learning algorithm, something like A.I. and this algorithm could predict which products people are willing to buy in the future and to train this algorithm, we would need a massive amount of data, raw data and there was a mysterious German customer in the back who would pay for all of this. And with this promising story, we went on the market, we even had a career site and we even had applications in the end. So we went on the market for I would say a couple of weeks with a valid phone number, with a valid email address and we wrote, we called more than 50, I think nearly 100 companies in the market and asked them if we could have raw data, if we could have data out of the click stream, out of people's lives. And in the end, we got into a deeper discussion with, yeah, two hand full, like with 10 or 20 companies where we really had more phone calls, more emails exchanging and which turned out to be the challenging thing on the research was that I often heard browsing data is no problem, but for Germany it's hard, but it's no problem, we only have it for the US and the UK. Yeah, what did we get at the end? Andreas will now dive into the data. So, we were actually quite astonished what we got as a freebie from this company because when we opened the data, we saw that it was three billion unique URLs that we received for free and the data was structured in a way such that we had 30 days of browsing data in it and each entry and the data files that we got basically contained a URL, some of the URLs were slightly anonymized like here, like you see these little X's which were removed from the data set and each line also has a user ID which is an anonymized identifier, so just a random number and some other information like a time stamp. So, and these three billion URLs linked to about nine million different domains and contained the data of three million, roughly three million people from Germany where some of the users in there had only a couple of dozen of data points and some others had tens of thousands of data points actually. So, now of course what we wanted to do was to try and see if we could from this anonymized data get back to the real people in there, so like de-anonymized the users in this data set and we use the technique which is called statistical de-anonymization for that. It's actually quite old technique and there are a lot of academic and applied research studies on that, so here I linked the paper from 2007 which got a lot of pest coverage back then where researchers managed to de-anonymize a data set that was provided by Netflix for a machine learning competition by correlating the data in this data set with other publicly available information, in this case from a website called IMDB and by correlating this the researchers were able to link many of the anonymized users in the Netflix data set to real user names in the IMDB data. So, how does this work? As I said, the data we got consisted of many URLs with user identifier associated and you can imagine that as having these columns of vectors that contain different attributes and that are associated with a given user and what you can put in these attributes is basically arbitrary, so in our case for example we could put in information that a given user in our data set has visited a given domain, for example Google.com and by doing that we can, for each user, create this kind of attribute vector and now we can see if we can also find some publicly available information that contains the same or some of these attributes that we have in our anonymized data. So we can, for example, I will show you some examples later, try to find publicly available data about web pages that people visited and then try to correlate the data with our data set here and by doing this we can exclude users on the left side here that are not compatible with the public data that we have seen for a given person and if we have enough information available then we can exclude almost anyone, almost everyone in the list in our anonymized data set and if we manage to drill down our possible users to one or maybe a few candidates then we effectively have de-anonymized this person in our data set. So let's try this. In order to do this we first take our input data and convert it into a matrix where each row in the matrix corresponds to one user and each column corresponds to a domain that this user has or has not visited. So whenever a given user has visited a domain we put a one in the entry of this matrix and if not we put a zero there. So this gives a very large but sparsely populated matrix that we can then use in order to compare our data set to publicly available information. Now the algorithm that we use for that is quite simple. So as I said we generate this matrix and then we can generate a feature vector which is called V with our public information. So there we would just put domains that we find on the public web for example and we then just multiply these two things together which gives us a new vector that contains for every user the number of domains, so to say the number of domains from our public feature vector that he or she visited and we can use that vector again and just see where the largest value is and the largest value will often give us then the user which corresponds to the public data and which is linked to the anonymized data in our set. Now you might ask yourself how well does this actually work. So here I have an example from our data set. Here we took from our 3 million users about 1.1 million those users namely that have at least 10 different URLs in the data set and we just looked for a single user how on like having knowledge about a domain that he or she visited reduces the number of possible users in our data set that are compatible with having visited these domains. And so you see in the beginning we have about 1.1 million users and then if you take the first domain in this case it's the gaming website gog.com you can see that there are only 15,000 users round about left in the data set that have visited this domain and now we say okay maybe our user is also a Kunde at the Deutsche Telekom and if that's the case you can see that these combined two domains have only been visited by about 367 users so from 1 million we already have drilled down the number of possible users to only a few hundred and we can do that again with a few other domains and as you can see after only four domains for given users we already have only one compatible user in our data set and we would so to say already have deanonymized this user. Now the question is of course can we actually get this public information that we need to do that and I want to show you two examples of that. So the first example, for the first example we use Twitter. As you know people they like to tweet about what they're reading and they're posting that on their timeline so what we did was to pick a random user from our anonymized data set that had a Twitter profile so had a Twitter link so to say and we then use the Twitter API to scrape all the URLs that this user posted on the timeline in the given time period and from these URLs we extracted the domains that are associated with them and this information we can then simply feed to our algorithm and see so to say if we can find the user again. In this example you can see that we have about I think nine different domains so mostly development websites as you can see like GitHub, some blogs, some documentation pages and what I show you in the parenthesis there is the number of times this URL appeared in our data set so you can see some of the URLs appear quite often. GitHub for example 2.5 million times some others are quite rare in our data set they appeared only 129 times. So now if you run that through our algorithm we can plot the results like this so what you see on this graph is on the X axis just a particular user that we are looking at so they are sorted completely arbitrarily and on the Y axis you see the number of matching domains from this set on the left that the given user has visited and you can see that of these 100,000 users about that have a Twitter profile in our data set that most of them didn't visit any of those domains but a few of them visited at least one, two, three, four, five, six or seven and one user with the seven ones, seven domains is actually the user we were looking for so this was quite good luck so we were really able to identify this user given only this information here on the left and we did that for about a few thousand users in order to verify it. It didn't always yield 100% success rate but we were always able to narrow down the number of compatible users to a very small group of maybe a couple of thousand users in total so you can see that this technique even with very few information works quite well actually. Now this works also with different kind of identifiers. There's also YouTube data in our data set because that's usually quite interesting for the advertisers so the URLs they were not anonymized and we could therefore extract the video IDs from these URLs and again we played the same game so we just looked for users in our data that had a YouTube, a public YouTube playlist and we used the YouTube API again to download all the elements from this playlist, extract the video IDs from that and then again run it through our algorithm. So doing that we have on the left side the video IDs from a random user again and here on the right side you again see the results of our algorithm. You can see now we have only about slightly less than 20,000 users that have at least one public YouTube playlist in our data set and you can see that most of them didn't see, didn't watch any of those clips at all on the left side but again we have one user who watched about nine of those and that's, that is again the user we're looking for. So it's, you can see this technique is working not only with domains but with a lot of different kinds of data. These were just two examples of data types that we can use for this kind of analysis. We also for example looked at Google Maps URLs so whenever you open Google Maps in your browser it stores the latitude and the longitude of the map area that you're looking at in the URL and of course we can go and extract that and then we can get an impression of what people are looking at in the map. You can see the Germans not surprisingly well they look at Germany and of course their favorite vacation destination Mallorca and having that data you could again search for publicly available and geolocated data. For example here we have public ratings of the user on Google Plus and then you could again use that data to run it through our algorithm and see if some users in our data set are compatible with in this case the geodata of the ratings. And this works as well with different types of identifiers you could do that with Facebook posts and with any kind of like social identifier or URL or information that you have in the data set. To be honest though in most cases we didn't even have to do this because we could already de-anonymize users with a single URL in our data set. That's what we call an instant de-anonymization. And here I show two examples of that. First of all there's a Twitter URL here from the Twitter analytics page. So maybe you know that page you can go there and then you see some statistics about how many people viewed your tweets and how often you got retweeted and the nice thing about this URL at least for us who try to de-anonymize people is that it contains the username and that it's only visible to the user who is locked in. So whenever we see this URL in our data set we can be quite sure that the user to which it belongs is actually the owner of this Twitter profile. And this really allowed us to de-anonymize a lot of people without going through like the pain of having this combination like the statistical method so to say. There are other examples of URLs like that. For example we have here a URL from Xing which is the German clone of LinkedIn. And there whenever you click on your profile picture that you see on the left there what Xing does is it attaches this search query parameter here to the URL which is only shown if you're really clicking on this picture from your own dashboard. And this URL is accessible by anyone but on the other hand it's only mostly the people that click on this from their dashboard that actually see the URL. So again by seeing something like that in our data set we can be really quite sure that the person who opened this URL is the owner of this Xing profile. And that's especially nice for de-anonymization because the URL also contains the real name of the person in most cases. So now that I showed you how we can de-anonymize the people in the data we will show you what we actually found in there. Okay I have two more examples. Yeah one was this guy and I think it's really pretty because I can play you the video so we can scroll through his whole browsing data but I can explain what you would have seen. So this guy he's a police officer and so you can see if you go through his whole browsing history that he's researching topics and that he's going to the police union side and stuff and what you also could do is yeah he is using Google translate to translate a text from English to German. This was the text he had been wanted to translate from Google and it was really funny.  So he was investigating a computer fraud and asking another ISP for a specific IP address and yeah he also stated his email address his first name last name and his phone number. So yeah so that's the problem with Google translate because everything you put into the translation box goes into the URL and the somebody who has this URL can see the whole text what you have written down. You can follow this guy through his whole life in August what he was searching so also some funny stuff. Okay one last example I was really thinking about showing this on this conference but I nearly felt forced to do this because this is part of the truth and this is very typical it's I mean when I spent the first days diving digging through the data I was yeah I thought now I knew now I know the internet. So what is special on this profile is that this guy he's a judge and from a German court and he has a really specific taste so if this would have been the video then I could you know we could go on this every day a couple of hours it goes like this and what you also can see and going further through this browsing history that he's waiting for his child so he's also looking for baby surnames and for a stroller and where he can go with his wife for yeah for getting his child or for getting his baby so what I want to emphasize with this last example is that this guy he doesn't do anything criminal at all he's just a normal guy I would say but you see how intimate this data can be and how easily he could be for example blackmailed with this data especially in his sensitive position so or yeah what would you think when this data gets out and his wife could see it or employee or his employer could see it so then I think his life would be dramatically changing so that I think it's very important to say here yeah who did this who collected the data the answer is easy when we saw the detainers and the deepness of the data so we had this suspicion that it must be browser plugins and we did a small test I mean one of the first things I did when we got the data I was searching for colleagues and I then asked a really good friend I found in this data I asked him I told him and then I asked him if he could please uninstall his browser plugins to a specific time he did this and then after the last one he they installed or he uninstalled we had a small time period where we could do something like live looking into the data where we refreshed itself every day and then he vanished from our screen when he did install this like browser plugin it's a browser plugin it is supposed to protect you during browsing and it has 140 million users worldwide we tested this browser plugin then a second time in a virtual machine we made a really set up some kind of scientific set up with an extra website and then we could the guy who did this is Mike Cookets it's a security researcher thanks by the way here and so he did the test and we found him in the data so we could be sure for this browser plugin at this time that this plugin was spying on him what did they say to all of this they after we made the story public then they slightly adapted their privacy policy but they basically say it in their policy that they are collecting web pages visited and timestamps of the visit and then they are going to great great length and that they really try to make sure that the information remains anonymous what you know now after this yeah after everything what we told you that this is nearly impossible so this gave us one of the plugins or the browser extensions that was collecting data but the question was of course how many others are there and luckily in the data set we could also get random identity or unique identifier for each extension version that collected the given data point and by analyzing that we can see how many different extensions are actually generating data and this is what you're seeing on this graph which is a double logarithmic graph so in every unit here the number is like multiplying by 10 so to say and on the x-axis you can see the different extension versions basically sorted by the number of data points that they contributed to the data set and this number itself you're seeing on the y-axis and you can see the most popular extension here contributes already about one billion data points to this data set and if you take the first ten extension versions you can see that 95 percent of the data is already accounted for by those and if I say ten extension versions I don't mean that it's ten different browser extensions but possibly different versions of the same extensions or different variants for example extension versions for different browser for Firefox Chrome or like a new version of the extension and you can see by the number of ideas we have in the data set that it could be up to ten thousand extension versions affected here that are spying on the users but effectively the number is probably a little lower because the version IDs are corresponding probably to the different versions of the same of the same extension so the true number should be somewhere between a few ten and maybe a few thousand or a few hundred extensions I think. So the question is of course why is interesting to use browser extensions for tracking at all and you might know normally tracking works in this way so you go visit the website where tracker is installed and then this website asks you to download some javascript in your browser and then this javascript basically does something and sends some data to a tracking server and of course this is a problem that has been that existed for many years and that's why today many users are using plugins to block these trackers so for example you block origin here and that's a quite effective way to keep most of these trackers from sending data to the remote server and for the data collection company this is of course a problem because the collection efficiency goes down and they can see less and less of the users actually. Now if you imagine that you instead of like having a script installed on a website use a browser extension this is much more attractive for the data collector because now the extension can completely bypass the security mechanism and send the data directly to the tracking server without being blocked by other extensions in the browser and this is of course very interesting for them and the even bigger thing or the bigger advantage of these extensions is that they do not only track the user on the pages where actually trackers are installed but they can track the users on every page that he or she visits so even on pages that have no trackers at all and they would get the complete URL information of the user which of course for like their purposes might be of course more interesting since it gives you a more complete picture of the user. Now the question we often get is can I protect myself against this? Yeah of course the first thing that you need to do is to be very careful with the browser extensions that you're installing so they are very they are various studies as well and projects that are trying to actually analyze these extensions by you putting them in a sandbox so if you're installing a new extension you should always try to see and if you can find it in those lists and if it's actually a trustworthy vendor and you have to always ask yourself the question how is this extension creator making money with that you know is it just an open source project maybe or is it something commercial and if it's something commercial how are they generating their revenue are they maybe using my data for doing that and but even if you do that and if you use plugins like PrivacyVedual or Ublock Origin there's still a possibility that you can be tracked based on your IP address or another identifier that stays stable over a longer time period like a few hours or even a few days sometimes and in order to circumvent or to like alleviate this problem and the only thing that you can do is to have a proxy solution like Tor for example or also a commercial VPN that uses rotating IP addresses exit nodes in order to masquerade your IP address and so if you can do that that's a good solution in order to protect yourself you should of course also be careful about which extensions you're using because some of the commercial ones are also collecting the data yourself you have seen before that the web of trust is actually doing that to their users or was doing it and there are other extensions which are similarly collecting data from their users in order to sell it so always try to find a trustworthy vendor so to say. Now another question we often get is can I hide in my data by acting randomly so can I just maybe open different websites and try to fool the algorithm into thinking that I'm somebody else and unfortunately in most of the cases the answer is no because the algorithm at least the one that we are using in our study is not sensitive against this kind of perturbation and you can think about it in this way because you saw earlier that we are what we were doing is basically comparing the public information that we have about a given user to the domains or URLs that this user opened and if we keep if a single user keeps adding new domains or new URLs to his or her profile then this won't actually change the score because the public information stays the same and since other users are not changing their data it also doesn't change the score relative to other users so effectively by just acting randomly you can normally not hide in your data unfortunately. So what are the takeaways? I hope you could see that it's highly problematic to have this very high dimensional data that is user related and that you publish because it's very very difficult to anonymize it even if you have the intention of doing so and you can also see that the public information that is available about users be it on social media or other channels is also growing so it's becoming more easy to find this kind of public information that you can use then to do the de-anonymization and lastly you have seen that only a few data points in most cases less than 10 are already sufficient to lead back to a single user even in a very large data set of millions or tens of millions of users. So we want to thank you all for listening to our talk and also want to say special thanks to a very big team of people who are yeah who had been working with us believing in us and yeah so yeah thank you.


The military is dominated by feminism. The governments are dominated. Most governments are dominated by feminism. The entire federal government is dominated by feminism. Most state governments, most local governments, all your schools, all universities, most of your, most of your churches, the courts, all the statutes, the laws, legal precedent, all this stuff. It's feminism, feminism. We're drowning in feminism. The country's gonna, I think, feminism, either one of two things is gonna die this century. America or feminism. That, that's where this is going. These two things are completely at odds with each other. They don't work. They are. They absolutely are. This is the antithesis of our founding and it's the antithesis of living in a free and rational society.


A few years ago, I was reading a book where the concept of be, do, have was explained. And here is how it goes. For you to have a new level of success in life, you'd have to become a new person and do new things. You have to become and do before you have. In today's video, I'll share with you the five lifestyle changes you must make if you want to become rich. If you're new here, consider subscribing so you won't miss other exciting videos like this. 1. Get used to uncomfortable things Last year, one of my students sent me a mail where he expressed his concerns or let me call it fears. According to him, since he had been my student, he had learnt a whole lot from me about what it takes to build a successful business. But doesn't it make sense that he expects success without much pain? You can predict what my response to him was and here it is. It doesn't matter how much you learn about entrepreneurship from anyone else.  People who succeed in life are those who get used to not being comfortable because life is filled with so much pain, disappointments and failures. If you want to be rich, you have to learn to follow the advice of Bill Gates, which is life isn't fair, get used to it. 2. Acquire high paying skills Almost every adult has some skill or another. But the problem with expertise is that they are not rewarded the same way. The bigger problem is the fact that now and then some skills become obsolete and the world no longer wants to pay for them anymore. Think about web designing. If you were a web designer in the year 2000, your skill was worth several thousand dollars per month. Today, web designing skills aren't worth that much because we now have so many innovative tools which help ordinary people to build their websites. The problem with stuff like this is that some guys lose their jobs while many would be underpaid. Then what can you do? Spend a few minutes every day on acquiring a new high paying skill. Take for instance, if you're a web developer, you may decide to spend 15 to 30 minutes every day to learn about artificial intelligence. If you're planning to start a business, you may choose to spend time every day to read and learn about marketing. If you're a writer, you might decide to read books about public speaking and practice as much as you can because speaking well will help you to write well. You get my point. Spending a few minutes every day to acquire new valuable skills can make you more relevant in the marketplace. Hence you'll get paid a whole lot more. 3. Stop expecting the next election Okay, I don't know if they are the right words to use, but let me explain. You see, in my country, Nigeria, the most exciting years are usually the year that leads to another election. And the reason for this is that when an election is approaching, people's hopes are renewed. It's often like, this president is bad and he's the reason why I'm poor, but a new president is coming, which will change things and make my life better. Unfortunately, six months after the election, people often see that politicians don't have the power to change their lives. Here's the thing, nobody has the power to change your life. If you want anything to change in your life, you have to take full responsibility. Be willing to get your hands dirty and fight for what you think you deserve. 4. Spend time with yourself Ford was one of the greatest entrepreneurs of the 20th century. He was an innovator and a revolutionary. He created a solution to one of the biggest problems of humankind, transportation. And here's what he had to say. Thinking is the hardest work there is. And that is why only a few people do it. Most of us are too busy to think, even though we think we are thinking. If you genuinely want to change your financial life, you'll do well to have some time to think. Take a sheet of paper every week and spend half an hour to think on the paper. Consider a few opportunities around you and think about the possibility of exploiting any one of them. You may be surprised at how you can come up with something great by merely thinking through stuff. 5. Stop making the rich richer I started my first major business when I was 15. It was a bicycle renting business and how it worked then was that after school, young boys like me would follow me to a playing field and pay me to rent my bicycle. Back then I often felt guilty because it was apparent that these guys were giving me the money they ought to use for themselves. However, when I grew up, I understood that it's a normal thing for most people to do. Most people simply wake up in the morning to work hard, so that they can have money to give to the rich. When you spend every dollar you earn to buy stuff that everyone is buying to take some photos for Instagram and Facebook, you're merely making the rich richer. I don't know any single person who becomes rich without mastering the art of paying themselves first. Some people don't save any money because they think that their income is too small to save any part of it. The problem with this thinking is that saving is a habit. Anyone who cannot save $2 out of the income of $100 won't save $100 out of $5,000. Bonus Points Just before you go, let me share with you something else that is very important if you want to become rich. Spend time with people who want to be rich. One of the biggest mistakes you can ever make is to spend all day with people who are not striving to become rich and then hope that somehow you can be rich. It won't just happen and I know why. You see, our relationships influence who we are, far more than we can imagine.  Try things and take risks. Frequently people who don't want to be rich don't read books about money or business so they probably won't start to contribute to any discussion about financial literacy.  The opposite of this is what happens when you spend time with successful people or people who want to become successful. These people are optimistic. They don't just dream, they take actions. They are determined and won't give up.  They read good books and will be happy to discuss what they learn with you. You have to become a new person to achieve a new thing. You have to get used to uncomfortable things. You have to spend time daily to acquire new valuable skills. You have to stop expecting the government to fix your life. You have to spend time with yourself and think. You must stop spending all you earn and spend more time among the people who want to succeed. If you like this video, don't forget to subscribe to our channel. We love you.