Why AI could be the next big privacy crisis

Protecting your identity in the era of AI. Brittany Kaiser is a well-known data rights activist and the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower who exposed how the firm used personal data from millions of Facebook users for political targeting during elections. Since then, she has written a memoir and become the subject of the Emmy-nominated Netflix documentary The Great Hack. She is currently the CEO of AlphaTON Capital. Kaiser joined the Opening Bid Unfiltered podcast with Yahoo Finance executive editor Brian Sozzi to discuss data protection, her biggest concerns about the rise of generative AI, and Anthropic's battle with The Trump Administration.

Welcome to a new episode of the Opening Bit Unfiltered podcast. I'm Yao Fence executive editor Brian Sazi. Let's get after it. I wanna welcome in Brittany Kaiser. Brittany, I, I wanna let, just let you introduce yourself. Um, I normally don't do that, but, uh, for those not familiar with your story, who are you and how did you come to me here at this table?

I'm here because I am the CEO of Alphaton Capital, NASDAQ Eton, and have been a privacy campaigner for over a decade, both a campaigner as well as an activist and an entrepreneur. So we launched Alphaton Capital to invest in building and launching privacy tech.That is available to the entire world, to billions of people, because most privacy and data protection technologies are not these days.

How did you, I, we were talking a little bit off camera. I started here at Yahoo, 7.5 years ago, 8 years ago. I knew you from Cambridge Analytica. Take us through.That time in yourlife.

So I started out my career as a human rights lawyer and uh joined Cambridge Analytica to learn enough about data science to finish my PhD on prevention of crisis situations and learned a bit more about data than I bargained for. I ended up working on data-driven elections in over 50 different countries.Realizing the way that data and technology functions today cannot protect human rights and becoming a whistleblower. And since then I've been working on legislation, regulation, and privacy-centric products so that people can protect their data, protect their rights, and therefore protect themselves and their companies and their families.

Did you, did youknow in that moment,Like you are a whistleblower. Like one doesn't grow up thinking I'm going to be awhistleblower.

Certainly not, it's being encouraged by our government, which is kind of exciting for someone like me. Normally youBecome a whistleblower because you have what's called a crisis of conscience moment, which means you can't sleep at night unless you do something about the information that you have. And so you figure out a way to tell people who will actually do something about it.

For those listening and and uh watching this, and they, they are familiar with your story, how do they go aboutWhistle blowing. I, and look, you're the first type of, I haven't talked to someone like you before, you know, I'm talking to a lot of CEOs um who are out there, you know, they're trying to make their quarterly earnings. Like you are very, you're a very unique person, and you're very unique to this podcast. Like how does one go about doing what you did?

Usually when you are whistleblowing on something, it means that you have evidence of fraud, waste, abuse, or other criminal activity. And so it's usually helpful to first go to a lawyer that can represent you and then package your evidence in a story that explains why and how a law is being broken, because you canYou can talk about something that's unethical and be upset about it, but if it isn't breaking the law, you're not really whistleblowing. Uh, so, what it means is to take that information with lawyers, ideally to both authorities, either it's a government agency or, uh, or law enforcement.And also sometimes that's journalists in a combination so that you can get the word out, you can get a case launched, and now it's very popular that you can even get a whistleblowing reward, which is between 15 to 30% of the of the money that is won from the company that's committing fraud.

When you're in that.You know, in those moments when you're doing this, was it hard toDid you ever think, all right, well, I did better just maybe not do this? How did you stay the course?

It was really knowing that I could help build the solution if people realized that something was wrong. But I had to point out what the problem was in order to start spending my time on the solution full time. And that's really what I've been doing since I became a whistleblower 8 years ago. Uh, because of my legal background, I joined multiple US congressional subcommittees on blockchain, fintech, and digital innovation and helped co-author and pass.A lot of the laws on these topics, data protection, privacy, digital assets, your digital assets being your intangible personal property, and a lot of other rights and definitions that we now have in law in the US and other countries today, and then started building products that people could have access to that would help them do things privately and securely.

Since you came out and you, um, blew the whistle, I don't, I don't know any other way to put it, but you, you did that. How do youWhat do you think about where the businesses of social media have come? I mean, do you recognize a Facebook? Do you recognize like an Instagram? And they just have gotten so much more powerful, I guess is what I'm trying to say.

Well, they, they have been from the beginning. They were designed specifically to be as extractive as possible, to take as much of your data as they could collect, and then build a profile about you and everyone you are connected to, even if those people didn't have a Facebook profile and use that data in order to monetize you and their platform. AndYou know, there are ways to legally do that and there are ways to illegally do that, and I have, you know, testified in over 27 different government investigations and about 50 lawsuits against Facebook, Instagram, and other meta related incidents, and I think that people arestarting to realize that a lot of the platforms that are in their daily lives are not safe, but they don't have somewhere else to go. And that has been my main concern, which is unless we give people an ethical and safe privacy centric alternative, then they're just going to keep on using meta-products every day.

And now, not even now, they'reThere's AI applications being applied over a meta. What do you, this has to be blowing your mind, and what I want to get into like an open AI and those things, but like just on social media company, now they're applying like high powered AI models to what was already a powerful business model. Like this stuff has to be blowing yourmind. Well,

yeah, of course, because, you know, it's been, it's been quite a few years since I've won, you know, lawsuits against companies forUh, you know, targeting people in ways that actually, you know, breach, uh, laws, let alone civil rights and human rights, uh, including, you know, testifying in a, in a case against Instagram for targeting children with suicide websites. I mean, that was just withMore basic data science. Now with AI we are starting to see products like chat GPT convince people to commit suicide. We're starting to see, uh, AI products like Character AI, which is a Google product, convince a child to kill their parents because they're grounded. Uh, it's getting much worse than just targeting on social media used to be. And we used to be very scared about our elections being intervened in, but when you're convincing people to, um, to take their own life or the life of other people,Uh, these products are, are, you know, less than safe. They're a danger to national security.

Danger to national security. Is it, you know, at what point, if you are inside, and I'm sure the paychecks are good, it's inside anthropic, you name it, companies like that, at what point do you speak out? And you know what, what we're creating, it's just not safe.

Yeah, I mean, I think actually most of the CEOs of these big AI companies are admitting to that. They're not saying that their products are safe.But they're not giving real teeth to their head of AI safety, right? So, I don't think there's any CEO of an AI company that says what they're doing is fully safe. I, I think they are actually quite transparent about the huge risks and dangers, but they're not doing much about that. And I think one of the biggest dangers is that AI has access to all of our most sensitive information, and now people are, uh,Giving permissions and access for these AI agents to get access to literally everything AI agents, and that information is not only going to all of the owners of those platforms, but also going into perhaps millions of databases around the world through data sharing agreements and can be accessible by anyone that knows how to write a good hacking prompt and ask that model what it found out.About you. How

aren'twe headed to some form of dystopian society? This stuff is, it's great. Look, I, I'm training for a competitive high rocks event, OK? I'm a fitness guy. I had Chad GBT mapped me out a, a, uh, meal plan and a race day plan, and I, I loved it, but I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about the risks of these platforms, and maybe I should be.

Well, the, the thing is, is that I am.I know it doesn't sound like it with what I just said. I am an eternal optimist and I'm actually a techno utopian. I really do believe that technology will create a better world, but we need to make sure that we are putting on certain guardrails, and it doesn't need to be some of the guardrails that a lot of people are talking about in Congress these days. What the guardrails need to be, what data is it accessing.And do we have permission structures? Do we have control over what is done with our data and where it's going? And most, mostly the answer right now