And this concept of digital is order. Hallie can you talk about that phrase for us? What is digital disorder, and why are you into this? And what's a seminal event in your life that made you really want to focus in on helping people with their digital strategies?
Hallie Stern
@HallieS · 4:51
I'd like DDoS my own IMDb page, or I'd target specific cohorts with stories that I would write, that I would want to get in front of the right people, or I would find loopholes in getting followers and ranking ranking signals is huge on social media. So I got really good at manipulating that. And that kind of led to me doing it for other people
Deborah Pardes
@DBPardes · 2:05
And when is it a time where you say, you don't have to understand this, let me just do it. Or when do you want to educate an entire company or an entire C suite so that they really buy into your services? Thanks so much for answering this question. I think it's going to help a lot of us understand how you do your work and how you assess people's level of understanding about what you can do for them
Hallie Stern
@HallieS · 4:27
That is, recipes that tell the Internet and the computer what to do and what output to give you, what website to go to, et cetera. So there's thousands and thousands and thousands of different kinds of algorithms that make up our information environment. The cybersecurity side of it. Again, I know that we kind of look at it as a separate, like Mr. Robot hacking into computers thing
Deborah Pardes
@DBPardes · 1:54
And I guess you could talk about TikTok, because that's on top of mind for a lot of people with regard to what's going on there. But I don't want to obfuscate this question with getting involved with TikTok, but I'm wondering if you have thoughts about that, because it's really about what is the data on TikTok and why is it so precious? And just another thing, I just also want to say that sometimes algorithms are wonderful, right?
Hallie Stern
@HallieS · 4:29
Especially if you are somebody who is working within the US government, who maybe you're in the military and you're being deployed, and it's not great for your data to be collected and for your contacts and who you're speaking to, to be observed by an application. Now, every application does this, facebook does this, twitter does this, every app on your phone does this. The issue specifically with Twitter, not Twitter, I'm sorry, with TikTok is with great power competition
Deborah Pardes
@DBPardes · 1:32
It's really an exciting time, especially in the ethical tech world, because everyone's really heightened in a good way. I think there's a lot of good people banding together to educate the public and also make sure that any nefarious actors know that we're out there and we're looking to help right some wrongs. But it feels a little more friendly when you talk about it, which I really appreciate
Hallie Stern
@HallieS · 4:52
And this is easier said than done. I mean, I certainly have holes in my own algorithmic ecosystem. But having that awareness, knowing what's knowable about you, knowing what your patterns are, knowing that if you are walking around in downtown DC. You might get advertisements for some of the stores that you were by, because your phone is pinging to that cell network. And even if you put a VPN on your phone, you're still pinging to that cell network
Hallie Stern
@HallieS · 4:51
I think it's going to get worse before it gets better. But I do think that if we shift our thinking and treat this as a technical issue rather than just a social issue again, educational programs, media literacy, taking down extremist content from terrorist organizations yeah, absolutely. But for everything else, this, I think, is an issue of data collection and data security and how that data is used to influence, if you will, people within their networks
Hallie Stern
@HallieS · 4:29
And this goes back to the very introduction of this chat where I say on my LinkedIn, everything that happens, I think it's everything that happens online influences human response offline before making its way into the digital sphere, turning that perspective. This is all human created, this Godlike technology that is making everything so topsy turvy. And creating such disorder is a collection of human minds