Roger McNamee is a name you may not recognize, but he’s someone with whom you should become familiar. He is referred to as every tech billionaire’s mentor with over 35 years in the technology industry. He has worked with Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin. When Roger talks about technology, everyone should listen.
I was blown away after listening to parts 1 and 2 of James Altucher’s podcast interview with Roger. They covered a variety of topics, but most importantly Roger discussed how companies like Google and Facebook have dominated the landscape of personal data and how these data are being used for profit and without our permission.
Have you ever completed one of those requests when signing in to a website ostensibly to prove you are a human being? The latest ones I’ve seen are usually a grid of pictures asking for you to identify something like a crosswalk or a stop sign. According to Roger, the purpose of this task is not to determine if you are a human being. They already know this by your cursor movements! Let that sink in for a second. The purpose of the task is for human beings to help Google’s self-driving car initiative by identifying objects in images.
This is just one of the many interesting things I learned. Another is that Roger refuses to have a Google Home or Alexa device and he gives very good reasons why.
If you are at all interested in technology or particularly how our privacy is affected by technology and the big tech companies like Google and Facebook, I highly recommend listening to both episodes. I also plan to get Roger’s latest book Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe.