Ever wonder where the internet stops and IRL begins? Close All Tabs breaks down how digital culture shapes our world through thoughtful insights and irreverent humor. From internet trends to AI slop to the politics of memes, Close All Tabs covers it all.
How will AI change our jobs and lives? Is the government watching what I post? Is there life beyond TikTok? Host Morgan Sung pulls from experts, the audience, and history to add context to the trends and depth to the memes. And she’ll wrestle with as many browser tabs as it takes to explain the cultural moment we’re all collectively living.
Support for Close All Tabs comes from Birong Hu and supporters of the KQED Studios Fund.
Close All Tabs Team
Morgan Sung
Host
Morgan Sung is a tech journalist whose work covers the range of absurdity and brilliance that is the internet. Her beat has evolved into an exploration of social platforms and how they shape real-world culture. She has written for TechCrunch, NBC News, Mashable, BuzzFeed News and more. Morgan Sung is represented by SAG-AFTRA.
Maya Cueva
Producer
Maya is the Producer for Close All Tabs, as well as an award winning director from Berkeley. She specializes in documentary, radio, and audio production. She was a Netflix Nonfiction Director and Producer fellow was also listed on DOC NYC’s 40 Under 40 Filmmakers, co-presented by HBO Documentary Films. Maya’s work has been featured on The New Yorker, NPR’s All Things Considered, Latino USA, The Atlantic, Teen Vogue, and National Geographic. She received a student Emmy for her short film, The Provider, and her feature film, On the Divide, premiered in the documentary competition at Tribeca Film Festival in 2021 and was broadcast on POV on PBS in Spring 2022. Maya Cueva is represented by SAG-AFTRA.
Chris Egusa
Senior Editor
Chris Egusa is the Senior Editor for Close All Tabs, as well as composer and sound designer. His reporting on disability and healthcare inequities has earned accolades from the Public Media Journalists Association, the Society of Professional Journalists NorCal, Investigative Reporters and Editors, the Webby Awards, and more. Chris’ background includes audio documentary production, filmmaking, and nonprofit strategy. He holds degrees from SJSU and Northwestern University’s Medill School. Chris is more online than he cares to admit, appreciates a good clicky mechanical keyboard, and definitely owns too many pairs of hi-fi headphones.
Chris Hambrick
Editor
Chris is an editor for KQED Podcasts and loves holding the big picture vision for shows. Previously they were a producer for Spooked Podcast from Snap Judgment Studios, host for The Tracklist on KGPC, as well as White Rabbit Story Hour podcast. They have contributed to KALW, KQED’s Bay Curious, and facilitated for national oral history project, StoryCorps. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you can catch her telling stories on the Mortified, SFLitCrawl or Moth stages.
Jen Chien
Director of Podcasts
Jen Chien is Director of Podcasts at KQED and co-founder of the Editors Collective and Edit Mode. Previously, she was Executive Editor for LWC Studios, Senior Radio Editor at Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting and Managing Editor for Crosscurrents and KALW News. Awards recognitions include Third Coast, Peabody, Gracies, ONA/OJA, and SPJ Sigma Delta Chi. She holds a BA in American Studies from Smith College, and an MA in Interdisciplinary Performance from New College of California.
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They explore the legendary story of how same-sex romance accidentally made it into the original game, the challenges of translating sexuality and gender into game systems, why so many LGBTQ players discovered their own identities in \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Sims\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> long before they felt safe doing so in real life — and why some players are worried about where the game might be headed.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm?e=KQINC3392561231\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guests:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Jessica Croft,\u003c/span> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">senior designer and lead designer at EA on The Sims 4\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Loel Phelps, senior game design director at Maxis\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Further Reading/Listening:\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-kiss-that-changed-video-games\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Kiss That Changed Video Games\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Simon Parkin, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The New Yorker\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.pcgamer.com/unearthed-the-sims-design-docs-show-the-debate-over-same-sex-relationships/\">Unearthed The Sims design docs show the internal debate over same-sex relationships\u003c/a>\u003c/span> \u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">— \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Steven Messner, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ci>PC Gamer\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xi-HWyh0Ybk\">Did The Sims make you gay? – a video essay.\u003c/a>\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Alexander Avila\u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ci>, \u003ci>YouTube\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://bricksmagazine.co.uk/2020/08/27/the-sims-knew-i-was-queer-before-i-did/\">The Sims Knew I Was Queer Before I Did \u003c/a>\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">— Megan Elliot,\u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ci>\u003ci> BRICKS Magazine\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.theguardian.com/games/2022/feb/22/gay-weddings-for-russia-how-the-sims-became-a-battleground-for-the-lgbtq-community\">Gay weddings for Russia: How The Sims became a battleground for the LGBTQ+ community \u003c/a>\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">— Tom Regan, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ci>\u003ci>\u003ci>The Guardian\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://frvr.com/blog/news/the-sims-designer-says-that-the-series-diversity-is-critical-especially-at-times-like-now/\">The Sims designer says that the series’ diversity is “critical, especially at times like now” as the games must recognise “the fundamental truths of our humanity” to stay successful \u003c/a>— Lewis White\u003ci>\u003ci>\u003ci>, \u003ci>FIVR\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>Want to give us feedback on the show? Shoot us an email at \u003ca href=\"mailto:CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\">CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Follow us on\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/closealltabspod/\"> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Instagram\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> and\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@closealltabs\"> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">TikTok\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Episode Transcript\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">A full transcript will be available 1–2 workdays after the episode’s publication.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n",
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Long before LGBTQ representation became common in mainstream games, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Sims\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> allowed same-sex relationships, helping create a devoted queer fan base that reshaped what players expected from virtual worlds.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In this episode, Morgan Sung talks with \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Sims 4\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> senior designer Jessica Croft and Electronic Arts’ senior game design director Loel Phelps about the game’s unlikely emergence as one of the most queer-inclusive franchises in gaming. They explore the legendary story of how same-sex romance accidentally made it into the original game, the challenges of translating sexuality and gender into game systems, why so many LGBTQ players discovered their own identities in \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Sims\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> long before they felt safe doing so in real life — and why some players are worried about where the game might be headed.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm?e=KQINC3392561231\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guests:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Jessica Croft,\u003c/span> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">senior designer and lead designer at EA on The Sims 4\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Loel Phelps, senior game design director at Maxis\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Further Reading/Listening:\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-kiss-that-changed-video-games\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Kiss That Changed Video Games\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Simon Parkin, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The New Yorker\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.pcgamer.com/unearthed-the-sims-design-docs-show-the-debate-over-same-sex-relationships/\">Unearthed The Sims design docs show the internal debate over same-sex relationships\u003c/a>\u003c/span> \u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">— \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Steven Messner, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ci>PC Gamer\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xi-HWyh0Ybk\">Did The Sims make you gay? – a video essay.\u003c/a>\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Alexander Avila\u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ci>, \u003ci>YouTube\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://bricksmagazine.co.uk/2020/08/27/the-sims-knew-i-was-queer-before-i-did/\">The Sims Knew I Was Queer Before I Did \u003c/a>\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">— Megan Elliot,\u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ci>\u003ci> BRICKS Magazine\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.theguardian.com/games/2022/feb/22/gay-weddings-for-russia-how-the-sims-became-a-battleground-for-the-lgbtq-community\">Gay weddings for Russia: How The Sims became a battleground for the LGBTQ+ community \u003c/a>\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">— Tom Regan, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ci>\u003ci>\u003ci>The Guardian\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://frvr.com/blog/news/the-sims-designer-says-that-the-series-diversity-is-critical-especially-at-times-like-now/\">The Sims designer says that the series’ diversity is “critical, especially at times like now” as the games must recognise “the fundamental truths of our humanity” to stay successful \u003c/a>— Lewis White\u003ci>\u003ci>\u003ci>, \u003ci>FIVR\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>Want to give us feedback on the show? Shoot us an email at \u003ca href=\"mailto:CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\">CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Follow us on\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/closealltabspod/\"> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Instagram\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> and\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@closealltabs\"> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">TikTok\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"slug": "how-to-prove-youre-not-ai",
"title": "How To Prove You're Not AI",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">During a recent phone call, BBC tech columnist Thomas Germain couldn’t convince his aunt that he \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">wasn’t\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> AI. Being unable to distinguish a real person from a fabricated version is a problem born from the sheer volume of AI-generated content flooding the internet — and one that’s increased dramatically in the last year alone. Even world leaders are now plagued by the issue: a glitchy video of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sparked an enduring conspiracy theory that he was really dead and his public appearances on social media were an AI-driven cover up.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In a world where everything looks fake, how do we know what’s real? Thomas joins the show to explain how we got here, where we might be headed, and a surprisingly analog technique that could save you from getting scammed by a deepfaked version of a loved one.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm?e=KQINC6560300791\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guest:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.bbc.com/future/author/thomas-germain\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Thomas Germain\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, co-host of the podcast \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Interface\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, and tech columnist at the\u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> BBC\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">.\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Further Reading/Listening:\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260324-i-tried-to-prove-im-not-an-ai-deepfake\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I tried to prove I’m not AI. My aunt wasn’t convinced\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Thomas Germain, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BBC \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.bbc.com/audio/brand/m002qwn7\">The Interface Podcast\u003c/a>\u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — \u003ci>BBC\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.theverge.com/tech/895453/ai-deepfake-netanyahu-claims-conspiracy\">Benjamin Netanyahu is struggling to prove he’s not an AI clone \u003c/a>\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Jess Weatherbed, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ci>\u003ci>The Verge\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/03/14/business/media/iran-disinfo-artificial-intelligence.html\">Cascade of A.I. Fakes About War With Iran Causes Chaos Online \u003c/a>\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">— Stuart A. Thompson and Alexander Cardia, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ci>\u003ci>\u003ci>The New York Times \u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/experts-warn-collapse-trust-online-ai-deepfakes-venezuela-rcna252472\">AI is intensifying a ‘collapse’ of trust online, experts say\u003c/a>\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Angela Yang, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ci>\u003ci>\u003ci>\u003ci>NBC News\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/deepfakes-elections-and-shrinking-liars-dividend\">Deepfakes, Elections, and Shrinking the Liar’s Dividend\u003c/a> — Josh A. Goldstein, \u003ci>Brennan Center for Justice\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>Want to give us feedback on the show? Shoot us an email at \u003ca href=\"mailto:CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\">CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Follow us on\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/closealltabspod/\"> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Instagram\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> and\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@closealltabs\"> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">TikTok\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Do you like these deep dives? Do you want more? It would be so, so helpful if you could rate and review us on Spotify, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to the show. Send it to your friends, your frenemies, that one niche micro-influencer you kind of have a parasocial relationship with. Maybe they’ll respond, I don’t know. All right, let’s get to the show.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">When we talk about deepfakes and AI, often what we’re thinking about is the idea that you’re gonna get tricked.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is Thomas Germain. He’s the cohost of the podcast The Interface, and also a tech columnist at the BBC. His column, Keeping Tabs, covers tech and how it affects average people every day. So, like many journalists on this beat, he’s been keeping an eye on the uptick in deep fake scams.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Someone’s going to scam you, they’re going to try and fool you into thinking that they’re someone else.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Fakes are synthetic media, images, videos, or audio recordings that have been generated or manipulated by AI to impersonate someone else.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But I started thinking about like, what would it be like if the shoe was on the other foot? What if you needed to convince someone that you’re real and you are who you say that you are? How difficult would that be?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So Thomas decided to do a little experiment. He called up his aunt Eleanor. Thomas and his aunt Eleanor are very close. She was at the hospital the day he was born and of all of his relatives, she’s the one he calls the most and she’s relatively online.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">She knows a bit about what’s going on. Her husband, my uncle, is actually a computer science professor. So she gets some of it, but she’s not like up to date on everything that’s happening. And I wanted someone who knows me really, really well.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That last part is important. Thomas called his aunt and explained the experiment. He would call her back, and she’d either be talking to the real him, her beloved nephew, or a deep fake, generated by AI. And what Thomas wanted to know was, could she tell the difference?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">At first, you know, it was a very fun, like, friendly conversation, but there was this weird, like tension, you know? She said before we even got on the phone, she’s like, “Oh, I’m gonna be really upset if I can’t tell,” you know, because she’s known me since the day I was born, right?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">His aunt Eleanor tried a few different methods to suss it out. First, she went on Facebook.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And read me like a bunch of jokes that she’s seen that she really liked, to like see what my reaction was. And you know, we’re like different generations, we have different senses of humor. So I’m not sure like, was the test that I would laugh or I wouldn’t laugh. It was kind of funny. That didn’t seem to convince her.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So she took a different approach.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">She was knitting me a sweater and we hadn’t decided on the color. And like a couple of weeks before we got on the phone. I told her that I was saying I wanted a gold sweater, like kind of gold colored yarn. And then when we were talking, when I was tricking her about AI, she brought it up and she’s like, “so have you decided on the color?” and I was like, “yeah, you know, I think it might just go boring, like just do like a black or like a dark blue or something.” And I think of all the things, that made her the most suspicious because like, ‘I was expecting you to go with like a more exciting color. She’s like “That…. I don’t know, that feels like a robot answer.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Laughter]\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It’s so generic, it can’t possibly be you.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, I know, but maybe I’m a boring guy.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">She still couldn’t be sure, so she gave him another test.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">She asked me for some details about, like, things from my childhood that you would be unlikely to know if you weren’t a member of my family. And I think she found that a little bit reassuring.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But overall, the experience left Aunt Eleanor rattled.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think by the end of the call where she realized she couldn’t be totally sure, it was kind of distressing. You know, like, you’re supposed to know your loved ones, how could it be? And we talked for like 20 minutes or so and by the of it she told me like, “I think it’s the real you, I just can’t be sure, I’m not 100% confident.”.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And at the end I told her it is me, I am not tricking you. But there were all these little things that she was trying to pick up on, and I think this is really important for people to understand, throw that out the window. This technology is so good, I promise you, there is nothing that you can do to tell that you’re not looking at an AI, and if you convince yourself that you could figure it out by just like thinking really hard and being careful, you are more likely to get in trouble and get fooled.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is way bigger than Thomas duping his aunt. It’s a real world problem. Every day, deep fake scams and AI generated disinformation lead people astray. Which is why the general public is becoming so distrustful of everything online. When everything could be fake, how do you tell what’s real and what’s not?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is Close All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung, tech journalist, and your chronically online friend, here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let’s get into it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Kicking this off as always, let’s open a new tab: the Netanyahu deep fake death rumor. In March, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a televised update on the war in Iran. A clip of it was posted on his official X account.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Audio clip of Benjamin Netanyahu addressing Israeli people in Hebrew]\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>\n\u003cem>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Citizens of Israel, my brothers and sisters, we are in historic times…\u003c/span>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Something about that video seemed off.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There’s one moment where he kind of waves his hand in front of the camera and if you freeze frame it at just the right second, it kind of looks like he’s got a sixth finger on his hand.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Screenshots of this moment started making the rounds. And if you’re just scrolling by and you see this freeze frame out of context, it would probably raise a few alarm bells, right?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It really looks weird. It’s like, it looks like this weird digital glitch and because it’s a video, you know, it’s little grainy it’s pixelated.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So this rumor started swirling around online. Was this televised speech really Netanyahu? Or was it a deep fake?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And people latched onto this because for the longest time, AI image and video generators really struggled with hands. Right? They were trained to focus on faces, hands were this thing they picked up along the way and they couldn’t get the hands just right. That was true two or three years ago. Right? The technology has advanced past that point. It’s not true that AI struggles with hands anymore. That isn’t really an issue, but this was enough and it does look weird if you pause at the right frame.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Thus, a conspiracy theory was born: Netanyahu was dead, and this was the cover-up. It didn’t help that the Prime Minister’s health had been the subject of public speculation for years. He had emergency heart surgery in 2023, and then a year later, underwent treatment for prostate cancer. And then there’s the war in Iran. The U.S. and Israel killed the Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>[Audio clip from Global News Youtube post]\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>\nIn Tehran, thousands gathered to mourn the death of the supreme leader. Similar protests were held in cities around the world including…\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In retaliation, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard has vowed to hunt down and target Netanyahu personally. The seed of doubt over Netanyahu’s health was already planted. Then, the wonky six-fingered video launched the conspiracy theory into the mainstream.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This was enough that some large swath of people latched on to this idea that Netanyahu had been killed in a missile strike, and the Israeli government was hiding the truth and making AI videos to convince the world that he was still alive, to what aim, I’m not exactly sure. It turned into, you know, such like a meme, essentially. Like, the conversation got so big that it was enough that Netnyahu posted another video.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cb>[Audio clip from Benjamin Netanyahu’s post on X] \u003c/b>\u003c/em>\u003cb>\u003cbr>\n\u003c/b>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Voice behind camera: Do you want to show us?\u003cbr>\nNetanyahu: Here. Here.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This video takes place in a coffee shop near Jerusalem. The camera approaches Netanyahu, and the voice behind it says, they’re saying on the internet that you’re actually dead. Netanyah, holding a latte, tells the camera, I’m dying for a coffee. And then he holds up his hand and says, do you want to count the fingers?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">He did a terrible job with it for a couple of reasons. If the goal was convincing the public. Number one, I talked to a bunch of people about this and they’re like, the worst thing you can do is come out and deny it because it makes it look like you’ve got something to hide. Right?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And there is still something off about the video. It was almost uncanny. He looked super crisp and almost too smooth. It only fueled the conspiracy theories.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">They shot this on like a nice DSLR, like one of those big cameras, which is how AI videos look. Right? They’re trained on high quality content, high quality videos, so they produce what looks like smoother, polished, high quality video. So it looked a little bit more like AI than it would have if he had just used a phone to record it. So that, I think, just sent people spiraling even more. Nobody was convinced by this, as far as I could tell. The people who had latched on, if anything, it just reaffirmed their belief that the bad guys were trying to trick them.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Here’s the thing about conspiracy theories. Once you’re convinced, everything else just seems like confirmation of what you already believe. People took screenshots, zoomed in, tried to find inconsistencies in the backgrounds of the video. Joe Rogan, for one, seemed pretty convinced.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cb>[Audio clip from The Joe Rogan Experience] \u003c/b>\u003c/em>\u003cb>\u003cbr>\n\u003c/b>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Look at this. Yeah, like the coffee. Look how turned it is, but it doesn’t spill at all. It just wiggles to the edge.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">He talked about it on his podcast, which has over 20 million followers on YouTube. And of course, that just spread the rumor further. I saw claims that if you zoomed in on the date on the register, the pixels didn’t look right. So surely it was fake. Right? Or that the video itself was real, but it wasn’t actually Netanyahu. It was really an actor deep faked to look like Netanyahu and the shadows gave it away. Or, that when he put his hands in his pocket, the fabric of his jacket seemed to smooth over.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And the thing about reality is it’s weird. Right? Like, if you look close enough at anything you’ll find weird stuff but especially with digital photography, digital video, it’s the way that the sensors work, like, errors are actually inherent to the way that a digital camera sensor functions. So if you zoom in on any video, if you’re, like, watching a clip from this podcast on social media, zoom in, take a screenshot and zoom in, you will find something weird. That’s just how digital images work, that there’ll be some little grainy thing, there’ll be some glitch. And I think it’s important for people to understand that unless you have serious expertise on this subject, you aren’t qualified to make that kind of call. I am not qualified to make that knd of, I think about this stuff all the time.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">For his column, Thomas talked to a few of the world’s leading experts on this, including Jeremy Carrasco. He runs a publication called Riddance, which investigates AI-generated media.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And he went through, he analyzed it, he determined it was real. I talked to professors, I talked to some people who were like, real world leading experts on digital forensics is what they call it, like figuring out what the origin of a file is. They said there is no doubt. It is impossible that these videos are AI-generated. Like, this thing where it sort of looked like Netanyahu had a sixth finger, even if you watch the clip, instead of looking at a freeze frame, you can kind of see there’s like a shadow on his hand and that’s what it is. It looks weird if you take a screenshot at the right second, but the video itself, it’s very clearly real. This was not enough. And I think that is kind of part of the problem is that we’ve lived through an era where there’s been an assault on expertise, right? That, you know, real conscious, intentional efforts to discredit traditional forms of you know, authority on truth.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Thomas also talked to Hany Farid, a professor at UC Berkeley who’s known as the father of digital forensics. He pioneered this field of examining files and figuring out if they’re real.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">He’s one of these guys that’s constantly watching this stuff. And he says, you can see the progression of AI and deep fake technology if you look at some of the recent global conflicts. Like, if we go back to the beginning of the war in Ukraine, it was almost all real footage. Like, every once in a while, you’d see something AI-generated, but for the most part, it was all real. Fast forward to the conflict in Gaza and it was starting to get to the point where there was more AI-generated content. It was a little harder to sort the real from the truth. You get to when the U.S. invaded Venezuela, and it was about 50-50. Right? You’re seeing as much fake stuff as real stuff if you just go out and look at a random video on the subject on the internet. By the time we got to the war in Iran, there’s more fake footage, there’s more fake clips, there is more mis and disinformation than there is real stuff.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">A few weeks ago, we dove into the slopaganda coming out of Iran, those AI-generated Lego rap videos dissing the U.S. They’re clearly not real, but they still push specific narratives to the American public. But there’s another kind of AI- generated media at play here: videos that look real but portray events that never happened, like AI-generated footage of Iranian missiles sinking U.S. ships and bombarding civilians in Tel Aviv.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In less than six months, we had this dramatic shift where I think people in power who’ve got like, you know, a game to play, they’ve got something that they want to try and convince the public of, they’ve realized that this technology is something they can put into play. There are whole operations that are ready to get off the ground at a moment’s notice to like, fill the world with fakery and lies. I think that is a real serious problem, I mean, even for journalists, even in the media. Like, it used to be if you saw something that was recorded with a camera, you know, in the not too distant past, it was almost certainly real. Right? Because it took so much effort, especially for video, so much effort to fake something in a convincing way. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Now I can do it like while I’m washing the dishes. I could reach over and hammer something out of my phone and generate a fake video. For the average person, I think this means that you are constantly inundated with nonsense. You are being exposed to lies on a near constant basis. It’s not just that the image looks real, it’s not just the video looks real. The thing that’s happening is so close to real life. Right? And if you’re a person who watches a lot of short form video and social media, if like scrolling through Instagram Reels or TikTok, the chances that you have seen a piece of AI content and been fooled that it was real, I’d say in the last week, are extremely high.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Actual footage, meanwhile, has been written off as fake and AI. When the U.S. bombed an elementary school in Iran, killing 120 children, some people online questioned whether footage of the aftermath was authentic. It didn’t help that the true photos and videos were mixed in with AI-generated depictions of what happened. It’s one thing for digital forensics experts, like Hany Farid, to sift through all of the slop and determine what’s real. It’s another for these experts to get the public to actually trust them.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It leads to an information ecosystem, you know, a landscape of truth where everything is up for debate. Nothing is set in stone and everything is suspect. And that leads to some new ways that power can be abused and people can be taken advantage of.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The conspiracy theories over Netanyahu’s death have not stopped. The follow-up videos and public appearances after the coffee shop debacle only fueled the rumors further. In March, Netanyahu appeared in a video with Mike Huckabee, who is now the ambassador to Israel.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cb>[Audio clip from Benjamin Netanyahu’s post on X] \u003c/b>\u003c/em>\u003cb>\u003cbr>\n\u003c/b>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Mike Huckabee: Mr. Prime Minister, I wanted you to know, the President asked me to come and make sure you were okay. \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Benjamin Netanyahu: Yes, Mike. Yes, I’m alive.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">If anything, it only convinced people that Huckabee was also a deepfake. On X and TikTok, people did the same exact thing they did to previous videos, zoomed in, slowed down, cropped screenshots, and looked for any anomaly that could confirm their theories.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>\u003cem>[Audio clip from a post on the TikTok account of @ragingprestigemaster3.0]\u003c/em>\u003cbr>\n\u003c/b>\u003cem>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The picture you’re seeing right up here, that’s not his ear, fam.\u003c/span>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think that is a truly historical moment. This is, according to everyone that I asked, the first time that the leader of a major world power has like openly gone out in front of the public to try and convince people that he’s not an AI. And I think it’s a sign of a very rocky period that we’re about to enter.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">What does this mean for media literacy, our ability to parse the truth from fiction? Well, it definitely does not bode well for the information ecosystem. It’s really easy to take advantage of public distrust and write off real evidence as fake and AI. We’re going to talk about liars and disinformation in a new tab, after a quick break.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But first, we wanted to remind you that Close All Tabs depends on listeners like you to keep us going. You can support us by becoming a member at donate.kqed.org/podcasts.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, after the break, we’re coming back to bunnies on a trampoline. Stick around.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We’re back. Time to open a new tab: the liar’s dividend.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">A while back there was this video of, it looked like night camera footage and it was bunnies jumping on a trampoline.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yes.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You remember this?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I got duped by that. I have a sense of whimsy. \u003cem>[laughter]\u003c/em> I thought it was real.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I fell for it too at first, you know, I saw that and I was like, wow, like maybe the world’s okay after all, like there’s still, you, know, there’s still nice cute things happening. No, turns out it was fake. Millions of people saw this. That doesn’t matter. Right? It’s not going to affect your day or your life that the bunnies aren’t real. But you’re seeing stuff that is a little bit more consequential, that is maybe affecting your beliefs about how the world works or what is happening. And I think this adds up to a lot of people being led astray in ways that are really, really subtle.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Because anything online could be fake, people have become suspicious of everything.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And that creates a situation where if there’s ever any reason to doubt that something is real, then it immediately falls apart.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is a media phenomenon called “the liar’s dividend.” Legal scholars coined the term back in 2018 in a paper about how deep fakes, truth decay, and cognitive bias affect the information ecosystem. They thought it was bad back then? They could not have predicted today. Anyway, so what exactly is “the liar’s dividend”?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It takes time or resources to verify that something is real. It’s free to cast doubt. It’s free to say that’s fake, right? It takes no effort at all. And once you raise those suspicions, you can take advantage of that. Right? I can say, ‘oh, that’s a fake news, that didn’t happen.’ And that gives people in power the ability to cast doubt on anything that isn’t convenient for whatever their goals happen to be.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You know, we’ve reached the point where you cannot trust your eyes, like, that ship has sailed, it’s over. You can’t tell whether you’re looking at an AI video or not. You certainly can’t tell whether your looking at a image. They’ve gotten so good that our physiology does not allow you to deal with this problem.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You don’t have to be a major world leader to be affected by this. Before he wrote about this deep, fake situation, Thomas worked on this story about a safety tool that wipes your personal information from Google search results. Like every other tech journalist, he’s really passionate about privacy. So he was chugging coffee, writing this article…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I got myself all worked up and I put in my family group chat, like, “Here’s a link to this setting. Everybody needs to go turn this on right now.” And my mom was like, “Is this really you?” Like, are you, is someone like taking…like that’s…[laughter] and in her defense, it is weird behavior. Right? That’s a strange thing for me to do. You have to use this Google setting right now, that’s something that’s gonna happen to you. Right? You’re gonna be talking to someone, something will be strange. Right? Maybe you’ll be in an emergency. Maybe you will get in a car accident and you call, you know, your wife and be like, I really, I desperately need Amazon gift cards right now. And it’s, it’s real.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">If your loved one calls you and urgently tells you that they need those gift cards, it’s probably a scam. But maybe your partner is calling to ask for the password to the family Netflix account. Your best friend lost her passport while on vacation and needs help getting a new one. Or your nephew tells you that he actually wants a blue sweater instead of the gold one you started knitting. These could be real, but how do you know?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That’s a thing that’s going to happen more and more because we’re living in this world where everything is suspect and if any little doubt comes up, suddenly everything falls apart.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So what is the solution here? Are AI companies or social media platforms doing anything to help differentiate between what’s real and what’s generated? Industry leaders and academics have been pushing for a kind of digital watermark that would be embedded in the file itself, like planting a flag that says AI-generated. And that flag would be planted deep in the pixel data. It would be really difficult to remove. Google Gemini already does this. It’s called Synth ID.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So the dream there is we’ll get to a place where like all of the big AI companies or companies that are making these tools will participate in this program and there’ll be some level of checking. On the flip side, there’s efforts to build a similar thing into cameras that when you take an image with a camera, you take a photo or a video, it would embed something in the file that says this was taken by an actual camera. It’s like, this is an image of reality. So far, that technology is not here. Right?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We haven’t gotten to the point where that is widespread enough that it can be usable. And hopefully we will arrive at a point where there’s some kind of technical solution or at least technical amelioration to this problem that will like help you sort through it. But we also just need from the social media companies, I think a lot of critics that I speak to say they need to be doing way more to label AI content right now than they are.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">On a lot of these platforms, you can upload a piece of footage or an image. They don’t really care whether it’s AI, right? The platforms where we’re getting all of our information could be doing a lot more to let you know that something that you’re looking at is suspicious, but they don’t have a financial incentive to solve that problem. Right? So I think what it really comes down to is we need regulatory approaches to this that will help at least do something to point people in the direction of truth. Not an easy problem to solve, but we haven’t really even tried yet.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, well in that case, how do you assure your loved ones that you’re really you? Let’s open our last tab:n how to prove that you are not a deep faith.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So this YouTuber, Jim Browning, makes videos about exposing scammers. He recently went super viral with his three-finger test.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cb>[Audio from Jim Browning’s Youtube post] \u003c/b>\u003c/em>\u003cb>\u003cbr>\n\u003c/b>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Jim Browning: Can you like hold up three fingers in front of your face or anything? \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Person: Oh, come on, that’s too much.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The reasoning? This would disrupt any face-swapping deep fake program and make it glitch.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>[Audio from Jim Browning’s Youtube post] \u003c/b>\u003cb>\u003cbr>\n\u003c/b>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Jim Browning: Can you do that then? \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Person: Uh, I don’t know, it’s too much to ask somebody. \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Jim Browning: Well, it’ll make sure you’re not AI, is that unreasonable? I mean, can you do that in front of your face? \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Person: Well, is that enough? \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Jim Browning: No, it’s not in front of your face. \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The scammer then abruptly ended the call, and in the comments, people were like, this is it. This is the perfect test. This is how to stay safe. But the truth is, this trick has been outdated for years.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I could tell you some things that you could look for, some telltale signs for audio and for video, but I’m not going to because if I gave you those tips, it would actually hurt you more than it would help you because in a week or in a month or in six months, they’re going to put out another AI model and those tips that worked last week aren’t going to work now. There is no giveaway that you’re watching an AI video. In fact, maybe the one thing that you can look out for is if you’re a watching a video that’s low quality, that’s grainy, you might be more likely to get fooled because if there is any weird digital artifact, it’ll be harder to see. AI can make high quality video, a low quality grainy pixelated image, that’s not a sign that you are looking at AI. Maybe it’s a sign, if there’s any doubt, that you might want to think twice. But we’ve past that point. Deepfakes are astonishingly good, and they keep getting just a little bit better.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Luckily, there is one way to protect yourself and your loved ones. And you don’t have to be that tech savvy to do it. It involves gathering up your inner circle. Older relatives, close friends, partners, nibblings, neighbors, basically anyone who could feasibly get this panicked emergency call from someone pretending to be you.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You should set up a secret word that you both agree on, that if there’s ever any doubt, you can ask the person for that password and they’ll give it to you and you know you’re talking to the real person. Because I have spoken to people who’ve been scammed, where they get a phone call and it is their husband or their child. I talked to this woman who a scammer set this up and called her and she like swears to this. She’s like, I know it’s fake, but it was my son. It was his voice. It was perfect and they’re really convincing and if you’re going to get scammed what they’re going to do is there’s going to be some emergency you need to deal with right now you’re not going to be in your right mind then it’s like a solution that’s so simple it’s kind of nice in a way that with like such a frighteningly high-tech problem the solution is just speaking words outloud.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This charmingly simple solution is more important than ever, because unfortunately, there’s no going back to the days before AI. But while this code word thing is great for keeping grandma from blowing her life savings on a deepfake scam, it doesn’t help you parse through all of the deepfaked and AI-generated content you come across online. There are still countless ways to get tricked.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think it will reach the point where for a lot of people, there is no source of truth. Everyone is trying to trick you. And I think there are a lot grifters who will take advantage of that. I think there’s people in power who will see an opportunity and they will seize it. You’ll be able to spin whatever kind of narrative you want because if you’ve got people who trust you, you can say, well, the things that I’m telling you are true and anyone who criticizes me, they’re all part of the lie.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>My optimistic view is it will get so bad that there will be such a desperate need for trusted institutions that people will step in to fill the void and people will seek out sources of truth that they can rely on and we will rebuild an ecosystem of trust. So I think the advice that would give you is like go find that one person on the internet, someone who’s sincere, who you trust, who you feel has your best interest in mind or maybe in institution. Maybe there’s a publication you like, maybe it’s local news. Try to find sources who you can go to, who you look to when there’s a question, because your eyes and your ears just aren’t gonna cut it anymore.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That being said, when it comes to these personal relationships, sometimes you do need a little trust. Thomas said that he and his aunt Eleanor don’t use a code word every time they talk on the phone.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Fortunately, this hasn’t caused any strife between me and my aunt so far. I told her that I wasn’t actually trying to trick her, that it was the real me on the other end of the line, but I hope that this experience was unsettling enough that if there’s ever any reason to doubt, if it’s ever like, hey, I’m in trouble, I need money, or I forgot my password, I hope that she will question it and try and figure out whether it’s really me because at some point someone is going to try and fool all of us.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah. So when she gets that chaotic text that you actually do want the gold sweater after all, she’ll ask you for your code word.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And I do need $600 in Walmart gift cards as soon as possible.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So if you do get a call begging for gift cards, it never hurts to double check and ask for the code word. That’s it for this deep dive, but stick around after the credits for some bonus content. Okay, let’s close all these tabs.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. This episode was produced by Maya Cueva and edited by Chris Egusa, who also composed our theme song and credits music. The Close All Tabs team also includes editor Chris Hambrick and audio engineer, Brendan Willard. Additional music by APM. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is our director of podcasts and Ethan Toven Lindsey is our editor-in-chief.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco Northern California Local. This episode’s keyboard sounds were submitted by Alex Tran and recorded on his white Epomaker Hi75 keyboard with Fogruaden red samurai keycaps and gateron milky yellow pro v2 switches. Thanks for listening.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You know, one of the people I interviewed for this story said, “I purchased 25 acres in Vermont so when the world falls apart, I’ll go live on my homestead.” You know, maybe they’ve got the right idea. I don’t know. I don’t have 25 acres in Vermont money myself. So I’m stuck here with the rest of us schlubs, you know, we’re gonna have to deal with the fallout.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"description": "During a recent phone call, BBC tech columnist Thomas Germain couldn’t convince his aunt that he wasn’t AI. Being unable to distinguish a real person from a fabricated version is a problem born from the sheer volume of AI-generated content flooding the internet — and one that’s increased dramatically in the last year alone. Even world leaders are now plagued by the issue: a glitchy video of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sparked an enduring conspiracy theory that he was really dead and his public appearances on social media were an AI-driven cover up. In a world where everything looks fake, how do we know what’s real? Thomas joins the show to explain how we got here, where we might be headed, and a surprisingly analog technique that could save you from getting scammed by a deepfaked version of a loved one.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">During a recent phone call, BBC tech columnist Thomas Germain couldn’t convince his aunt that he \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">wasn’t\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> AI. Being unable to distinguish a real person from a fabricated version is a problem born from the sheer volume of AI-generated content flooding the internet — and one that’s increased dramatically in the last year alone. Even world leaders are now plagued by the issue: a glitchy video of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sparked an enduring conspiracy theory that he was really dead and his public appearances on social media were an AI-driven cover up.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In a world where everything looks fake, how do we know what’s real? Thomas joins the show to explain how we got here, where we might be headed, and a surprisingly analog technique that could save you from getting scammed by a deepfaked version of a loved one.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm?e=KQINC6560300791\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guest:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.bbc.com/future/author/thomas-germain\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Thomas Germain\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, co-host of the podcast \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Interface\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, and tech columnist at the\u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> BBC\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">.\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Further Reading/Listening:\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260324-i-tried-to-prove-im-not-an-ai-deepfake\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I tried to prove I’m not AI. My aunt wasn’t convinced\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Thomas Germain, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BBC \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.bbc.com/audio/brand/m002qwn7\">The Interface Podcast\u003c/a>\u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — \u003ci>BBC\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.theverge.com/tech/895453/ai-deepfake-netanyahu-claims-conspiracy\">Benjamin Netanyahu is struggling to prove he’s not an AI clone \u003c/a>\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Jess Weatherbed, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ci>\u003ci>The Verge\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/03/14/business/media/iran-disinfo-artificial-intelligence.html\">Cascade of A.I. Fakes About War With Iran Causes Chaos Online \u003c/a>\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">— Stuart A. Thompson and Alexander Cardia, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ci>\u003ci>\u003ci>The New York Times \u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/experts-warn-collapse-trust-online-ai-deepfakes-venezuela-rcna252472\">AI is intensifying a ‘collapse’ of trust online, experts say\u003c/a>\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Angela Yang, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ci>\u003ci>\u003ci>\u003ci>NBC News\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/deepfakes-elections-and-shrinking-liars-dividend\">Deepfakes, Elections, and Shrinking the Liar’s Dividend\u003c/a> — Josh A. Goldstein, \u003ci>Brennan Center for Justice\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>Want to give us feedback on the show? Shoot us an email at \u003ca href=\"mailto:CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\">CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Follow us on\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/closealltabspod/\"> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Instagram\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> and\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@closealltabs\"> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">TikTok\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-content post-body\">\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Do you like these deep dives? Do you want more? It would be so, so helpful if you could rate and review us on Spotify, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to the show. Send it to your friends, your frenemies, that one niche micro-influencer you kind of have a parasocial relationship with. Maybe they’ll respond, I don’t know. All right, let’s get to the show.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">When we talk about deepfakes and AI, often what we’re thinking about is the idea that you’re gonna get tricked.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is Thomas Germain. He’s the cohost of the podcast The Interface, and also a tech columnist at the BBC. His column, Keeping Tabs, covers tech and how it affects average people every day. So, like many journalists on this beat, he’s been keeping an eye on the uptick in deep fake scams.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Someone’s going to scam you, they’re going to try and fool you into thinking that they’re someone else.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Fakes are synthetic media, images, videos, or audio recordings that have been generated or manipulated by AI to impersonate someone else.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But I started thinking about like, what would it be like if the shoe was on the other foot? What if you needed to convince someone that you’re real and you are who you say that you are? How difficult would that be?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So Thomas decided to do a little experiment. He called up his aunt Eleanor. Thomas and his aunt Eleanor are very close. She was at the hospital the day he was born and of all of his relatives, she’s the one he calls the most and she’s relatively online.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">She knows a bit about what’s going on. Her husband, my uncle, is actually a computer science professor. So she gets some of it, but she’s not like up to date on everything that’s happening. And I wanted someone who knows me really, really well.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That last part is important. Thomas called his aunt and explained the experiment. He would call her back, and she’d either be talking to the real him, her beloved nephew, or a deep fake, generated by AI. And what Thomas wanted to know was, could she tell the difference?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">At first, you know, it was a very fun, like, friendly conversation, but there was this weird, like tension, you know? She said before we even got on the phone, she’s like, “Oh, I’m gonna be really upset if I can’t tell,” you know, because she’s known me since the day I was born, right?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">His aunt Eleanor tried a few different methods to suss it out. First, she went on Facebook.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And read me like a bunch of jokes that she’s seen that she really liked, to like see what my reaction was. And you know, we’re like different generations, we have different senses of humor. So I’m not sure like, was the test that I would laugh or I wouldn’t laugh. It was kind of funny. That didn’t seem to convince her.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So she took a different approach.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">She was knitting me a sweater and we hadn’t decided on the color. And like a couple of weeks before we got on the phone. I told her that I was saying I wanted a gold sweater, like kind of gold colored yarn. And then when we were talking, when I was tricking her about AI, she brought it up and she’s like, “so have you decided on the color?” and I was like, “yeah, you know, I think it might just go boring, like just do like a black or like a dark blue or something.” And I think of all the things, that made her the most suspicious because like, ‘I was expecting you to go with like a more exciting color. She’s like “That…. I don’t know, that feels like a robot answer.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Laughter]\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It’s so generic, it can’t possibly be you.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, I know, but maybe I’m a boring guy.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">She still couldn’t be sure, so she gave him another test.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">She asked me for some details about, like, things from my childhood that you would be unlikely to know if you weren’t a member of my family. And I think she found that a little bit reassuring.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But overall, the experience left Aunt Eleanor rattled.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think by the end of the call where she realized she couldn’t be totally sure, it was kind of distressing. You know, like, you’re supposed to know your loved ones, how could it be? And we talked for like 20 minutes or so and by the of it she told me like, “I think it’s the real you, I just can’t be sure, I’m not 100% confident.”.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And at the end I told her it is me, I am not tricking you. But there were all these little things that she was trying to pick up on, and I think this is really important for people to understand, throw that out the window. This technology is so good, I promise you, there is nothing that you can do to tell that you’re not looking at an AI, and if you convince yourself that you could figure it out by just like thinking really hard and being careful, you are more likely to get in trouble and get fooled.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is way bigger than Thomas duping his aunt. It’s a real world problem. Every day, deep fake scams and AI generated disinformation lead people astray. Which is why the general public is becoming so distrustful of everything online. When everything could be fake, how do you tell what’s real and what’s not?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is Close All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung, tech journalist, and your chronically online friend, here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let’s get into it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Kicking this off as always, let’s open a new tab: the Netanyahu deep fake death rumor. In March, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a televised update on the war in Iran. A clip of it was posted on his official X account.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Audio clip of Benjamin Netanyahu addressing Israeli people in Hebrew]\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>\n\u003cem>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Citizens of Israel, my brothers and sisters, we are in historic times…\u003c/span>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Something about that video seemed off.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There’s one moment where he kind of waves his hand in front of the camera and if you freeze frame it at just the right second, it kind of looks like he’s got a sixth finger on his hand.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Screenshots of this moment started making the rounds. And if you’re just scrolling by and you see this freeze frame out of context, it would probably raise a few alarm bells, right?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It really looks weird. It’s like, it looks like this weird digital glitch and because it’s a video, you know, it’s little grainy it’s pixelated.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So this rumor started swirling around online. Was this televised speech really Netanyahu? Or was it a deep fake?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And people latched onto this because for the longest time, AI image and video generators really struggled with hands. Right? They were trained to focus on faces, hands were this thing they picked up along the way and they couldn’t get the hands just right. That was true two or three years ago. Right? The technology has advanced past that point. It’s not true that AI struggles with hands anymore. That isn’t really an issue, but this was enough and it does look weird if you pause at the right frame.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Thus, a conspiracy theory was born: Netanyahu was dead, and this was the cover-up. It didn’t help that the Prime Minister’s health had been the subject of public speculation for years. He had emergency heart surgery in 2023, and then a year later, underwent treatment for prostate cancer. And then there’s the war in Iran. The U.S. and Israel killed the Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>[Audio clip from Global News Youtube post]\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>\nIn Tehran, thousands gathered to mourn the death of the supreme leader. Similar protests were held in cities around the world including…\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In retaliation, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard has vowed to hunt down and target Netanyahu personally. The seed of doubt over Netanyahu’s health was already planted. Then, the wonky six-fingered video launched the conspiracy theory into the mainstream.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This was enough that some large swath of people latched on to this idea that Netanyahu had been killed in a missile strike, and the Israeli government was hiding the truth and making AI videos to convince the world that he was still alive, to what aim, I’m not exactly sure. It turned into, you know, such like a meme, essentially. Like, the conversation got so big that it was enough that Netnyahu posted another video.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cb>[Audio clip from Benjamin Netanyahu’s post on X] \u003c/b>\u003c/em>\u003cb>\u003cbr>\n\u003c/b>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Voice behind camera: Do you want to show us?\u003cbr>\nNetanyahu: Here. Here.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This video takes place in a coffee shop near Jerusalem. The camera approaches Netanyahu, and the voice behind it says, they’re saying on the internet that you’re actually dead. Netanyah, holding a latte, tells the camera, I’m dying for a coffee. And then he holds up his hand and says, do you want to count the fingers?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">He did a terrible job with it for a couple of reasons. If the goal was convincing the public. Number one, I talked to a bunch of people about this and they’re like, the worst thing you can do is come out and deny it because it makes it look like you’ve got something to hide. Right?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And there is still something off about the video. It was almost uncanny. He looked super crisp and almost too smooth. It only fueled the conspiracy theories.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">They shot this on like a nice DSLR, like one of those big cameras, which is how AI videos look. Right? They’re trained on high quality content, high quality videos, so they produce what looks like smoother, polished, high quality video. So it looked a little bit more like AI than it would have if he had just used a phone to record it. So that, I think, just sent people spiraling even more. Nobody was convinced by this, as far as I could tell. The people who had latched on, if anything, it just reaffirmed their belief that the bad guys were trying to trick them.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Here’s the thing about conspiracy theories. Once you’re convinced, everything else just seems like confirmation of what you already believe. People took screenshots, zoomed in, tried to find inconsistencies in the backgrounds of the video. Joe Rogan, for one, seemed pretty convinced.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cb>[Audio clip from The Joe Rogan Experience] \u003c/b>\u003c/em>\u003cb>\u003cbr>\n\u003c/b>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Look at this. Yeah, like the coffee. Look how turned it is, but it doesn’t spill at all. It just wiggles to the edge.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">He talked about it on his podcast, which has over 20 million followers on YouTube. And of course, that just spread the rumor further. I saw claims that if you zoomed in on the date on the register, the pixels didn’t look right. So surely it was fake. Right? Or that the video itself was real, but it wasn’t actually Netanyahu. It was really an actor deep faked to look like Netanyahu and the shadows gave it away. Or, that when he put his hands in his pocket, the fabric of his jacket seemed to smooth over.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And the thing about reality is it’s weird. Right? Like, if you look close enough at anything you’ll find weird stuff but especially with digital photography, digital video, it’s the way that the sensors work, like, errors are actually inherent to the way that a digital camera sensor functions. So if you zoom in on any video, if you’re, like, watching a clip from this podcast on social media, zoom in, take a screenshot and zoom in, you will find something weird. That’s just how digital images work, that there’ll be some little grainy thing, there’ll be some glitch. And I think it’s important for people to understand that unless you have serious expertise on this subject, you aren’t qualified to make that kind of call. I am not qualified to make that knd of, I think about this stuff all the time.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">For his column, Thomas talked to a few of the world’s leading experts on this, including Jeremy Carrasco. He runs a publication called Riddance, which investigates AI-generated media.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And he went through, he analyzed it, he determined it was real. I talked to professors, I talked to some people who were like, real world leading experts on digital forensics is what they call it, like figuring out what the origin of a file is. They said there is no doubt. It is impossible that these videos are AI-generated. Like, this thing where it sort of looked like Netanyahu had a sixth finger, even if you watch the clip, instead of looking at a freeze frame, you can kind of see there’s like a shadow on his hand and that’s what it is. It looks weird if you take a screenshot at the right second, but the video itself, it’s very clearly real. This was not enough. And I think that is kind of part of the problem is that we’ve lived through an era where there’s been an assault on expertise, right? That, you know, real conscious, intentional efforts to discredit traditional forms of you know, authority on truth.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Thomas also talked to Hany Farid, a professor at UC Berkeley who’s known as the father of digital forensics. He pioneered this field of examining files and figuring out if they’re real.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">He’s one of these guys that’s constantly watching this stuff. And he says, you can see the progression of AI and deep fake technology if you look at some of the recent global conflicts. Like, if we go back to the beginning of the war in Ukraine, it was almost all real footage. Like, every once in a while, you’d see something AI-generated, but for the most part, it was all real. Fast forward to the conflict in Gaza and it was starting to get to the point where there was more AI-generated content. It was a little harder to sort the real from the truth. You get to when the U.S. invaded Venezuela, and it was about 50-50. Right? You’re seeing as much fake stuff as real stuff if you just go out and look at a random video on the subject on the internet. By the time we got to the war in Iran, there’s more fake footage, there’s more fake clips, there is more mis and disinformation than there is real stuff.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">A few weeks ago, we dove into the slopaganda coming out of Iran, those AI-generated Lego rap videos dissing the U.S. They’re clearly not real, but they still push specific narratives to the American public. But there’s another kind of AI- generated media at play here: videos that look real but portray events that never happened, like AI-generated footage of Iranian missiles sinking U.S. ships and bombarding civilians in Tel Aviv.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In less than six months, we had this dramatic shift where I think people in power who’ve got like, you know, a game to play, they’ve got something that they want to try and convince the public of, they’ve realized that this technology is something they can put into play. There are whole operations that are ready to get off the ground at a moment’s notice to like, fill the world with fakery and lies. I think that is a real serious problem, I mean, even for journalists, even in the media. Like, it used to be if you saw something that was recorded with a camera, you know, in the not too distant past, it was almost certainly real. Right? Because it took so much effort, especially for video, so much effort to fake something in a convincing way. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Now I can do it like while I’m washing the dishes. I could reach over and hammer something out of my phone and generate a fake video. For the average person, I think this means that you are constantly inundated with nonsense. You are being exposed to lies on a near constant basis. It’s not just that the image looks real, it’s not just the video looks real. The thing that’s happening is so close to real life. Right? And if you’re a person who watches a lot of short form video and social media, if like scrolling through Instagram Reels or TikTok, the chances that you have seen a piece of AI content and been fooled that it was real, I’d say in the last week, are extremely high.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Actual footage, meanwhile, has been written off as fake and AI. When the U.S. bombed an elementary school in Iran, killing 120 children, some people online questioned whether footage of the aftermath was authentic. It didn’t help that the true photos and videos were mixed in with AI-generated depictions of what happened. It’s one thing for digital forensics experts, like Hany Farid, to sift through all of the slop and determine what’s real. It’s another for these experts to get the public to actually trust them.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It leads to an information ecosystem, you know, a landscape of truth where everything is up for debate. Nothing is set in stone and everything is suspect. And that leads to some new ways that power can be abused and people can be taken advantage of.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The conspiracy theories over Netanyahu’s death have not stopped. The follow-up videos and public appearances after the coffee shop debacle only fueled the rumors further. In March, Netanyahu appeared in a video with Mike Huckabee, who is now the ambassador to Israel.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cb>[Audio clip from Benjamin Netanyahu’s post on X] \u003c/b>\u003c/em>\u003cb>\u003cbr>\n\u003c/b>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Mike Huckabee: Mr. Prime Minister, I wanted you to know, the President asked me to come and make sure you were okay. \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Benjamin Netanyahu: Yes, Mike. Yes, I’m alive.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">If anything, it only convinced people that Huckabee was also a deepfake. On X and TikTok, people did the same exact thing they did to previous videos, zoomed in, slowed down, cropped screenshots, and looked for any anomaly that could confirm their theories.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>\u003cem>[Audio clip from a post on the TikTok account of @ragingprestigemaster3.0]\u003c/em>\u003cbr>\n\u003c/b>\u003cem>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The picture you’re seeing right up here, that’s not his ear, fam.\u003c/span>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think that is a truly historical moment. This is, according to everyone that I asked, the first time that the leader of a major world power has like openly gone out in front of the public to try and convince people that he’s not an AI. And I think it’s a sign of a very rocky period that we’re about to enter.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">What does this mean for media literacy, our ability to parse the truth from fiction? Well, it definitely does not bode well for the information ecosystem. It’s really easy to take advantage of public distrust and write off real evidence as fake and AI. We’re going to talk about liars and disinformation in a new tab, after a quick break.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But first, we wanted to remind you that Close All Tabs depends on listeners like you to keep us going. You can support us by becoming a member at donate.kqed.org/podcasts.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, after the break, we’re coming back to bunnies on a trampoline. Stick around.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We’re back. Time to open a new tab: the liar’s dividend.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">A while back there was this video of, it looked like night camera footage and it was bunnies jumping on a trampoline.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yes.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You remember this?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I got duped by that. I have a sense of whimsy. \u003cem>[laughter]\u003c/em> I thought it was real.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I fell for it too at first, you know, I saw that and I was like, wow, like maybe the world’s okay after all, like there’s still, you, know, there’s still nice cute things happening. No, turns out it was fake. Millions of people saw this. That doesn’t matter. Right? It’s not going to affect your day or your life that the bunnies aren’t real. But you’re seeing stuff that is a little bit more consequential, that is maybe affecting your beliefs about how the world works or what is happening. And I think this adds up to a lot of people being led astray in ways that are really, really subtle.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Because anything online could be fake, people have become suspicious of everything.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And that creates a situation where if there’s ever any reason to doubt that something is real, then it immediately falls apart.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is a media phenomenon called “the liar’s dividend.” Legal scholars coined the term back in 2018 in a paper about how deep fakes, truth decay, and cognitive bias affect the information ecosystem. They thought it was bad back then? They could not have predicted today. Anyway, so what exactly is “the liar’s dividend”?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It takes time or resources to verify that something is real. It’s free to cast doubt. It’s free to say that’s fake, right? It takes no effort at all. And once you raise those suspicions, you can take advantage of that. Right? I can say, ‘oh, that’s a fake news, that didn’t happen.’ And that gives people in power the ability to cast doubt on anything that isn’t convenient for whatever their goals happen to be.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You know, we’ve reached the point where you cannot trust your eyes, like, that ship has sailed, it’s over. You can’t tell whether you’re looking at an AI video or not. You certainly can’t tell whether your looking at a image. They’ve gotten so good that our physiology does not allow you to deal with this problem.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You don’t have to be a major world leader to be affected by this. Before he wrote about this deep, fake situation, Thomas worked on this story about a safety tool that wipes your personal information from Google search results. Like every other tech journalist, he’s really passionate about privacy. So he was chugging coffee, writing this article…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I got myself all worked up and I put in my family group chat, like, “Here’s a link to this setting. Everybody needs to go turn this on right now.” And my mom was like, “Is this really you?” Like, are you, is someone like taking…like that’s…[laughter] and in her defense, it is weird behavior. Right? That’s a strange thing for me to do. You have to use this Google setting right now, that’s something that’s gonna happen to you. Right? You’re gonna be talking to someone, something will be strange. Right? Maybe you’ll be in an emergency. Maybe you will get in a car accident and you call, you know, your wife and be like, I really, I desperately need Amazon gift cards right now. And it’s, it’s real.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">If your loved one calls you and urgently tells you that they need those gift cards, it’s probably a scam. But maybe your partner is calling to ask for the password to the family Netflix account. Your best friend lost her passport while on vacation and needs help getting a new one. Or your nephew tells you that he actually wants a blue sweater instead of the gold one you started knitting. These could be real, but how do you know?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That’s a thing that’s going to happen more and more because we’re living in this world where everything is suspect and if any little doubt comes up, suddenly everything falls apart.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So what is the solution here? Are AI companies or social media platforms doing anything to help differentiate between what’s real and what’s generated? Industry leaders and academics have been pushing for a kind of digital watermark that would be embedded in the file itself, like planting a flag that says AI-generated. And that flag would be planted deep in the pixel data. It would be really difficult to remove. Google Gemini already does this. It’s called Synth ID.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So the dream there is we’ll get to a place where like all of the big AI companies or companies that are making these tools will participate in this program and there’ll be some level of checking. On the flip side, there’s efforts to build a similar thing into cameras that when you take an image with a camera, you take a photo or a video, it would embed something in the file that says this was taken by an actual camera. It’s like, this is an image of reality. So far, that technology is not here. Right?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We haven’t gotten to the point where that is widespread enough that it can be usable. And hopefully we will arrive at a point where there’s some kind of technical solution or at least technical amelioration to this problem that will like help you sort through it. But we also just need from the social media companies, I think a lot of critics that I speak to say they need to be doing way more to label AI content right now than they are.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">On a lot of these platforms, you can upload a piece of footage or an image. They don’t really care whether it’s AI, right? The platforms where we’re getting all of our information could be doing a lot more to let you know that something that you’re looking at is suspicious, but they don’t have a financial incentive to solve that problem. Right? So I think what it really comes down to is we need regulatory approaches to this that will help at least do something to point people in the direction of truth. Not an easy problem to solve, but we haven’t really even tried yet.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, well in that case, how do you assure your loved ones that you’re really you? Let’s open our last tab:n how to prove that you are not a deep faith.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So this YouTuber, Jim Browning, makes videos about exposing scammers. He recently went super viral with his three-finger test.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cb>[Audio from Jim Browning’s Youtube post] \u003c/b>\u003c/em>\u003cb>\u003cbr>\n\u003c/b>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Jim Browning: Can you like hold up three fingers in front of your face or anything? \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Person: Oh, come on, that’s too much.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The reasoning? This would disrupt any face-swapping deep fake program and make it glitch.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>[Audio from Jim Browning’s Youtube post] \u003c/b>\u003cb>\u003cbr>\n\u003c/b>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Jim Browning: Can you do that then? \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Person: Uh, I don’t know, it’s too much to ask somebody. \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Jim Browning: Well, it’ll make sure you’re not AI, is that unreasonable? I mean, can you do that in front of your face? \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Person: Well, is that enough? \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Jim Browning: No, it’s not in front of your face. \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The scammer then abruptly ended the call, and in the comments, people were like, this is it. This is the perfect test. This is how to stay safe. But the truth is, this trick has been outdated for years.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I could tell you some things that you could look for, some telltale signs for audio and for video, but I’m not going to because if I gave you those tips, it would actually hurt you more than it would help you because in a week or in a month or in six months, they’re going to put out another AI model and those tips that worked last week aren’t going to work now. There is no giveaway that you’re watching an AI video. In fact, maybe the one thing that you can look out for is if you’re a watching a video that’s low quality, that’s grainy, you might be more likely to get fooled because if there is any weird digital artifact, it’ll be harder to see. AI can make high quality video, a low quality grainy pixelated image, that’s not a sign that you are looking at AI. Maybe it’s a sign, if there’s any doubt, that you might want to think twice. But we’ve past that point. Deepfakes are astonishingly good, and they keep getting just a little bit better.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Luckily, there is one way to protect yourself and your loved ones. And you don’t have to be that tech savvy to do it. It involves gathering up your inner circle. Older relatives, close friends, partners, nibblings, neighbors, basically anyone who could feasibly get this panicked emergency call from someone pretending to be you.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You should set up a secret word that you both agree on, that if there’s ever any doubt, you can ask the person for that password and they’ll give it to you and you know you’re talking to the real person. Because I have spoken to people who’ve been scammed, where they get a phone call and it is their husband or their child. I talked to this woman who a scammer set this up and called her and she like swears to this. She’s like, I know it’s fake, but it was my son. It was his voice. It was perfect and they’re really convincing and if you’re going to get scammed what they’re going to do is there’s going to be some emergency you need to deal with right now you’re not going to be in your right mind then it’s like a solution that’s so simple it’s kind of nice in a way that with like such a frighteningly high-tech problem the solution is just speaking words outloud.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This charmingly simple solution is more important than ever, because unfortunately, there’s no going back to the days before AI. But while this code word thing is great for keeping grandma from blowing her life savings on a deepfake scam, it doesn’t help you parse through all of the deepfaked and AI-generated content you come across online. There are still countless ways to get tricked.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think it will reach the point where for a lot of people, there is no source of truth. Everyone is trying to trick you. And I think there are a lot grifters who will take advantage of that. I think there’s people in power who will see an opportunity and they will seize it. You’ll be able to spin whatever kind of narrative you want because if you’ve got people who trust you, you can say, well, the things that I’m telling you are true and anyone who criticizes me, they’re all part of the lie.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>My optimistic view is it will get so bad that there will be such a desperate need for trusted institutions that people will step in to fill the void and people will seek out sources of truth that they can rely on and we will rebuild an ecosystem of trust. So I think the advice that would give you is like go find that one person on the internet, someone who’s sincere, who you trust, who you feel has your best interest in mind or maybe in institution. Maybe there’s a publication you like, maybe it’s local news. Try to find sources who you can go to, who you look to when there’s a question, because your eyes and your ears just aren’t gonna cut it anymore.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That being said, when it comes to these personal relationships, sometimes you do need a little trust. Thomas said that he and his aunt Eleanor don’t use a code word every time they talk on the phone.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Fortunately, this hasn’t caused any strife between me and my aunt so far. I told her that I wasn’t actually trying to trick her, that it was the real me on the other end of the line, but I hope that this experience was unsettling enough that if there’s ever any reason to doubt, if it’s ever like, hey, I’m in trouble, I need money, or I forgot my password, I hope that she will question it and try and figure out whether it’s really me because at some point someone is going to try and fool all of us.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah. So when she gets that chaotic text that you actually do want the gold sweater after all, she’ll ask you for your code word.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And I do need $600 in Walmart gift cards as soon as possible.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So if you do get a call begging for gift cards, it never hurts to double check and ask for the code word. That’s it for this deep dive, but stick around after the credits for some bonus content. Okay, let’s close all these tabs.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. This episode was produced by Maya Cueva and edited by Chris Egusa, who also composed our theme song and credits music. The Close All Tabs team also includes editor Chris Hambrick and audio engineer, Brendan Willard. Additional music by APM. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is our director of podcasts and Ethan Toven Lindsey is our editor-in-chief.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco Northern California Local. This episode’s keyboard sounds were submitted by Alex Tran and recorded on his white Epomaker Hi75 keyboard with Fogruaden red samurai keycaps and gateron milky yellow pro v2 switches. Thanks for listening.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You know, one of the people I interviewed for this story said, “I purchased 25 acres in Vermont so when the world falls apart, I’ll go live on my homestead.” You know, maybe they’ve got the right idea. I don’t know. I don’t have 25 acres in Vermont money myself. So I’m stuck here with the rest of us schlubs, you know, we’re gonna have to deal with the fallout.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>"
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">When JetBlue replied to an angry customer on X that they should clear their cookies for a better flight price, it seemed to confirm a long-held consumer belief: companies use your personal data to \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">determine what you should pay in real-time based on your urgency, habits and identity\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. It’s what’s known as \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">surveillance pricing. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">According to economic sociologist Lindsay Owens, \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">the practice is rampant. She says companies have been investing for years in sophisticated tools meant to squeeze every last dollar out of consumers — and for the most part, it’s legal. Lindsay joins Morgan to \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">talk about how we got here, the U.S. laws designed to fight back against surveillance pricing and what you can personally do to sidestep the practice.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm?e=KQINC8058124943\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guest:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://groundworkcollaborative.org/person/lindsay-owens/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Lindsay Owens\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, executive director of \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://groundworkcollaborative.org/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Groundwork Collaborative\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Further Reading/Listening:\u003c/b>\u003ci>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.propublica.org/article/asians-nearly-twice-as-likely-to-get-higher-price-from-princeton-review\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Tiger Mom Tax: Asians Are Nearly Twice as Likely to Get a Higher Price from Princeton Review\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Julia Angwin, Surya Mattu and Jeff Larson, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Pro Publica\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/10/18/starbucks-loyalty-program-surveillance-pricing/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The hidden way using a rewards card can cost you more\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Geoffrey A. Fowler, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Washington Post\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/sp6b-issue-spotlight.pdf\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Issue Spotlight: The Rise of Surveillance Pricing\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — FTC Staff, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Federal Trade Commission\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.org/economy/technology/2026/05/why-surveillance-pricing-bans-are-suddenly-gaining-traction-this-year-and-not-just-in-california/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Why surveillance pricing bans are suddenly gaining traction this year (and not just in California)\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Khari Johnson, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">CalMatters\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.fastcompany.com/91544120/public-library-hack-book-cheaper-flights-mistrust-airlines\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Influencers are peddling ‘the library hack’ as a way to score cheaper flights. Whether it works is beside the point\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Grace Snelling, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Fast Company\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>Want to give us feedback on the show? Shoot us an email at \u003ca href=\"mailto:CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\">CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Follow us on\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/closealltabspod/\"> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Instagram\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> and\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@closealltabs\"> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">TikTok\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung, Host: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Hello, Tabbies. We’ve been workshopping games. What do you think of Tab Hive? Could also go with Tab Closers? Maybe Tabdom, like Tab fandom, but I don’t know, that sounds kind of ominous. Anyway, if you’re a Close All Tabs listener and you like our deep dives, then please rate and review the show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you’re listening to this. It would be a huge help to get the word out. Okay, let’s get to the show.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So online, there’s this kind of urban legend when it comes to booking flights. Basically, as the myth goes, if you’ve been looking up flights between certain destinations and you’re finally ready to book, you should always clear your cookies or book the flight from an incognito tab so you get a better price. For years, this travel hack was based on anecdotal experience, not actual evidence that airlines were using personal data to determine prices. But we do know that our personal data is kind of up for grabs anyway. We talk about this all the time on the show. It’s not wild to believe that corporations are tracking you and price gouging you based on your specific habits. But if you brought it up on travel forums or comment threads, you might get written off as a tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist. And then in April, JetBlue just tweeted it out.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens, Guest: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is just a really incredible story, one of those ‘truth is stranger than fiction’ moments.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Lindsay Owens is an economic sociologist who runs the affordability think tank Groundwork Collaborative. She keeps a pretty close eye on this kind of thing.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">If you’re feeling it in your wallet, we are studying it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So back in April, a customer took to X, the site formerly known as Twitter…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">To kind of complain, vent, gripe about the fact that his flight had increased by more than $200 overnight, and he was just trying to get to a funeral. And he tweeted sort of, JetBlue, what gives here? Why are you doing this? And incredibly, JetBlue’s corporate Twitter account replied.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Here’s the real travel hack. If your flight is delayed or canceled or you’re stuck in customer service hotline hell, complain about it on Twitter. There’s a chance that the airline will see it and give you a discount or at worst a snack voucher. At least that’s how they usually respond. But this time JetBlue took a different approach.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">They said ‘try clearing your cash and cookies or booking with an incognito window.’ And then they did say, ‘we’re sorry for your loss. ‘\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In other words, JetBlue’s official corporate social account told the customer that if he didn’t want to be overcharged, he should just trick the company’s booking software into not identifying him.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And this was a pretty stunning thing to see on Twitter. JetBlue’s HQ immediately weighed in and said the tweet was mistaken, that they don’t use personal information to set prices.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">A spokesperson for the company told multiple news outlets that the airline fares are determined by supply and demand, not by customer data. JetBlue very quickly deleted the response, but it’s the internet, screenshots live on. This exchange went super viral.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It was a real confession of sorts, but it was a window into the ways in which pricing is changing right under our feet.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">An airline surreptitiously gleaning personal information to maximize how much money they can make off of each individual customer, it’s not out of the realm of possibility. In fact, Lindsay said that just last year, she listened in on a Delta earnings call and the company told investors about this new strategy they were piloting, a partnership with an Israel-based AI company called Fetcherr, which specialized in personalized pricing. Lindsay went on Fetcherr’s website and found a white paper.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Phase two was called ‘the exploitation phase’ —really not hiding the ball with this one. That’s when they’ve learned everything they can about Delta’s competitors, about their customers, and when they start going for broke and they start increasing those prices and getting better revenues for Delta. They were guaranteeing increases in revenue of near 10% in some cases. So we’ve had quite a few of these examples with the airlines now revealing some of their plans, experiments, and things that they’re working on.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Lindsay wasn’t the only one paying attention. Journalists did too. News of the earnings call spread. This set off a PR firestorm for the company with Delta’s competitors saying that they’d never do this to their valued customers, and Delta announcing that they didn’t actually plan to go through with it. But this practice is becoming the norm across industries. We’ve gotten used to dynamic pricing: price fluctuating based on supply and demand, like, how concert tickets get more expensive as seats fill up. What we’re talking about today goes further. Economists call it personalized pricing. This idea that companies charge you based on their assessment of how much you’re willing to pay for a good or service. It’s a practice more commonly known as surveillance pricing.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">They’re doing anything they can to learn about you, including sometimes spying on you, which is why I do think the term surveillance pricing is so apt and accurate. Companies gather a lot of data about us. Some of it we offer up willingly, our browsing history, we accept the cookies, we agree to let them sell our data, and all of that can be used to set a price for you specifically — ideally, if you’re a company, a price that gets pretty close to the maximum that you’d be willing to pay before you might walk away or start looking elsewhere.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Today, we’re diving into surveillance pricing. Where it came from, how it works, and what we’re supposed to do to save ourselves from it. And no, clearing cookies isn’t always the answer. Ready?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is Close All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung, tech journalist and your chronically online friend, here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let’s get into it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Here’s the funny thing. A set price is a fairly new concept compared to the entirety of human history. Let’s talk about it. Kicking this off as always, let’s open a new tab: History of the price tag.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>\u003ci>[Audio from Jessie J singing “Price Tag” live] \u003c/i>\u003c/b>\u003cb>\u003ci>\u003cbr>\n\u003c/i>\u003c/b>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Ain’t about the, uh, cha-chang-cha-chung \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Ain’t bout the, b-bling-b-bling \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Wanna make the world dance\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Forget about the beep beep beep boop boop boop\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> …price tag. To quote the iconic Jessie J, we need to take it back in time. We don’t even have to go that far back. The price tag dates back to 1861, when Wanamakers opened its stores in Philadelphia. It was one of the first American department stores, and also invented the.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>\u003ci>[Audio from Jessie J singing “Price Tag” live]\u003cbr>\n\u003c/i>\u003c/b>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Priiiiiiiiiicetaaaaaagggg!\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The price tag.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Prior to Wanamaker, you really had thousands of years where we haggled. You went to the market, you picked out what you wanted, and then you started a process of bartering or haggling to set the price. The merchant at the souk or the market maybe sized you up a little and said, oh, you look like someone who could pay more. Maybe he knows a little bit about you, knows you’re wealthy, charges you more. Maybe you know a little bit about him, you have a little dirt on him, he charges you less, right? Those were the kind of rules of the bizarre economy.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That started to shift in the U.S. context really with the Quakers and they felt like bartering and haggling was really unfair. They felt a sort of moral conviction about this; you and I are created equal under God, they thought. Why would we be charged different amounts for the same item? So they instituted a fixed price, and everyone would pay the same amount for items at a Quaker market.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">John Wanamaker wasn’t a Quaker, but he was a devout Christian, and he had this brilliant idea. What if he took this Quaker concept further? Not just standardized prices, but print them on a little tag attached to each item, and then call it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>\u003ci>[Audio from Jessie J singing “Price Tag” live]\u003cbr>\n\u003c/i>\u003c/b>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">…the priiiiiice taaag!\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But of course, Wanamaker wasn’t just doing this for religious reasons, he was also doing it because he was a good businessman and haggling takes a lot of time. The price tag is pretty efficient, right? It makes it pretty easy to tally up what you owe and get on with the purchase. But look, the price tag, I think, did a number of really important things. The first thing it did is it offered transparency. And transparency is really key to fair and honest markets, and that’s really key to a healthy economy. We knew how much something cost. As part of that transparency, we could comparison shop. We could look at how much anything cost in one store, we could look at how much something cost in another store, and we could take the offering that we thought provided the best value. Actually, that mechanism of bargain hunting and comparison shopping is also an important function in a healthy competitive economy.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And the price tag also offers some stability and predictability. Of course, things like inflation and seasonal availability and wars that shut down access to major waterways can affect prices. But overall, you’d probably have an idea of how much your weekly groceries will cost.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And predictability is bedrock to home economics, to budgeting in the household. If you don’t know how much something is gonna cost from one week to the next, it is hard to know if you’re gonna clear at the end of the week.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Dynamic pricing has gotten out of hand and Lindsay said this wasn’t always the case.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I do think while we have gotten very used to dynamic pricing in a whole host of settings, it is actually the case that in the not too distant past, there were other ways that companies allocated scarce resources. It has really shifted over time and I also think dynamic pricing is increasingly happening in places where resources aren’t scarce at all. You know, you see dynamic pricing in the grocery store, Target isn’t running out of wheat thins. Kroger’s not running out of Barilla pasta, right? This isn’t about managing scarcity. It’s just about charging what they can at any given time. So I think there has been a, kind of, increase in the prevalence of dynamic pricing and the types of goods that are subject to it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">When did this use of personal data specifically to set prices become such a common practice?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think the way to think about the advent of surveillance pricing is to start with the advent of surveillance advertising, which really takes you to the internet. I mean, that’s when this starts getting really creepy, and it’s when it starts to become big business. You may have heard about a company called DoubleClick. They really pioneered and built the infrastructure for surveillance advertising on the internet. They tracked what you looked at online. And then they built an advertising system to serve it back to you. So if you’ve ever looked at an item, you didn’t buy it, and then the next day it started popping up in your feed over and over and again, and you finally relented and purchased the item, that’s just the latest iteration of surveillance advertising.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">DoubleClick was eventually purchased by Google, and Google is advertising king in the early digital era. In some ways, the logical next step for many of these companies was as they get better and better at knowing what you want, predicting what you want, maybe persuading you to want something, they might as well also think about getting better and better, figuring out how much you might be willing to pay for it. And so marrying sort of dynamic pricing with surveillance advertising is how we get to the modern form of surveillance pricing that we’re starting to see today.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Why does the idea of dynamic pricing and surveillance pricing, why does that upset people so much?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">By and large, Americans hate the idea of companies charging different amounts to different people for the same item at the exact same time from the exact same store. I think the answer is really simple. I think when you see sort of a ubiquitous response to something in culture, it’s because you’ve tapped into a core human value. And in this case, I think that value is fairness.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So how does surveillance pricing work in practice? That’s a new tab, which we’ll open after a quick break. But first, we wanted to remind you that close all tabs depends on listeners like you to keep us going. You can support us by becoming a member at donate.kqed.org slash podcasts. Okay, after the break, big data and your wallet. Stick around.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We’re back! So how does surveillance pricing work exactly? Time for a new tab: Big Data and Your Wallet. Let’s talk about some examples of surveillance pricing and how mass data collection determines those prices.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So this one was uncovered in an analysis by ProPublica, which showed that the prices for online SAT tutoring packages at the Princeton Review, the test prep company, were varying quite substantially depending on where customers lived. So if you went online to book an online test prep package and you typed in your zip code, Some people were offered the course for $6,600. That’s, by the way, a good price, apparently, for a test prep package in 2015. I’m sure it’s more today, it’s a little staggering. But for others, the same package would be almost $2,000 more. And what they determined is that folks in zip codes with a larger percentage of Asian Americans were almost twice as likely to be offered that higher price than others.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">They called this the “tiger mom tax.” Yeah, and even in lower income neighborhoods, Asian Americans were quoted the highest prices by the Princeton Review.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think it is a good example of how companies were using zip codes and demographic information to try to estimate the likely willingness to pay for a service like test prep. We have seen similarly during that period, a study from the Wall Street Journal in 2012, which showed that the online office retailer Staples was varying prices by zip code. This one was actually a little more nefarious in some respects. If you lived in a zip code where there were other office stores nearby, like an Office Depot, you were getting better pricing. If there was not an OfficeMax or an Office Depot within 20 miles or so, you were charged more because they knew you didn’t really have any ability to go to a competitor or go anywhere else. You were probably gonna go with the Staples offering. So those are some of the early examples of companies starting to toy around with gaging your desperation, gaging your willingness to pay. Gaging how likely your exit options were, how much choice you have in a market, and then using that to put you over a barrel and charge you as much as they possibly can.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You know, it’s so funny that you say that because my friends and I joke that with Pride right around the corner, Target is probably jacking up prices for plain white tank tops for queer people because they know we’ll probably buy them for all the lesbian events in June. And obviously, that’s purely speculative and it’s mostly us kind of joking among ourselves like, ‘oh, this $5 tank top is going to be $12 next week.’ But it seems like this theory isn’t that far-fetched after all.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It is not far-fetched at all. That is exactly the kind of thing to expect. When Walmart announced that they were installing electronic shelf labels in every Walmart store throughout the country. The first thing that many consumers thought is they are going to start jacking up the of coke and ice cream and cool items on a hot summer day. When there’s a snowstorm, they are gonna charge more for soup. These are all the things that are possible when you have the ability to do dynamic pricing at scale, either online or in brick and mortar stores, which you can do with electronic shelf labels. Pricing algorithms can be controlled remotely. It is very easy to have them respond to things like the weather and other data inputs. And it starts to present, I think, a real sort of dystopian view of what shopping could look like in the future.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So what are some of the pieces of personal information that could be used to set the price that you pay, which people probably aren’t thinking about?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It is a long list. So you give up a lot of your information in a lot settings. Those terms and conditions when you get on a website that you click on without reading, often what you’ve done is just sort of pulled back the curtain and let the company ransack all of your data. Loyalty programs can be great, but often are sophisticated data harvesting operations. Okay, kinds of things they might know: they might be connected to your bank account and know when it’s payday. They might have information about your location. They might your purchase history, what you buy weekly, what you haven’t bought in a while that you usually buy and so you’re due for. They track your movements online, your mouse movements, what you hover over, how long you hover it, what you click on, what you put in your cart and don’t buy.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Lindsay pointed to this report from former Washington Post tech columnist, Geoffrey Fowler. He requested his data from Starbucks and got a detailed dossier of everything he ever bought there.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">He was a reporter, so he had purchased a lot of coffee.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>[\u003c/b>\u003cb>\u003ci>Geoffrey Fowler in Washington Post story]\u003cbr>\n\u003c/i>\u003c/b>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The more coffee I ordered, the fewer discounts I got. Sure, I was still collecting stars, but the average price I paid per cup of coffee was going up. My loyalty was working against me.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You know, in this case, they are collecting all the information about your caffeine habits. When you have your morning cup of copy, when you have you afternoon cup of cofee, if you have a sweet tooth and like to have a cookie with your afternoon coffee, right? All of those things they can collect. They can buy information about you from third parties. So, you know, this breadcrumb trail of data you leave when you participate in e-commerce provides a really robust set of data that companies can use to predict how much you’re willing to pay for any given item.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">More and more consumers are using chatbots and AI agents to do the price comparisons for them. You know, kind of taking off the drudge work of like sifting through all these websites. Are AI agents shopping for you, the new haggling?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Shopping and e-commerce and chat bots combined is really scary for folks who worry about privacy and for the potential for surveillance pricing at scale. We may be just in the first inning of our journey through the big bad world of surveillance pricing. A lot of the data that companies collect about you is behavioral and a lot of it is inferences. We think you must like this because you hovered over it for a while. So they’re guessing and using those guesses to decide what to advertise to you and how much to charge you.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But now with conversational LLMs, often the guesswork can be eliminated because you might just tell them, right? You might say to your chat bot, hey, I have a wedding on Friday. I’m totally screwed. I need a dress. What are some options? Show me some options. Well, you’ve really just given away the store. Right? They know you’re desperate, they know you are in a rush, they know you need it now, and they’re gonna charge you top dollar for it. They’re gonna return results that cost you a lot of money. So the types of data that you offer Chopbots is pretty helpful in commerce. And so then the question is, how will the sort of move from AI into commerce make use of that data? And I think there are real questions about what’s likely to transpire.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But we got a very recent hint and it was not great: a couple of researchers, one at Princeton University, one at the University of Washington, tested some LLMs and they put in some different scenarios and tried to measure how the advertising and pricing would work. You know, the results were pretty alarming. All of the current LLM’s, they tested all of them, exhibited risky behaviors, that was the researcher’s word, that favored the company over the user; steering users towards more expensive sponsored products; concealing that the products were sponsored and therefore impacted their recommendations; recommending predatory products like bad loans with high interest rates.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In practice, users were also nudged to spend more. That one we didn’t need a study to confirm, we already have data from Walmart, where the CEO has been quite candid with their investors about the fact that Sparky, the Walmart chat bot, is doing a great job of nudging consumers to spend more. And folks who use Sparky are spending 35% more than folks who don’t, in part because Sparky is bidding up their cart total very effectively.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We also learned in the study that when asked to recommend between two otherwise equivalent products, The vast majority of the models in the study chose the sponsored option more than half the time, despite it being twice as expensive. I think this is really the next big frontier in surveillance pricing. It’s the next place for people like me who research this stuff and who think through and help craft policy solutions to protect consumers from this stuff.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The good news is people aren’t overwhelmingly shopping in AI right now, although, as I mentioned, companies like Walmart are building this into their apps and into their e-commerce offerings. But it would be great to get this one fixed before the horse is out of the barn because the future doesn’t look great.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yikes, right? I mean, how is any of this even allowed? Is there anything we could do to stop it? Okay, let’s open one last tab: Is surveillance pricing even legal? I’ve googled this question many times, and the answer is never satisfying. Long story short, yes, surveillance pricing is legal. At the federal level, the U.S. is not great about comprehensive data privacy laws. And you may be asking, but what about the FTC? The Federal Trade Commission. They’re supposed to protect consumers and promote business competition. Well, under Lina Khan’s leadership, the FTC conducted a preliminary study on AI-driven pricing tools. It was released in January 2025, right before the Trump administration took over. And since then…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I mean, look, the federal government is not really leading the charge right now. We’re seeing much more action in the states.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">To understand what’s going on there, we need to talk about the flip side of surveillance pricing: surveillance wages.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Companies learning about you to figure out the maximum you’re willing to pay can use the exact same tools to learn about their workers and figure out the minimum they’re willing to charge in the form of wages. So it’s great news for companies who can deploy both at the same time because they can bring in more revenue from consumers and they can spend less on their workers. The processes and the systems are really similar and we’ve started to see some, oh really I think, concerning examples of this type of algorithmic wage discrimination starting to pop up in a whole host of sectors.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There are some examples of day nurses being subjected to auctions where they bid against each other for a shift. But instead of an auction where the highest bidder wins, whoever will take the minimum to show up for work would win. We have examples of Uber offering different drivers different fares for the same trip, right? So we are starting to see some examples of algorithmic wage discrimination in parallel to these examples of surveillance pricing.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So why might this whole practice of algorithmic wage discrimination actually lead to more legal action against these companies that are using surveillance pricing?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">To crack down on surveillance pricing, arguably we’re gonna need new laws. We’ve now seen in 40 states and localities just this year in 2026, people cracking down on surveillance pricing, introducing bans in state legislatures to eliminate this practice. Some of those bills also include prohibitions on algorithmic wage discrimination.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Just last month, Colorado actually passed a bill that would do both. It bans corporations from using personal data to set individual prices and wages.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But there are some cases in which algorithmic wage discrimination will already be illegal. So we have fair labor laws and we have employment discrimination laws and it is illegal to pay men and women different amounts for the same job. And so where algorithmic discrimination falls afoul of existing employment discrimination and labor laws, there may be opportunities for enforcement agencies to go ahead and crack down on those practices even without updating the law.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Do you think that this kind of legislation will be effective in combating surveillance pricing? How does it compare to other policy pushes that you’ve seen?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So far, we have seen a couple of different types of laws. We’ve seen disclosure laws, which would require companies to tell you they’re spying on you in order to overcharge you, which New York put into effect this year. If you are the victim of surveillance pricing in New York, you will know it, because you will see a disclosure that says this price was set by an algorithm using your data. So disclosure laws are interesting. They’re interesting to people like me, because it gives me a nice population of companies to study. They’re interesting to consumers because sometimes you can say, okay, I’d rather not purchase from this company anymore. But, you know, I would prefer that companies not be able to do this.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">At the beginning of the year, California Attorney General Rob Bonta opened a sweeping investigation into surveillance pricing. California lawmakers have also proposed an outright ban on the practice. A similar bill failed to reach the governor’s desk last year, but this one just cleared a major milestone in the state legislature this month. If it does pass, Lindsay said it could be a really strong law.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think it would be a game changer for a state as large as California with as many tech companies located in California as there are to pass a bill like this and it would great to see that happen as soon as possible.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It seems like we’re finally at a kind of inflection point for surveillance pricing with consumers, especially after the JetBlue tweet, kind of waking up to it and starting to push back. How are retailers responding to the policy pushbacks and also the consumer outrage?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Retailers have to make some tough choices about the costs and benefits of deploying technologies like this. The benefits are clear. You can make a lot of money charging your consumer the absolute maximum they are willing to pay for every item in their cart. There is revenue to be won. But the risk is that when consumers find out about this, they are really, really ticked and you risk boycott and losing some market share. And throughout history, we have seen companies touch the stove when they, you know, went too far.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In the 90s, the CEO of Coke let slip that they were piloting, installing thermometers in Coke vending machines so that they could charge you more for Coke on a hot summer day. That was in 1999, it was before TikTok, but it was viral. It was on the front page of every major newspaper in the country. The Honolulu paper, the Philadelphia paper, the Wall Street Journal, hardly a bastion of consumer sentiment, weighed in on how outrageous that proposal was. Pepsi, of course, seized on the gaff. Coke immediately backtracked, said they wouldn’t be piloting it. They would never do it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You know, I think the best way, absent the law, to keep companies from pursuing some of the most egregious forms of this practice, the spying on you, the overcharging you, is actually consumer pressure. There are, of course, retailers who use slightly different business models who say, you know, I’m not in the business of charging consumers the maximum they will pay. The canonical example is Costco, who uses a cost plus model. They charge between 14 and 15 percent on top of the wholesale price. It’s cost plus 14 or 15 percent, that’s the margin. They could go higher, they don’t, they pass the savings along. But, you know, generally speaking, companies are moving in the direction of getting more sophisticated with pricing and of taking their pricing to a place that’s much higher tech.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I’m sure you are asked this question constantly, but what could the average consumer do to limit surveillance pricing in their lives?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I really do not believe it should be every consumer’s job to bob and weave and try to beat the machine. Shopping against the robot is not a future anybody wants to have, and it should be lawmakers’ job and policymakers’ job to make sure markets are fair and honest because that’s good for everyone. It’s good for our economy, it’s good for society. The second thing I’ll say is I do really believe in the power of consumer boycotts. And I think when you see something, say something. Take to Reddit, take to TikTok, take to Twitter like our friend experiencing the JetBlue price hike did. Those are great ways to sound the alarm and sometimes to get companies’ attention. Consumer boycotts can be effective.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But finally, there are a few things to think about as a modern consumer. It’s probably time to update how you think about comparison shopping. So it used to be that you would look at the same item at two different stores, see which store offered you the better price, go with that one. Now you probably need to comparison shop within stores. Look at the price in the app, look at the place on the website, look at price in the brick and mortar store, compare those three, go with the lower price. You could do some comparison shopping with your spouse, sit on the couch, both of you log in, see if one of you gets a better price. Go with that price. So I think there are some ways to sort of update how you think about comparison shopping. And then of course, all of the standard advice around browsers that offer more robust privacy protections, all of that can be useful as well.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Let’s close the loop on the JetBlue saga. They now face a class action. Everyone’s still really mad at them. It’s been weeks and they’re still getting like, comments being like, remember when you said this? Like, we’re not letting that go. How do you think the saga will end for JetBlue?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Uh, hard for me to know what the result of that class action lawsuit will be. And of course, those can take a long time to unwind. So it may be a minute before we get to read the final chapter of that book. But, you know, I do think JetBlue will face some pretty substantial damage in the interim. I think they have lost faith with a lot of consumers when consumers may look elsewhere for their travel. That being said, we’ve got a problem in the airlines, which is they’re not very competitive. We don’t have that many carriers and we actually just lost one of the main competitors to JetBlue— Spirit. So they have a lot of pricing power right now. They have a of dominance as a low cost carrier, but they certainly, I think, have lost the faith of a lot consumers and they may have lost a lot their customers.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Never underestimate the power of a rage tweet. That’s it for today’s deep dive, but stick around after the credits for a surveillance pricing fun fact. Actually, it’s less fun and more terrifying, but hey, it’s good trivia. Okay, let’s close all these tabs.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. This episode was produced by Chris Egusa, who also composed our theme song and credits music, Production help from Francesca Fenzi. It was edited by Chris Hambrick. The Close All Tabs team also includes producer Maya Cueva and audio engineer, Brendan Willard. Additional music by APM. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is our director of podcasts and Ethan Toven Lindsey is our editor-in-chief.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco Northern California Local. This episode’s keyboard sounds were submitted by Alex Tran Alex Tran, and recorded on his white Epomaker Hi75 keyboard with Fogruaden red samurai keycaps and gateron milky yellow pro v2 switches. Thanks for listening.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There was a really interesting study in 2023 that got quite a bit of attention. And it looked at how Uber was charging customers more if their phone battery was sunk. Like, you got to get in that Uber before your phone dies. As someone who is always on low battery mode.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I would never remember to charge my phone.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Me neither. It’s like really scary to think about that one.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Correction: A previous version of this story misidentified the organization Lindsay Owens runs. It is Groundwork Collaborative, not Groundwork Collection. The story has been updated.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"description": "When JetBlue replied to an angry customer on X that they should clear their cookies for a better flight price, it seemed to confirm a long-held consumer belief: companies use your personal data to determine what you should pay in real-time based on your urgency, habits and identity. It’s what’s known as surveillance pricing. According to economic sociologist Lindsay Owens, the practice is rampant. She says companies have been investing for years in sophisticated tools meant to squeeze every last dollar out of consumers — and for the most part, it’s legal. Lindsay joins Morgan to talk about how we got here, the U.S. laws designed to fight back against surveillance pricing and what you can personally do to sidestep the practice.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">When JetBlue replied to an angry customer on X that they should clear their cookies for a better flight price, it seemed to confirm a long-held consumer belief: companies use your personal data to \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">determine what you should pay in real-time based on your urgency, habits and identity\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. It’s what’s known as \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">surveillance pricing. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">According to economic sociologist Lindsay Owens, \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">the practice is rampant. She says companies have been investing for years in sophisticated tools meant to squeeze every last dollar out of consumers — and for the most part, it’s legal. Lindsay joins Morgan to \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">talk about how we got here, the U.S. laws designed to fight back against surveillance pricing and what you can personally do to sidestep the practice.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm?e=KQINC8058124943\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guest:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://groundworkcollaborative.org/person/lindsay-owens/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Lindsay Owens\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, executive director of \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://groundworkcollaborative.org/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Groundwork Collaborative\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Further Reading/Listening:\u003c/b>\u003ci>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.propublica.org/article/asians-nearly-twice-as-likely-to-get-higher-price-from-princeton-review\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Tiger Mom Tax: Asians Are Nearly Twice as Likely to Get a Higher Price from Princeton Review\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Julia Angwin, Surya Mattu and Jeff Larson, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Pro Publica\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/10/18/starbucks-loyalty-program-surveillance-pricing/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The hidden way using a rewards card can cost you more\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Geoffrey A. Fowler, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Washington Post\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/sp6b-issue-spotlight.pdf\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Issue Spotlight: The Rise of Surveillance Pricing\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — FTC Staff, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Federal Trade Commission\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.org/economy/technology/2026/05/why-surveillance-pricing-bans-are-suddenly-gaining-traction-this-year-and-not-just-in-california/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Why surveillance pricing bans are suddenly gaining traction this year (and not just in California)\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Khari Johnson, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">CalMatters\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.fastcompany.com/91544120/public-library-hack-book-cheaper-flights-mistrust-airlines\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Influencers are peddling ‘the library hack’ as a way to score cheaper flights. Whether it works is beside the point\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Grace Snelling, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Fast Company\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>Want to give us feedback on the show? Shoot us an email at \u003ca href=\"mailto:CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\">CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Follow us on\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/closealltabspod/\"> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Instagram\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> and\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@closealltabs\"> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">TikTok\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-content post-body\">\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung, Host: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Hello, Tabbies. We’ve been workshopping games. What do you think of Tab Hive? Could also go with Tab Closers? Maybe Tabdom, like Tab fandom, but I don’t know, that sounds kind of ominous. Anyway, if you’re a Close All Tabs listener and you like our deep dives, then please rate and review the show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you’re listening to this. It would be a huge help to get the word out. Okay, let’s get to the show.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So online, there’s this kind of urban legend when it comes to booking flights. Basically, as the myth goes, if you’ve been looking up flights between certain destinations and you’re finally ready to book, you should always clear your cookies or book the flight from an incognito tab so you get a better price. For years, this travel hack was based on anecdotal experience, not actual evidence that airlines were using personal data to determine prices. But we do know that our personal data is kind of up for grabs anyway. We talk about this all the time on the show. It’s not wild to believe that corporations are tracking you and price gouging you based on your specific habits. But if you brought it up on travel forums or comment threads, you might get written off as a tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist. And then in April, JetBlue just tweeted it out.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens, Guest: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is just a really incredible story, one of those ‘truth is stranger than fiction’ moments.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Lindsay Owens is an economic sociologist who runs the affordability think tank Groundwork Collaborative. She keeps a pretty close eye on this kind of thing.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">If you’re feeling it in your wallet, we are studying it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So back in April, a customer took to X, the site formerly known as Twitter…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">To kind of complain, vent, gripe about the fact that his flight had increased by more than $200 overnight, and he was just trying to get to a funeral. And he tweeted sort of, JetBlue, what gives here? Why are you doing this? And incredibly, JetBlue’s corporate Twitter account replied.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Here’s the real travel hack. If your flight is delayed or canceled or you’re stuck in customer service hotline hell, complain about it on Twitter. There’s a chance that the airline will see it and give you a discount or at worst a snack voucher. At least that’s how they usually respond. But this time JetBlue took a different approach.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">They said ‘try clearing your cash and cookies or booking with an incognito window.’ And then they did say, ‘we’re sorry for your loss. ‘\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In other words, JetBlue’s official corporate social account told the customer that if he didn’t want to be overcharged, he should just trick the company’s booking software into not identifying him.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And this was a pretty stunning thing to see on Twitter. JetBlue’s HQ immediately weighed in and said the tweet was mistaken, that they don’t use personal information to set prices.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">A spokesperson for the company told multiple news outlets that the airline fares are determined by supply and demand, not by customer data. JetBlue very quickly deleted the response, but it’s the internet, screenshots live on. This exchange went super viral.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It was a real confession of sorts, but it was a window into the ways in which pricing is changing right under our feet.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">An airline surreptitiously gleaning personal information to maximize how much money they can make off of each individual customer, it’s not out of the realm of possibility. In fact, Lindsay said that just last year, she listened in on a Delta earnings call and the company told investors about this new strategy they were piloting, a partnership with an Israel-based AI company called Fetcherr, which specialized in personalized pricing. Lindsay went on Fetcherr’s website and found a white paper.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Phase two was called ‘the exploitation phase’ —really not hiding the ball with this one. That’s when they’ve learned everything they can about Delta’s competitors, about their customers, and when they start going for broke and they start increasing those prices and getting better revenues for Delta. They were guaranteeing increases in revenue of near 10% in some cases. So we’ve had quite a few of these examples with the airlines now revealing some of their plans, experiments, and things that they’re working on.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Lindsay wasn’t the only one paying attention. Journalists did too. News of the earnings call spread. This set off a PR firestorm for the company with Delta’s competitors saying that they’d never do this to their valued customers, and Delta announcing that they didn’t actually plan to go through with it. But this practice is becoming the norm across industries. We’ve gotten used to dynamic pricing: price fluctuating based on supply and demand, like, how concert tickets get more expensive as seats fill up. What we’re talking about today goes further. Economists call it personalized pricing. This idea that companies charge you based on their assessment of how much you’re willing to pay for a good or service. It’s a practice more commonly known as surveillance pricing.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">They’re doing anything they can to learn about you, including sometimes spying on you, which is why I do think the term surveillance pricing is so apt and accurate. Companies gather a lot of data about us. Some of it we offer up willingly, our browsing history, we accept the cookies, we agree to let them sell our data, and all of that can be used to set a price for you specifically — ideally, if you’re a company, a price that gets pretty close to the maximum that you’d be willing to pay before you might walk away or start looking elsewhere.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Today, we’re diving into surveillance pricing. Where it came from, how it works, and what we’re supposed to do to save ourselves from it. And no, clearing cookies isn’t always the answer. Ready?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is Close All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung, tech journalist and your chronically online friend, here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let’s get into it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Here’s the funny thing. A set price is a fairly new concept compared to the entirety of human history. Let’s talk about it. Kicking this off as always, let’s open a new tab: History of the price tag.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>\u003ci>[Audio from Jessie J singing “Price Tag” live] \u003c/i>\u003c/b>\u003cb>\u003ci>\u003cbr>\n\u003c/i>\u003c/b>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Ain’t about the, uh, cha-chang-cha-chung \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Ain’t bout the, b-bling-b-bling \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Wanna make the world dance\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Forget about the beep beep beep boop boop boop\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> …price tag. To quote the iconic Jessie J, we need to take it back in time. We don’t even have to go that far back. The price tag dates back to 1861, when Wanamakers opened its stores in Philadelphia. It was one of the first American department stores, and also invented the.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>\u003ci>[Audio from Jessie J singing “Price Tag” live]\u003cbr>\n\u003c/i>\u003c/b>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Priiiiiiiiiicetaaaaaagggg!\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The price tag.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Prior to Wanamaker, you really had thousands of years where we haggled. You went to the market, you picked out what you wanted, and then you started a process of bartering or haggling to set the price. The merchant at the souk or the market maybe sized you up a little and said, oh, you look like someone who could pay more. Maybe he knows a little bit about you, knows you’re wealthy, charges you more. Maybe you know a little bit about him, you have a little dirt on him, he charges you less, right? Those were the kind of rules of the bizarre economy.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That started to shift in the U.S. context really with the Quakers and they felt like bartering and haggling was really unfair. They felt a sort of moral conviction about this; you and I are created equal under God, they thought. Why would we be charged different amounts for the same item? So they instituted a fixed price, and everyone would pay the same amount for items at a Quaker market.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">John Wanamaker wasn’t a Quaker, but he was a devout Christian, and he had this brilliant idea. What if he took this Quaker concept further? Not just standardized prices, but print them on a little tag attached to each item, and then call it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>\u003ci>[Audio from Jessie J singing “Price Tag” live]\u003cbr>\n\u003c/i>\u003c/b>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">…the priiiiiice taaag!\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But of course, Wanamaker wasn’t just doing this for religious reasons, he was also doing it because he was a good businessman and haggling takes a lot of time. The price tag is pretty efficient, right? It makes it pretty easy to tally up what you owe and get on with the purchase. But look, the price tag, I think, did a number of really important things. The first thing it did is it offered transparency. And transparency is really key to fair and honest markets, and that’s really key to a healthy economy. We knew how much something cost. As part of that transparency, we could comparison shop. We could look at how much anything cost in one store, we could look at how much something cost in another store, and we could take the offering that we thought provided the best value. Actually, that mechanism of bargain hunting and comparison shopping is also an important function in a healthy competitive economy.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And the price tag also offers some stability and predictability. Of course, things like inflation and seasonal availability and wars that shut down access to major waterways can affect prices. But overall, you’d probably have an idea of how much your weekly groceries will cost.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And predictability is bedrock to home economics, to budgeting in the household. If you don’t know how much something is gonna cost from one week to the next, it is hard to know if you’re gonna clear at the end of the week.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Dynamic pricing has gotten out of hand and Lindsay said this wasn’t always the case.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I do think while we have gotten very used to dynamic pricing in a whole host of settings, it is actually the case that in the not too distant past, there were other ways that companies allocated scarce resources. It has really shifted over time and I also think dynamic pricing is increasingly happening in places where resources aren’t scarce at all. You know, you see dynamic pricing in the grocery store, Target isn’t running out of wheat thins. Kroger’s not running out of Barilla pasta, right? This isn’t about managing scarcity. It’s just about charging what they can at any given time. So I think there has been a, kind of, increase in the prevalence of dynamic pricing and the types of goods that are subject to it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">When did this use of personal data specifically to set prices become such a common practice?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think the way to think about the advent of surveillance pricing is to start with the advent of surveillance advertising, which really takes you to the internet. I mean, that’s when this starts getting really creepy, and it’s when it starts to become big business. You may have heard about a company called DoubleClick. They really pioneered and built the infrastructure for surveillance advertising on the internet. They tracked what you looked at online. And then they built an advertising system to serve it back to you. So if you’ve ever looked at an item, you didn’t buy it, and then the next day it started popping up in your feed over and over and again, and you finally relented and purchased the item, that’s just the latest iteration of surveillance advertising.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">DoubleClick was eventually purchased by Google, and Google is advertising king in the early digital era. In some ways, the logical next step for many of these companies was as they get better and better at knowing what you want, predicting what you want, maybe persuading you to want something, they might as well also think about getting better and better, figuring out how much you might be willing to pay for it. And so marrying sort of dynamic pricing with surveillance advertising is how we get to the modern form of surveillance pricing that we’re starting to see today.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Why does the idea of dynamic pricing and surveillance pricing, why does that upset people so much?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">By and large, Americans hate the idea of companies charging different amounts to different people for the same item at the exact same time from the exact same store. I think the answer is really simple. I think when you see sort of a ubiquitous response to something in culture, it’s because you’ve tapped into a core human value. And in this case, I think that value is fairness.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So how does surveillance pricing work in practice? That’s a new tab, which we’ll open after a quick break. But first, we wanted to remind you that close all tabs depends on listeners like you to keep us going. You can support us by becoming a member at donate.kqed.org slash podcasts. Okay, after the break, big data and your wallet. Stick around.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We’re back! So how does surveillance pricing work exactly? Time for a new tab: Big Data and Your Wallet. Let’s talk about some examples of surveillance pricing and how mass data collection determines those prices.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So this one was uncovered in an analysis by ProPublica, which showed that the prices for online SAT tutoring packages at the Princeton Review, the test prep company, were varying quite substantially depending on where customers lived. So if you went online to book an online test prep package and you typed in your zip code, Some people were offered the course for $6,600. That’s, by the way, a good price, apparently, for a test prep package in 2015. I’m sure it’s more today, it’s a little staggering. But for others, the same package would be almost $2,000 more. And what they determined is that folks in zip codes with a larger percentage of Asian Americans were almost twice as likely to be offered that higher price than others.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">They called this the “tiger mom tax.” Yeah, and even in lower income neighborhoods, Asian Americans were quoted the highest prices by the Princeton Review.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think it is a good example of how companies were using zip codes and demographic information to try to estimate the likely willingness to pay for a service like test prep. We have seen similarly during that period, a study from the Wall Street Journal in 2012, which showed that the online office retailer Staples was varying prices by zip code. This one was actually a little more nefarious in some respects. If you lived in a zip code where there were other office stores nearby, like an Office Depot, you were getting better pricing. If there was not an OfficeMax or an Office Depot within 20 miles or so, you were charged more because they knew you didn’t really have any ability to go to a competitor or go anywhere else. You were probably gonna go with the Staples offering. So those are some of the early examples of companies starting to toy around with gaging your desperation, gaging your willingness to pay. Gaging how likely your exit options were, how much choice you have in a market, and then using that to put you over a barrel and charge you as much as they possibly can.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You know, it’s so funny that you say that because my friends and I joke that with Pride right around the corner, Target is probably jacking up prices for plain white tank tops for queer people because they know we’ll probably buy them for all the lesbian events in June. And obviously, that’s purely speculative and it’s mostly us kind of joking among ourselves like, ‘oh, this $5 tank top is going to be $12 next week.’ But it seems like this theory isn’t that far-fetched after all.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It is not far-fetched at all. That is exactly the kind of thing to expect. When Walmart announced that they were installing electronic shelf labels in every Walmart store throughout the country. The first thing that many consumers thought is they are going to start jacking up the of coke and ice cream and cool items on a hot summer day. When there’s a snowstorm, they are gonna charge more for soup. These are all the things that are possible when you have the ability to do dynamic pricing at scale, either online or in brick and mortar stores, which you can do with electronic shelf labels. Pricing algorithms can be controlled remotely. It is very easy to have them respond to things like the weather and other data inputs. And it starts to present, I think, a real sort of dystopian view of what shopping could look like in the future.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So what are some of the pieces of personal information that could be used to set the price that you pay, which people probably aren’t thinking about?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It is a long list. So you give up a lot of your information in a lot settings. Those terms and conditions when you get on a website that you click on without reading, often what you’ve done is just sort of pulled back the curtain and let the company ransack all of your data. Loyalty programs can be great, but often are sophisticated data harvesting operations. Okay, kinds of things they might know: they might be connected to your bank account and know when it’s payday. They might have information about your location. They might your purchase history, what you buy weekly, what you haven’t bought in a while that you usually buy and so you’re due for. They track your movements online, your mouse movements, what you hover over, how long you hover it, what you click on, what you put in your cart and don’t buy.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Lindsay pointed to this report from former Washington Post tech columnist, Geoffrey Fowler. He requested his data from Starbucks and got a detailed dossier of everything he ever bought there.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">He was a reporter, so he had purchased a lot of coffee.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>[\u003c/b>\u003cb>\u003ci>Geoffrey Fowler in Washington Post story]\u003cbr>\n\u003c/i>\u003c/b>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The more coffee I ordered, the fewer discounts I got. Sure, I was still collecting stars, but the average price I paid per cup of coffee was going up. My loyalty was working against me.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You know, in this case, they are collecting all the information about your caffeine habits. When you have your morning cup of copy, when you have you afternoon cup of cofee, if you have a sweet tooth and like to have a cookie with your afternoon coffee, right? All of those things they can collect. They can buy information about you from third parties. So, you know, this breadcrumb trail of data you leave when you participate in e-commerce provides a really robust set of data that companies can use to predict how much you’re willing to pay for any given item.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">More and more consumers are using chatbots and AI agents to do the price comparisons for them. You know, kind of taking off the drudge work of like sifting through all these websites. Are AI agents shopping for you, the new haggling?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Shopping and e-commerce and chat bots combined is really scary for folks who worry about privacy and for the potential for surveillance pricing at scale. We may be just in the first inning of our journey through the big bad world of surveillance pricing. A lot of the data that companies collect about you is behavioral and a lot of it is inferences. We think you must like this because you hovered over it for a while. So they’re guessing and using those guesses to decide what to advertise to you and how much to charge you.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But now with conversational LLMs, often the guesswork can be eliminated because you might just tell them, right? You might say to your chat bot, hey, I have a wedding on Friday. I’m totally screwed. I need a dress. What are some options? Show me some options. Well, you’ve really just given away the store. Right? They know you’re desperate, they know you are in a rush, they know you need it now, and they’re gonna charge you top dollar for it. They’re gonna return results that cost you a lot of money. So the types of data that you offer Chopbots is pretty helpful in commerce. And so then the question is, how will the sort of move from AI into commerce make use of that data? And I think there are real questions about what’s likely to transpire.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But we got a very recent hint and it was not great: a couple of researchers, one at Princeton University, one at the University of Washington, tested some LLMs and they put in some different scenarios and tried to measure how the advertising and pricing would work. You know, the results were pretty alarming. All of the current LLM’s, they tested all of them, exhibited risky behaviors, that was the researcher’s word, that favored the company over the user; steering users towards more expensive sponsored products; concealing that the products were sponsored and therefore impacted their recommendations; recommending predatory products like bad loans with high interest rates.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In practice, users were also nudged to spend more. That one we didn’t need a study to confirm, we already have data from Walmart, where the CEO has been quite candid with their investors about the fact that Sparky, the Walmart chat bot, is doing a great job of nudging consumers to spend more. And folks who use Sparky are spending 35% more than folks who don’t, in part because Sparky is bidding up their cart total very effectively.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We also learned in the study that when asked to recommend between two otherwise equivalent products, The vast majority of the models in the study chose the sponsored option more than half the time, despite it being twice as expensive. I think this is really the next big frontier in surveillance pricing. It’s the next place for people like me who research this stuff and who think through and help craft policy solutions to protect consumers from this stuff.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The good news is people aren’t overwhelmingly shopping in AI right now, although, as I mentioned, companies like Walmart are building this into their apps and into their e-commerce offerings. But it would be great to get this one fixed before the horse is out of the barn because the future doesn’t look great.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yikes, right? I mean, how is any of this even allowed? Is there anything we could do to stop it? Okay, let’s open one last tab: Is surveillance pricing even legal? I’ve googled this question many times, and the answer is never satisfying. Long story short, yes, surveillance pricing is legal. At the federal level, the U.S. is not great about comprehensive data privacy laws. And you may be asking, but what about the FTC? The Federal Trade Commission. They’re supposed to protect consumers and promote business competition. Well, under Lina Khan’s leadership, the FTC conducted a preliminary study on AI-driven pricing tools. It was released in January 2025, right before the Trump administration took over. And since then…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I mean, look, the federal government is not really leading the charge right now. We’re seeing much more action in the states.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">To understand what’s going on there, we need to talk about the flip side of surveillance pricing: surveillance wages.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Companies learning about you to figure out the maximum you’re willing to pay can use the exact same tools to learn about their workers and figure out the minimum they’re willing to charge in the form of wages. So it’s great news for companies who can deploy both at the same time because they can bring in more revenue from consumers and they can spend less on their workers. The processes and the systems are really similar and we’ve started to see some, oh really I think, concerning examples of this type of algorithmic wage discrimination starting to pop up in a whole host of sectors.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There are some examples of day nurses being subjected to auctions where they bid against each other for a shift. But instead of an auction where the highest bidder wins, whoever will take the minimum to show up for work would win. We have examples of Uber offering different drivers different fares for the same trip, right? So we are starting to see some examples of algorithmic wage discrimination in parallel to these examples of surveillance pricing.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So why might this whole practice of algorithmic wage discrimination actually lead to more legal action against these companies that are using surveillance pricing?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">To crack down on surveillance pricing, arguably we’re gonna need new laws. We’ve now seen in 40 states and localities just this year in 2026, people cracking down on surveillance pricing, introducing bans in state legislatures to eliminate this practice. Some of those bills also include prohibitions on algorithmic wage discrimination.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Just last month, Colorado actually passed a bill that would do both. It bans corporations from using personal data to set individual prices and wages.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But there are some cases in which algorithmic wage discrimination will already be illegal. So we have fair labor laws and we have employment discrimination laws and it is illegal to pay men and women different amounts for the same job. And so where algorithmic discrimination falls afoul of existing employment discrimination and labor laws, there may be opportunities for enforcement agencies to go ahead and crack down on those practices even without updating the law.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Do you think that this kind of legislation will be effective in combating surveillance pricing? How does it compare to other policy pushes that you’ve seen?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So far, we have seen a couple of different types of laws. We’ve seen disclosure laws, which would require companies to tell you they’re spying on you in order to overcharge you, which New York put into effect this year. If you are the victim of surveillance pricing in New York, you will know it, because you will see a disclosure that says this price was set by an algorithm using your data. So disclosure laws are interesting. They’re interesting to people like me, because it gives me a nice population of companies to study. They’re interesting to consumers because sometimes you can say, okay, I’d rather not purchase from this company anymore. But, you know, I would prefer that companies not be able to do this.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">At the beginning of the year, California Attorney General Rob Bonta opened a sweeping investigation into surveillance pricing. California lawmakers have also proposed an outright ban on the practice. A similar bill failed to reach the governor’s desk last year, but this one just cleared a major milestone in the state legislature this month. If it does pass, Lindsay said it could be a really strong law.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think it would be a game changer for a state as large as California with as many tech companies located in California as there are to pass a bill like this and it would great to see that happen as soon as possible.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It seems like we’re finally at a kind of inflection point for surveillance pricing with consumers, especially after the JetBlue tweet, kind of waking up to it and starting to push back. How are retailers responding to the policy pushbacks and also the consumer outrage?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Retailers have to make some tough choices about the costs and benefits of deploying technologies like this. The benefits are clear. You can make a lot of money charging your consumer the absolute maximum they are willing to pay for every item in their cart. There is revenue to be won. But the risk is that when consumers find out about this, they are really, really ticked and you risk boycott and losing some market share. And throughout history, we have seen companies touch the stove when they, you know, went too far.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In the 90s, the CEO of Coke let slip that they were piloting, installing thermometers in Coke vending machines so that they could charge you more for Coke on a hot summer day. That was in 1999, it was before TikTok, but it was viral. It was on the front page of every major newspaper in the country. The Honolulu paper, the Philadelphia paper, the Wall Street Journal, hardly a bastion of consumer sentiment, weighed in on how outrageous that proposal was. Pepsi, of course, seized on the gaff. Coke immediately backtracked, said they wouldn’t be piloting it. They would never do it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You know, I think the best way, absent the law, to keep companies from pursuing some of the most egregious forms of this practice, the spying on you, the overcharging you, is actually consumer pressure. There are, of course, retailers who use slightly different business models who say, you know, I’m not in the business of charging consumers the maximum they will pay. The canonical example is Costco, who uses a cost plus model. They charge between 14 and 15 percent on top of the wholesale price. It’s cost plus 14 or 15 percent, that’s the margin. They could go higher, they don’t, they pass the savings along. But, you know, generally speaking, companies are moving in the direction of getting more sophisticated with pricing and of taking their pricing to a place that’s much higher tech.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I’m sure you are asked this question constantly, but what could the average consumer do to limit surveillance pricing in their lives?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I really do not believe it should be every consumer’s job to bob and weave and try to beat the machine. Shopping against the robot is not a future anybody wants to have, and it should be lawmakers’ job and policymakers’ job to make sure markets are fair and honest because that’s good for everyone. It’s good for our economy, it’s good for society. The second thing I’ll say is I do really believe in the power of consumer boycotts. And I think when you see something, say something. Take to Reddit, take to TikTok, take to Twitter like our friend experiencing the JetBlue price hike did. Those are great ways to sound the alarm and sometimes to get companies’ attention. Consumer boycotts can be effective.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But finally, there are a few things to think about as a modern consumer. It’s probably time to update how you think about comparison shopping. So it used to be that you would look at the same item at two different stores, see which store offered you the better price, go with that one. Now you probably need to comparison shop within stores. Look at the price in the app, look at the place on the website, look at price in the brick and mortar store, compare those three, go with the lower price. You could do some comparison shopping with your spouse, sit on the couch, both of you log in, see if one of you gets a better price. Go with that price. So I think there are some ways to sort of update how you think about comparison shopping. And then of course, all of the standard advice around browsers that offer more robust privacy protections, all of that can be useful as well.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Let’s close the loop on the JetBlue saga. They now face a class action. Everyone’s still really mad at them. It’s been weeks and they’re still getting like, comments being like, remember when you said this? Like, we’re not letting that go. How do you think the saga will end for JetBlue?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Uh, hard for me to know what the result of that class action lawsuit will be. And of course, those can take a long time to unwind. So it may be a minute before we get to read the final chapter of that book. But, you know, I do think JetBlue will face some pretty substantial damage in the interim. I think they have lost faith with a lot of consumers when consumers may look elsewhere for their travel. That being said, we’ve got a problem in the airlines, which is they’re not very competitive. We don’t have that many carriers and we actually just lost one of the main competitors to JetBlue— Spirit. So they have a lot of pricing power right now. They have a of dominance as a low cost carrier, but they certainly, I think, have lost the faith of a lot consumers and they may have lost a lot their customers.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Never underestimate the power of a rage tweet. That’s it for today’s deep dive, but stick around after the credits for a surveillance pricing fun fact. Actually, it’s less fun and more terrifying, but hey, it’s good trivia. Okay, let’s close all these tabs.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. This episode was produced by Chris Egusa, who also composed our theme song and credits music, Production help from Francesca Fenzi. It was edited by Chris Hambrick. The Close All Tabs team also includes producer Maya Cueva and audio engineer, Brendan Willard. Additional music by APM. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is our director of podcasts and Ethan Toven Lindsey is our editor-in-chief.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco Northern California Local. This episode’s keyboard sounds were submitted by Alex Tran Alex Tran, and recorded on his white Epomaker Hi75 keyboard with Fogruaden red samurai keycaps and gateron milky yellow pro v2 switches. Thanks for listening.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There was a really interesting study in 2023 that got quite a bit of attention. And it looked at how Uber was charging customers more if their phone battery was sunk. Like, you got to get in that Uber before your phone dies. As someone who is always on low battery mode.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I would never remember to charge my phone.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lindsay Owens: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Me neither. It’s like really scary to think about that one.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Correction: A previous version of this story misidentified the organization Lindsay Owens runs. It is Groundwork Collaborative, not Groundwork Collection. The story has been updated.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>"
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"info": "Possible is hosted by entrepreneur Reid Hoffman and writer Aria Finger. Together in Possible, Hoffman and Finger lead enlightening discussions about building a brighter collective future. The show features interviews with visionary guests like Trevor Noah, Sam Altman and Janette Sadik-Khan. Possible paints an optimistic portrait of the world we can create through science, policy, business, art and our shared humanity. It asks: What if everything goes right for once? How can we get there? Each episode also includes a short fiction story generated by advanced AI GPT-4, serving as a thought-provoking springboard to speculate how humanity could leverage technology for good.",
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"soldout": {
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"title": "SOLD OUT: Rethinking Housing in America",
"tagline": "A new future for housing",
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"info": "Tech Nation is a weekly public radio program, hosted by Dr. Moira Gunn. Founded in 1993, it has grown from a simple interview show to a multi-faceted production, featuring conversations with noted technology and science leaders, and a weekly science and technology-related commentary.",
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