10 Questions You Need to Ask Right Now

Welcome back, Shit Givers.

Today’s essay is like one big Action Step — and couldn’t be more timely.

Feature update: For the past two years I’ve shared hundreds of hours of 1:1 offline calls with CEO’s and students, farmers and founders, scientists and senators — people who want to help, and who need help with…whatever.

It’s not coaching, and it’s definitely not consulting, but enough people have found our conversations valuable and I have so few hours to share that I synced my (very limited) availability up on Calendly, where you can buy (and probably expense!) my time. More info here.

👩‍💻 You can read this on the website, 🎧 you can listen to it (Apple Podcasts, Spotify), 📺️ or watch them our YouTube channel

TOGETHER WITH INTERNATIONAL INTRIGUE

Staying informed about the world doesn’t have to be boring.

International Intrigue is a free global affairs briefing created by former diplomats to help the next generation of leaders better understand how geopolitics, business and technology intersect.

They deliver the most important geopolitical news and analysis in <5-minute daily briefing that you’ll actually look forward to reading.

What We Can Do

⚡️ Last week’s most popular Action Step was checking out your real-time air quality data with Purple Air.

⚡️ PFAS (“forever chemicals”) have been linked to serious health problems. Urge Congress bans PFAS from all food contact materials by using this script from Toxic-Free Future.

⚡️ Work in marketing? Join Clean Creatives, a movement of advertisers and PR professionals, and pledge to cut ties with fossil fuels.

⚡️ Reclaim your right to privacy online with the Mullvad VPN (I use it every day).

⚡️ Keep informed with Circle of Blue’s in-depth reporting on the solutions and challenges to the water scarcity crisis.

10 Questions You Should Absolutely Ask A Company Before You Use Their Fun New AI Tool

There’s tradeoffs to everything, from crushing an entire box of Girl Scout cookies to another round of chemo. What seems like an easy, if not great call almost always has some sort of long-term consequences.

This is especially true “online”, a vast wonderland and hellscape that basically didn’t exist when I was in high school, but has now permeated, empowered, and infected everything from how you communicate with your co-workers to wifi and GPS-enabled vibrators and electric lawn mowers.

In some cases, the tradeoffs are both immediately evident and clearly worth the cost.

So we spent the past decade willingly providing Facebook, Google, etc with our most intimate data, in exchange for connecting us (for free!) with old friends and new friends.

And we gave them our pictures and tagged ourselves and friends in them, whether our friends knew or agreed or not.

As GPS became available for civilian use, we gave those platforms — suddenly among the largest companies of all time — our location data, and we gave it to a bunch of upstarts, too.

We gave them our names, birthdays, our home address, our work address, our wedding dates, the names and addresses of our pediatricians and abortion clinics, our kids soccer fields and the days we’re usually there, our favorite bars, our “private” DM’s and our voice, our pictures and video, our opinions, our meeting notes, our sonograms, and more.

A few months ago, when AI was first popping off, I wrote “What Do You Need” about our collective browsing history:

In 2022, platforms and companies and users that had been fucking around for quite a while finally found out as the Supreme Court obliterated privacy and your location and period data, among others, were suddenly evidence in court.

And now, on any given day, six hundred “biggest AI newsletters in the world” trumpet six hundred new AI tools and plug-ins and extensions, many of which are genuinely exciting and most of which are the products of companies that didn’t exist on Friday.

It should be clear by now but it really, really behooves you to be very, very careful about who you give any of your data to. Oh, this new AI plug-in can record your family Zoom about whether or not to finally unplug Uncle Dave? So you don’t have to take notes? So it can provide you with a transcript and — even better — a summary of exactly which siblings weirdly jumped at the opportunity “to do the bastard in after all these years”?

So helpful! But what else is that company doing with your audio? Do you have literally any idea?

Many of these tools have immense promise to make us more productive, or even to contribute to a future we can’t possibly predict — even if they’ll inevitably flame out or be “Sherlocked” by one of the big five.

But in nearly every situation the ethical foundations are inevitably not great, Bob.

So instead of pounding out a couple thousand words on why, I simply put together a list of standard questions you and everyone should ask these revolutionaries before you even download their software, much less install it and provide it with direct access to your contacts, calendar, email, writing, photos, blood type, etc.

Tweet these questions at the companies and CEO’s and the VC’s that fund them, and when they point you towards a hastily slapped together privacy policy, reiterate that you want them to answer these questions, your questions directly.

These questions aren’t perfect, but they’re simple, self-explanatory, and grounded in data ethics.

Even better news: Long-time designer friend Bryan Flynn whipped together a delightful image you can share, below.

Ready? Let’s do this.

1. What data of mine are you collecting?

2. Where are you storing my data?

3. How is my data encrypted?

4. What safeguards do you have in place in case of a data theft, leak, or breach?

5. Who has access to my data?

6. Why do they have access to my data?

7. Who are you sharing my data with?

8. Who has decision-making power around use of my data?

9. Is my data being used as training data?

10. If so, how are you anonymizing (or de-identifying) my data?

11. BONUS: How are you tracking me across the internet?

That’s it. Read them, memorize them, share them, and let’s make answering them the most basic prerequisite to a better, safer, more ethical (and maybe way more futuristic) internet.

— Quinn

News From My Notebook

Health & medicine

• Most pregnancy-related deaths occur in the year after a baby is born, prompting new strategies in caring for new mothers

• The science behind how chronic stress impacts gut health

• Nano-plastics are causing inflammation in the gut and brain, but the damage is reversible when they’re removed

• Maybe everyone knowing where you are at all times isn’t actually the healthiest thing for our relationships? Imagine being a teen worrying that everyone is hanging out without you, and then confirming your suspicions are correct

Climate

• State Farm is no longer accepting homeowner insurance applications in California

• What the Debt Ceiling Deal means for the climate

• The White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs is changing the way the government calculates the costs and benefits of regulation, all in the name of fighting pollution

• How and where to build a strong manufacturing base for clean energy in the US

Food & water

• How the debt ceiling agreement will put 750,000 older adults at risk of losing food assistance

• Commodity farmers are using regenerative cover cropping to adapt to climate change

• A million plastic bottles are purchased worldwide every minute. EVERY MINUTE! That’s a shit ton. If you need help visualizing a shit ton, here’s a visual.

Beep Boop

• A summary of Wolfram Alpha’s breakdown on what the hell is going on with ChatGPT and LLM’s

• It’s time to start thinking about the governance of superintelligence

• Amazon has settled with the FTC for illegally spying on users and collecting kids data

COVID

• Here’s what COVID does to your lungs

• And the 12 most common symptoms associated with Long COVID

Got YouTube?

Life comes at you fast. How the hell can we keep up? Watch (and subscribe) below.