Internet DNA Podcast

We take a look at the apps out there, to see if there is anything that we really couldn't or shouldn't live without. But do we need a cake delivery app, family list maker,  app to stop you fiddling with other apps, apps to help you buy more, feel more, do more. And what if these apps are bit by bit reducing our freedom and civil liabilities? Are we in fact sleepwalking back to 1984 and what is the real cost of track and trace and Huawei.

Transcription

(this transcription is written by robots… so don’t be surprised!)

 

Hello, and welcome to this week's episode of Internet DNA with me Abi, and me Dan, this week, we're going to discuss apps that change your life. Dan, have you used any apps that changed your life?

 Apps that changed my life. Yes. I have Google maps, Google maps changed my life. I think it changed everyone's life on the basis that I don't have map books in my car anymore,

 for me to have the confidence to drive long distances and drive into London and things, something that I absolutely hated  and get in a panic about.

But now that I have. Google maps telling me where to go. I feel totally confident. I can do it. So actually it's given me a massive amount of freedom, but my husband did like this meandering routes. I used to take him to here on the map and ending up in people's back gardens and down tracks and things just cause I said, that's the shortest route.

Google maps does that as well. And some people end up in Lakes.

 Yes they do. But I mean, for me, I used to. I have a fairly good sense of direction anyway, and I'm sure if I drive there, eventually there'll be a sign, but I did get lost quite a lot, but also things like, Oh, meet me in this pub somewhere. And then they send you where that is.

I mean, that's so much of an easier thing. I don't know how we did it beforehand. I suppose you had to know where that pub was. I think it's changed, not just my life, but most people's lives.

 I think that would probably be the top dollar. Well, the reason that we're discussing this this week is because last week, I said, I was worried that apps seemed to be all shiny things for middle class people with income to spare and you laughed and said, no, no, there are lots of apps helping people survive and live better lives.

And yes, there are apps and inventions around solar panels around electricity that we talked about around being able to get your crops to market missing out the middleman about being able to get better access to healthcare. So there are those. Things there, but as I did my research with the top 20 apps to look for that, were going to change the world or the top 10 life saving apps.

You know what some of the top apps, well, one of them was brilliant. It was an Indian company called Bakeys and Bakeys decided that they were going to make all that throw away cutlery out of edible vegan rice. So I thought this sounds good. Anyway, Bakeys had gone bust, but I do get it cause in India, they used to make everything out of clay.

I don't know about the knives and forks. They didn't use to use knife and forks but they’re teacups clay. So they're literally just Chuck them out the train. That'd be fine. Now they Chuck the paper out and it's not so fine, so nice idea, but it didn't work. But I went through reams and reams of car-sharing, financial incentives, baking food, sharing cakes subscription.

This was an app to look out for. That sounds fantastic. You know, what was really bad about it. It wasn't even just, Hey, send me a cake every week. It was. Something to do with, you had to choose the ingredients to go into your cake for them to then make the cake and send it to you. So there was even work involved.

 Just send cake, we talked to

 might've been better. They're quite interesting ones helping you to really recycle properly, really sort out single use plastics, really help with being eco in your home. So there was quite a lot of green and helping you personally be a one women worrier to green the planet, nothing. that wasn’t really common sense. The apps that have

 changed your life,

 I'd like to go through some others rather fulfilling this awful prophecy that I had. That they're all pretty useless. There's a be immunized for young parents that need to keep all their children's immunizations in one app. 

 okay.  Slightly worrying.

 A cozy family organizer. I mean, these are like top apps. 

  What does a

cozy family organizer do?

 The entire family could shop together, share their calendars and to do lists. I mean, exactly this other brilliant ones on his eatable. And then that one's quite good. It helps people with food allergies, anything to do with food allergies is really good.

Dark sky. I mean, why is this sort of top act list

 basically?

 It tells you it's going to rain in the immediate future. So not even in the future.

 Hey dude, look out the window. It's hot. It's damn hot.

 Lots of coupon based apps and so many fashion apps. Sort of ridiculous. I was being really quite disheartened by the whole thing. And then there were apps to help you find more apps

 that's always useful,

 but also have health care apps helping you be fit or better.

 So I use one of those. It's a thing called calm and. I use it for sleeping. I don't think that that's really what it's for. I think it's for becoming a Zen master or a Buddhist.

 My point. Exactly. Middle-class apps for middle class people. If you are struggling to survive and your crops are being eaten by locusts an app to help you be a Zen master or sleep better is probably not. Top of your,

 yeah. Okay. I think that top 20 list isn’t  the top 20 list of Ethiopia. Is it? It's the top 20 lists of America and England where all lives are so cosseted anyway. The only thing we can divert our mind with is whether we need more apps or whether we have a cozy family.

 What you're suggesting is a lot of these apps, like the sleep apps, because you've bought an app and you're doing it.

You feel good about the fact that you're doing and therefore you feel that it's benefiting you. So in a strange way, it is benefiting you.

 Placebo effect, or it gives you  the feeling, like when I'm doing the pointless thing that I do, it's helping others do something via an app. That's helping other people and therefore helping you feel good too.

 That is good. I'm with you on that.

 But I think a lot of these apps, that's exactly what they do. As I said, I use calm. I believe it helps me sleep. I'm not sure if you measured it. Whether it actually does, but does that matter? It makes me feel like it does. And then, so, okay.

 Here was another  really good one to help you not fiddle with things on your phone all the time. You can to have an app that grow a tree by fiddling with it on your phone. The only good side of that is by fiddling with this tree, as opposed to the other apps on your phone, trees will get planted. So there is some goodness in it, but the idea of having an app to stop you use apps is, is this mind boggling idea that more apps can help you live a better off screen life?

There were a lot of apps on not eating meat. So for vegans, there are a lot of vegan apps. Unsurprisingly, there was a lot of apps on how to get beer delivered. This one is a world leading app and they're holding. A loaf of sourdough, the world's leading ordering app. There you go, so have I found anything to help change my life?

No, it just confirmed what I'd thought, which I found rather disheartening and disappointing.

But how about YouTube

Hate it?

 Really?

 Yeah. I'm old.

No. I know that everyone else likes to learn by watching videos. I like to learn by reading.

 Okay. So seeing somebody do something is not helpful at all.

 Definitely not. Okay. Tell me in a step by step guide, what to do and I'm much happier.

 Well, we only learn from failure, so I suppose that's quite a good way of getting into it. I'm saying like, even if I watch stuff on YouTube, I also accept that. I'm still not going to be able to do it like that.

 People normally have their fat fingers in the way of the really tiny little bit of something I'm trying to look at.

 Okay. So I watched less fat fingered videos, I guess. And also you find people that you like. So anyway, I find YouTube is like, I don't have to go to a bike shop to change my headset anymore because I've looked it up on YouTube.

I know how to set it, you know, all of that stuff. Whereas before. How would you learn? I could have bought a book called the Haynes manual to your mountain bike, and I could have read it that way, but YouTube, you can almost follow along paint by numbers. So I find YouTube really useful, but I think maybe we're about to come into a point where there's an interesting app, which is track and trace.

I just want to recap before we go into something that might be really good, about my custom cake ordering app it's number two in this amazing apps list. And it says original. Has there never been an option to order customized cake,

but is this not because people don't know how to make cakes? It just seems to me, if you've got all the ingredients, you might as well just

 check  YouTube and make the cakes.

This is what's making me sad. Is there an app I can't live without. The only app I can't live without is Google maps. I really like my radio apps. I really like audible. I can listen to books when I run anything to do with things that take my mind off things. When I'm running, music, file storage, I quite like file storage.

Okay. So let's talk about track and trace, track, and trace for corona virus. Very, clever Google and Apple already. Up there and on it. And then in the UK, they decide they're going to make the app themselves

 In France too, everyone's doing it

 They’re probably using Huawei to do it, but they can't possibly use Google or Apple.  Which to me sounds strange, but what do I know? Yes.

 What do you know? So I don't know if it's driven by Huawei.

 I don't think it is, but it's probably using 5G that it does have, Huawei

 We have to be really careful about our attitudes. Huawei. Is this not American protectionism flowing out into the media?

Because that's how it felt to me. Maybe you don't want to in your military and police applications, but really everything's made in China.

 I was only being facetious in the why couldn't we use an off the shelf app that was already there. And if everywhere around the world use the same app, then it'd be really handy when you go to a different country that your app still working instead.

Why do we suddenly feel that we have to do our own app? That by the very nature of starting from scratch and not having all the software that Google and Apple have, it's not going to be as good, and it's not going to be ready in time and it's not going to be global. I don't know.

 I'm going to guess that we're going to get into privacy issues.

I not sure I want Google having access to my medical records. The British government app is using Google's geolocation. It's not like it's not using parts of the Google API. It's just not feeding the data through Google. Let's say COVID-19 is just the first of many pandemics that we're now going to live through in our globalised world or is this the end of globalisation that people are going to go, actually, why are we doing all this ridiculous costs, saving half a penny by shipping it out to somewhere else when really it's the dangers of it arer higher? I don't know. So I think this is really interesting about COVID, but I can understand why each government wants to be able to have its own app.

Now. I'd worry about central aggregation of medical records. And particularly I'm not particularly happy with just generally the whole track and trace to begin with, but I can understand why it's important.

 So my question, I want to ask this, there are two camps here. There's the one camp that privacy of your information is everything. Without that you will never, ever be free. And then there's the other camp. Okay. Well, I'm happy to give up my personal information. If you are going to keep me safe and I can come out of lockdown and be free. So they both think that their way is giving freedom, but they're both very different. I am and always have been in the 2nd camp and I've always got into trouble here. By giving up my data. To be free to be out of lockdown. But interestingly counter-argument was, yeah, well, it's fine now, but what if some authoritarian government took your information and used it a bit like 1984. And now suddenly we are in the position where the government wants to take my data to use it.

To track me 100%. So I'm a little bit like, okay, this is the thing that everyone told me that might happen and it's happening, but I still would like the freedom to live healthily and come out of my house.

 And my thing about track and trace is. I'm working from the idea that we're all going to get COVID.

I mean, it might be all right with COVID, but eventually, you know, there'll be a pandemic we all have to get. And surely the whole point is it's limiting the infection rates. And for that, I get it, but I don't want to be giving those details to Google. I'm sorry. I don't think that Google is the great Satan, but I just don't think that's the place for that kind of data.

I think what you want is each country has its own data. And that they create some sort of open standard where they can share it where, you know, let's say some British person who has been in contact goes to France, so they can say to France, this dude, actually, you need to isolate them. Well, a little bit more worried about is Google going ha you know, all this information we've got about every single person you've ever met in your entire life and who you've been close to and where you've been, it's starting to get into a. Oh, we just sleep walking into a surveillance nightmare. And I'm not one of those people that is a hundred percent weird about my data, but do live constantly on a VPN.

I do mostly browse in incognito mode. I don't use Chrome for non-work based browsing. I worry that people are using corona virus. In order to tighten up the surveillance. You only have to look at Hong Kong and see where it goes. If you're not really, really careful about what people know about you. And it's not that they know you eat cornflakes, it's that you're in a segment with everybody else that eats cornflakes.

And now you're there. You're going to get treated like that. Whether that's actually you or not. Do you see what I mean?

 But instead of cornflakes, it's people that talk about the party so artists and intellectuals speaking out in a way

 current situation where people are pretty angry in America. Well, the world about the George Floyd I understand, why, but then it's spilling over into criminality.

I understand there are bad actors using it as a cover, but let's say you have track and trace on there. Now they know where you were now. They know who you were. Did you go to that protest? This is where it starts to worry me about. Civil liberties and, and it's, we feel fine cause we're in the UK and what are they going to do? But if you're in a country that's not as free and open and allowing of that sort of thing, the very fact that they know exactly which protest you are at. Yeah. And do you want Google knowing that, do you want to really be put in that bubble?

 And that's what worries me, for example, all apps lead to. Anti freedom.

 I think there are a lot of apps that the side effects of the data that they gather are yet unknown.

 Yes, but then here's me saying apps that have changed your life. Now, maybe every app that takes a little bit more information, you know, that app knows what flavor cake I like, and that knows that I'm not recycling properly.

And that app knows how in tune my family is with each other, every single app that's gathering this bit of data is taking away my freedom. Is that what you're saying? That instead of apps. Changing our lives for the better, every single app is just slightly clamping us down until something like track and trace comes along.

And the riots in Hong Kong and a authoritarian government comes along and suddenly all that information is used to do something else.

 Well, that's why I don't like track and trace, particularly because Google's famous for. Really playing the very edge morality. Well, I would say, well over the age of what is ethical to do with people's data,

 Are you against a track and trace app. Altogether or just against a global company that has a monopoly created

 I'm undecided at the moment. I mean, I understand why people want track and trace. I get it, but what are we giving up would track and trace, now allow children to go back to school, allow the economy to function more and therefore is a good thing.

Surely do you think in China, in Wuhan, they would have been able to get back to. Normality as quickly as possible if they hadn’t.

And the thing that comes out of China, how does a virus that started that I get contained two months later, so quickly,

 but this is what I mean, technology does not seem to be improving our lives. I can't find apps that are out there in their masses that are really making a difference to our lives. And maybe my worst fears have come true.

 Do I think track and trace will help. Yeah. Probably yes, but what's the cost of it. Do you see what I mean? It's like, you know, did lockdown help. Yeah. But what was the cost of it?

A lot of this, we've got ourselves into a sort of terrified state where everything's super, super frightening all the time and it just makes us quite malleable. I don't know. I just don't like the idea of giving it to someone other, if the NHS need it. That's fair enough. If the government needed it, not so keen on that. If Google needed it or, you know what, I'll take my chances.

 Well, that's interesting. Will you use it when it comes out?

 Yeah. I don't see any reason why not to use it. If it's from the NHS. I think that's fine. Maybe that's my blind trust in the NHS. Sure. If we can keep reinfection rates down then. Yeah, I think that's brilliant. My worry is where is the data going? That's my concern.

 Okay, we're going to have to finish up now, but I did save some apps for the end that I thought were okay. That were pretty good. And that we should probably get right. As you know, I run a lot and I walk the dog a lot. Now this one's called charity miles and you put the app and for all the distance, I don't know how it works, but all the distance you cover. As you cover more distance, more money is given to charities of your choice. That's called charity miles. I thought that was pretty good.

 Basically saying a proportionate of the advertising revenue we make. We're going to give to good causes. That's not a terrible thing is, I mean I use smile at amazon instead of just amazon.co.uk.

 Yes, every time I buy something that goes to charity, this one was lovely. Be my eyes. If you're blind, this app helps you hold up your phone and volunteers will go, okay. Yeah. The door's over there or your glasses are over there or yeah, you're going to be able to get through there. No, you're not gonna be able to get through there.

So I thought that was quite good. I like that pocket CPR. I thought it was brilliant.

 I know I've got a lot of those kinds of apps because I do mountain biking, first aid apps, how to treat broken bones. Plus I've got an app which is just a button, which you just press it and it alerts the emergency services is lifesaving.

 Anything that helps you actually save people's lives, whether it's your own or someone else's is amazing. Then there were a lot of do good acts, reminding you to do an act of kindness, which is lovely, but you shouldn't need an app to do it. And. This may be great if you're in a unlimited package, but this is for Android phones. You can give your power over to cutting edge scientific research without doing anything. All you need to do is download the app and leave your phone plugged in and connected to the wifi at night. And it basically saps your power it's costing someone a fortune.

 Yeah. So I have this running on my computer called folding at home  so it helps researchers fold proteins. Now we're talking about COVID, that's how that kind of research is done. That's how you research viruses and it basically uses the spare cycles of your computer. While it's on.

 Okay. So that is really good.

 I think folding at home is really important. That's basically donating the free cycles of your computer. Now I've got an incredibly powerful computer that most of the time I'm doing web browsing on why would I not allow that? Free power. Oh, well the free processing that over spec by computer to do most of the time to be used for good. Yeah. Scientific research. I liked that sort of thing. It does cost me because I have an increased electricity bill and so forth, but it doesn't use internet so much because it's only when it completes a cycle, then it uploads that and grabs the next one down.

 It's not bandwidth, it's not megabytes. Right? One final one, which is quite interesting. And there's a few like this. It's using games to create awareness and then through the game and money for good causes and charities.

And this ones, my life is a refugee and it's educating people of what it's really like to live as a refugee  but in a gaming way. And as you win and go up levels, money is donated. So quite interesting, trying to do good through gaming is something that is being brought in. And for me it feels more altruistic than a lot of the fashion and the health and beauty ones.

 Right? Well, that seems like most apps are rubbish. Some apps are funny. One or two apps actually do change.

 yeah, isn't that sad?

 Really? No, I don't think so.

 It's not

 sad?

 I don't see how it could be any other way. If you walk down a high street in the shops, most pointless, some are interesting. One or two change your life. That's pretty much it, and that's life. We live in such a world where we don't have to hunt. We don't have to survive. We don't have to, most of our life is going to be about distraction. That's just Western culture. I bet. If you looked at third world countries, surviving, they would have much more useful.

 I hope so. But I just feel with so much power with so much information, we should be using it for good. Not just to fritter away.

 Yeah, we should. But we don't.

 And on that note, we better go.

 Okay. I see.

 Speak to you next week. Bye.

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Dan & Abi work, talk & dream in tech. If you would like to discuss any speaking opportunity contact us.