Raj Goel’s Looking For Love? Don’t Trust Online Dating Sites

Host: Dave, It’s been quite a journey to be where we’re actually at a point now where we have good partners of the cyberhood watch and have joined our family to be contributing on a regular basis, and we really appreciate Raj taking time out of his day, coming in and sharing with us, and I know he’s a busy man and things are hustle, hustle, hustle, Raj, but we sure appreciate you being here, taking your time, and we’re excited to hear what you have going on right now to share with us as far as the world of tech we were talking about that just before we went live with you is that tech you know it proliferates both sides of the coin. Good and bad. And Dave and I are trying to get people to understand that the bad’s out there, but the good side kind of where you’re in as well, you learn so much and see so much and are able to expound on the things that tech can do down the road for us. It’s pretty exciting, so welcome back raj.

Raj: yes, it’s great to be here.

H: well, good to have you

Dave: you bet, hi raj!

R: hey guys

H: one of, let’s take a couple of seconds to kind of let everyone out there know, um, what you’ve been up to. I know you’ve been on the show a few times, but I’d like you to share if you would, and just let our audience kind of hear a little bit of your background and especially the tech side, the IT side, so they can really get a real appreciation for what you’re doing for us

R: no problem. So I’ve been in IT for over 25 years, for the last 15 I’ve focused on information security compliance for hospitals, retailers, large corporations of PCI compliance. And essentially we run a 2 different business, 2 parallel practices. If you’re on the island of Manhattan in New York City, we want to be your IT Company. If you’re a lawyer, accountant, insurance, or any of the licensed professions. Architects, doctors and so on. If you’re outside of Manhattan, across the country, then I work with hospitals, large retailers, I do a lot of public speaking in front of bar associations, state bars, accounting societies. Just last week I had the pleasure and the honor of addressing the long island association of certified examiners, and let me tell you, it’s a fun evening when you have 40 CFEs in the room. These are attorneys and accountants who have specialized at finding fraud at the corporate level, and one of my audience members was the FBI agent who busted John Gotti back in the day. And, so that’s what I do, and that’s what I have fun doing. I meet a lot of people across the country, between our last show and today, I was in Dallas and Austin about a month ago, where I addressed and trained over 350 security professionals from the air force, military, large corps, defense contractors, on various challenges and how computing and social media security. So if anybody in the audience here belongs to a bar association or a large org and they want to have me come and speak for them either in person or a webinar or a Skype session, I’m more than happy to do that. And you can find me at rajgoel.com. And given today is Valentine’s Day, I figured today we should talk about, or we could talk about the security and privacy threats with online dating. What do you guys think about that?

D: I think that’s a good topic

Host: absolutely. It’s had such a rise over the last years, you don’t hear as much about it, but then it’s still something that a lot of folks do, there’s…it’s a huge huge number in as far as the millions of people that still do that. I know that they really tried to have that be secure. How does that work over the last couple of years, and you’ve seen that decline or increase in security with websites, you know, you put a lot of personal information in there.

R: let’s talk about security; you know what does security really mean in this context? So have the websites gotten more secure, more hacker-proof? Yes, they have to some degree. But the real problem was never that they were hacker friendly or hacker unsafe. The real problem with most dating sites is the amount of information people put up about themselves which never goes away. Just last week, electronic frontier foundation (eff.org) put out an 11 point bulletin on the dangers or threats with online dating sites. Everything from…everything you put online on online dating sites never ever goes away. These guys go create a profile, most people end up in a relationship, or you end up giving up on the site, whatever have you. You don’t really go in and delete your profile data and if you asked to delete it, most of them cannot. We learned just last week that for the last three years, Facebook has more than doubled its user base. Zuckerburg is now a mega billionaire, but they have not been able to delete photos for over three years from Facebook. So if you’re putting info in online profiles, it’s never going away, and in many cases, people interviewing for jobs…you see one thing on their Facebook or linked in profile, and you see something else in their dating profile – and the two don’t match. We’ve seen headhunters declining people for interviews; we’ve seen people getting passed for interviews. My personal favorite is the number of divorce cases that are arising out of social media online dating sites. In a match.com likes to tell you in their commercials that 1 in 5 marriages and relationships begin online. What they don’t tell you are in the US, 1 in 5 divorces begins online. That is based on data out of the American society of matrimonial attorneys. In the UK, 1 out of every 3 divorces cites Facebook or social media as the cause for divorce. So that’s really what’s going out there right now, is people putting up stuff and looking for dates and so on, and there was a case about a year ago where a mother in a middle of a divorce, a mother swore in court that she never did any drugs or smoked marijuana. They went to her Facebook profile and saw pictures of her smoking blunts. She obviously lost the case. Julian assange – Mr. Wiki leaks – he’s currently under house arrest in the UK, and you can find out a lot more info about him from his OKC profile than you can in the rest of the web combined. In every world, you get to hear the message he wants you to hear. You go to OKC, which was bought by match.com a year ago or something, and all of the stuff that he didn’t want you to know anymore is still out there. So for adults, the real threat is what are we putting on dating profiles? If you’re married and you say you’re single, that information is going to come out. We’ve seen spouses batter each other or go to jail because one spouse didn’t like the post of the other. If you marriage is on the rocks and you put down that you’re single or avail on Facebook or your dating profiles, your spouse finds that out, you’re not going to win your divorce case. It’s going to make it that much harder for you to win the argument in court. More and more matrimonial attorneys are now requiring that their clients given them their Facebook, twitter, Gmail account credentials as part of the divorce process, because they want to make sure that the client doesn’t put something online that may come back and bite them when they go in front of the judge.

D: You know, it wasn’t long ago that I remember reading where attorneys were requiring or wanting to see and use Facebook in litigation cases, which was a really kind of an eye opener back then, but now I hear what you had to say, it has come to that point, and one thing you mentioned earlier, I think you said 1 out of 5 or 1 out 3…

R: 1 out of 5 in the US, 1 out of 3 in the UK

D: Okay and those were because divorces caused through social media you said

R: well, I don’t know if they were caused by social media; I think divorces are caused by people just not communicating anymore, but these were one in five cases citing Facebook or social media as one of the contributing factors to the divorce

D: that’s very ironic to hear that…because they don’t communicate anymore and social media is all about being social

R: come on, it makes perfect sense, you don’t like your wife, you get into an argument, and you see a message on Facebook you start talking, next thing you know, the old flame gets kindled and your marriage is now on the rocks. I won’t say that Facebook, or social media causes divorces. People cause divorces. But certainly social media has been one of the contributing factors to giving you more options to philander or have other relationships than to be with the one you’re currently legally attached to.

D: exactly, I agree. You know what? My question…as you were talking about that I was wondering what your thoughts are…you’re in the world daily. When you go out and speak, you’re talking to corporate, level people and pros all over the world. You’re talking to the elite of the elite people out there when you go and speak. What’s the feedback that you get from them on how they use these mediums? Now, to me, I wonder how much information and process daily is spend daily on Facebook and twitter, and linked in as well because it’s considered a professional site. Are professionals really using those to be a part of their daily business? You know, if they don’t have a Facebook profile…is it like that? Or is that just kind of a media hype around Facebook that they think they have to have it, because I’ve done it for 3 or 4 years now, and I wonder the value that you get out of that, just a real legal question if you were to sit down and ask a pro…how much value do you think your company gets by having Facebook be a part of your advertising model or your marketing model? Do you follow where I’m going there? Because a lot of these contributing problems are gossip, hearsay and rumors, so you allow yourself to be in the mix of this process and you’re risking your own professional career, you’re risking your businesses. Is it really viable that CEOSs and companies have this? Because they’re all on the bandwagon now.

R: well, great question, and quite frankly, people are a bit schizophrenic about this. On the one hand when I speak to attorneys, accountants, business owners, CIOs, we talk about security and those challenges, they’ll get concerned but inevitably within 5 minutes of the presentations being over, the question usually becomes, can you give me better search rankings on Google? What can I do with my Facebook profile or my linked in profile, because somewhere along the line, socially we’ve all drunk the Kool-Aid that we have to be on Facebook or LINKED IN or anything else. One of the things I say repeatedly is if you’re in a mass market business, like you’re selling cars, you’re selling a soda, you’re selling things where you have to market to millions of customers, then Facebook and social media are fantastic. If you’re selling cars, Facebook is a great platform. It’s just like being on TV. But if your business, if you’re an attorney, accountant, lawyer, doctor, and the reality is, if you’re an accountant or a CPA or an attorney or a small bus. Owner like myself, you know what? We get 5 new clients this year with 5 to 15 employees in Manhattan, we have a good year. We get 8, we’re going to be really over committed, we get 10 or more, I’m going to have a heart attack, because we just can’t handle the work. For most small bus. We don’t need 1000s of new customers. You know, I speak to attorneys that tell me if they get 5 good divorces a year, or in some cases, 2 good cases a month, that makes their year. They make anywhere from 5-30 new clients a year. Insurance pros, great ones do 10 sales a month. That’s 120 new sales a year. We’re not looking at getting billions of customers and so my advice to most pros is: you want to be in social media? Fine. But it’s not really where you should put your marketing dollars. Go network. Go to your local chambers of commerce meetings, BNIs, Gotham’s. Better yet, spend more time getting to know your customers. The biggest mistake small business owners and large corporations make, is that they keep chasing customers. About 7 years ago i was in sales training, and my sales trainer told me the most lesson in sales.

R: here’s what he said. He said dumb salespeople spend 90% of the time chasing after new customers, but smart people and smart business owners spend 70% of their time up selling existing customers and turning them into paying customers who’ve already bought from you into referral sources. And to me that’s just brilliant. We look at our clients, I’ve sold you a service, could be IT support, could be a security audit. I’ve done 20 other things you may not even know about. I’ve done 20 other things you may not have needed 5 years ago. That might be more appropriate for you today. We educate our small business clients on how to better market to existing customers, existing networks, because people buy from people they know and people they like. If you’re selling a service, it’s all based on relationship, it’s not based on the advertising, and so when we look at social media, I generally recommend to clients, if you can do it, get out of it. We have seen more small businesses get thoroughly and completely infected because somebody at work was on Facebook, not because Facebook itself is bad. It is, but because it’s such a huge platform, it’s the new windows, it’s the new mono culture, there are so many really really good flash based viruses and Trojans running on Facebook. They’ll never get rid of them. They can’t get rid of them. And we’ve seen more businesses get infected, get taken down, through Facebook and flash malware on fb.com MLB, NFL, sports illustrated, than anything else. 10 years ago, used to be porn or shopping. We took those out of corporate networks. Now it’s social media.

H: can you explain how that’s done, when you mention flash media having filed, I mean, I’ve heard that and Dave’s heard that, but our audience, the y need to understand just as regular people, if they’re checking their profile out of their work, they’re running a risk of actually losing their job and being fired for something that can have some long term effects. What exactly happens in that process of checking, because of course we don’t want things on our home PCs or on our home devices, whether it’s mobile or PC, but if you’re at work and you’re doing this, and you could cause your company to go down, what are they doing that makes that happen? You said this really quickly, and I’m like, what’s happening in that process that brings the companies down? One keystroke and that’s it?

R: it’s not just a keystroke. So you go to Facebook, you go to any major website, they all have those ads on the left hand side or right hand side and videos, the movies, whatever else. And most of those are safe, but the ones that aren’t, you can’t tell. You know, flash by itself is more complicated than windows 3.1 used to be. It’s got more lines of code than most Oss. It’s a big heavy language, it’s almost a complete OS running inside your browser, and what the criminals have figured out is they can…you watching that, you’re doing nothing. You’re checking your profile, you’re going to sports illustrated, and you’re checking the new magazine cover. You go to time magazine. The criminals have already bought ads through legit ad brokers, or they’ve broken into companies and infected sites, so when you look at this ad and you do nothing else but watch this flash ad because it’s already playing for you automatically, and in less than a second, they’ve downloaded 100s of diff viruses and Trojans on your machine. A couple of years ago I was at a security conf where the head of Cisco security got up on stage, and he did a live demo where he went to some broker’s site out in the middle of nowhere called erato, an auto business because of the real estate crash. The website wasn’t taken down, because hosting it was paid for. Criminals broke into it and put some code on there which you couldn’t detect, and in less than a second, he showed his machine getting infected with over 100 different drive by downloads. So you don’t have to click on things, you just get infected. And for most people, they get infected when they click on a status update, they click on the surveys, the polls, all this interactive things, because you really can’t tell on most social media, including Facebook what is official Facebook content and what is a 3rd party ad or object from somebody else. You know on TV we know what’s a program and what’s an advertisement. And yes, some programs have a lot of placements so you can see when Charlie’s drinking a can of coke; somebody got paid to put that can of coke in the actor’s hand. On the internet you really cannot separate content from advertising because all the internet is one giant advertising platform. It’s how Google makes their billions, its how Facebook makes their billions. So Facebook, goggled, LINKED IN, all these guys, they make their money by selling your eyeballs to advertisers. And they will do anything and everything in their power to seamlessly embed the advertising everywhere, text stats, popups, flash ads…and the criminals know that with 800 million people and growing everyday on Facebook, and 130 million on LINKED IN, and I don’t’ know how many millions of people are going to watch the sports illustrated cover on their website today…they get their ads on these networks and they infect your machines. And so everytime you get a call from someone between 35 and 55 saying I think my computer has a problem, the first question is what were you doing on Facebook? And the second is, okay; let my guys deal with the cleanup.

D: So it’s almost like, you don’t want to be involved with the internet, but that’s not gonna happen.

R: I’m not saying don’t be involved in the internet. But there’s a difference between going out on the streets and walking through dark alleys with no lights where the drug dealers and the hookers hang out.

D: yeah, but most people think they’re walking to the mall where lots of light and lots of other people and they’re safe there, but what you’re saying is that it doesn’t really matter. You could be on the most innocent site and just happen to be a victim of some hacker that’s placed his code on that site.

R: right, you can be, and that’s a very small percentages – maybe 2 to 3 percent of the people get infected through innocent drive by activities

D: okay, good.

R: more people get infected because they are on facebook. They are you know, on Google plus. They are doing all the social media nonsense. They’re watching vimeo videos. People are sending them funny video links, they’re clicking on the pdfs that are coming in their emails. Generally, most of the computers are not properly secured, yet, a lot of that is useless. A lot of the software is garbage. Even the ones that work are either turned off or really outdated. And beyond that, people put on a blinder when they go on the internet. You know, we should really look at the internet like we look at a major city. There’s good parts of town, there are parts of town that are regulated – lots of cops ands streetlights, and then there are parts of the town where the criminals and drug dealers and hookers hang out. And if you’re looking for that kind of entertainment, sure, go there. But don’t let your kids walk in those neighborhoods. The internet is one giant sewer

D: are you saying, LINKED IN , facebook, twitter, and all those are the seedy side of town?

R: facebook to me is absolutely the seediest side of town. It is what the Times Square used to be 30 years, 20 years ago. LINKED IN is a bit more like what Times Square is today. It’s cleaner, it’s neater. There are currently not going after all…they’re not training you to share more about your life than you need to be. It’s a professional network. There are issues but not as many as facebook. You know, facebook really is what Times Square was in the 70s and 80s. It really is that bad. LINKED IN isn’t that bad, however there’s something about LINKED IN , and that is simply this: if you work for another corporation, if you’re not a business owner and you have a LINKED IN profile, you can be fired for having a LINKED IN profile. People have been fired for putting in a LINKED IN profile, clicking in the box that says I’m open to job offers. In the UK a couple a months ago, lost a couple hundred thousand dollar a year job because he created a LINKED IN profile, because everyone’s supposed to have one of those, and he checked on the box that says I’m open to job offers. He really was not looking for a job; it was just one of the defaults he checked without thinking because it’s one of the defaults. And his employers said sorry, we don’t trust you anymore because you clicked this, so here’s your walking papers. You’re open to job offers? Good, go get them somewhere else. You know, that’s a grown adult making a mistake and those things are fairly rare cases. More and more you know, going back to them of today, we’re seeing adults and teenagers doing stupid stuff online. One thing I strongly recommend to your listeners, if you’re thinking of taking a salacious or x rated shot of yourself and sending it to your loved one using cell phones or twitter or facebook, don’t do it. Whether you’re 12 or 35 or 55, don’t do it. These pictures always come out. And if you’re under the age of 18 anywhere in North America, especially the United States, and you’re thinking of sending your boyfriend, your girlfriend, your sweetheart a risqué photo, do not do it. In most states, kids under 18 sending or receiving will be charged with child porn and will be branded as sex offenders for life.

D: yeah, I know that can happen

R: it’s already happened. There are Das who are prosecuting 15, 16, 17 year olds for sending photos of themselves to each other, and then once the photos get shared to friends, it makes rounds in the schools and they’ve got a whole bunch of kids who are charged with child porn.

D: yeah, I…we’re aware of that. And that is something that you know you cannot say enough for kids just don’t do it, you know. Don’t take the chance.

R: and I will say for adults, don’t take…don’t make x rated home videos and leave it on your computer. It looks cute, it looks funny, it looks romantic today, I do a lot of forensics work for divorces, and let me tell you, what looked cute and sexy 3 years ago on Valentine’s Day is not the kind of stuff you’re paying your lawyer to find for you or the other side. And when this stuff comes out in court, homemade porn, amateur porn, “photos between consenting, married adults,” don’t look all that great when you have to show them to a judge.
D: is that problem could be prevalent if you…I mean, you brought that up a couple of times now, I’m not shocked, but I’m listening here and I’m finding that a lot of the trends that you’re talking about are things that you may happen to hear about that’s happening or you know, in the news media once or twice and you think that’s shocking

R: these are things I’m talking about from personal experience. I’ve seen photos of adults doing things I wish I could unsee. I can’t…here’s where it becomes a problem people don’t think about this. Okay, you want to make an amateur home video, you want to send your boyfriend, girlfriend, husband whatever, nude photos or dancing videos, fine. But I’ve been involved in cases where one party or the other threatens to show these videos to the kids. Guess what? The very fact that these are on the family computer opens both adults in the family to child endangerment issues.

D: wow

R: If you’re doing it on a personal computer that no one else in your family has, it’s your personal computer, you have access, your spouse has access to it, your kids have access to it, that’s one thing. But if you’re using the family computer or family ipod or family ipad. And in most families, they share the family computer, this stuff is sitting on the machine. No matter how well you password protect it or how well you hide it, under the law, if you’ve got minors in the house with access to that computer, one or both parties can be charged with child endangerment. And anybody can file that complaint. It can be your spouse. It could be your in laws, it could be your neighbor. It could be a vengeful coworker. This is a threat people don’t think about when they start doing stuff stupid stuff with technology. And if you’re using twitter, the first thing wrong with twitter, but no following. One, every tweet ever sent globally is being archived at the library of congress. Two, two weeks ago the FBI put out an RFP a request for proposal, they wanted a company to build them an engine, a computer program that will log every facebook post, wall post, every tweet ever sent. And there are a couple of lawsuits going on right now where the us government is claiming with a straight face that people on twitter have no rights to privacy, which is the same argument the Syrians, the Chinese, the Russians, and the Indians make.

H: man, that’s some pretty big stuff, isn’t it, Dave? That’s why I love raj being on our show because he brings it all down to workable and understand that this problem is huge and we need to start waking up.

D: I agree with you, and one thing that kind of just upset me the other day, and maybe raj, you can shed some light on this, but I was on my cell phone and I was opening up a program and updating it. And I read the terms of service, and you know, I’m flabbergasted of what they’re saying they have a right to do, and I read this and I still, I don’t know if you’ve seen it, or bill, if you’ve seen it, but it will…it actually said, on my cellphone terms of service when I updated this one program, that that company has the right at any time to turn on my camera on my phone and take pictures while the camera is in my hand without me knowing it’s being, it’s being done. The other thing is it can record at any time, so that I mean, right now, my phone could be recording our conversation without me really knowing it. And I’m saying, why in the world do they need this stuff? How are they getting away with making it a mandatory thing or I mean, are you running across this? Is anybody else talking about this?

R: yes, we run across this all the time, we’ve been talking about it for years. I’ve always maintained that we need a lemon law for software, and you know, part of it is that the law right now, there’s a vacuum in the law about what vendors can and can’t do with the data, but really, the biggest problem, 99% of the problem is us. Why do you need that application on your phone? When did it become socially acceptable or when did it become necessary that our phones should now become the phone, the email, the computer, and do everything? I assume your house has more than one room. I assume that your bedroom, your kitchen, your dining room and your bathroom, and your background and your front yard are at least 6 different spaces. On your computer, on your phone, that you’re in the same room?

D: yeah

R: Um, I have a Smartphone, and I live on my Smartphone, but my Smartphone has exactly two 3rd party applications on it. One is an email program I need to connect to my office, and the other is an eBook reader. That’s it. I don’t install third party apps. I don’t let my wife install apps on her phones. We don’t need the LINKED IN and the facebook and the twitter and all these other applications on our smart phones. Because quite frankly, the battery life on these things is horrible enough, I don’t need one more thing draining my battery, and I’m really happy that I can get emails and talk on the thing for more than 2 hours without charging it. So you can’t really blame the vendor for trying to get away with murder and asking you to give over all of your rights when you’re the one going in and installing those applications. And there have been a number of publically disclosed FBI cases and other cases where law enforcement and others have remotely turned on the microphones and hidden cameras and you can’t detect it. This is happening globally. The NY times had an article yesterday or the day before where their recommended best practices if you’re going to china and they interviewed an executive who literally said every time he goes to china and he has to go there frequently, he takes a brand new scrubbed machine, brand new, reformatted new laptop, a scrubbed dumb phone. When he stays in his hotel, he pulls his battery out of his phone and laptop. When he comes back to the United States, these machines are given over to corporate security, they scrub them clean, and he uses his US machines when he comes back in the country. Your cell phone is the biggest surveillance device and most powerful surveillance device ever invented. George Orwell didn’t dream of it in his wildest dreams. And what social media…the amount of data social media collects and sells on you is more data than the CIA and KGB ever dreamed of. If we had facebook or Google 30 years ago today, the east German government would still be around. Half the Germans living today may not be around, but the Soviet Union and stasis would still be alive today. And the sad part about this is we won the cold war, but we lost the culture war. Every government today, the Americans, the Canadians, the British, the French – they are building online databases and surveillance engines that are more powerful and worse than anything the soviets and east Germans dreamed of. The Canadians are discussing a law right now which ill be talking about next week in Vancouver, this law literally requires the people in Canada to log everything. Every email, every facebook post, every tweet, every photo, log everything and make it available to government without even a subpoena. And this is a country called Canada. Not china.

D: what should we be doing, then?

H: I just got Goosebumps. That’s what I was going to ask, raj. What can we be doing?

R: first off, educate yourselves, educate your families, you know, on a personal level, keep your kids off of facebook and social media. If you guys want, go to brianlink.com or rajkhalil.com. on both my sites on the right hand side, I’ve got a 30 minute video called what to teach your kids, and it talked to you about social media. We’ve talked a about this before, but I finally put a video together on case studies around the world where kids and adults have been kicked out of college, gone to jail, lost their freedoms, lost their money, because of social media stupidity. So at a personal level, keep your kids off of social media as much as you can. My personal policy on this? Is my kids get their email accounts and they get their social media, but the thing is I can trust them with car keys. Secondly, at a business level, look at what’s out there. Train your employees to think before tweeting, think before posting. At a social level, talk to your senators, talk to your congressmen. Social media, and this is if it’s Google, LINKED IN , facebook, all these third party apps, all these guys – these are the new cigarette companies. In the 20s, what did cigarette manufacturers, what ads did they put out? Everybody’s doing it! Paying actors and actresses millions to smoke in movies. They put out ads where they showed pregnant mothers smoking because it was good for the mother’s health and good for the baby. It wasn’t but because there was no law against it and we didn’t know any better, we bought into these ads. Today, I live in NYC, good luck, you can’t smoke in any restaurants, you can’t smoke in any of the streets out here without getting a ticket. We’ve turned smoking from something cool and sexy to something socially unacceptable. Nothing says social media should get a free pass. Social media are the new cigarette dealers. They’re training our kids and our grandkids to give away their privacy for nothing or next to nothing. Google will give you a $25 gift certificate if you let them monitor your web surfing at work or a detailed level for a year. You can’t buy a 6 pack of marshmallow fluff on Amazon before Google will pay you to surveil you at a very very intrusive level for a whole year. Why? Because there’s no law against it, and people are unfortunately dumb enough or ignorant enough to do this. You know there’s an old principal, ignorance is not a defense. So if you’re clicking around an installing an apple because it’s a hot new thing – you’re going to a new site because it’s a hot new thing – or you’re accepting these click and shrink wrap licenses. You’re the one singeing up for this. No one put a gun to your head and said bill, hey install that application. No one put a gun to your head and told you go on facebook, go on twitter, go on LINKED IN .

D: you mention shrink wrap licenses?

R: Yep.

D: alright, better explain that one.

R: shrink wrap licenses are also called end user license agreements; those are what you click on to download software. Whether they come in printed form in the boxes where they used to be. Or you now click on them in a click click click next. About a year ago, South Park did a great episode on the iTunes end user license agreement. It was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen and fortunately way too close to reality.

D: you know, with all of that in mind, because my head is spinning around today, raj, I was thinking if we are as a community especially with our kids, going to start to make changes very much like our guest last week talked about teen harassment and cyber bullying and some of the major issues our kids are dealing with, we got to start standing up and making a change, making a change, making a stand, can’t just sit back and keep clicking terms of service OK and expect not to be giving this away so in the light of what you’re talking about today with dating, what’s your recommendation on that? Do you recommend not doing online dating? Do you recommend that people use particular services or things like that, or is it just much better to just reach out and shake somebody’s hand and say hello and hopefully you do all the things correctly and you can find people in your own community with face to face rather than the online type relationships…do you feel like that’s really where we need to be. The online relationships aren’t what they’re cracked to be because you know, honestly I can’t imagine being in a relationship unless you were able to meet that person and spend time with home and actually see how they act and do and all those kind of things. I don’t get the online side of it, I understand why you would do that, but I don’t understand how you would follow through and make that a long term commitment. So should folks out there start avoiding this and not putting all of their personal data out, because it’s part of human nature, gonna say they need to know this they need to know that, and once you make that little change, you’re open to everything from the way it sounds like what you’re talking about, these data mining coming right from our own government

R: right, so I’m not saying don’t use online dating sites if you actually want to, go right ahead, but know what you’re buying. Most site are actually horrible if you’re looking for dates, put up a website saying I’m looking for dates, or better yet, go talk to the people in the community, go to your church or synagogue, your business groups. I promise you I know half a dozen guys who are single and half a dozen women who are single, each looking for a date. The human population is not shrinking, so the amount of people available today looking for a date is the largest it’s ever been in human history. If you want to go online and post stuff, go right ahead. I can’t stop you, I will not stop you. But I will recommend that you read the terms of service and agree to the terms. If you don’t understand it, don’t do it. Yet these things make your life a bit more convenient, but you know what? I know people who have 10, 15, 30 online dating profiles, you know…jdate, and match.com and living single and all this nonsense, and i’m wondering how do you have any time to date if you’re spending all this time managing your online dating profiles. You know? Go jog in the park, go put the word out to your friends and family, you’re looking for a date, you’re available. Go mingle with people at the end of the day, at the end of the day you’re gonna marry a human being at least in the next decade or two. We’re about five online persona s later. I still assert that for 99% of the human race, and that includes most of us, we do business with people we know and people we like and people in our community, and we marry and we date people locally. Go offline, go meet people. Online isn’t bad, but we’ve kind of replaced the singles bar with singles websites and I’m not sure it’s any better. Socially it’s not any better, legally it’s a mine field. You get drunk at a bar, worst case scenario is you’re looking at one night in the clink, or possibly an arrest for drunken disorderly stuff. You put stuff online, it’s never going away and it’s gonna come back and bite you 5, 10, 20 years down the road, you know? To change the subject just slightly, tom tom announced a new gps model that if you buy it and you work with a particular insurance company they’re recommending, you will get a car insurance rate based on your driving habits gps tells the insurance company. That’s happening today.

D: I’ve seen that, isn’t that similar to what, there’s an insurance company out there, there’s a little button you plug it into your car, and your rates go up and down according to, you know, are you stopping to a complete stop, are you going 5 miles over the speed limit, that’s pretty, I mean, that’s getting to know your car kind of thing, that’s pretty crazy stuff for people to open themselves up to because isn’t there some legal ramifications there, that if you’re driving over 70 or80 or 90 miles an hour all the time, they’ll just pull that record up and you could spend time in jail for that if you got in a bad accident or were a drunk driver

R: that’s already happening. I read a story yesterday where a Florida newspaper, I believe the sun sentinel pulled out a year or two years worth of ezpass data on cops in Florida, and they named hundreds of cops who were caught you know, according to ezpass and gps data, doing 90 in 45 zones, 130 in 55 zones, getting into accidents. People have been killed by cops driving ridiculously. One of the things I talk about in my social media video is in several cases, people have been caught committing adultery because of what the ezpass data showed. It’s not uncommon anymore for attorneys in a divorce case and a criminal litigation case, in a speeding case, murder case, to go after your social media records, your social media logs, your ezpass logs, your gps data, once data is out there, nothing prevents the other side from demanding it or getting their hands on it.

D: it even goes to your credit score, I mean a lot of that, your credit score information affects your insurance as well.

R: yes, credit score information certainly does affect your insurance rates and everything else, and right now there’s a band in hong kong called lindo bank where they’re targeting young people through social media and they’re saying if you sign up with their bank to get a loan you have to give us your LINKED IN , twitter, facebook, all your social media accounts. If you’re a good payer, we’ll give you a better rate and tell all your friends automatically you got a great deal through us and they’ll get a great rate because you’re a friend of theirs. And they bury this in your terms of service: if you’re a deadbeat and you’re late on your payments, they can link your social media accounts to tell everyone else you’re a deadbeat. How many 20 something year olds do you think actually read 13, 14, 15 or 40 page contracts?

D: they don’t

R: how many adults read 40 page contracts?

D: they don’t do that either, and then they make it such legalese that you don’t even understand what you’re reading it when you’re reading it anyway.

R: absolutely. So we can’t go offline, the genie’s already out of the bottle. And like everything else, every technology creates new advantages and new challenges. When the cars came out the car radios came out, when Henry ford came out with model T there was a famous preacher who actually, you know, told everybody the car is the tool of the devil, it’s going to lead to destruction of society and all of that stuff. Henry ford gave the preacher a free car, and all of a sudden the preacher’s sermons changed. You know, when Motorola came out with the first car radio, same thing. You know. It’s going to ruin society, it’s going to destroy generations, kids are gonna have sex in the back of car seats, but they were having it before anyway. I’m not saying technology is bad. These are good tools in the right hands. You know, guns are good tools in the right hands. In the wrong hands they are dangerous tools. And we really should…we really could start using and treating our computers the way we treat our cars. I don’t give my 10 year old my car keys. We don’t start our car until the seat belts are on. Are you doing the same thing with yourself, your employees, your kids and your grandkids.

D: good point, you know, really quickly, raj, will you let everyone know, we’re almost to the top of the hour, I can’t believe the hour has gone by so quickly…so much information. Let them know where you’re gonna be. You say you’re going to be in Canada, we’ll make sure we get that up on our message, and we’ll shoot the message out. We’ll use our network to promote.

H: we’ll use our facebook accounts

D: we’ll use that, and we’ll promote you, and we want to make sure folks know in that area, we have listeners up there as well they can come and check you out live and the information on that.

R: well the best things is go to rajjoel.com, click on the events page, it’ll tell you all the conferences and events I’m speaking at. I’d love to see some of your audiiences. I do request that they check with the conference organizers. A lot of the events I speak at are invitation only or selective audiences. Others are open to the public. I’ll be in Vancouver next week. The week after that, I’m at an attorney roundtable in Nassau county New York. Open only to attorneys and accounts. April 25th, I’m doing a presentation at aces international in New York. It’s the largest fiscal security conference and it’s the oldest fiscal security organization on the planet, and I’m talking about cyber security, because the fiscal guys are slowly realizing that fiscal and social security need to go hand in hand. I’ll be all over the country throughout the year. Go to rajjoel.com/events you can see where I’m going to be next. If you want to invite me, just email me and let me know you want me to speak at your next conference or keynote or event. And my one request to you guys, personally, professionally, is take my video and give it to everyone you know. If any kid between 10-18 should watch it with their parents. I know that for four months my nephew was on his parent’s facebook, he wouldn’t listen. I had a 10 minute conversation and deleted his account. Once you learn it was how to used to destroy lives of his peers, he destroyed his facebook account. And subdue that. Go to brainlink.com or rajgoel, it’ the video on the right hand side to teach your kids about social media. Watch it. Share it. And keep an eye on it. I will be updating it probably once a quarter or once every six months because this is a highly highly mobile moving target.

D: we’d love to have you come out to salt lake so if there’s anything or any organization that you’re affiliated with, let us know, and we’ll try to promote it.

R: you know, have Utah’s state bar association have bugged me to do CLEs, I’ve done full day CLEs for Delaware, I’ve done half day CLEs for NYC bar associations. Have the local lawyers and invite me, because quite frankly, everything we’re talking about is not a fractional be problem. It’s a legal or a gap in the law problem. And once we educate the attorneys, we educate the accountants and senators and congressmen, maybe in 10-15 years, they’ll close the barn door after the horse has left the gate

H: that answers our one question right there: close the barn door, Dave I think that really sums it up and how we need to look. Raj, as always we appreciate your time, we know we’re going to have you come back on a regular time throughout the year. We’re so excited about that. Anything Dave and I can do to help you out, let me know. Everyone who’s out there listening, please go to raj’s site – you’re going to be so impressed with information you get. The level of knowledge – this is the biggest thing, raj. I think if folks out there, if they understood, they would start to make some changes. So we’re in the good fight with you spreading that message out to all our listeners. So thank you very much.

R: thanks guys, I appreciate this, and a G.I. Joe said in the 80s, knowing is half the battle.

H: thanks raj. Happy Valentine’s Day.

D: happy Valentine’s Day you guys, go kiss your wives and kids and have fun.

H: but not on camera. Bye everyone.