In this eye-opening conversation, Rob Braxman shares his expert insights on how to protect the privacy and future of your children in the digital age. As a renowned tech expert, Rob emphasizes the importance of digital literacy and tech awareness in ensuring your child’s online identity remains secure. With the rise of remote learning, it’s crucial to educate your kids on safe browsing habits and digital hygiene practices to avoid privacy risks. Rob also discusses the significance of privacy education, media literacy, and identity management in safeguarding children from potential threats. By implementing these essential security measures, you can enhance your child’s online privacy and secure their future. Tune in to learn more about the importance of privacy laws, identity security, and online safety from Rob Braxman, mentioned in the popular Joe Rogan show.
Transcript:
Rob: If you don’t protect your identity from day one then you can’t protect anything that happens in the future.
Victoria: How to protect the privacy and future of our children the internet privacy guide Rob Braxman. Learn what every parent needs to know to protect their children’s digital footprint. Thank you so much Rob for being here.
Rob: Thank you! I’m happy to be here.
Victoria: I’m super excited because I know that for me in the past, I was like, well, I don’t have anything to hide. Who cares, I have all my life in all the profiles Facebook, Instagram but now that I’m a mom I’m so concerned with AI smartphones sharing photos. It’s like I’m really concerned of the future of our children so, I would love first to know a little bit more about you. I do know but for people that might not be familiar with you how you started your story is fascinating.
Rob: Well, I was, I’ve been in tech for a very very long time. I don’t want to tell you the number of decades because it’ll show my age, but it’s very long time I founded several companies and some became big and I no longer involved with them. I’ve sold those companies but my interest in this is because I was involved in health care, so I had a Health Care System company which I now sold but that company had access to a lot of private records, and that already brought me to concern. I said my goodness! You know, I have access to so much information here and then the government wanted to take more and put it into their databases and people were hacking these Hospitals and Clinics, you know, clients of mine.
And so, I was very concerned already about cyber security because I was involved with the hospitals and large clinics and then combined that with what the government wanted to do was to take all of your information live as a doctor is working with you, they’re actually taking information live now. I said, you know, I got to speak up here and this is what got me to do this because I was kind of retired from my old career and I said let me just focus on this because this is important.
Victoria: Yes certainly very important and more than anything. I think most people don’t understand what’s happening. It seems so complex and so foreign to many of us that we don’t know what to do, so what specific types of digital information that we are sharing about our children today may have an impact in their future. And why? because we don’t really know, but I’m sure that you can give us a lot of insight on that.
Rob: Right, well, you know, one of the things that you know, I work with some schools and and it bothered me how they are so Tech technically uneducated and they make some pretty serious mistake that will affect these kids probably forever. This started my concern about. This started around 2007 when the iPhone first came out and Facebook started to come out and then they went public so this was 2012, 2013, something like that. They went public and then I realized you know that people have shifted kids, what kids did, but kids were doing in high school and Grade School was shocking. One of the things that I remember back in 2012 was the use of Snapchat and Snapchat was used because kids thought they had secret communications between themselves, so they were passing. These are teenagers, so you can imagine they’re passing information or photos primarily between themselves and thinking there was no consequence because the statement from Snapchat was the photos disappear except they don’t.
Victoria: Oh, they don’t
Rob: No, because you know one of the things that they said well the photos are only there when you hold your finger down and then you know it disappears. Then people went and figured out a way around that it’s so easy, so what they did was take a phone, this is a Brax 3 phone. By the way, so they take a phone and then take a picture with another phone.
Victoria: Yeah that makes sense
Rob: I mean you know, basic Tech stuff that we we all know because you know we are understanding of tech but these kids did not know that so. One of the things that I teach kids early on is that the internet is permanent, so I have had families put personal information on things like Facebook. There there’s this family that just concerned me so much because they went on Facebook and basically stated that their daughter was raped in college and discussed it all on Facebook. The school did not take any action because they didn’t feel like there was enough information to make that kind of judgment, so they litigated it on Facebook. This person now has this on record and this person is now married and, I can just imagine, many years from now when those kids are teenagers, her children looking on Facebook and seeing this kind of information out in public and you can’t delete it.
That’s one of the things on Facebook is you cannot delete anything. So one of the things that I’ve often told parents is that you really should not give phones to kids below a certain age, and to me, I remember families with kids in 11 years of age and I have many friends who do this, 11 years of age and they give them an iPhone.
Victoria: Oh my God!
Rob: It’s like 11, okay, these kids don’t even know anything about technology and just they just know, oh, I’m going to go on Tik Tok and Snapchat, and all this. I’ve witnessed so many scary things on these phones because the parents of course give from the phone and don’t supervise like back in the day I used to broadcast live streaming on an app called Periscope. Periscope is supposed to be for 18 and above and guess what? You know, kids downloaded Periscope and start to do live streaming, live streaming at the age of 12 and these are girls. Many times, I distinctively remember these girls were being ogled by people from all over the world. You know, thousands of viewers and they were saying take your clothes off, take your clothes off, and they were they were..
Victoria: Oh my goodness!
Rob: They were actually starting to do it.
Victoria: Oh my goodness!
Rob: Now, because they don’t know anything, of course, and here’s the funny part, the parents were partying in the yard. The parents were partying, you can hear them in the distance with a group of them having a party and ignoring the kids and exposing these kids to apps like this that just not made for kids. So my rule is this, kids should not be exposed to phones and social media until you’re in Middle School at least. So much pressure that you’re not going to be cool if you don’t do social media and you’re not on Instagram and you’re not going to be famous on social media if you do this.
It’s like, these parents are so screwed up because they were born, these are Millennial parents now. They were born during the era of that SnapChat thing. I was talking about to them, this is like they’re normal and then they are slowly realizing that you can’t delete it. It’s not deletable whatever you do. It’s there permanently so you know it’s very hard to be giving this kind of advice because if you don’t understand the technology, it just they don’t understand the seriousness of it until you start doing things like doxing. Doxing is when somebody goes into the internet and looks for your private information and publicly publicly reveals it to the outside world.
Victoria: Wow!
Rob: That is the way you’re attacked now when people are your enemies or whatever. They will dox you now, you know, I’m subject to doxing constantly but you see I was always careful about what I put on the internet. There’s very little damage to me that can happen from doxing because what are you going to dox, I only put whatever in the internet that I want you to see if I don’t want you to see it, it’s not on the internet.
Victoria: Right
Rob: Kids don’t understand that you don’t put your real name on social media. You don’t go on YouTube and Facebook and Instagram and put your real name. You don’t do that, okay. You use an alias, you use a pseudo anonymous name, some other name you know, and that’s how you protect yourself. Now, the schools themselves are really problematic here. One of my friends were asking me to protect themselves or asking for a solution because the seventh grade teacher had them all make a website, so the kids all made a website and you know what? They asked them to put on their website family history.
Victoria: Oh my goodness!
Rob: So each kid wrote their own family history not viewed by the parents by the way. So the kids just wrote whatever they want and then wrote everything they know about the family history. Some of them wrote some of the problem with their uncles, uncle who went to jail, stuff like that, they put it out there in the website. Then years later they come to me and says we need to delete that entry made by my kid when she was in seventh grade and this kid has now graduated college still can’t remove it. Why? because the teacher didn’t know anything and didn’t care, didn’t save the passwords and now they can’t go back to the websites and those websites are just permanently there, and the free website. So it’s going to be there forever and it’s not correctable because the internet is permanent. So here we go permanent and even if you deleted the website there’s something called you know archive.org where every website there’s the history of every website.
Victoria: I know that one
Rob: So saying that by the way, you know that’s very useful in lawsuits because I had cases where you know the website was changed then you can prove during lawsuit that no, you changed it because this was the original, this is what it is now, so you’re trying to cheat us or you know that kind of thing so you can do things like that. That’s a problem, the internet being permanent. Here’s another thing that schools do first of all, in many grade schools they now require them to have Chromebooks, Chromebook needs a Google ID.
Victoria: Oh no!
Rob: You can’t use a Chromebook with a Google ID, Google Drive, all of that. Now they have established and they put their full name on the Google Chromebook and then I said, they do their homework like you know, Indian tribe, this that stuff that they’re supposed to do and then they go research on the Chromebook and I said to myself, if somebody wanted to know some sexual predator wanted to attack these kids, all they have to do is make a kid site for Education like you know Indian tribes and so on, and the kids will go there and because it is Chromebook it defaults to location on.
Victoria: Wow!
Rob: Now that you know Google ID location on, it’s like it’s just the stupidity of it all and again what should have been done if these people were smart is one, not use Chromebook because you’re forced to go put everything in the cloud. Second, if you had to use Chromebook because many schools now put Google Gmail as the school email, 99% of schools use Gmail for email. They just put the edu at the end and then you think oh, it’s the school made their own email. They used Gmail and now Gmail is your full name, and all the information they’re tracking and Google tracks the Google ID which is now what it’s call.
The Google ID knows every click on the internet from the time you’re kids to the time you’re adults and this just goes on and on and Google being the number one issue here with the Google ID. Then this ties to a lot of privacy issues with the phone identification and how they identify who owns the phone and do some more complex technology that track device to device and it’s crazy people are not aware of any of this. You would have solved the problem if the schools were aware of how to manage identities of kids in school identity number one thing. Secondly to deprive them of social media until they’re an adult enough to not do what those 12 year olds did. I mean these kids don’t know anything and now they’re being exposed to sexual predators at the age of 12, and these 11, some 10 even and these parents are so, they’re terrible because they give a phone and then they don’t supervise and they don’t know anything that’s happening and the kids of course are going to experiment and they say well I’m on Tik Tok and they all go on Tik Tok, well I’m on Snapchat so they go on Snapchat and then they’re going to hide what they do from the parents.
Victoria: Of course
Rob: I mean this is natural stuff.
Victoria: There are solutions that I know you’re going to share with us like my deoogled phone that I purchased from you but we’re going to talk about that in a moment, and by the way, I know your time is so precious. Whenever you need to cut just let me know, but I have another question that is maybe more like we don’t realize about it at all which is as moms, we take a million pictures of our babies when they are babies and toddlers and we share it with family. My son is not yet 2 years old so we take pictures and I like to send them to my friends and all of these but there are two parts to this social media I’m afraid of sharing the pictures there, but even personally in iPhone, it tags each kid with face recognition,
Rob: That’s right.
Victoria: and location services. So if you could share with us what are the repercussions of this, and if there is any way around this so that we can share it with friends does it matter if they have, let’s say they don’t have a profile on social media so they cannot be identified or how this works because it’s confusing.
Rob: Yeah so the main thing it got worse of course because of the iPhone Apple intelligence and windows co-pilot and Google Gemini, these are new things. It’s the AI side of things.
Victoria: That’s new iPhone 16 which I learned from you.
Rob: Yeah.. yeah.. so when my friends have an iPhone 16, I’m a little scared and you should be. So the problem with photos is when you put it in a public site like Facebook or Instagram, that really is a problem because it’s there permanently. Even if you try to delete it doesn’t actually delete. It deletes what you see but once it’s shared it’s written in the meta privacy policy. Once it’s shared, you lost control. If you have a thousand friends and the thousand friends saw the pictures they now have their own copy, so you say, oh I’m going to delete my account, I’m going to delete everything, so you delete but it doesn’t matter because it’s on their timeline.
Victoria: Oh interesting, okay
Rob: It’s actually written in the Facebook and this one of the reasons I left Facebook in 2012 because I said I can see now what they’re doing, this was before they even talk much about this. I figured out what their plans were, so Facebook is like the number one evil and of course Instagram is, Facebook, Instagram, Facebook and Meta, so that’s the problem. You post pictures and you’re identified because on Facebook you’re required to identify yourself with a fixed identity with a photo and you’re not allowed to use any name but your real name validated by email and a phone number, so a crowdsource do. You’re verified by your classmates friends and all that, so basically it’s kind of like almost a government record what Facebook is like, if I needed to find somebody I’m going to go to Facebook and if they have a Facebook account you’re pretty much you’re in trouble because I can find everything and even if you start say I’m going to hide my data from my friends, I have a way around all of that. I can find anything so there is really actually no way to hide anything on Facebook.
Once you put it on Facebook, you can’t delete it of course and you’re done now still I would delete my Facebook account because that’s the only solution here and what it does at least is stop somebody from finding you from your Facebook account. They can find you from the accounts of your friends but not through the main Facebook account because it won’t exist anymore and when I do that I manually delete every photo and that takes forever it took me three months I think.
Victoria: Oh wow it would take me 10 years
Rob: Yeah.. nowadays people put even more but back in the day I deleted three months worth and probably most people now will take years but you know, you close your account then you can come back and delete it and close the account again. You can do it in pieces so it’s just a backup in case you know they don’t follow whatever they say in the terms of service so I would still want to delete it not just close the account in any case. That is the only protection is to not be on Facebook, not be on Instagram, not to be on these particular sites and let me tell you why. They’re unique, they’re not actually as dangerous as some of the other ones but Facebook and Instagram have your real identity. They have your real name so let’s go say you go to some other social media site even YouTube and you do not put your real name on there.
That’s actually there’s not much information you can gather from that so that’s actually why I’m on social media. I’m obviously, I’m very big on YouTube and I’m on other platforms, limited platform but not on Facebook where you’re required to have a validated name with an ID. Now, they don’t actually ask you for an ID as you know what they ask is your phone number and then the phone number is attached to your ID so you’re pretty much sucked and then the ID is attached also to because the phone number can be connected to credit reports and they can find out the history of everything.
Many people use Facebook for buying things and so they put all their credit card information and that’s tied to your credit reports even more, so Facebook is very dangerous. Now are other platforms as dangerous I have found as long as you don’t use your real name and you don’t give them a phone number, that’s your real phone number then the risk actually go down and you use a different email per account. This is why I offer those products on my website because if you have multiple emails with unlimited aliases you can give a different email to everyone you have. You can have different phone numbers with Brax’s virtual phone and of course you have a different phone. Now, why is this phone unique? This is a Brax 3 Degoogled phone, this phone is unique because I did not log into the phone when you turn on the phone you never log in on a standard phone you put on your Apple ID or your Google ID on this phone.
I didn’t do anything so that alone. When I go use the internet how do they know who it is? Well, they don’t. Then that’s the real key, it’s actually that simple. I don’t. need to get into complicated explanations of why these phones are unique but there’s no Google in here. There’s nothing to extract Google. There’s nothing to require an ID, so the key word that I’m teaching here and this really goes to childhood to keep it simple for you and brief is everything is tied to two things, the data that you reveal and your identity. We can’t always stop the data that gets revealed but we can often stop the identity, so if we don’t use our real identity, the data is useless. So, unless your identity is in the data but if they don’t know who you are it doesn’t matter what you say.
Victoria: Right right
Rob: Okay and obviously it’s a problem with pictures because pictures have your face because if they can correlate with some other thing that has your name and the same picture you could even search that on Google image search. So, you find a face and you say well, this is not the real name. You go to Google image search and and they’ll find the face on Facebook.
Victoria: Right so for example, have your real name for our children like let’s say as moms we have our pictures and we want to share with family and friends is there a way to share it? Do we need, if somebody has an iPhone we need to like delete the tags that iPhone puts.
Rob: No.. no.. all of that’s a danger if you use iMessage for example on iPhone and send the pictures directly to the people. That’s not as bad okay, as if you put it on social media were is permanent. So, not as bad but a little bit worse on, it’s worse when you have devices that have Apple Intelligence, Microsoft Co-Pilot and Google Gemini because what happens is the AI will know you. The AI knows all of your friends and can facially recognize everyone and can really connect everyone and that’s where the danger is and so the solution of course is plan on having a different phone like these phones don’t have AI.
So, there’s no device as analyzing your life and saying well I know every everything you’re doing, I know all your friends, I know everything that’s going on with your life. That’s a problem because let’s say you extend it outside of yourself, you send your photo to your sister and your sister has a copy now and she has an iPhone, the iPhone now connects you because it’s all analyzed by the AI, and that’s really a long-term danger that I’ve been warning people because what it’s really telling you is with the phone there are no more secrets now. Obviously, family things are not secrets so it’s less of an issue. I’m not really as concerned about baby pictures being passed on iPhones but everything you do is on here, everything. You cannot hide, so secret communications using Signal and all that forget that the iPhone will figure it out because the AI can see whatever you’re typing on signal.
Victoria: Right
Rob: So, it’s not necessarily about you know general pictures of family but about you know family conflicts family arguments, family secrets things that you know, nobody’s perfect. Families are not perfect. Things happen, another litigating thing, 2 women, one was the original wife and the other one was the new wife divorced the old one. This is more interesting story, so the old wife married the brother so they’re all still connected because they’re still part of the same family, and then of course there’s an inheritance to fight over so now you got the wife, the ex-wife, the brother, you know it’s complicated and you know what they start to do, they start accusing each other of stuff on Facebook…
Victoria: Oh no!
Rob: And I said to myself, that is permanent. Whatever you’re arguing about here this will stain you for the rest of your life and maybe you don’t care, maybe you do, but I’m just reminding you that it’s permanent and you really shouldn’t be litigating there, you know why don’t you argue face to face.
Victoria: Exactly!
Rob: That’s the kind of stuff that I’m saying there are no secrets to Apple Intelligence and all this and so I worry because people don’t realize that there are no secrets.
Victoria: For our babies that we have today like my son two years old that I’m maybe sharing some pictures just maybe WhatsApp which we know is Meta, so maybe concerning but maybe I share a little bit of background what happened today with my family in Spain, things like that. What do you think in the future might have a consequence because of this especially you coming from a country that maybe it wasn’t as free as the US.
Rob: Fortunately you have to divide the information that’s taken by the government versus data taken not by the government. That’s not a different thing because of what you just said it is true that the US government and the intelligence agencies have everything. You sent a photo to a friend they have a copy of that they got everything so you know Snowden validated this. There’s nothing you can send or do or communicate and now with Apple Intelligence they can even see encrypted conversations. Now, they pretty much have that, however, the countries that are not controlled by the Intelligence Services the Five Eyes (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States) they don’t have access to that, so other countries you mentioned Spain.
Spain probably doesn’t have any technical ability to do anything to you so in that sense that the government is not fear in that way, your fear is more Big Tech because they can always go to Big Tech and say Big Tech give us the data and so they do it indirectly. Big Tech is actually the the problem, meaning, you know any of the Big Tech: Google, Facebook, Meta in general. I mean, between Google and Facebook alone, they probably control a big chunk of the information. Google alone probably has 90% of everything that goes on, Apple has obviously over 50% of information that happens to people with iPhones but Google specifically has 100% of all users because everybody uses Google.
Victoria: Everybody
Rob: And right, so again, there is no way you can protect yourself against that there it’s many of you will have done too many things already, so the way you protect yourself in the future is watch your identity.
Victoria: My children more than…
Rob: Identity
Victoria: Identity, okay.
Rob: Protect your identity so even though…
Victoria: We don’t have anything to hide but it’s important to keep in mind these alternatives.
Rob: You give that, anyone in your family go to the Internet should have an alternate identity. Alternate name, even an alternate photo profile, so something to confuse the issue with when it comes to that and all of that will help. Obviously, there are basic things like turn off location tracking on phones and so on, but you really can’t turn off location tracking on iPhones and Google phones, only the Googled phones can turn off location.
Victoria: I have mine that I got from you and we have Brax 3 coming up the phone so if you can share a little
Rob: Yeah, you will have this. This project is on https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/brax3-the-most-privacy-friendly-smartphone# it’s called Brax 3 so this is just about to be shipped in the next couple of weeks and it’s running a privacy OS called iodé which is another company because we are going to make this to have multiple operating system that are supported by multiple companies so it’s not just us…
Victoria: So we will put that link in the description so that people can get
Rob: So by the way, iodé OS which is what we put on here has a family protection plan
Victoria: Oh that’s good.
Rob: So you can actually control what the family sees on the phone so they have a subscription for that and it’s a service they offer. It’s actually good for families, so many people have bought like multiple of these for their families because it’s cheap right?
Victoria: Yeah we’re getting $299 we’re getting three for just my husband and I.
Rob: Yeah, it’s $299 I mean, and it’s a very solid looking phone. It looks it looks expensive and it’s only $299.
Victoria: Amazing! thank you for creating this because you know once again we don’t have anything to hide but we cannot know what AI with the smartphone, face recognition…
Rob: You got to protect yourself.
Victoria: location services, it’s all of these that we just..
Rob: And your life is long, the things can happen in your life. You don’t know what life will bring you so you always have to protect. I told you, crisis happen in life and if you don’t protect your identity from day one then you can’t protect anything that happens in the future.
Victoria: Yeah, especially for our children. I feel that’s what made me switch and say enough.. enough.
Rob: So again, reminding identity number one and of course don’t give it to them until they’re older but teach your kids early on to never put the real name on the Internet.
Victoria: Yeah, and don’t let kids have a phone. Yesterday we were in the zoo and a little kid was taking pictures of people this he’s like course..
Rob: Yeah it’s just, you give them real camera and for I suggest people use, I have fancy cameras, I got all these fancy lenses and everything.
Victoria: Oh nice!
Rob: Because you know, I believe that if you want good picture go get a real camera..
Victoria: Right.. right. That’s what they are for.
Rob: Not a phone. A phone is being sold as a camera, it’s not a phone. It’s not a camera, it’s a phone.
Victoria: It’s a spy in your pocket.
Rob: Yes
Victoria: Thank you so much Rob! This was great and by the way, this is just a little excerpt of all the incredible information that Rob has we have been learning from him for a while now and it’s a lot of information so I wanted to just show a little bit of it. Go to his channel, he has incredible information with many many details and everything is backed up with facts so it’s not like he’s making it up.
Rob: No. I don’t make it up. I do not make things up.
Victoria: Exactly! it’s a very very good source of information. So thank you so much Rob! I appreciate your time thank you everybody.
Check out Rob Braxman’s channel https://www.youtube.com/@robbraxmantech
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