Samsung’s S25 Ultra and the end of the flagship phone | The Vergecast
- Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of minor smartphone camera upgrades. I'm your friend David Pierce and I am sitting here once again repacking my travel electronics bag. I've been traveling a bunch. I've had a lot of 36 hour trips recently, which is a weird and sort of unique packing challenge, but I've gotten very good. I can do the whole thing in a backpack now, even if I have to bring a camera. And the trick, the key for me has been that I turned this whole gigantic bag full of cables and other assorted crap into two things.
I bought these things from Amazon. They're these retractable USB cables. I got one that's six feet long and black, and one that's blue and three feet long. And these are now the only USB cables I carry with me anywhere.
I can plug into walls, I can plug into other devices, I can plug them into almost everything. This thing where everything is USBC is great. To be clear, I don't care how you feel about the EU, I don't care how you feel about Apple wanting to do lightning, whatever. It's better that there's one port for everything.
And I'm finally to the point where, actually, other than my AirPods, which I haven't upgraded in a long time, every gadget I own is USBC and it's fabulous. So now, instead of a giant bag, I just have this and it has made everything a whole lot easier. I'll link these in the show notes, they're on Amazon. I don't know if there's any specific reason to buy this brand over any other, but they're great. Anyway, we are not here to talk about USB cables, although we're a little bit here to talk about USB cables on every single episode of this show.
Today, we're gonna do two things on the show. First, we're gonna talk about the Galaxy S25 and all of the phones coming up this year, what we think is gonna happen in maybe not the most interesting year ever in smartphones, but in a year where a lot of smartphone companies are going to make the case that your phone can be different and new because of AI. So we're gonna get into that. We're also gonna talk about China. With all of this stuff happening with TikTok and RedNote and DeepSeek. This question of how we as internet users should think about China and the Chinese government and apps that come from China and products that come from China, it's just complicated.
And we're gonna try to sort through it with somebody who actually knows what they're talking about. We also have a question from the Vergecast Hotline. Lots of fun stuff to get to. This is a particularly fun hotline question, and I feel I say that a lot, but I really enjoyed this one because it made me think about a gadget I haven't thought about in a long time. All that is coming up in just a sec.
But first, I'm just gonna, do you see how fun this looks? Look, it's a long cable and you pull and it goes back in. This is what The Vergecast is here for, retractable USBC cables. This is the dream. This is The Vergecas. We'll be right back. All right, we're back. Let's talk about some gadgets.
So last week Samsung announced the Galaxy S25 lineup. There's the S25, the S25+, the S25 Ultra. By and large, I think these phones are not the most interesting things that have ever been launched, but they're gonna be very popular and they are the first kind of big, mainstream, lots of people are going to buy them phones that we've seen this year, which makes it a fun moment to I think look at the rest of the year ahead. We know pretty much what we're gonna get.
We're gonna get new Pixels, we're gonna get new iPhones, we're gonna get more foldables, we're gonna get more flippable. We're gonna have a lot of new ideas about what a smartphone should do and how AI should figure in. And so I figured Alison Johnson and I should just get into what we think 2025 is going to look and maybe a little bit what we're hoping for from smartphones in the year to come.
So let's talk S25. Let's talk 2025. Let's get into it. Alison Johnson. Hello.
- Hello. - It's phone time again. It's January 31st as we're recording this and somehow it's already phone time. - [Alison] It's phone season, baby. - [David] This is just the rest of your year now.
- Oh, don't say that. - You got two weeks between CES and right now, and now it's just phones forever. - [Alison] Phones for the rest of time. Yeah. - [David] Okay, so because it's January, I kind of wanna do two things. I wanna talk about your review of the Samsung S25 Ultra, a phone I find both deeply boring and thoroughly fascinating and I wanna peel that apart a little bit. And then I wanna look ahead to the year to come a little bit.
I think it's gonna be a really interesting year of phones and I just wanna talk about that a little bit. But let's start with the S25. You've reviewed the thing, you tried it. I would not say, based on the little bit I've heard about your review, you seem wildly enthusiastic about this phone. Is that fair to say? - [Alison] Yeah, that's fair. And I've been using the S25 Ultra first for the past week.
Yeah, it's complicated. It is a great phone. It's a very good phone. It's been a good phone for the past couple of generations, but it just feels like Samsung is kind of losing the plot on like, they call this phone the Ultra, it should be the everything you could ever want from a phone.
And it kind of is, but it feels like the past couple years, they've just been taking away little things of like, it used to have the 10X dedicated zoom and then they're like, "Well, people didn't really use it that much, so we do a 5X." And you're like, fine. And then this time around they're like, we took away the the Bluetooth and the Stylus and you can't do the little magic wand things anymore, 'cause no one was doing them. And it's like, fine, I guess I'm not gonna miss them. But then you end up with like, what have they been adding? And it's just kind of like stalled out.
I feel like we've got all these AI features, which are a real mixed bag still, and they're on every other phone. They're like on all the Samsung phones, they're on older Samsung phones, they're on Android phones. So I'm just sort of sitting here like, this is a great phone, sure, but what makes it so special? I don't know. - [David] So I'm of two minds about all of this, which is part of what I wanna talk through with you.
I think on the one hand, the thing that Samsung is describing where it's like, let's take all the confusing and complicated stuff out and just give you a phone that is good and is full of things that people like to do, I think it's good, right? Like, it's a thing we ask for in product design all the time. Like, stop shipping weird shit and just make a good phone that does things people like. I think it's like a not wrong path, but then on the other hand, I do feel like either Samsung is, like you said, kind of losing the plot and running out of ideas, or this is just a sign that there is absolutely nothing left to do in smartphones and that maybe our phones are what they are and they have hit laptop territory of like, we pretty much know how this is supposed to go, the end. And then I think if you're Samsung, continuing to sell a phone that you call the Ultra just feels bonkers.
Like, the more I think about your review and your experience, the less I even understand why this phone exists. Because like you're saying, this is supposed to be the one that does all the things and it's supposed to be the place where Samsung tests its weirdest ideas. And I kind of love Samsung for that. And for years they were like, oh, most people don't want a Stylus, but some people do.
And so we make a Note and it's gonna blow up on a plane. - Right. - But like, they did that for people and there's something about that that I actually really appreciate about Samsung, that they're like, this is the one where we just said yes to everything. And now that it's not that, I'm not super clear on what it even is anymore. - [Alison] Yeah, and it's like I am generally of the mind that phones are boring now and that's okay. It's like we just kind of landed on what a phone is shaped like and what it does.
We're not doing a bunch of wacky things anymore with like cameras that pop up or like little things that flip around, you know? Bless LG. - Those were fun days though. - Yeah. - I miss those times. - I know, they were fun. - [David] What was the LG one that the screen like turned 90 degrees? - [Alison] I think that was the wing. - [David] The wing. Ugh. I wish that had been successful.
- LG wishes that too. - I don't think any person on earth bought that phone, but I loved that it existed. - [Alison] Yeah. Bless them. Yeah, yeah, it's like we were just landed on the basic idea of like what a phone is shaped like, what it does, and it's fine.
And we use it for so many things in our lives, you don't wanna have to learn a bunch of different stuff every time you buy a new phone. So, I think that's okay. But yeah, I think the problem comes when Samsung is like, "Here's the ultra phone and it costs 1,299 and you definitely should pay that much money for it."
And you're , okay, what do I get? And it's like, well, you get a 5X zoom, but you could get that on a Pixel phone. You get a little Stylus that like used to do some special stuff and it does it now. I don't know, give us something.
Do something, make it a little bigger and double the battery life, or I don't know, you know? I'm sure it's that easy designing engineering phones. But yeah, I feel like there's something. There has to be something and Samsung is just kind of like stalled out.
- I know, I do think, I'm glad you mentioned the battery life 'cause I was thinking about it and I'm , okay, what would work as Ultra for me? And it's like twice as thick, twice the battery would do it, right? I think you could feasibly be like, this phone is like a thick boy with two Cs, but it lasts for five days. And actually, I think that is an incredibly interesting idea about a smartphone. Then on the flip side, I think the other one they could have done is really gone after durability and like Motorola I feel like was really the last company to take a big swing at like, we are going to make a phone that you can't break. And it didn't really work, but I think that's more for Motorola reasons than it being a good idea of reasons. And so I think if I'm Samsung, I would've been interested to see if Samsung had poked it either of those two and been like, is this a thing people will upgrade for? Because I think it is, but we have no evidence for it because no one has ever really tested it. I think if I could say to somebody, here's a phone that will last you from Monday to Thursday reliably, or here is a phone that you slippery handed doofus you, you can't even break.
That works. That is the most interesting new idea about a smartphone I've heard in a very long time. And I wish Samsung had picked something like that to do here. - [Alison] Yeah, I feel like we're gonna end up with the Fold, the Z Fold in the Ultra merge into here is the ultimate phone that does other things and it somehow comes with the Stylus and folds in half and if they upgraded the cameras on the Fold, that would be an Ultra phone I think, if such a thing exists. But yeah, as far as things that people actually want in their lives, battery life would be an easy one. - Yeah, I totally agree.
So the two things I'm particularly curious about on the S25 Ultra in particular, but kind of the S25 line in general is, as ever, the AI and the cameras. Brand new-ish version of Gemini shipping first on this device is supposed to be the multi-step, multi app action thing. Supposed to be kind of the next AI experience on your phone. You've gotten to test it, how'd it go? - [Alison] Good and bad.
So I'll start with the good. I finally did the thing where it's like, you have something on your screen and you wanna put it on your calendar, and that has just not been a thing that Gemini or any other technology in the world can do, apparently. But it finally happened. You summon Gemini, which is now the default assistant on Samsung phones. - [David] Which we agree is an extremely good upgrade, right? That is the correct. Okay. - Yeah. It should be this way.
Bixby is hanging around in the settings menu, doing some stuff and that's fine. That's where Bixby belongs. - [David] I don't wanna kill Bixby, I just don't wanna think about Bixby very often. - I know. Yeah. Bixby can just be hanging out. Yeah, I had something on my screen, I summoned Gemini, and there you get a little chip that's like, ask about this screen or get help with the screen.
And I was like, add this to my calendar and it frigging did it and it was like the best thing. It was like, finally, this is all I've been wanting, but it kind of falls apart in other ways when you're like, I'm into Sudoku now. I am in my Sudoku era and I was asking Gemini for some Sudoku solving, I was like, find some videos on YouTube to help me learn Sudoku and add them to a note, and it can do that. It follows instructions. It's like, okay, and it goes and gets some videos and then opens a Note app. It's like, that is all cool to see that happening, but what it created in the Notes app was just a list of video headlines with no link.
- [David] I did the same thing. I tried it when it first came out just on Gemini Web and I did the same thing. I forget it was, oh, it was GPU explainers and it pulled five different Google Keep notes that were just the title of the video and nothing else. I was like, what are we accomplishing here? - [Alison] I know. Yeah, I was even like, add hyperlinks to the videos and it did not do that either. - It's rough. - Yeah.
I have so many examples of just like, you guys talked about last week too on the Friday Vergecast of like, when you're fighting with the tool, you're just done. I had to fight with Gemini so many times that I was like, I don't care that I can take this detail and have it email my husband or whatever. I can't convince it that my flight leaves from San Francisco and not San Jose. It was arguing with me for five minutes about this.
- [David] And there's so many things in all of that, that it feels very obvious that Gemini should be able to do it. And I remember back when Siri could tell you some sports scores, but not other sports scores. And there's a thing about that that just feels broken because it's like, well, if you know the football scores, why don't you know the baseball scores? And I forget which order it was, but there's just something about that, that is like, okay, this thing doesn't work and I should not have to understand which specific feature flags have been turned on. It just doesn't feel like it works.
And I think in reading your review of the experience you had of asking when someone's flight was landing was one of those where I was like, this so obviously should work that it is just infuriating that it doesn't. - [Alison] Yeah, and it's one of those things that's like, I know I can go to Google and just type in Alaska Airlines flight Detroit to Seattle, when does it land? And it's like, boom, gonna be there. Gemini does this whole dance of like, oh, I don't know, I'm a large language model, and I'm yelling at it to Google it. I'm like, I'm not gonna use this tool anymore.
- [David] Yeah, it's like you're Google. If at the very least it would just fall back on a Google search. - Yeah, exactly. - [David] The thing that Siri does that sucks is it's like, here's what I found on the web, but it's always wrong, but Google is Google. - I know - Just be like, oh, I don't know, but here's a Google search for all the words that you just said. Even that, we would be somewhere.
- Yep. Yep. - But it can't. Okay, yeah, I feel like this just continues to be the Gemini experience. The thing with the dates and the screen is amazing. And there are just enough moments like that for me with even things like visual intelligence and a lot of these tools are getting good at that kind of thing where it's like, here's a list of stuff.
Can you add everything on this piece of paper to my grocery list? And it works and it feels like magic. But then for every one of those I have found three that it's like, this is actually easier than the thing that you did that works and it doesn't work. And I can't figure out why and it just makes me want to use the tool less and less. - [Alison] I know. Yeah. It feels like it does a good job when it has very specific parameters where like on the Ultra it does a good job with note summarization. I just was like, my kid was sick and I was trying to type out that note you make for yourself before you go to the pediatrician to be like, here's when symptoms started.
Blah, blah, blah, fevers. And it was all just kind of like blah. And I used the rewrite tool to make it make sense. - Oh that's neat. - And it did great
and it picked up on the fact that it was a child's illness progression and it kind of gave it a title like that. I was like, this is good, this is fine, you know? I wasn't asking it to go ask three other apps to do anything, but we're we're getting the handle on stuff like that. - [David] Yeah, that's something. I'll take that. So the other one on the S25 Ultra is the camera. And I think Samsung made, as far as I understand it, two trades on the camera.
It got rid of the 10X zoom and it added a 50 megapixel ultra wide lens. My immediate read of that is I'm very into one of those changes and I am very unhappy about the other one, but what's your experience? - [Alison] Yeah, the 10X was actually last year. So the S24 Ultra is when they did the swap. - Oh, okay. - Yeah. And they added the 5X and they're like, well, you can just do digital zoom Remosaic zoom to 10X.
- [David] Which is not correct, it's called cropping. Digital zoom is called cropping. Anyone who says otherwise is selling you something. - [Alison] Cropping without upscaling, which is something. - Sure. - Yeah. - But I do think, so I bring this up in part because I, for the first time this year, went from an iPhone Pro to an iPhone and so I lost the 5X zoom and I miss it terribly.
And I am consistently surprised at how often I miss the 5X zoom. And so I guess this is to some extent now a year old question, but do you miss the 10X, or does the 5X feel like it does the job for you? - [Alison] I miss it because I'm a sicko and I can see the difference. I think the difference is that you just amplify the fact that you're using a crappy little lens and you can see some of the aberrations from the lens more than you could see it with the 10X. - Interesting. Sure. - This is my theory. I can see a slight difference. Does this matter to most people? No, probably not at all.
- [David] Yeah, I mean, I guess from Samsung's perspective where it's like, okay, we can either add this very expensive thing that makes the phone bigger and all that stuff, or we can get rid of it and people can pinch with their fingers if they really want to. I guess I get that trade, but I absolutely unequivocally do not buy that they're the same thing, and they aren't, and Samsung is lying and should feel bad about itself. But tell me about the ultra-wide, because this seems like it's a good trade.
- [Alison] Yeah. Yeah. They just kind of upgraded it from, I believe a 12 megapixel to a 50 megapixel now. It's got a wider aperture, so it's an F1.9. - Oh, I like that. - Yeah.
- [David] So does that in theory mean that with a 50 megapixel ultra-wide you could shoot a lot more often in ultra-wide and then just crop as you need to? That's actually an interesting use case of you just shoot the most you can because you have more pixels to play with, but then like the, I don't know, the ultra-wides always get a little fisheye-ee for me. So maybe that's not a perfect solution. - [Alison] Yeah, I think you still get a little bit of that and even in kind of like dim light. The main camera is so much better for, yeah, getting freezing action and all that. But the ultra-wide, apples to apples with the previous ultra-wide, it definitely is better in low light. It'll complete a night mode exposure a little quicker than the previous one.
There's a little more detail. It's just kind of like check, check, check, all the things you would expect from a more modern, nice pixel-bin sensor. So it's, yeah, good. - Yeah, I'll take that. Okay, so the S25 Ultra, and I think we will reserve judgment in case one of the other S25s blows your mind.
But I think the story of these is going to be, they're very good phones. If you're in the market for a Galaxy phone, these are the best ones, but there's nothing here that's gonna blow your socks off or change your life forever. What I'm wondering is, is that just the story of 2025? Is this what we're in for? Because the thing that worries me is that this is supposed to be the year that AI does everything for all of our phones forever. And I think we can say with pretty strong confidence that that's not this year. It might happen someday.
I'm not willing to rule out that maybe someday AI will get very good. I think it's very unlikely that it's gonna happen this year. So what else are we in for this year? - [Alison] I think, yeah, it's gonna be a lot of, I think we're just in this head space of, we're so focused on the hardware launches. A phone is released, it does X, Y, and Z new things, and then the next year, new phone, you know? And we're in such a different space now of like, the hardware is just the less interesting thing, almost.
And it's about the software updates that are happening throughout the year. And Samsung especially is like, they put a lot of the AI in the software in previous phones, so it's even less important if you have an S24 and S25, presumably. So I think that's just gonna be an adjustment for all of us in just kind of how we think about these things, and even how we cover them and use them. 'Cause it's gonna be a lot more like, what does this phone do six months later that it didn't do when it came out? So, seeing things like Gemini getting better at a somewhat slow rate, but being able to do more for us and trying those things out is going to be like, that's gonna be my focus for the year, honestly. But in the other corner is the weird, the slim phone thing, which is just like, okay, we've reached a conclusion, I guess. And on one side, it's like the phone is here, phones look like this.
And then they've kind of doing a lateral move of like, what if a phone was really slim? - [David] Yeah. I'm into it, honestly. Any kind of new idea about what a phone should look like, I am psyched about right now. Where's your head on foldables and flippables coming into this year? I mean, Samsung kind of teased the tri-fold thing. I think in that, we saw an outline, and that's about all we saw. But we've been on the show for a while talking about, is this the time these things are gonna come mainstream? And I do think it's possible to gin up some real excitement about one of those this year, specifically because there is not a ton of wild, other cool stuff coming that's gonna blow people's minds. Apple Intelligence is not going to convince hundreds of millions of people to run out and get new iPhones.
But does that mean there is potential for Google or Samsung or somebody to do the flip phone thing well enough to pull people in? Could this be the year that these things start to really take off, or am I just wishful thinking? - [Alison] I don't know. I feel like I've kind of said that for the past three years, where I'm like, "I don't know, this could be the year." And I just have so many interactions with people when I'm carrying a folding phone or one of the flip phones.
So many people will be like, "Oh, that's that Samsung phone or a Google phone." They're like, "I almost bought that, but then I just got the whatever, regular slab phone." I think there's interest, but there's still a real hesitation from people, 'cause I kind of chalk it up to durability. I know someone who has the third-generation Samsung Flip and that thing doesn't look great. The inner screen is all peeled and gross.
I'm like, "Girl, you need to trade that in." But yeah, that's the kind of thing where I'm like, yeah, your phone just has to take so much abuse throughout the day and I think there's a certain person who's willing to be like, "Yeah, I want all the benefits of this and I'm willing to accept the risks of the inner screen might do something wonky." I don't know how the manufacturers really address that.
I think they've been pushing forward as much as they can with the waterproofing, dust-proofing? Is that even possible with a hinge? I think they mitigate it as much as they can and they've kind of been beefing up their repair programs. Samsung, if you buy their CarePlus plan, they'll just repair the inner screen as many times as you want for free. - That's cool. - For not extra money. - [David] But never a great sign that that's a thing they have to offer, though.
- To your point. - I know, yeah. - Yeah. - Yeah, they weren't exactly shouting that from the rooftops either. - Ask a few questions. - Yeah, I will say, the Z Flip6 has appeared in the wild around me more than I would've expected.
And I think part of it is I notice every one of them because it's so different looking. But they're out there. I saw one in a coffee shop this morning. It was just a person sitting there eating a bacon, egg, and cheese, and they had a flip phone on the table. - Oh wow. - And I was just like,
"Let's go." - I love that. - [David] They were almost certainly an Amazon employee, 'cause I was at HQ2 at this coffee shop. So make of that what you will. But I think if it's gonna be anything this year, there might be a folding phone that gets closer.
I have no particular reason to bet on that, but it feels like that is pushing towards being the right size and shape faster than the foldable phones are. And I say that the Pixel 9 Pro Fold, stupid name, kicks ass. It's a great phone. - Yeah, yeah. - [David] There's so many good things about it. But the problem with those is they're still $1,800. And so, I wouldn't be shocked to see Samsung come out and try to knock that price down substantially.
But also, the fact that these phones now didn't go down substantially doesn't necessarily give me great faith that that's gonna come. - [Alison] I know, and they've been so stagnant on the Fold. It's like, every year for the past three years has been like, "Well, it's two millimeters wider." - Right. - This is it. - [David] Very slowly pulling at the edges of the thing. Yeah. - They're just stretching it
a little bit. - Yeah. - [Alison] I don't know. That's the only thing that's making me pessimistic about the foldables, particularly Samsung's foldables.
I haven't seen, I don't know. Is there really a fire there to go out and capture the market for it or are they just kinda like, "Eh, I don't know. People aren't buying these things like we thought they would?" - It sure seems like it's that, but I think there is a chicken and egg thing going on there. Last question and then I'll let you go. If there was going to be one phone company that shocks us this year, does something no one would've expected, who would you bet it's gonna be? - [Alison] I feel, wow, I feel like the wild card is nothing.
- [David] That's what I was gonna say too. - [Alison] Yeah. Okay. Because they've been kind of not on the radar for a minute. I'm like, what might they be doing? I feel like it's a company with enough interesting ideas and enough kind of like, they've established connections in supply chains and I think maybe they're gonna be in a place to flex a little bit. I would be really interested.
I don't have any specific idea of what that could be. It just sort of feels like, yeah, they could do something. - Yeah, yeah, Carl Pei, Nothing's CEO, has has always said that they did not exist to be a phone company. And it does seem like they're not a real competitor in this space yet next to Apple and Samsung, but like you said, they're established.
That company has proven they can do the thing. And I kind of hope this is the year that they're like, "Okay, here are our actual ideas." - Yeah. - I'm with you. I think if anybody's gonna do it in a way that is cool and exciting, I would bet on Nothing. I have high hopes on that one.
- Yeah. - All right, Allison, thank you as always. There's gonna be so many more, folks. It's MWC soon. Are you going to MWC? - Yeah. Yeah. I am booked. I'm ready for some Harman and phones.
- [David] That is the one and only thing I miss about MWC, is the Harman. - It's a good thing. - Well, we're gonna have to hang while you're in Barcelona, but thank you as always. It's great to see you. - All right, thank you. - [David] All right, we gotta take a break and then we're gonna come back, talk about China. We'll be right back.
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Terms and conditions apply. All right, we're back. So one of the questions that has been swirling really in the last few weeks, but also over the last few years, is this question about how we should think about China's role on the internet. As we've talked about the TikTok ban, we've talked kind of ad nauseum about this idea of the Chinese government being able to get our personal data from TikTok and do something with it. Then people left TikTok and went to RedNote, which is an app that is much more straightforwardly connected to China.
There have been all these questions about DeepSeek's connection to China and how we should think about using an AI model from China, or an AI model from a company from China. This question of what we should be thinking about China, not like big macro politically, but as people on the internet, is a thing that I have struggled with and would love to have somebody just talk me through. So that's what we're gonna try and do in the next little while here. I asked Cooper Quentin, who's a senior staff technologist at the EFF, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, to come on and just walk me through how he thinks about all of this. Cooper does things like help activists think about security training and he works with nonprofits and vulnerable populations all thinking about how to operate online in a safe and productive and private and useful way. And he's also somebody who's been thinking about China specifically a lot for a long time.
And he is just going to walk me through how we're supposed to think about all of this, how it should weigh on our decisions about what we use and what data we reveal and whether we want TikTok to be banned or sold or whatever. We're just gonna try to make sense of it all. So let's just dive in. Cooper, welcome to the show.
So, I guess maybe the easiest place to start is like, let's just lay the land a little bit in terms of what are you thinking about and researching and talking to folks about right now as it pertains to China in particular, but also just kind of the internet more broadly? What's your angle on this space right now? - [Cooper] So for me, there's two topics that I'm interested in and that I think both come up when we're talking about this. One is surveillance capitalism and this sort of industry of data brokers and selling your data and all of this industry that the internet has really been built on, right? And how your data flows and whether you have control of it and what can be done with that, right? And there's some really interesting things in there like law enforcement buying access to that data so that they don't have to deal with pesky things like warrants, right? So that's all really interesting to me. The other thing that I've studied pretty extensively in my time at EFF is malware and spyware, specifically the types of spyware that are used to spy on activists, journalists, human rights defenders, and people who are trying to exercise free expression and trying to improve their lives and fight against their governments, or governments of countries which they used to be a part of oftentimes, right? Oftentimes these are people who have left their countries for fear of oppression and are still though doing the work of fighting against corruption in the country that they left. And so, in the conversations around TikTok and around RedBook and around DeepSeek, I see echoes of all of these topics.
- [David] Interesting. How so? What echoes are you seeing right now? - [Cooper] So, go back a little bit, right? I think that the reaction to TikTok going away and people starting to join Little Red Book, right, is really funny. - [David] The fact that RedNote is actually technically called Little Red Book is one of my favorite discoveries of 2025.
Enjoyed that to no end. It is the funniest and most direct, beyond parody thing we could have possibly done in that moment. - [Cooper] Should we break that down? Because I think it's really interesting. - Sure, please. - Little Red Book is Mao's Little Red Book. This was one of the main tracks of Maoism that was given out to people in revolutionary China, right? It'd be like calling an American social network the Federalist Papers or something like that, right? It's so on the nose, right? This is an application of the CCP, right? Absolutely, 100%, we're not pretending otherwise, right? But the reaction to me was so funny.
It's such a prototypical reaction of a 13-year-old, right? Well, we're gonna have to ban TikTok because we don't want your data going to China and there's some serious privacy issues and national security issues here. And people's reaction was, "Oh, you don't want me to like China? You don't want me to like China? Guess what? I love China. I am gonna give China all my data. I am mailing a copy of my birth certificate to Xi Jinping right now." And I saw videos of people pretending to put data in an envelope and mail it to the Chinese government.
And it's a really funny reaction because people are like, "Yeah, I know, I know that they're taking all my data. I don't care. Why should I care? You took all my data anyway. US companies took all my data.
Meta took all my data, right? Twitter took all my data. The US government has all my data and is constantly being leaked, so why do I care if China has it? And in fact, because you don't like that, it makes me wanna do it even more, right?" And it's so interesting to me. - [David] I'm forever somewhat compelled by that argument.
I think it's so easy in this time that we live in to fall into that particular brand of nihilism, which is like, look, if China wants to know information about me, China has so many ways that are more efficient than developing a social network that like, I struggle with this personally of like, A, how much of this is sort of real threat versus potential, maybe possible several steps down the road threat, and what does it mean in a practical sense that someone in the Chinese government can theoretically find out what I watch on TikTok? Who cares? - Right. - [David] I sort of intellectually know that that's an argument that will lead only to ruin and trouble, but I kind of understand how people land there. - [Cooper] Yeah, definitely. I mean, it is a form of privacy nihilism, right? - Yeah, yeah. - At the end of the day. Absolutely, but it's understandable that people have come to privacy nihilism, right? We don't have anything that anybody can do in terms of laws, in terms of litigation.
There are no legal protections for people's data, right? Zero. Unless you happen to live in California, right? Where there's some okay privacy laws, right? That still don't seem to prevent this data from ending up in the hands of these corporations. It just means that you can go request your data and remove your data, which is better than nothing. - For sure. - But people,
I think it's understandable why people end up with this sort of privacy nihilism, right? And because we've accepted as, maybe accepted isn't the right word, but as a society, this is where we're at, right? You will give up your data in exchange for some kind of crappy services from Facebook and there's nothing you can do about it because if you wanna participate in society, you have to be on these kind of crappy services. - [David] So, how do you understand the difference between what it means to do that to a company like Google or Meta and doing that with a country or a government like the Chinese Communist Party? Are those meaningfully different things? I think we have a hard time talking about what China is and what that threat looks like and why that is dangerous in a way that having it in Google servers isn't, or is differently dangerous. How do you think through the difference there? - [Cooper] I always say it depends on your threat model, right? If you have family in China, if you have friends in China, right? Or if you, I don't know, work in national security, right? Or if your work is related to something that has historically been a target of Chinese espionage, right? Then that's one very specific threat model, right? Where the CCP actually should be in your threat model, right? You don't want to search for Taiwan or Tiananmen Square and have that come back to investigation of your family in China, right? And if you're in an industry that is the target of Chinese espionage, information that you give could be used for phishing or other sort of more targeted espionage attacks, right? - Right, phishing is a really interesting one, by the way.
I think I've heard a couple of folks mention that in this context in a way that I have actually found really instructive because that's a good example of things you know about what I watch on TikTok become ways in which to appear to be someone I know or have information about me that you can then use to get other more dangerous information about me. And I think like, - Sure. For sure. that to me is, 'cause it's like, if I'm not taking a picture of my bank account information and posting it on TikTok, the sort of direct threat there is lesser, but there's this data you can use to understand me better, which you can use to get other information out of me is like that's the kind of stuff I think people often fail to understand. - [Cooper] But it's still hard for me though, to see actually a meaningful difference, right? Because this data already exists anyway, right? Meta has this data, Google has this data, right? And so do a dozen data brokers, right? Journalists keep showing that you can get people's location in near real time just from the advertising bidstream, which is where when you are using an app or whatever and ads are showing up, people are bidding in real time on who gets to sell you ads. And there's data in there about your demographics, how old you are, what kind of phone you have, what your interests are, there's data about your location, right? All of this data is just flowing around the internet all the time and there's no reason that the CCP can't just get that data from that source, right? There's no reason that they can't get it by taking out ads in Meta, right? There's no reason they can't create a US cutout and make a partnership with Meta or with Google to get this data. So they can get it directly from Little Red Book or possibly from TikTok.
There are easier ways to get the data actually, right? The target audience for Little Red Book was not data collection of Americans, right? This was a kind of Pinterest-like application, kind of an intersection between Pinterest and TikTok, right? That was primarily targeted at women in China and people talking to relatives or whatever in China, right? This was targeted at Chinese people in China, right? So, there are other ways to get this data and it's all, none of it is good, to be clear. - [David] I was gonna say, you sound an awful lot like a privacy nihilist. - Right. No, yeah. It's so easy to go into privacy nihilism talking about this, right? - Yeah. - [Cooper] And I think people are correctly frustrated with Silicon Valley oligarchs and US surveillance capitalism, right? It's a bad industry that should not exist, right? This is not a good thing.
I don't think that trading in that for CCP surveillance is going to make anyone's lives meaningfully better, right? - Sure. - They are both bad. Two things can be bad, right? They are both bad in different ways, and in a lot of the same ways, right? In the end, the most useful, for 99% of people, the most lucrative use of this data for the CCP is going to be to sell it and sell advertisements off it, the same way that it is for Silicon Valley, right? Surveillance capitalism cuts both ways for both organizations, right? - [David] Yeah, so I guess if the way of thinking about it is it's definitely not a better choice to give that data to the CCP instead of to Google or Meta, is it a substantially worse choice to do that? Again, I think we should carve out the people who have, like you were saying, the sort of obvious threat models. I think there's a set of people who should think about all of this minute to minute and day to day more careful. - [Cooper] Right, right.
- [David] We can talk about those people, but I think for the people who ask you questions like, "Who cares? I have nothing to hide." Is it that different a trade? - [Cooper] I really don't think that it is. I don't see any good argument that it's that different of a trade, right? And what we need, and stop me if I'm jumping the gun here, but we need desperately federal privacy law. We desperately need federal laws that let us control our data, that let us stop our data from being sold, that let us actually have meaningful opt-in consent into who we give our data to, an understanding of what's being done with that data, and a private right of action to sue when companies misuse our data or take our data without our consent. This would go a long way to solving the problem of the CCP stealing people's data.
This would go a long way to solving the problem of Silicon Valley Surveillance Capitalism and Meta and Google stealing people's data, right? This would go a long way to solving the problem of the constant background noise of data breaches, right? And data being breached and then used in phishing campaigns and everything else, right? Data breaches are another angle. One could argue that Google and Meta have pretty good security teams and your data is safer from a data breach with them than it is in the hands of some of these Chinese apps, right? But I don't think that that's a strong argument because data breaches still happen all the time in the US, right? - Yeah. - [Cooper] There's all sorts of data breaches every day and even if Google and Meta themselves aren't getting breached yet, and I think on a long enough timeline, the probability approach is a hundred percent that there will be a data breach from one of these companies, right? But even if those haven't been data breached yet, they still have that data and they still sell it in the form of ad targeting, right? So it doesn't need to be breached when you can just buy it. - Right, so is it possible then that one reason to think about keeping this data in the United States is that in theory we live in a democracy that can in theory pass laws and that if we are able to regulate this, at least we can retroactively make some of this stuff better in a way that whatever you're dumping onto RedNote is gone and lost and there's nothing you can do about it? I feel like I just said 11 glass half full things in a row to get to that point, but is that at least an argument that sort of makes sense? - [Cooper] I think it's a very optimistic argument. - [David] Yeah, I would agree. Listen, I said theoretically a bunch of times.
- [Cooper] But yeah. I mean, certainly if we one day have a functioning Congress and certainly if we were ever to get any sort of federal privacy law, right? Domestic privacy law. So yeah, it is possible that that could apply to retroactively gather data about you. And I guess that is one reason. I mean, I think you yourself would admit it's not the most compelling reason, right? - [David] No, it's not. Yeah. - [Cooper] There's another compelling reason not to have any of these apps on your phone, which is just that, and the compelling reason is who do you trust to run code on your phone, right? Who do you trust to have control of your phone? And I think a lot of people will say, "I don't care if Meta or the CCP has control of my phone, right?" As a form of, again, privacy nihilism.
I don't know. I think each person needs to do a little bit of threat modeling and think about that, right? For whatever it's worth, Google and Facebook have pretty good security engineering, right? And people have looked at these apps, whereas some of these other apps don't have as good a security engineering necessarily, right? So, the possibility that you'll be putting an app on your phone which is poorly programmed and is not using things like HTTPS, is not using other kind of standard technologies and is therefore leaking your data and causing potential security issues, right? That is a thing that I think people should consider. - [David] Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
Can you walk me through how you think about kind of the average person's threat modeling? I mean, you mentioned kind of that first rung of people who have some direct threat in sort of the one degree removed from a real possible threat, but I think that's a big group of people. I think that's a bigger group of people than we often give it credit for, but that's not everybody. And I think there are lots of people who are not even sure how to think about those threat models. How do you talk people through how to think about that stuff? - [Cooper] Sure. Unfortunately, for a large percentage of Americans, the US government is a very big, obvious threat, right? Anybody who is an immigrant here, right? Anybody who is not a born citizen, but on a visa or a citizen through a green card or anybody who is trans, right? Or gender non-binary, right? The obvious threats from the American government, unfortunately, are much more real than any sort of perceived threats, future threats from the CCP.
But the way that I would kind of walk people through this is to first think about what you know, where you work, what access you have, that could be interesting to other people, right? For example, if you work in telecom, right? If you work at AT&T or Verizon or one of those fun companies, look at what just happened with Salt Typhoon, right? You are definitely a potential target for espionage. Anybody who works for the government is a potential target for espionage, right? Obviously people that have family there, we kind of went over that, right? That's a pretty obvious threat model there. I think some of the less obvious threat models are industry, right? Anybody in any industry can, obviously we target, we know that there've been espionage from China on the medical or the sort of drug industry in America, right? And aviation industry and things like that.
You might also not really care about that, right? You might look at your situation being paid poorly in the drug industry and be like, "What do I care if Chinese spies wanna use me to get to patent documents." - Fish away, friends. Yeah. - Right? They should pay me more if they want me to care about that. And that's pretty understandable.
The consequences for you could actually be pretty severe, right? Even if you were an unwilling participant. So I don't think it should be actually treated that cavalierly. Overall, I think that most people don't face that severe a threat of Chinese espionage. And if you do, I don't think it's going to significantly matter whether you use TikTok or Little Red Book or not, right? The CIA existed long before the internet did, right? Espionage can be done just fine without this sort of data. This sort of data does help. - Yeah. - For sure.
- [David] So you think there are people who could do a pretty rational threat modeling of their own life and come out of it and say, "I'm good, let the CCP have my data, it's gonna be fine?" Do you think there are people for whom that is a reasonable, rational outcome? - [Cooper] I don't think that is totally a reasonable. That is a rational outcome in the lens of privacy nihilism, right? - Sure. That's fair, yeah. - The rational outcome is I don't want anybody to have my data, right? My data is mine, I want to control it.
Nobody needs to know what I enjoy thinking about and looking at, right? That's actually just not data that needs to be out there because I don't trust the CCP to handle it any more responsibly than I trust Facebook to handle it, right? But for somebody who's looking at it through the lens of privacy nihilism and is saying like, "Facebook already has all my data anyway, how is it different?" I think that there's a large percentage of people out there for whom a reasonable answer is there's not a meaningful difference. - Yeah. That's totally fair. So, given that then, why do you think kind of societally, we talk about China and data privacy and security so differently than we talk about companies like Meta and Google? And I do think there are maybe more examples than often get credit for of us talking about them the same way, right? I think that the idea that these things are all collecting data they shouldn't be and using it in ways they shouldn't be is pretty true across the board. But even now, the way that people have worked themselves up about the personal data being shared on TikTok and collected by the CCP hit a fever pitch that I don't remember with Google or Facebook or really anything. Why do you think China is so different? - [Cooper] I mean, I think there's a couple of reasons.
One is sort of the openness of government surveillance in China, right? Government surveillance and control of speech is done openly in a way that makes Americans very uncomfortable with a strong First Amendment history, right? I think Americans are definitely uncomfortable anytime the government says, "You're not allowed to say these things," right? Anybody who's ideologically consistent should say that. Oftentimes people are comfortable with the government truncating speech they don't like, right? People want to make it legal to run over protestors on highways, right? Or not to seem partisan here, people aren't comfortable with people talking about guns, right? But for the most part, we tend to not want the government to curtail that, right? - For sure. - We also, I think as Americans, like our government surveillance kind of hidden from us, right? We don't really want it in your face, right? We're okay with police having license plate readers and we're okay with whatever the NSA has to do as long as it's to get the bad guys.
In China, the surveillance is very much more in the open, right? It's sort of targeted at everybody, right? And I think that that, even if you could argue surveillance in America is just as bad, right? Or is just as prevalent, at least, I think that there's a difference in how it feels to Americans. And then the other part of this is, of course, just good old fashioned xenophobia, right? China is scary. Just all this sort of old, well, you don't wanna be like China, right? This is America, this isn't China. We don't do things like that here. You don't want China to have your data, right? It's just kind of like, well, that's those other guys and you can trust us, but you can't trust them. Honestly, I think it's that, right? I think that's a big part of it.
At my most cynical, I'd say a big part of it is being mad that they're not getting a cut of the data, or a cut of the profits, right? We are okay with Facebook collecting this data and then China buying it from Facebook, or buying ad targeting or whatever from Facebook because US companies are getting a cut. We're not okay with it just going straight to China, right? That would be my most cynical take on it, right? We gotta get our cut. - [David] That's a good take. I hadn't heard that one, but that rings truer than I would like it to. - [Cooper] It does, and I hate it.
- It it does. I don't like it, but I'm gonna keep hearing that in my head for a while. Let's end on a positive and productive note here.
- Yes. - We wanna keep people out of privacy nihilism. I think it is an understandable place to go, but it is a place we should all do our best to avoid going. In the absence of these kind of big structural improvements you're talking about that I think we absolutely are in agreement ought to exist.
What can people do? What's a useful thing that people can do to start pushing this stuff at least a little bit in the right direction for themselves? - [Cooper] So, the privacy nihilism is so rampant right now. I think it's more rampant than I've ever seen it. And I'm gonna say clearly and unequivocally, privacy is not dead. You can still have privacy, right? Surveillance capitalism is not an inevitability, and there are lots of things you can do, right? Getting off of Meta products is a great place to start, right? Uninstall Instagram from your phone, get off Facebook, right? See if this improves your life, right? There are a lot of really interesting social networks which are popping up right now, which are not based on the model of surveillance capitalism and which are not owned by tech oligarchs, right? So things like Bluesky, things like Mastodon I think are really interesting models for what social media without surveillance capitalism could look like. And doing things like looking at what apps are on your phone, right? If you can uninstall most of the apps on your phone, and you can, right? That's a great place to start, right? Do I really need an app from my grocery store? No, no, I don't. And I don't need it and I don't want it, right? I think pushing back on those things, right? There are so many places now which want us to install an app just to get basic services and just kind of refusing to do that.
I'm with the Boomers on this one, man. No, I refuse to install an app to eat at a restaurant. I refuse to install an app to shop at CVS. - Yeah. - I will not be doing this. I think that that's a good place to start, right? Installing ad blockers.
There are some really good ad blockers out there. EFF makes one called Privacy Badger. There's another one called uBlock Origin. Those are both great ad blockers, right? If you're a bit more technical, there's a there project called Pi-hole that lets you set up your own sort of ad blocking DNS on your network. You can say like, this is something you can set up on your home network to prevent a lot of the tracking that goes on. If you wanna go even a little bit more down the rabbit hole, things like turning off location services on your phone, unless you're using it for navigation.
This is a great way to stop your location
2025-02-07 03:56
