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April 21, 2020

Privacy and Pandemics with Washington Post's Cat Zakrzewski

Privacy and Pandemics with Washington Post's Cat Zakrzewski

Cat Zakrzewski is a technology policy reporter for the Washington Post and authors the technology 202 newsletter. She previously reported for the Wall Street Journal, Pro Venture Capital. Her work has been published in Tech Crunch, the Boston Globe, USA Today and the Chicago Sun Times.

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Transcript

Scott Wallsten: Hi and welcome back to think minimum. Today is Wednesday, April 15th, 2020 and I’m Scott Walston, president and senior fellow at the technology policy Institute. I’m with my colleague TPI senior fellow, Sarah Oh. And today we’re delighted to have as our guest, Cat Zakrzewski is a technology policy reporter for the Washington Post and all parts of the Technology 202 Newsletter. She previously reported for the Wall Street Journal Pro Venture Capital. Her work has been published in Tech Crunch, the Boston Globe, USA Today and the Chicago Sun Times. Thanks for joining us, Cat.


Cat Zakrzewski: Thanks for having me on the show, Scott. 

Wallsten: I’m a big fan of your Tech 202 newsletter. It has been a ton of work to get it off the ground.

Zakrzewski: Thanks. It’s been an amazing time to be writing about tech policy.

Wallsten: Yeah. Lots of things we hadn’t expected. And in this morning’s Tech 202 you write about the location tools, location tracking tools that Google, Facebook and Apple have released showing how mobility has changed since the coronavirus hit and after governors began closing businesses and restricting movements. So tell us a little bit about what you’ve learned about those efforts and what you think about whether we’re moving towards a test and trace system.

Zakrzewski: It’s really a fascinating time because I think there’s just a mad rush right now in Silicon Valley to figure out how these companies can work with the federal government, provide data that would be useful in tracking the efficacy of social distancing efforts and later possibly restarting the economy. But at the same time thinking about the privacy implications of all of this. For the past few years we’ve really been in a position where Washington has been really closely scrutinizing what a lot of the tech companies are doing on the privacy front and thinking about new privacy laws. And so all of these issues are kind of coming to a head right now when we think about the response to the Corona virus. And what we wrote about this morning is the newest addition, which is Apple released a tool yesterday that basically allows public officials to look at the Apple maps requests of various cities and countries around the world.

So by looking at that data you can say, okay, in Washington D C you know, driving direction requests are down significantly. And so you could take that as an indicator as people are driving less and you could look at how do they compare from city to city and get a sense of how effective are these different measures. And it’s been really interesting to see all of these companies try to make data like this available, but with different flavors. You know, the first really roll this out a few weeks ago was Google when they started to make some of the data that they usually use for Google maps to measure if a restaurant or a store is busy, available to public officials to see how busy is the grocery store or how busy is a pharmacy. And so we’re really seeing these tools that, you know, many of us use every day and even before this pandemic be reused and re-imagined a new ways to address the coronavirus.

Wallsten: Do you see, have you heard of public officials using these tools yet?

Zakrzewski: No. I mentioned in the newsletter I was, I just happened to be tuning into a press conference, in Philadelphia, which is my hometown and where a lot of my family members are healthcare workers. And I was surprised to hear, you know, during that conference some of the public officials talking about looking at the Google data and measuring how they’re using, how Philadelphia is social distancing measures were in comparison to other cities. And you know what the official set in Philly was that we’re doing a good job but we could be doing better based on looking at other cities and he gave them a B plus. And so it’s just kind of a way for public officials to measure how effective their languages, their messaging, what you know, I think we’re all looking out for as reporters is as we’re seeing policymakers make decisions, you know, in some States they’ve decided, okay, we’re going to completely shut down like beaches and boardwalks in New Jersey or you know, here in D C to shut down the fish market the on the other day. What we’re going to be watching is how many of those decisions are being made based on, you know, trends from Google and other tech companies like Facebook as well.

Wallsten: So what are the things you mentioned as was privacy concerns and the companies have been careful to mention that this is aggregated data and so you can’t follow a particular person, but that kind of privacy protection may not be as easy when we’re talking about tracking people, if that’s a direction that we want to go in Do you find them talking about this issue or thinking about privacy differently than they did a couple of months ago?

Zakrzewski: You know, that’s an interesting question. I think, you know, I’m hearing a lot of openness from policy makers to consider all the options on the table. I mean, no one lawmaker who I’ve talked to a lot about all of this is Ro Khanna whose home district is Silicon Valley. And so many of the employees at these companies live in his district. And so he’s been thinking about this a lot because you know, he put out a privacy bill of rights more than a year ago now probably. And is also kind of thinking about how tech could be part of the solution and in the coronavirus spite. And so I think the one thing I will say is as the companies have unveiled these various initiatives, we have seen particularly democratic lawmakers on the Hill already kind of step up, write letters, ask them questions for more information on these services. So I do think there is certainly an interest and a demand for it in Washington. It seems like, from what I’ve heard, particularly in the public health agencies in the white house, but at the same time, given the debates that we’ve been having over the past few years about Facebook, about data breaches, about a lot of these issues related to privacy, I do think we’ll see lawmakers try to exert some oversight of these technologies as they roll out. But again, you know, when you look at the U S response to the Corona virus, so much of it as you might’ve seen in President Trump’s news conference yesterday is being left up to the corporations themselves. So you have these major multinational companies like Facebook, Google, Apple, making huge decisions that affect each of us without a lot of direction from government and you know really that have implications all over the world because we have to remember what Facebook and Google do in the U S you know, it doesn’t happen in a vacuum. They have customers everywhere.

Wallsten: What would be a good alternative here in the U S, I mean you mentioned the press conferences and you know those have experts like the CEO of My Pillow at it. What kind of government oversight should we have right now that can do this in an intelligent way?

Zakrzewski: That’s a really good question and I think it’s going to be a big challenge for there to be intelligent government oversight right now with the restrictions on Congress convening. I think one of the interesting things we saw about a week ago now was because you can’t have a traditional Capitol Hill hearing right now where everyone’s in the same room and Congress is on recess at the moment. There was actually a paper hearing on these ideas around location tracking and how big data could be applied to the fight against a coronavirus. So I think we’ll see lawmakers continue to experiment with that. I mean how much can they do over letters, sending request document requests to the companies. But you know, at the same time, I think one of the biggest challenges that we’re going to see in this crisis is just how many different directions Congress is being pulled in at the moment. Obviously, you know, the tech piece of this is just one piece of this broader response. And I think a big challenge will be ensuring that you know enough people are paying attention to this because I’ve talked to a lot of privacy experts who worry that they see a lot of parallels between the place we’re in right now and what happened after nine 11 and just how there can sometimes be a rush to respond to a crisis without thinking of some of the long-term effects that might have on privacy

Wallsten: How would do people who are concerned about privacy think we should move forward?

Zakrzewski: So I think there’s a couple of different proposals that are gaining traction. I mean, one, you know, approach that has been popular among privacy efforts is what we’ve seen the companies doing on Bluetooth tracking. I mean there’s still concerns, but I think when you’re looking at efforts that other countries have done with GPS location data, using Bluetooth proximity tracing seems like a much preferable option from a privacy perspective. And so that’s something that certainly I’ve heard some tepid support from privacy advocates. But you know, as we wrote in the newsletter yesterday, there’s still a lot of questions about the efficacy of that technology and how it would be rolled out to ensure that that privacy is there.

Wallsten: Right. I guess one of the questions is whether it would work if we have opt in or people somehow have to be required to do that and if that’s the kind of thing we would stand for.

Zakrzewski: Yeah, that’s a really good point. Right now, the most ambitious promising Bluetooth contact tracing I have heard is this partnership between Apple and Google. And they are very adamant that their initiative would be opt in. They have said that they will not allow governments to use the technology if they try to make it compulsory. But at the same time there’s a big question we’ve seen there are so many times where maybe it’s not the government is ordering you to do this, but we as consumers feel like we don’t have a lot of choice over the tech we use. So one of the issues privacy advocates raised with me with these types of opt-ins services from Google and Apple is well so maybe the government isn’t an ordering everyone to do that. And that’s probably something that we would be uncomfortable with and would raise a lot of thorny constitutional questions in the U S but you know what, if the Washington post says to me, okay you have to use this program and show us that you haven’t come into contact with anyone if you want to come into the office?

And  I think about, yes, maybe the government wouldn’t be forcing people to opt in, but would there be a scenario where companies, schools, even if a Trader Joe’s said, Hey, to come into our store and shop, you need to show that you’re in the clear on this app. I think that’s one of the things that privacy advocates are really concerned about. And you know, people are just still sorting out because they’re, like I’ve said in the newsletter, we really haven’t heard a lot from particularly the U S government about how they’re planning to use this technology. And what type of app they’re trying to build with it. And so a lot remains to be seen about how it’d be rolled out.

Wallsten: Do you think this is causing policymakers to more explicitly think about tradeoffs in ways that they haven’t before or even let’s say people either do tend to be strongly on one side of the issue or another? Do you see people thinking harder about costs and benefits of different approaches?

Zakrzewski: I think so. I mean one of the things that was really interesting to me was, you know, you’re a member of our Technology 202 network, our regular survey of tech experts. And a couple of weeks ago we did a survey asking people about whether the U S government should use location data in its efforts to fight the coronavirus. And that is a group that really spans the political spectrums, spans industry and government. And there’s a lot of people that, you know, I kind of usually can expect what kind of an answer that they might give to some of the questions just based on their policy positions and their lives. And you know, we saw that people had really mixed response and, and I feel like a lot of people, you know, really caveated their answers there. They would say, well yes they should, but here’s like a long list of privacy protections that should be in place or no they shouldn’t. But like here are some alternatives that we should consider. So yeah, I think definitely this is an issue that there’s not black and white answers on.  There’s a lot of gray areas here and there’s a lot of questions about, you know, just how can you maybe do this in a measured way. Like the contact tracing, like Bluetooth is a good example of finding ways that, okay, we’re, we’re working on this thinking about privacy but, but then that comes with other tradeoffs related to efficacy and rolling it out.

Sarah Oh: We had a question about telemedicine too. I think HIPAA rules are being relaxed and state rules like borders for doctors are being relaxed as well. Have you heard an openness to rethinking about health privacy rules in particular? Not just tech but the health side?

Zakrzewski: Yeah. So to be honest, my colleagues on the health team have been spending more time on this area than I have. But I have a little bit about just how this has really been a turning point for telemedicine. I mean, so many of us who previously would have gone to a doctor for a simple appointment or maybe seeing now that we can’t do that, how easy it can be to use these services. And certainly, I think there’s going to be a lot of interest from the healthcare field in how to deliver these more easily to people. I mean, one of the interesting things that is raising some security red flags right now is the doctors are able to use consumer services like FaceTime and Google duo to reach out to consumers. And you know, while there are a lot of questions about how that will work long-term and if there are security issues. I think it’s very possible if we don’t see major breaches or issues come up during this crisis, maybe people and lawmakers would get more comfortable with the idea of having some of these health services over FaceTime and other consumer apps. One of the things that’s come up with telemedicine so much that I hear when I talk to healthcare professionals and family is just how much friction there can be for the user with using some of these [inaudible] apps and because of HIPAA. I think there will certainly be a change in sentiment about the importance of getting these services at home and that could certainly push the public policy conversation long term.

Oh: Yeah, at least from my point of view, HIPAA is important especially for, you know, health privacy concerns. But if you really want to lower the costs of getting a doctor to talk to somebody who needs health services, like just flip on FaceTime. And the same thing with like wearables, like the temperature measurements on your Apple watch or other kinds of technologies like that. So, I don’t know what you think about where Congress is going in terms of tech privacy.

Zakrzewski: Yeah, I think it’s going to be a really interesting issue when he immediate threat of the pandemic settles down and we get back to the privacy debate in Washington because it felt like for a while there was so much momentum, especially as states were increasingly passing privacy laws to pass some sort of a federal national privacy law. I don’t think that that goes away after this. I think it’s on pause while the country deals with the crisis at hand. And I think certainly though it could shift aspects of this debate when Congress does get back to it. Healthcare is certainly an interesting issue. And you know, I think there will be new questions about big data and AI and if we do see that some of this tech that we’ve been discussing earlier in the podcast is useful in responding to this crisis, does that change at all about how law makers are thinking about these regulations is something that we’ll definitely be tracking.

Wallsten: Maybe this is a naive question, but do you see people rethinking their priors or does everybody see in the Corona virus proof of what they already believed?

Zakrzewski: I was really interested in some of the answers that I got to that network poll that we put on the survey that we put out just because I do think there were some people who I expected who usually come down very hawkish on privacy. You know, some people in their background responses to me talked about their own personal experiences with the coronavirus and, and so I think this is one of those things where everyone’s going to be impacted by this personally. You look at the numbers and the news, you know, we’re all going to know someone unfortunately who [suffered] from this disease and so that may, you know, make this more personal and change how people are thinking about what the role of tech should be in a response to this. I think this will be in a lot of ways, a major turning point that we look back on in tech policy and will shape how we, how the U S writes those regulations moving forward. Because when you look at the course of history these big crises like 9-11 and the financial crisis had so much influence on where the tech debate was in 2020. This certainly will be no different

Wallsten: [Inaudible] we could probably talk about privacy all day often. Actually we do that. Let’s move on to a different topic. Content moderation, which is also something you’ve written about in the past. There’s always a debate of whether platforms should err on the side of taking down things that lots of people might think should stay up or should they err on the side of leaving things up that people think should come down. But in the case of the coronavirus, they seem like they’ve aggressively tried to take down misinformation. And it seems like everyone, everyone is a strong word, but people will agree that that was the right, the three towards the right thing to do. If they ended up taking down things that shouldn’t come down, that was the right error. But how do policymakers think about the platforms efforts to do that? Do they think it’s been successful and how is that going to affect this debate afterwards? Do policymakers now think, oh, these platforms were just lying to us about how hard it was?

Zakrzewski: That’s a really good question. I mean, I think the is one of the biggest differences we’ve seen this time is just how forcefully they immediately came out and said, we’re going to have really strict policies on coronavirus misinformation. You know, if you think about how long it took for that to get to that place on foreign election interference after 2016 or even just how long it was kind of an early problem for them. But in the early days, how they came around to developing their policies on terrorism. This was just a total shift where we saw pretty urgent action from, at least Facebook, Google and Twitter to adopt strict policies on this. I think one of the things lawmakers are just watching to see how effective they are at enforcing these policies. Overall, it seems like they’re doing a pretty good job, but you know, you have to remember they’re also doing this in a much more limited way because many of the companies had to send home their content moderators.

Right now, they were relying a lot more on AI. And I do think there will be a lot of questions, especially as we get closer to the 2020 election about, Oh, okay, so you could figure out how to take this down with coronavirus but, but why can’t you with politics, I mean I think the questions will just be are things in some ways with health misinformation or things like selling masks are those things a little bit more cut and dry than some of the political misinformation that we otherwise see? And so certainly though it’s going to be part of the debate and I think it will influence how lawmakers look at the company’s actions in the future.

Wallsten: Do you think, sort of thinking long term, is it part of the trend that we are increasingly willing to accept centralized authority and decisions on what we can and can’t do? I mean, with the content moderation, they’re deciding what’s appropriate and what’s not. And that seems like the right thing to do for right now. But we’re seeing that in, I think, almost every part of our day to day behavior. Is this something that’s going that’s likely to stay? Do policymakers see this as ways to, as a way to be more active, in the economy, whether they think it’s for good or not, or will all of this sort of go away as we’ve learned to deal with us?

Zakrzewski: That’s a really interesting question. I think it depends on a lot of factors, particularly who is in the White House in 2021 may have a big influence on that. But yeah, I mean certainly we’re seeing a greater centralization of power, whether it’s with the companies. I mean, I think one of the interesting things right now when we talk about power centralizing and the beat that I cover is just what’s going to happen in the tech industry. We’re seeing the strain that this is putting on many startups and smaller companies right now. You know, there’s an interesting story that we included a link to in Tech 202 today from the New York times about ad revenue for instance, and like Facebook and Google are going to see a major hit to their ad revenue, but smaller companies that rely on digital advertising like Yelp and really rely heavily on local ads. I think they’ll see that even more. And so you know, one of the outcomes that we could see from the economic hit of the coronavirus I think is a greater centralization of power and some of the big players and less competition from smaller upstarts that might be more vulnerable to some of the economic headwinds right now. And so, I think that will certainly influence our thinking on power in the economy moving forward.

Wallsten: That’s a really interesting point, especially about startups and the struggles that they’re having, but also it’s a privacy has affected startups too. And I think we’ve seen some evidence of how important scale is these platforms, but also where other platforms were able to scale up even though they weren’t [inaudible] Zoom being the obvious example, but then they have all these privacy problems and it sort of made, this isn’t quite as related to the coronavirus but TikTok tock came, you know, blew past Facebook and Instagram. But people worry about it’s from China and has security issues. Are these privacy concerns. So I guess are privacy concerns risking blocking competition in these things that we hear about?

Zakrzewski: That’s a great question. And it’s something I know the Department of Justice is really thinking about carefully as they conduct this larger antitrust review. And certainly it’s something that David Cicilline in the House who’s also conducting an investigation. They’ve had hearings where this very issue comes up because yes, I think these two issues of privacy and competition, our intention a lot of the time, you know, it’s hard to say, yes, you can make the argument from a competition standpoint that Facebook and Google and a lot of these companies have more resources just spend on privacy and security. So maybe they are more private and secure than a service like zoom. But you know, there’s also the counter argument to that when you look at privacy and security as maybe an issue of consumer harm and the competition debate and you know, could the privacy and security measures at Facebook and Google be even better if there are more competition in the sector right now. You know, if you’re the top company you might not be pushed to innovate as much as you could on that front. And so I think that’s a question there as well. So it’s a really kind of an interesting point where yes, I do think sometimes those ideas are in tension, but they’re also so interrelated in this debate.

Wallsten: So another issue that was big before this started, and it seems to have disappeared maybe because all we can focus on as coronavirus is 5G and, in some ways it’s nice to have a break from that discussion. But the biggest part of that before it was focused on China and the components for 5g that come from Huawei and ZTE. What’s happened to that debate? It’s not on the front pages, but are policymakers still worried about it and has coronavirus changed the nature of the debate, particularly with increased suspicion of the Chinese government and what it may have not told us about the virus?

Zakrzewski: It’s a really good question. To be completely honest, I have not talked to policy makers in recent weeks about 5G just because of all the attention on the coronavirus and the related issues, but talking to other people, I have heard a lot of people just raise the issue that this entire crisis could really increase what was already in some ways a growing sense of nationalism in the U S tensions with China and yes, I do think that that could have major impacts on Huawei and other Chinese component makers. I think what will be interesting to see is…this certainly this doesn’t help with the tensions in the U S. One thing, I’m curious like what does this mean in Europe? Will we see similar sentiment between Europe and China post virus because it seemed like some of the governments there were more willing to use Huawei components as they were building their networks.

Wallsten: Right. At the same time, China has been sending equipment to places and it’s great that they’re doing that of course, but it also might buy them some friends.

Zakrzewski: Yeah. I think once the dust settles a little bit, it’ll be really interesting to see where the chips fall on that. But just talking to experts, people who are close watchers of this space and that they feel certainly that this will only further deteriorate some of the tensions we’ve been seeing between the U S and China on tech issues.

Wallsten: So probably the biggest issue we’d be talking about it for warrant for the coronavirus would be the election. And we haven’t heard much about tech policy platforms yet. And maybe that’s fair. It’s early. But have you heard anything about what Joe Biden’s tech platform might be and who his tech advisors would be? Will we see players from the Obama administration being making reappearances?

Zakrzewski: It’s a really interesting question and again, I’m sorry, it’s just one that I haven’t been monitoring as closely as we’ve shifted all of our resources toward covering the virus. But I think it would be very interesting to see that.  I was tracking prior, right where a lot of the support in the Valley was moving among the candidates. I’m interested to see a lot of people who were supporters of Mike Bloomberg kind of talked about how possible that he could pick up a lot of supporters in the tech industry. It was interesting a little bit earlier in this race on how divided a lot of people were working in the industry where I expected more of the former Obama people to perhaps come out more emotionally for Joe Biden. But we saw a lot of them scattered between the Buttigieg camp and the Warren camp and Sanders.

I think the question is how much all of those people will coalesce behind Biden and also just how much bandwidth a lot of them have to focus on the campaign issues right now because we have seen a lot of the most civically minded engaged people in the Valley. A lot of former Obama administration people working on other types of public private initiatives. You know we’ve written about the U S digital response, which is a bunch of former Obama administration officials and tech and players who are essentially trying to match tech workers with various state and local governments. There’s another effort kind of spinning off of that that’s working on sourcing PPE. So one of the interesting things, and I think we’ll have to watch right now is how much of that tech support the Biden campaign is going to be able to pick up while people are so focused on many of these other initiatives.

Wallsten: You said you haven’t been focusing much on the campaign. Do you think from what you’ve seen, has Biden been doing a decent job at using technology to campaign basically from his house? 

Zakrzewski: So, I think it’s really been a challenge for him. My colleagues who closely cover Biden at the post had a story a little while ago just about like, you know, the general awkwardness we’re all dealing with, with trying to use Zoom to just do our work and do our jobs. Like the added challenges there when you’re doing that to run a presidential campaign. And I think it’s a real challenge when you know, you have president Trump blocking out, whether it’s in front of the briefing room or in the Rose guard and like yesterday, every night on primetime television with a big audience and you have Biden trying to do, you know, virtual campaign rallies via Zoom and other services. There’s a big disconnect in the quality there. And you know what we saw too early in the race, like I don’t think when you looked at the democratic field, you could ever really make the argument that Joe Biden had the strongest tech skills out of that, right?

Instead of, you know, they weren’t really doing a lot of new and innovative things on the tech front and now that’s going to be a huge challenge because you have a candidate whose main skill I think is often being like one-on-one with people in rooms and at rallies. Now trying to mount this campaign digitally. I think it’s going to be a big challenge. But also, you know, I think we’ll see some really interesting new political tech come out of this campaign cycle just because whether it’s at the presidential level, but also certainly at the congressional or local level, the candidates across the board are going to have to experiment with new ways to get in touch with voters. Because I have it look so bad, even the summer we won’t be able to have the typical campaign events that we normally would see

Oh: I have read that political ads are becoming much cheaper online because demand has just dropped from the commercial sector. I don’t know if that will affect political adds but a 20 cent link a month ago is probably 2 cents now. So maybe there will be more political ads? 

Zakrzewski: Yeah, it’s very interesting and if ad prices come down and that democratizes access so you know candidates to might not be the incumbents or have as much of the name recognition or big donors could come in and make big ad buys on social networks. I think that would be an interesting trend to watch. I think just the thing that I’m curious about too is just how much the candidates are able to raise right now too and how much political donations are going to fall off just with the broader issues in the economy.

Wallsten: Do we have any evidence about that yet or is it too early for any FEC reporting?

Zakrzewski: I personally haven’t seen any and I would imagine it would be too early just because of the reports coming in on a quarterly basis, but you know it’s definitely something I had to keep an eye on and we’ll have a big impact on how these candidates are spending on online ads.

Wallsten: Let’s see. We’re running out of time, but before we finish, I’d like to ask about your career. How did you get into tech into covering tech in the first place?

Zakrzewski: So I was very lucky. I had the opportunity to actually intern at tech crunch when I was in journalism school and so I was always the one who was really interested in technology, grew up kind of loving to play around with computers and later iPods and things like that, but basically really got interested in these issues around the time of the Snowden revelations and started reading a lot more about national security and privacy. And so then was able to do some stories on that in journalism classes in college and then eventually got a position with tech crunch as a summer intern. And so I ended up out in San Francisco. It was summer of 2014 and basically it was peak tech boom, you know, I was going to all these different startup accelerator events. It was just a really fascinating time to observe the industry. And right after I interned in San Francisco with tech crunch, actually came to DC and did a fellowship with the Boston globe and was writing about politics here. It was a lot of the issues here were then around surveillance reform, data breaches, some of those issues were on the agenda. And so I got really interested there. And so that’s kind of how I first became interested in this beat. And I just think it’s fascinating to see how so many of the tensions that we talk about all the time and politics are playing out in new ways with tech, particularly that these questions between safety and privacy always and you know, certainly they, they really come to a head with the coronavirus crisis.

Wallsten: Okay. So it sounds like also, you mean you were starting out, you know, as journalism itself was kind of not collapsing but under a lot of stress to say the least. Was it different in tech coverage?

Zakrzewski: It really was. I mean that was one of the fascinating things to watch. I think, you know, when I first started in journalism school, I really thought I wanted to be a Metro newspaper reporter. And when I interned sometimes I was doing like cops and homicide reporting actually that summer and kind of thought that was where my career would go at least early on. But you know, once I saw what was happening with tech crunch and later when I moved to San Francisco to work with the Wall Street Journal, there was really a boom in tech reporting because I think there was this realization between, you know, 2014 to 2016 of just how much power these companies were amassing and really a shift from how tech was covered. I mean, when I think about how startups were covered in 2014 when I first started and it was kind of like, Hey, let’s check out this new app. And there’s all these fun things to download online to where we are now, where it’s really a lot more like political reporting because what a lot of journalists are doing right now with the tech companies is accountability reporting. And I think that’s a shift that really happened right around the time that I was starting out.

Wallsten: Interesting. Some of these are ended up being huge stories. I mean, five years ago, if we would have thought about a controversy about a cloud computing contract, nobody would have had any idea what that even meant. Right. So I think we should wrap up now. So thank you so much for joining us. This was really interesting. We really appreciate your time.

Zakrzewski: Thank you so much for having me on the podcast