All language subtitles for The Digital Age

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the speakers, not the producers.

This documentary is for educational use only.

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Every click you make, every purchase...

every movement tracked, stored and analysed...

right now, your data is already being harvested.

Your spending habits, your location, your online behaviour.

Feeding algorithms that predict and manipulate your actions.

But the more data that's collected, the greater

the risk.

The moment this data is hacked, manipulated or

used against you...

the consequences are irreversible.

One of your biggest fears is that your

contact information is on the street.

That's the case now, because it's become clear

that hackers...

have taken the data related to work of

all Dutch police officers...

and made it public.

Are you shocked by the data?

All e-mail information has been made public.

Not the NAV data, but all e-mail

data.

And that's extremely harmful.

The Minister of Justice and Security and the

police are also shocked.

And that's really bad.

I've also noticed that the police are also

extremely anxious.

The Minister of Justice and Security is also

working on it.

But a complete list of people working for

the police...

including all government agencies where digital security is

important...

shouldn't have been allowed by the police.

You can assume that almost all data about

you has been stored somewhere.

Whether it's your medical data at the doctor's

office, your financial data at the bank...

or maybe advertisement preferences of all kinds of

advertisers...

they can now also use data from your

friends and family members...

to make shadow profiles of you.

So what you see is that the holes

in the network of your data...

can be extrapolated by the enormous web of

data around it.

So a lot of data has already been

stored.

And I don't think people realise how much

data is stored...

and what can be done with it.

A lot of people often argue that they

have nothing to hide.

That's a really bad argument.

And you can't blame people for that.

Because it's quite abstract.

People don't realise what's going on, what the

consequences are, what the risks are.

And I think that if there was a

bit more awareness about it...

people would realise that it's a lot scarier

than they realise at the moment.

The trend we've seen as Privacy First for

years now...

is that there's more and more talk about

increasingly large-scale data collection...

and more and more linking data, databases...

which is often used for profiling, profiling people.

When you link data together, it often creates

new information, new data about a person.

And it can also be very sensitive information.

So sometimes you have different types of data,

different databases...

and apart from each other it sometimes looks

like relatively innocent data.

When you put it together, it can be

something about someone's daily life pattern...

someone's hobbies and interests, or which doctor you're

visiting...

or possibly your medical condition.

Actually, your whole daily life is often just

transparent...

through data, including financial transaction data.

At this moment, what we read, what we

see in the Western media...

mainstream media especially, about China...

doesn't show what is really happening in China.

I found out in 2018 that it was

about 200 billion in the Netherlands...

and later I found out that it was

about many more, thousands of billions.

So I actually saw that book as a

kind of life insurance.

People, for example, are fleeing again for gold

or bitcoin.

They're actually already witnessing this crisis of power.

The institutions that have to take care of

our money...

and therefore the value of it...

are actually neglecting us.

And that's exactly what they want.

That you can no longer pay your groceries,

your rent, your mortgage...

and then you're desperate.

But look at what's happening.

If this continues as it is now...

Europe is doomed to become a third world

state.

This can't go on like this.

And then they have you exactly where they

want you.

It can be DCs.

Financial transactions become part of that data web.

When money is fully digital, every purchase, every

donation...

every movement is visible and potentially controlled.

Data leaks, algorithmic profiling, social credit systems.

What happens when your digital footprint determines your

access to services...

travel or even basic freedoms?

The question is no longer who is watching,

but who is in control.

The tech giant is accused of sacrificing privacy

for profits.

And now it's agreed to pay up for

its alleged violations...

when it comes to Alexa and Ring doorbell

cameras.

Amazon is now paying up.

Handing over more than $30 million in customer

refunds and fines...

accused of using Alexa and Ring doorbell cameras...

to collect voice and video data on adults

and kids.

Alexa, it's game day.

Streaming football on Prime Video.

The Justice Department, on behalf of the FTC...

claiming that for years Amazon kept Alexa voice

recordings...

calling the practice unlawful.

According to the complaint, Amazon promises customers it

will delete...

In the US, there was a woman who

was constantly getting ads for baby stuff.

She wondered why that was, because she hadn't

been looking for anything else.

Or she had seen something in that trend.

And weeks later it turned out she was

pregnant.

I sometimes hear from people around me...

that I'm being eavesdropped on by big tech.

Because if I talk about something, it appears

in all kinds of ads.

What I'm saying is that I find it

much more disturbing...

that so much data is collected about you

and such a complete profile can be made...

that they can reasonably predict what you're looking

for...

before you notice it yourself.

And that's what happened to that woman in

the US.

Before she knew she was pregnant, she already

knew the data.

Amazon, in this case, had collected so much

data that they could predict it.

My name is Steven Dierks.

I'm an IT lawyer at Rechts en Robots.

Last year, I did a lot of work

for the Ministry of Public Health.

And specifically the CEBG, which I always see

as the IT organisation of VWS.

I mainly focus on privacy law, IT law,

intellectual property law and AI law.

We live in an age where digitalisation is

growing faster.

We also see that technological progress is growing

faster.

And that big tech companies are gaining more

and more influence.

If you look at the influence of behaviour...

we saw that with Cambridge Analytica in 2016,

I believe.

They used data from voters, for example on

Facebook...

to show those ads, to show fake news,

to direct them in a certain direction.

And that's a really big danger.

And those are all the consequences people don't

know about.

They can happen if you leave your data

behind.

And maybe you never hear about them, but

they are going to keep them.

as an individual, a very small piece of

that puzzle, but of all those billions of

data points, of all the billions of people

around the world, such complete images and analyses

can be made that a whole group can

be sent in certain directions.

Then you can get a normal person, who

may be well-read on a certain topic,

become more and more extremist, radicalised, and maybe

even pushed into a certain political corner that

normally wouldn't be like that.

Every scroll, every like, and every time you

share or upload something, is analysed.

Not only is it sold to advertisers, which

is what most people think, but also to

governments.

And now they can predict what you do.

So not only predict what you buy, where

you go, but also what you vote for,

and against what you demonstrate.

And now it gets exciting.

If the government knows that you are going

to demonstrate against certain things, you can already

see it in America, people who didn't listen

to the government, who didn't agree with the

policy, their accounts were blocked.

They were dissuaded, their bank accounts were dissuaded.

They got a lot of questions.

It is, Maria, by invoking this Emergencies Act,

which has never been used before in the

law's current form.

It gives the federal government sweeping powers, including

providing local police with federal law enforcement resources.

On top of that, you can see the

truckers are still here.

It also gives the Canadian banks the ability

to freeze bank accounts without a warrant of

anyone participating in this roadblock aid, as well

as anybody funding it.

And if trucks are blocking the road, they

can suspend the insurance of those truckers.

On top of that, this will expand the

scope of money laundering and terrorist financing laws

to include and to cover crowdfunding sites like

GiveSendGo, where donations of millions of dollars have

been pouring in from all over the world,

including the United States and much of it

from Canada.

And so GiveSendGo has ignored a court order

and provided truckers, they say, with some of

the money.

But this will now potentially prevent that from

happening.

My name is Rabi Atli.

I have worked for years at various financial

institutions such as ABN Amro, Rabobank, Deloitte, Saxo

Bank and Robeco as a laundry and tax

investigation specialist.

In my time here, I have seen a

lot of how financial institutions work, how laundering

works, how tax evasion works, and especially how

the monetary system looks on the inside and

on the outside.

Under the banner of emergency powers, donations became

threats.

Dissent became financial risk.

It was a warning shot to the world.

What happens when digital money and digital surveillance

become one?

One of the moments when I really saw

how much power financial institutions have was during

the plan de mille.

But it's for my safety.

I'm not doing anything wrong, am I?

That's the most dangerous sentence.

Every dictatorship, every tyranny started to ensure your

safety.

First, you had to give up your freedom

for terrorism.

Then, for a virus.

Immediately, for CO2.

And in the end, the government has all

the control.

With a digital euro and a digital ID,

they can convert all this data into...

This happens, for example, in China.

If you drink too much alcohol there, you're

not allowed to travel with the public transport.

If you do certain things that are not

allowed by the government, they take other things

from you.

We've seen that in Europe as well.

If you didn't have a stamp, you didn't

have a QR.

But they can do that to the extreme.

In Europe, this all seems more subtle.

With laws like the Digital Service Act and

the AI Act, Europe is much more subtle.

It's not about violence, but about an algorithm.

Try talking to a chatbot when your account

is blocked or you can't log in somewhere.

Maybe you've done that before, but it doesn't

work.

And what if the government puts everything in

algorithms?

You can't get in touch with the municipality.

You have to talk to chatbots.

Then everything suddenly becomes very black and white.

And with a digital ID and a digital

euro, everything can be blocked as soon as

you do something.

And nobody does that, right?

It's an algorithm that's set up.

So try fighting an algorithm.

If you say you have nothing to hide,

you say, OK, I don't do anything that's

illegal, so everybody can know everything.

Well, that's a pretty bad argument anyway.

Because we've seen that over the years, some

things can become illegal that weren't before.

And then it could be that the information

you had, which at that moment was just

legal, fair, normal, suddenly causes a problem.

It wasn't just products that flowed in.

It was people.

Engineers.

Entrepreneurs.

Trained in Silicon Valley.

And they came back, not just to copy

the West, but to build something far more

powerful.

In 1994, China officially connected to the internet.

So that started the Chinese development of the

internet.

Of course, China started this by really copying

the Western digital development.

Many of the Chinese tech company founders, they

studied in the US, in Silicon Valley, and

they had experience in the United States.

And they brought those technologies back to China,

or those business formats.

So that also drives domestic development.

The famous ex-CEO of China, Kai-Fu

Lee, once said in his book that if

the US tech founders are mission-driven, then

the Chinese tech founders are market-driven.

And China is a huge country.

It has one time zone.

It has one language.

It has a huge population.

So you have a big market to really

exercise and practice.

And try all kinds of business models.

In China, because of the online shopping and

e-commerce, has developed to a very next

level.

But at the same time, I think consumers

started to worry that, okay, I'm constantly driven

by the platform.

And a few years ago, when I was

discussing this with a Chinese colleague of mine

in China, we talked about how Chinese e

-commerce is developing.

And then that colleague of mine said, yeah,

you have to be careful, because the platform

is listening to you.

So there are already concerns from users about,

okay, the data ownership, who has the say.

And of course, this also leads to overconsumption

concern.

China became the world's largest test environment.

New digital tools, new financial systems, rolled out

in real time, tested live on hundreds of

millions of users.

Everything here is platform-driven.

Transport, communication, payments, even identity.

And while these platforms may look domestic, the

truth is far more global.

Tech giants like Alibaba, ByteDance and Tencent aren't

just Chinese success stories.

They're backed by capital from Wall Street to

Singapore.

This isn't just Chinese innovation.

It's global infrastructure with Chinese characteristics.

And yes, people are aware.

These systems watch, and they listen.

Would you let artificial intelligence spend your hard

-earned money for you?

Visa announced it's enabling artificial intelligence to find

and buy products for its customers.

Mastercard made a similar announcement Tuesday.

Consumers can still set guardrails and preferences, but

both Mastercard and Visa say their AI can

select items and make online purchases themselves.

And that's not all.

Amazon is also testing its own AI shopping

agent.

Now what our product teams have done is

used AI to empower consumers.

Empower consumers to have more effective and efficient

shopping experiences, to be able to work with

your agent, whether you're going to go, you

need a new set of tennis shoes to

run a marathon, or you're going to buy

a Mother's Day gift, which is coming up

in a week or two.

Your agent will be able to go do

that on your behalf.

But for that to work, your agent needs

the tools to do that.

And we announced a lot of tools today

that are going to make the payments work.

And you need trust.

All they want is you constantly shop on

it.

They will promote certain products to you.

In China, you have two major payment systems.

One is Alipay.

The other is WeChat Pay.

So Alipay is very straightforward.

It's linked to Alibaba.

So Alibaba is a tech giant in China.

And up to now, Alibaba and Tencent, they

are not a Chinese company anymore.

They are a shareholding company because they have

a lot of business branches all over the

world.

They are a multinational company.

So we cannot just simply see them as

a Chinese company in China.

So all in all, you can see more

and more influence or control from the central

government on those private sectors.

Chinese digital economy that created a lot of

profits, prosperity and gains.

But at the same time, we should definitely

see the dark side of platform businesses because

they also give an alarming lesson to the

rest of the world.

In the West, we often look at China

with caution.

But quietly, we are building our own version.

Big tech is no longer just shaping what

we see.

It's starting to shape how we spend.

Visa has now introduced an AI that can

make purchases on your behalf.

It learns from your habits, follows your budget

and makes decisions without you lifting a finger.

It's marketed as convenient, effortless, smart.

But every automatic payment is more data.

Every decision you surrender is one more step

away from control.

And while private companies blur the line between

assistance and automation, governments are watching closely.

In Europe, plans are underway for a central

bank digital currency, a digital euro, promoted as

safe, efficient, modern.

But ask yourself, who controls the rails?

Because if your identity, your behavior and your

payments all run through a single system, then

money is no longer a tool of freedom,

but of permission.

I work as a lawyer.

And in 2012, a client approached me with

a so-called interest swap.

That's a complex product.

And that product, well, he got smeared, I

would almost say, by his bank.

There seems to be a very big international

fraud behind it.

And that fraud I eventually exposed in my

book.

If we're going to put all our trust

in a digital currency controlled by central institutions,

we should first ask, have those institutions earned

our trust?

Because behind the scenes of Europe's most respected

banks there are stories of deception, risk shifting

and regulatory failure.

One of the people who saw this from

the inside is Hester Bees.

The product my client got was a non

-trade product.

OTC derivatives, that's what they call it in

the professional world.

And the bank had thought of something for

that.

Because the client came to the bank for

financing.

He got this complex product.

So the bank couldn't say, well, are you

going to give me a base for the

trade in this complex product?

Because the client came for financing.

So he just wanted money from the bank.

Well, to comply with those rules, banks, without

the client knowing or understanding that, borrowed money

on a bank account, on a blocked bank

account, in the name of the client.

And that as a base was blocked on

that client's account.

As if he was trading in those derivatives.

And that base cost this client 700,000

euros.

And that was increased over time when the

client closed this product to 1.3 million.

Which he actually got from an extra financing

from the bank without him knowing.

So that 1.3 million had influence on

the client's debitory position and therefore also at

the height of his interest the liquidity deposit.

And what surprised me, at the beginning of

2013 the bank received, or sent the bank

suddenly to the client bank receipts.

And they had never done that before for

this complex product.

So the client sends that directly to his

lawyer.

And I look at that.

And I think, yes, I actually discovered that

the deposit accounts that the bank had administered

until 2013 were no longer on the bank

receipts.

Well, and that is fraud.

You can ask yourself whether it is fraud

that the bank first booked those deposit accounts

because the client did not deposit high liquidity

deposits at all.

He did not deposit money.

The bank had just borrowed that with a

credit line.

And then this bank removed it in 2013.

At that time, it was not about a

very large amount in the financial world.

It was about this client who had received

an increase in interest and the damage he

had suffered was about 7.5 tons.

And that file was so full of abuses

and was so in conflict with all the

rules that I normally as a client, as

a lawyer advise about.

That I thought, yes, this will be actually

an egg.

We go to that bank and I was

actually convinced that that bank would want to

steal this because it was such a bad

file, so to speak, for the bank.

But because the bank's lawyers with such a

straight leg and so intimidating, yes, that I

really thought, okay, what's going on here?

I actually became suspicious and they made me

curious that I thought, God, this is very

serious why are they doing this?

Why are those lawyers and that bank so

intimidating and why are they going in here

with such a straight leg?

And that actually aroused my curiosity even more

so that I went even deeper into those

files.

And yes, well, that eventually led to that

I found out that this liquidity problem, this

liquidity shortage, this substantial shortage for this product,

OTC derivatives, in the Netherlands was 200 billion.

And that 200 billion turns out to be

much larger And that is in, I have

in 2016 in a document from the Korean

Institute of Finance read that in Europe it

is about 3,500 billion euros and that

it is worldwide about 41 billion euros.

And the biggest problem is, and that is

really the biggest scandal that is going to

come out is that they have used the

pension funds to, that substantial shortage of 200

billion to temporarily borrow that from the pension

fund.

So that is of incredibly great importance and

yes, when I found out I had to

swallow because then I understood that I was

much bigger yes, secretly on the trail and

that I that yes, possibly myself would also

be in danger of that.

What you see is that the financial system

which is thus evidenced with the worst bank

scenario that that yes, completely in blockchain will

take place and that that actually the base

of that system is in the hands of

a few large parties the business banks, the

asset managers and their regulators and in my

eyes those central banks actually in recent decades

infiltrated by these people who therefore actually pursue

the own interest of those banks and asset

managers and what you see is that their

ultimate goal is that global liquidity and that

control over that citizen, over that consumer.

The retail CBDC, which now has a lot

to do yes, the closing of the system

in my eyes that is not even the

most worrisome.

The worrisome is that it can lead to

that the system is closed, that it becomes

a closed system so that citizens can no

longer have cash or outside that system for

example can trade with bitcoin by only allowing

bitcoin via license-holding companies.

So actually that everything will be fixed between

intermediaries to control the behavior of those consumers

to monitor and eventually also to limit.

Yes, I think especially that the acceleration that

has taken place in that technology and that

that lack of liquidity in that system by

reusing all those assets and also centralizing all

those assets is a much bigger danger.

In China, technology became infrastructure.

Payments, transport, identity, all merged into one seamless

trackable platform.

Now that model is spreading.

In the West, Visa has launched AI that

spends on your behalf deciding what you buy,

when, and how.

All in the name of convenience.

Meanwhile, global banks face a familiar crisis.

Massive collateral shortfalls, hidden risks, shrinking trust.

The solution now offered?

A central bank digital currency.

A new kind of money.

Coded, controlled, and programmable.

Sold as stability.

But when the same institutions that failed to

protect the old system are building the new

one, what exactly are we walking into?

Eventually, we had to go back to the

basics.

Why did money ever exist?

In the past, we had to trade.

Milk against eggs, stones, shells, kilos of gold.

And then, money was discovered.

With money, you can move things more easily.

Very simple.

But the money we have now, with banks,

with crypto, and with cash, it works.

Everyone sees that it works.

No one feels the urgency.

No one feels that we really need a

digital euro, a digital dollar.

Only the system that wants control on you.

Isn't that funny?

No one wants this.

We live in a world where

everyone wants

to have a digital euro.

We live in a world wants to have

a digital euro.

We live in a world a digital euro.

We live in a world where everyone a

digital euro.

We live a digital euro.

We live wants to have We live in

a world a digital euro.

We live in a world a digital euro.

We live in a world a digital euro.

what they are going to do, you also

have to spend it within a certain time

limit.

Look, with cash money you can save.

What does that mean?

You can save six months and if your

employer does something you don't like, you can

say, you know what, I don't work for

you anymore.

I don't have a job anymore, but you

can at least go on for six months.

You have a little more autonomy and you

have a bigger mouth, you dare to do

something.

But if you don't have a savings account,

all the money you earn, you have to

spend it directly, you can't get by much

faster for yourself, because you can't pay your

rent, your mortgage, don't feed your children, so

you have to lower your head and listen.

But a promise is only as strong as

the pressure not to break it.

In Canada, peaceful protesters saw their bank accounts

frozen without a trial.

In the Netherlands, political leaders publicly suggested cutting

benefits for parents who refused to vaccinate.

The line between public health and personal control

proved razor thin.

So what happens when money becomes code?

Who decides what's allowed, what's delayed, what's denied?

You now see almost a kind of perfect

storm, which, one, indicates that our monetary system

is coming to an end.

And there are still one or two rabbits

in the haystack by central bankers.

Think, for example, of a central bank digital

currency and financial repression.

There are all kinds of interests.

Those interests are gigantic.

Many billions involved are involved in the implementation

of a central bank digital currency, but also

in preserving the status quo.

By the way, preserving the status quo is

not without victims.

We see that in reality, with the more

expensive words of messages, with higher bills, with

the ever-increasing gap between the poor and

the rich.

What I always refer to in my book

as corruption and ambition, are all signs of

the failure of this monetary system.

In the end, it is inevitable that it

will happen.

We will have to start again at some

point.

And the powerholders, or at least the policy

makers, the governments and now central banks, are

trying to get ahead of this by introducing

a central bank digital currency.

But what they are doing with it is

that the current system is still a little

bit left to wriggle, you could say, before

it eventually has to die.

It's a framework, not designed to restore stability,

but to control the collapse.

To contain a crisis by managing you.

If we want to sketch an image of

what the end of this monetary system will

look like, then it is not necessarily an

explosion.

I think it's more of a candle that

slowly but surely burns.

And it's not about shocks.

There will be shocks.

But it's much more of a closing process.

And we can already see that closing process

very well.

Namely, it is a process of a slow

but certain reduction of one purchasing power of

the currency, but also in relation to, for

example, our first need for life.

In Roman times, we see at a good

moment that there is a huge expansion of

the number of slaves.

And now you can think, well, that has

everything to do with the fact that they

are going to take the work out of

their hands.

Whether it's about housing or agriculture, whatever.

That is of course the case.

But another important reason for keeping slaves was

that they represented capital.

In fact, it was actually money.

You could pay with your slaves.

And you also kept slaves in order to

have a lot of capital in that way.

In short, they actually became a means of

payment.

And one of the reasons why in Rome

the number of slaves also expanded or increased

was precisely because people needed extra capital to

let the economy grow in that way.

And that one is extremely critical of all

kinds of attempts that are now being made

to actually put the freedom of the citizen

on the line.

Because one feels somewhere that that implies that

indeed this wizard, this fist, will also master

your property.

And with that, in fact, you will end

up in a position of expropriation or maybe

even of slavery again.

And that is a kind of roundabout in

which we may end up in a very

strange way, in a different way than the

Greeks of that time, in a situation of

debt slavery.

Whether it comes to that, the future will

have to show.

You have to ask yourself.

Freedom is not something you automatically get.

You have to protect it.

And you do that by understanding how power

and a structure work.

This is not a criticism of the Netherlands.

This is a call to maturity for you.