Is Your Phone Listening? Expert Reveals Every Secret to Protect Your Online Privacy

In this podcast episode, Tucker Carlson engages with Yannik Schrade, a 25-year-old German cryptographer and founder of Archium, about the deep connections between privacy, freedom, and technology. They explore the importance of encryption, the challenges posed by current surveillance systems, the limitations of popular privacy tools, and the evolving landscape of digital privacy amid growing global demands for surveillance. Yannik brings a unique perspective shaped by his legal, mathematical, and computer science background, explaining how cryptographic principles rooted in the universe's fundamental laws can empower humanity to protect individuality and freedom.

What Privacy Truly Means

Yannik opens by emphasizing that privacy is synonymous with freedom, protecting an individual's core identity against coercive forces that seek to reduce humans to objects or slaves. Privacy stands as a shield guarding the soul and essence of humanness. He contrasts this with historical tools of protection, likening privacy to weapons envisaged by the Second Amendment—meant to defend the individual from overreach. This inherently human right is supported by a mathematical and physical reality where certain computational tasks—encryption—create secrets that impossibly resist even the mightiest efforts to break them without explicit permission. This computational asymmetry forms the bedrock of modern cryptography and privacy technology.

The Universe's Role in Encryption

A captivating aspect of the discussion involves how encryption leverages the universe's inherent unpredictability and complex mathematics. Yannik illustrates this with the analogy of shuffling a deck of cards, where true randomness creates a practically infinite complexity that no adversary—regardless of computational power, energy, or lifetime—can unravel. This intertwining of physics and mathematics establishes an unbreakable fortress for secrets, something humans have only recently harnessed through cryptographic invention. The principle that secrets can be concealed and computations performed in privacy fundamentally alters how humans can interact with data without fear of exposure.

Current Privacy Systems and Their Shortcomings

While encryption itself is sound, Yannik argues that the existing ecosystem fails to guarantee end-to-end privacy due to the exposure that arises when encrypted data must be decrypted on user devices. The "end devices," like smartphones, become vulnerable points where powerful actors can access decrypted information. The closed nature of hardware and operating systems prevents complete transparency and auditability, leading to inevitable flaws and intentionally installed weaknesses by malevolent insiders or inadvertent coding errors. Thus, even if messages are encrypted in transit—like through Signal—once they reach and are decrypted on devices, users remain susceptible to surveillance through hacking, device compromises, or backdoors.

Surveillance Capitalism and Data Exploitation

The conversation then turns toward the ecosystem of companies profiting enormously from surveillance capitalism. Through mass and bulk data collection, these platforms covertly extract value from user behavior without informed consent, transforming users into products. This data enables predictive behavior modeling, micro-targeting with ads, and ultimately behavioral control, shifting individuals toward becoming manipulable "puppets." Despite legal frameworks like GDPR, there is skepticism about genuine protection because large-scale bulk data harvesting continues with limited accountability, and legislative actions often mask commercial and governmental interests.

Tactical vs. Strategic Surveillance

Yannik distinguishes between tactical surveillance—targeted spying on specific individuals with legitimate judicial oversight—and strategic surveillance, which applies indiscriminately to everyone, harvesting and storing all data indefinitely for potential misuse. The recent trend shows a shift from tactical to strategic, intensified by technology advances, decreasing costs, and new surveillance infrastructures such as the controversial "chat control" proposals in Europe and the UK. These systems embed monitoring and censorship capabilities directly into messaging platforms, often under the guise of combating child exploitation or terrorism, but creating unprecedented opportunities for abuse and loss of privacy.

The iPhone vs. Android Security Debate

Regarding device security, Yannik notes Android's advantage due to open-source operating systems that allow independent verification and customization, enhancing security and innovation. He references secure versions of Android, like GrapheneOS, which specialize in privacy. However, trust ultimately depends on manufacturers controlling hardware and firmware. Apple's tightly controlled ecosystem provides institutional trust for many users but remains a closed system with opaque processes. The ideal, Yannik suggests, would involve technically adept users building and running their own minimalistic, open-source operating systems on trusted hardware, a solution still largely impractical for most consumers.

Encryption's Proven Security and Historical Backdoors

Yannik affirms the fundamental security of contemporary cryptography, supported by a global community of mathematicians and open-source scrutiny. Nonetheless, he highlights past attempts by intelligence agencies, particularly the NSA, to weaken security standards through sinister measures like the "dual elliptic curve deterministic random bit generator" backdoor—disguised as legitimate cryptographic randomness but actually compromised. This effort nearly undermined the global cryptographic infrastructure until whistleblowers and the cryptography community exposed it. Such actions, designed to increase national security, ironically endangered the economic and strategic security of entire nations.

The Role of Open Source in Trust

Open-source cryptography projects like Signal are trusted because their code and algorithms are transparent and subject to continuous peer review by experts worldwide. This collective oversight makes hidden backdoors or flaws almost impossible to sustain undetected. Though Signal benefited from early CIA funding, its open nature and strong community support provide confidence in its security and intentions. Yannik explains that trust in encryption products should derive from their openness and verifiability rather than mere institutional ties or funding sources.

The Emerging Frontier: Privacy in Computation

Yannik's company, Archium, aims to extend privacy beyond encrypted communication into encrypted computation, enabling multiple parties to jointly compute outcomes over their private data without exposing inputs. This represents a new paradigm where data ownership remains with the individual while still allowing valuable collaborative processing, such as medical research or financial analysis, to occur securely and privately. The approach includes verifiability, ensuring computed results are correct without revealing underlying data, unlocking unprecedented opportunities across industries and government systems to innovate without sacrificing confidentiality.

Challenges with Hardware and Supply Chains

Yannik highlights the biggest privacy hurdle as the inseparability of hardware and software. Current devices involve closed architectures, opaque supply chains, and trustworthy assumptions that are frequently violated. Design flaws, backdoors introduced during manufacturing, and vulnerabilities in firmware make fully secure hardware a near impossibility. To mitigate this, Yannik advocates decentralization, where no single compromised device or actor can jeopardize security at scale, shifting trust from centralized authorities toward distributed and redundant systems.

The Complexity and Risks of End-User Devices

Examples illustrate how zero-day vulnerabilities in messaging apps can instantly compromise a user's entire phone by simply sending a malicious image, circumventing end-to-end encryption altogether. Such risks demonstrate that the security of encrypted communications also depends heavily on operating system integrity, app sandboxing, and robust hardware protections—all complex and often insufficiently secured layers. Even popular secure messaging apps face criticisms about single points of failure like "private contact discovery" relying on trusted hardware (e.g., Intel's trusted execution environments), which have proven vulnerable to physical and software attacks.

Surveillance Technology and Government Overreach

State actors, motivated under pretexts like child protection, terrorism, anti-money laundering, and drug enforcement, push for invasive laws enforcing "client-side scanning," effectively turning personal devices into government spies. The UK's Online Safety Act and the EU's chat control proposals mandate backdoors and real-time message scans, undermining encryption and enabling mass censorship. Despite promises of strong oversight, these powers lack transparency and democratic accountability, creating grave risks of abuse, unlawful surveillance, and erosion of civil liberties.

The Tornado Cash Case and Crypto Privacy Under Fire

Yannik delves into the controversial prosecution of Tornado Cash developers, who created privacy-preserving tools for blockchain transactions. Despite the legitimate technological innovation enabling greater financial privacy, authorities targeted several founders with harsh charges, labeling their software a sanctioned money laundering tool because illicit actors exploited it. The case underscores the tension between empowering privacy and governmental control, highlighting how developing privacy tools on open platforms can provoke aggressive legal backlash, often unrelated to the developers' intent or actions.

The False Promise of Crypto Anonymity

Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin offer pseudonymity, not complete anonymity, since all transactions are recorded on transparent ledgers exposing behavioral patterns. This transparency enables tracking and de-anonymization through off-chain interactions and identity linking at on/off ramps. Yannik stresses that privacy-enhancing blockchain technologies are emerging but remain controversial and heavily policed. These limitations shattered early hopes that cryptocurrencies would provide fully private and unregulated financial systems, exemplified by government seizure of crypto assets and censorship of privacy-focused projects.

The Future of Money and Privacy

Central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), currently being explored worldwide, pose risks of absolute financial surveillance and control, far beyond traditional cash monitoring. Unlike cash, which already has serial number tracking and is vulnerable, CBDCs threaten to freeze assets instantly based on digital profiling, creating unprecedented mechanisms for censorship and control under the guise of law enforcement or regulatory compliance. This bifurcation forces society to choose between a utopian future with secure, private digital money and a dystopian state of monetary control and loss of individual freedom.

Pervasive Surveillance in Daily Life

Yannik illustrates the extent of modern surveillance beyond communication—through Wi-Fi routers, motion tracking, microphones in devices, facial recognition, license plate readers, and ubiquitous cameras. The technology exists to monitor everyday life deeply, capturing even subtle movements in private spaces. The commodification of user movement data by service providers and the lack of alternatives create invisible control systems that erode privacy in the home and public spaces alike. This surveillance infrastructure frequently lacks encryption, safeguards, or accountability, making misuse by malicious actors or oppressive regimes more likely.

The Balance Between Technology and Freedom

Throughout the conversation, Yannik stresses that privacy is a tool enabling a free and humane society. Yet technology itself is neutral—it can empower or enslave—depending on its implementation, governance, and adoption. While new innovations can challenge entrenched powers who profit from control and surveillance, adoption hinges not only on ethics but on delivering superior, practical alternatives that make privacy decision-makers and users unwilling to accept less secure solutions. This fusion of technological advancement and user incentives is essential for shifting toward a freer digital future.

Personal Commitment and Outlook

Despite the daunting challenges and risks, Yannik embodies optimism and commitment. Fueled by a passion for mathematics, law, and technology, he has channeled his energy into founding Archium and advancing privacy technology that brings encryption and secure computation closer to widespread, pragmatic use. Even facing potential opposition from powerful interests, he remains undeterred; embracing the risk as intrinsic to impactful innovation. His hope is that privacy technologies become indispensable for businesses, governments, and individuals alike—a foundation for freedom in the digital age.