The Future of Privacy - Olayinka Oshidipe

Oshidik to speak to us on the future of privacy. Please a round of applause for him.

All right. Hi, good morning everyone. My name is Allay Inka. Um the title was supposed to be the future of privacy but I changed it last minute to be the future of your data because like it's one and the same, right? Um so quick intro about me.

My name is Olainka. I am Devro developer relations at Nillion. At Nillion, we are ensuring that your data stays private. I'll get into that in a bit. Does this work?

Oh, this thing is so cool. Okay, so we've been taught to trade privacy for convenience. What does that mean? That means if you've ever used any social media platform, Instagram, Tik Tok, Twitter, any of those things, you know that they are very convenient in the sense where especially Instagram where you get ads for things you're looking for, but like they are selling your data. So I personally tend to buy a lot of things from Instagram.

I buy a lot of shoes, right? So, if I'm shoe shopping and I go on Instagram or maybe I'm having a conversation with a friend, the next thing I know I'm seeing a bunch of ads on shoes. Will I buy them? Absolutely. But that's not the point.

The point is that my privacy has been violated, right? They figured out I was looking for shoes because of the conversation I was having with a friend. While it is convenient, right, I'm trading my privacy for it. And that doesn't need to be the case. And so at Nium, we're building the technology that ensures that you do not give up your privacy to have the experience of convenience.

Does that make any sense? Right. Okay. So, uh now the problem is all of this is by design. Like all of the applications that are being built today um they are built with extracting your data by design.

It's not it's not a it's not an afterthought. when Instagram, you know, was built or started up, whatever, they needed your information, your email, password, yada yada yada. And also, Meta, Facebook gets audio um data, if you will, from your smartphone. If you think I'm kidding, just hold your phone. You don't need to do anything.

Hold your phone and say things like um restaurants near me, you know, or food, rice, whatever. And in a couple minutes, you'll begin to see those ads pop up on Instagram. How they are extracting your data. They are violating your privacy. And then they sh they are selling those things to advertisers and that's how they're able to serve you ads.

Right? So privacy isn't missing. It is intentionally excluded. Now a lot of the things I've talked about I've talked about like Instagram, Twitter, um, and the likes. But we have a more bigger problem on our hands and that is the problem of chat bots AI chip and everything in between.

In the past couple months a lot of really crazy things have happened. One of them is hundreds of thousands of um group chatbot conversations are showing up on Google search. Here's what that means. That means that if you put in a query into chat JPT or group or whichever one of these um AI chatbots about your personal issues, it can show up on Google which means I can see what the problem you're facing and you don't want that. Like you really do not want that.

And it goes beyond you know your personal issues. It goes into your medical records. It goes into whatever sensitive anything you consider sensitive that you share with any of these chatbots is very it's liable to be exposed right and again we're coming back to the to the point of trading privacy for convenience now I use chipity I think you know most of us use that and it is a really you know efficient tool it makes your life ever so slightly easier but again we're trading all of that convenience for our private Y and as you can see, this one is actually really huge. It's like um some guy, a crypto um millionaire in Europe was attacked and almost lost everything. And it cost them just $6,000 to get the data they needed to kidnap him.

And he's worth millions. So $6,000 is a walk in the park. But and then there are some of us that are obviously not worth that much that they can probably get our data by just running a Google search, right? So your data is being sold and there is a solution for that. You do not need to live in a world where you're trading constantly trading your privacy for convenience.

And um the first speaker when he was talking he talked about um chatbot and privacy and everything in between. And it is super important that as we are exposed to these technologies, we also understand the underlying issues that comes with them. Right? So now while we have the current issue of privacy and our data being sold and um all of these companies basically just ripping us off and making a lot of money from us. We also do have privacy enhancing technologies that solve this problem.

I'll give us a very quick highlevel overview um just so we know what we're talking about. So we have zero knowledge proofs. Um, is anyone here familiar with ZKP zero knowledge proofs? Uh, no. Okay.

So, zero knowledge proofs are a way to prove that you know something without revealing the data. I encourage you to do a deep dive. You can look it up. It's very simple and straightforward, but I won't be doing that in this talk. I've done it, you know, a couple times prior.

Um, we also do have trusted execution environments. A trusted execution environment is an environment where secure computation happens. We have multi-party computation. No one holds the full data only partial share. So basically your data is split across multiple nodes.

Right? And then we have my favorite and it stops working. Did I break it? Okay. We have my favorite which is a fully homorphic encryption.

Can you please help me move it to the next slide? I know. Okay. Thank you. Full homomorphic encryption compute an encrypted data and it doesn't need to be decrypted.

I'll just spend a couple minutes on the last one so I can explain to you why it is really cool. So take um Instagram for example. Currently Instagram needs everything from you to process anything. And that means even the engineers are exposed to your data, right? That means the government could call Instagram today and they're like, you know what, we need everything this user has uploaded to your servers from day one and they will provide it easily because they have it.

Do you understand? Now, some of us have deleted pictures way back in 2010 when we had questionable looks. Um, we were in very different points in time. And those pictures should stay buried. Instagram will bring them up.

I promise you. Same with Facebook and every other platform you've used. Now a fully homorphic encryption is a piece of technology where you send in encrypted data and that data stays encrypted and it is processed and you get a result. Basically if I hand you if I hand you a recipe to cook food, you don't need to look into the into the recipe to see what it is made out of. You are able to make the meal without knowing what the recipe is.

Right? So that is a a high level overview of what a fully homorphic encryption can do. And it is really cool because it means that any in between now and the next couple years we have applications that are taking advantage of fully homorphic encryption and we don't need to sacrifice our privacy for convenience. Now, one of the really interesting tools we built recently at Nillion is a tool called It's not working. Please, next slide.

It's a tool called Neil GPT. Okay, before we get into that, we need to build products where privacy is the starting point and it is not a lastm minute patch. So if you are a developer here or an enthusiast, if you're looking to build stuff and and and I think and I encourage you to you know begin looking to building infrastructures, begin to look into building technologies because that is one of the many ways we can get Africa Nigeria on the map. Right. Anyway, if you are doing any of such I would like to implore you to be sure that you are thinking of the user privacy.

What that means is you're building an infrastructure that doesn't expose your users to threats that doesn't expose I mean I just showed you the thing where they basically kidnapped a guy you know and they were exploiting him of his money and it the onus is on obviously the developers to build systems and infrastructure and products that are privacycentric um and like I was saying one of the next slide please. One of the tools we're building over at Neon is called NeoGPT. So Neil GPT is basically a very privacy preserving version of chat GPT, right? So all of the things I said about chat GPT where you put in queries and Sam Alman can practically read your conversations, none of that happens with this piece of software. And this is possible because we are building a technology called Neo DB and Neil AI.

Right? So, so we we have we've built the infrastructure that ensures that you're able to build user products that covers your user privacy. So, the technology the engineering team behind um the engineering team at Neon that is building this, we don't see any version of your data. If you can move to the next slide, does it work now? Thank you.

All right. Sweet. Uh, it's taking me backwards. Oh. And there we go.

And now it's frozen. Okay. Wow. This is so much fun. All right.

It's broken again. Nah. Anyway, I'm just going to go on and speak to you and hope that this actually works. Okay. So, um the next Please stay at slide seven.

I think it's a slide seven that I'm talking about. So, Neil GPT, if you've ever used Chad GPT, can I see, you know, show of hands? I've used Chad GP at one point in time. Okay, that's a lot of us. That's everyone.

Exactly. Now what this means is every single one of us at least 90% of us have been ex have exposed our data to the open AI team. This should terrify you. Like I'm not even trying to be dystopian or whatever. You should be scared.

Now you can say well I mean who am I? I'm just some random Joe. There isn't anything about me that is you know spectacular. Five years from now would that still be the case? No, because you'll be far further in life than you are right now.

And you want to ensure that you have a track record that no one can make take advantage of, right? So, Neo GPT is your totally secure AI companion. And again, I'm not really coming here to say this, oh, I'm trying to get you to use NeoGP because like I work here. Honestly, it doesn't really matter. You don't have to use it.

However, this is a ridiculously cool piece of technology that ensures that everything you are saying and doing stays private. you get the best of both worlds, which is privacy and convenience. And if that doesn't trigger something in you, then we do have a long way to go as far as building products that everyone gets to use while ensuring that it stays private and secure, right? So from user verification to we also have like ensuring you have passphrases. passphrases.

If you forget your passphrase, you don't have access to your conversations and the backend team don't even have any idea what is going on in the front end because like I said the bunch of technologies, privacy enhancing technologies that we are making use of. Fully homorphic encryption means all of that processing is done encrypted. It's done in an encrypted environment and no one nobody no one sees anything you are doing. And so this is just one of the many things you can build. You can build an expense tracker.

You can build um a medical record where if you're in the medical field or if you have a friend in the medical field where you build a product where you're passing in user data and it's not being exposed to people who shouldn't see them. If you've ever worked in a field where data is sensitive, where data is crucial, where secrecy is important, you understand the importance of isolating certain parts of data and keeping it from people's eyes, right? And so ensuring that you're building product that keeps your considers your user privacy is really the next frontier. And I want to encourage us to begin to think about what that means as you you know are exploring the applications you use as you are building or thinking of building products you are looking at your user privacy. So finally a privacy first future starts um with us if you can put it in the next slide or not.

Yeah I want to encourage you that as you you know leave here my talk is not really technical. I had no intention of making techno. I just wanted to inform you of what's happening. Your data is being sold every single day. Your p privacy is being violated every single day.

And you need to take ownership of that. And one of the many ways to do that is to use applications that are privacy preserving and to take control of your data and your privacy at all times. So, thank you very much. I hope this was helpful. My name is Na.