We Are Millions - Reclaim privacy day

so for everyone watching tuning in today welcome again uh for the third day of the we are millions event this is the reclaim your privacy day first off if this is your first time tuning in don't forget to claim your avatar nft if you haven't already and don't forget during the sessions between each talks uh you're able to claim experience for your avatar because this whole event is set within a game as well and it's called resistance now we'll provide a link to the uh resistance platform in the chat of course and also of course in discord there's um if you haven't checked it out there's a channel chart start here that has all the instructions you might need for the uh to enjoy the event to the fullest um so if you have any further questions related to that uh please we are there for you in discord to answer them in the meantime uh let's go through the schedule of today we have first off we have a presentation on swap chat a private messaging application running on swarm which will be presented by rinka and you will tune in quickly after that at half past five we'll join in a panel um on the um sorry got the program here which will be hosted by gregor we have quite a few guests available there including there it is there we go including uh guests from uh projects like nim dirk phi hammers and swarm to discuss privacy as a core value of web3 and uh i'm really looking forward to hear what the uh the new paradigm shifts of the of of webwe could offer in sense of privacy uh then we have a short break and we'll continue with the second panel of the day which is called developing for privacy with a focus on anonymization this will have uh speakers from abitopia the helium uh and it will be hosted by alexandria const from being crypto before that we'll start with a exciting demo on swap chat as soon as our beloved colleague rinka will tune in after his reboot so we now get a demonstration of the speed of his computer processing power there he is welcome back for those of you who haven't heard about swarthchat before it was recently demoed at fosdem which is a great open source event run yearly running from belgium this year was online there's a demonstration there and be sure to check it out as well in the future erika you're connecting i could see your face for a second there are you with us yeah i'm here robert thank you some last minute uh problems with uh putting on my camera but uh but i'm here yeah so i'm going to demo um the swap chat and uh i'm keeping my fingers crossed that the demo will actually work because we're doing this on live live network with uh my computer just rebooted so we prepared some things but now we can't rely on those anymore so we really hope embrace the demogors that this works um so i'm just going to share my screen and uh while we try to connect um i will tell a bit about this uh this application and then robert and i are going to have a conversation about uh about this if he has more questions um so yeah what you see here in front of you is a swap chat and it's a very basic application basically running on top of swarm so all the information that is found on this page the html the business logic everything is fetch transformed and executed in my browser and it has a very simple purpose namely to establish a connection with somebody else and and then have a chat over that um however uh this application running on swarm is actually very special um why is that well first of all because it truly provides a zero leak messaging and what i mean with that is that uh with this application uh you can chat with somebody else and you don't really leak any information you don't need the information of what you're talking about it's like we encrypt the messages it's the same if you chat with somebody on signal or even on whatsapp um the operators of those servers are also at least they're claiming not to be able to uh to read your messages but the messages still go via a centralized server if i had this backbone so you still leak something namely the fact that you are messaging with somebody what we can do in swarm is having zero league communication and it adds on top of this uh that also the act of messaging is uh obfuscated so if you use swap chat nobody will even know that you are messaging um only the person who is sending the message and the person who is receiving it and what's more this application also after i closed this browser window that i just did because i had to reboot my computer because my camera didn't work everything that was in the jet at that moment is also gone and uh unless somebody intercepted some uh cryptographic material uh on the way and um they should basically uh be on your computer to do that um then the the the the jet that is going back and forth um is also not not kept you know like the the chunks the data the encrypted data is still in the network uh but nobody has the encryption key so it's a truly zero league messaging um the other thing that is interesting of this application and it seems that robot or somebody else is not able to connect so i'm just going to reload the page and then i continue my uh my story so i'm reloading this and i let me retry with the new link this code yeah i'm going to send it to uh robert so oh now i need to stop the share because i don't want to share my private signal so i'm sending to robert some link with some material that robert needs to um to connect to me and i share my screen again and i just thought that i might need to do something else which i'll do now so return my screen so if i need to do something like this yeah i need to yeah okay slash accepts terms in terms of condition okay so now now maybe uh it will work so let me continue to the next part because it's made um you know of course it's fully open source uh so you can find it here um the application is called swap two two uh there was also a swap chat one uh but this is as object um and the special thing of swapjet is that it's using bjs and um i spoke to the developer which is not me by the way it was made by by dan and the experience of creating this application in its own world was like really smooth because uh swarm um apart from the the network layer we are also developing uh all kinds of tools that developers can use to very easily make applications on the postform so swapjet was made with uh bgs and for the developers amongst us this is an npm module so if you're making a javascript or typescript project um you can access all of the swarm apis via bjs and there's also some very convenient additional functionalities so with bgs you can basically plug and play make applications like swap chat um yeah and and that's it so um let's see if i'm already connected no i'm not yet connected robert how are you looking on your side i am connected you are connected right says accepted and now it's connecting to you uh it is still connecting okay okay so then i guess we we are not going to actually do this live demo which is a shame um but yeah something like this always happens uh when you do live demos and it's even more difficult because i'm not the developer of this application so i can't do bug fixes as well they they did some last minute changes today because uh swarms apis got updated and they had to um yeah update something i guess something is broken there along the way but um anyways it was most like this does work because i was demoing it at first them and there it worked flawlessly about a week ago so uh it's just some you know i think they call them a children's diseases uh at least in netherlands they do um but the concept is there right so you can make such applications on the postform in a relatively easy way um it provides zero league communication and that's because it's built on top of swarm so it inherits the the qualities from swarm and it's just exposed to users to you and me via a very easy to use interface like this and what you can do with this you know you can chat with somebody rest assured that nobody will intercept your messaging and that is i think really important uh in the world anyways but i think especially nowadays with so many things changing in the world and oppression rising in general so i guess that will be a demo which unfortunately wasn't the real demo but i hope i made the concept clear and that was already uh in any ways useful for you okay i sent you a link from my side now you sent me a nick from your side okay i'm going to try opening it on my mobile because it should also be mobile friendly and let's see indeed if i can connect to you if i can then you of course need to [Music] share your screen it tells me waiting to connect to the initiator so okay in the meantime could you perhaps um shed some light on how this application uh would differ from other end-to-end uh applications uh from let's say [Music] how does it differ from me from an existing application like whatsapp yeah so i already kind of alluded to that so um swapjet is uh working on double swarm and with that it enables zero league communications so the special thing of working on top of swarm is that when you communicate with this application your data has not been sent to a centralized server you know like if you work with whatsapp um you are sending information to whatsapp or the meta server somewhere else and the person on the other side of the line is receiving information from that server so all the communication goes via this centralized backbone and in whatsapp i think communication they claim that the communication is um is encrypted so uh in principle your [Music] the what you are chatting about uh should not be known to matter so like we need to believe them because it's not open source uh we also can't see can validate what they're actually running but let's assume that it's encrypted when you use whatsapp um but what's not uh encrypted what you are always leaking is the fact that you're communicating with somebody and i don't know how whatsapp works under the hood but i'm pretty sure that they know that i am communicating with robert if i send you a message right so that on its own is already quite interesting information um for you know for whatsapp uh and also it's it's uh is revealing something uh private i might not want to know i might not want meta to know that i'm communicating with uh with certain people um on top of that these communications are always persistent on my phone so i just actually heard from my for my a wife about a person in russia who wanted to get out of the country he did nothing wrong but at the border they stopped him and they looked in his telegram and they saw all kinds of chats related to you know to to uh to ukraine and to uh to helping the people in ukraine so these border people they just slowed him down deliberately he he had to he missed his plane and they told him okay please go back to your home so this person was not allowed to to leave the country so um that's important to to realize that even though you're not leaking something to a centralized server your messages are still persistent on your phone and i think here swap jet is also really unique in the sense that when i close my browser window there's really no trace left or that i ever send a message again unless somebody intercepted some cryptographic material on my computer but they need to maybe run a virus am i confused to do that so yeah so the messages themselves are destructed afterwards does it allow for a self-destructive chat like you would for instance on telegram i mean yes and no like on the internet something is never truly lost because the moment it is on the internet um you never know whether somebody made a copy and it's also like that in swarm um slightly different though because in swarm uh when you upload information to the network it's a junk and the junk the moment after you've uploaded it it is in in in the realm of of the network nobody can delete it anymore which contributes for a big part to the censorship resistant properties in swarm but the consequence of that is that after i sent a message uh it the the the data itself will stay in the network um what is destructed what can be destructed is the cryptographic material to let's say unlock this data so the messages in swapshed they are encrypted client-side um and if i close my browser window i lose the information that i need to decrypt this message and it basically as if it never existed even though there is still some gibberish data out there on the network that doesn't mean anything to anybody but um but yeah with the serious data you're referring to the chunks which are encrypted exactly yeah so in in swarm anything is a chunk and in swapjet in particular a chunk is the message okay and this project is maintained by dan you mentioned exactly dan nicholas is he still looking for contributors well i'm pretty sure yeah so um like he told me that he was working on the feature for this that you can also uh persist the messages so let's say we have a very important conversation you and i and like i want to close my browser window and i just want this chat to be to open it afterwards like it would have been very handy because we were preparing this download earlier today it would be very handy for me to have this feature because i would have used it before shutting down my computer and the demo would look better um you know but this feature wasn't there so that's something that then is working on um but i think swapjet is like it's very useful on its own but uh to me at least the biggest use in swap chat is to show that swarm exposes the building blocks to make applications like swap chat and if you just let your fantasy go on you know it's not too big of a step from swap jets to group chats or to forums or to timelines or to you know social media or marketplaces like um the building blocks in swarm are there what we just need is developers making those so i guess that's great that we have the one hackathon um and there are i think many things hidden in swarm that uh that are just somewhere in swarms code base ready to be picked up by developers and start making cool applications with because there's so much to build and having your application running it on swarm um it fundamentally changes the properties of your application as opposed to if you would make a similar application on web 2 of course yeah yeah i think this this these calls for bounties i would say yeah yeah like uh let's talk to them and make the bounties and yeah it's open source as well so you can always reach out to them and even just start contributing if you like the project okay um with this uh bridge i would like to mention again the bounties for the hackathon event by the way if you haven't check them out uh they're on git coin on their fair data society for all the projects which are being mentioned throughout the event rinka thank you for this thank you for for this intricate presentation and a demo on swap chat yeah pleasure for those who want to review it and see how it works if it is connected please check the video on fosdem i will provide the link in discord right after where we did a demo on uh swapchat we can actually see how the connection is established and yeah and flawlessly of course and then it's a nice thing he's not here so you can just blame him for the fact that everything on the wall so for anyone watching dan is a great guy so reach out to him if you want to contribute yeah thank you then okay um and with that i would like to thank you rinka and we are heading forward towards our next panel which is going to start in a few minutes thank you again is gregor already in the house yes nope okay in that case i'd like to take a moment again to mention again if you haven't uh claimed your nft your avatar nft yet be sure to do so and if you have any questions related to that we are available on discord and suddenly a wealth gregor appears yeah yes i mean i've been here the whole time i've been uh following uh your discussion drink very very interesting yes so uh we have the uh the panel uh will begin in five minutes maybe uh we can use uh a couple of minutes for a break um it's uh we announced it online that it starts at uh 5 30 so uh let's uh let's wait a couple of minutes uh for those who want to tune directly into the panel or the youtube stream uh gregor given your uh overview of the swarm project have you heard of any similar projects like swap chats which are focused on messaging on doubles that's a very good question um i mean there are there are some [Music] there are some you know projects that i i picked up uh over the time that uh we're also experimenting with messaging in this or the other way um uh on other platforms it's also you know there's many flavors of messaging so it's once we go down that rabbit hole it's uh yeah really in a way what we need we need to define what we're looking at so um but a swap chat i haven't seen i haven't seen i don't know uh i don't know for any solution where uh there wouldn't be at least some metadata trailer so uh here with the use of single owner chunks with the wizardry and you know like the magic stuff uh from our dev site uh they achieved uh yeah pretty pretty amazing things um at the same time it's exactly this you know when we speak about messaging is uh this architecture white uh gives extraordinary privacy properties probably wouldn't be able to handle i don't know telegrams traffic in messaging and uh the real-time aspect and so many uh so many uh concurring messages i don't know but uh definitely it's uh it's also very much important uh for establishing handshakes to establish contact to start conversations so there are there are many many flavors of it yeah i'm quite excited to see you know uh how um how this will be developed further uh it's been sort of um swap chat has been sort of like internal exploratory project but it would be really good for the community to pick it up and that maybe we see emergence of some really private decentralized messaging now i would i'm curious how it would involve and uh how it could like uh perform an alternative for for projects like matrix for instance then running on swarm yeah maybe very interesting cool um okay then we'll take a oh a short break then until the panelists arrive um uh i also wanted to mention because we've seen a lot of new faces in the discord appearing in the past few days and if you're new to to the uh fair data society be sure to check it out fairdatasociety.org and check out the principles of course they're located at the top menu um it's what this event these three weeks are it's what this event of these three weeks are based around um to facilitate uh the sharing of knowledge insights and also to collaborate on building projects which are in line and adhere to let's say the new values of the web with regards to data and for that also as swarm as one of the facilitators of this uh program we also have a grant program for your projects and you can find it on my.eswan.org be sure to check it out we'll also leave that of course in the discord because as form we also support new projects building let's say the next well the better web let's put it that way new and improved and the first start for that would of course be the bounties for this event even if you're still let's say exploring the potential of web3 there are quite some opportunities there to check out what our current tooling and current new networks offer to build new potential interests business cases or or ideas just like swap chat okay and with that it is 5 30 at 5 30 cet i must say uh personally i'm broadcasting from europe and uh let's see gregor has returned uh great i'll pass the mic to you to introduce your uh panel guests i guess i'm like the re-entrance bug you know just kidding so yes 5 30 on the spot i would invite our guests so if they can join me uh for the upcoming discussion on privacy as a core value of web 3. hi danny hi powers it hello oh it's uh we have uh jaya here uh is manchester uh from nim hi hi i can't turn on my video by the way i think the admin has to do it yes for the most host can you do it a call to our technical crew they will fix it uh they will fix it immediately so yeah welcome welcome everybody it's uh it's amazing to to be in such a company this is the third day of the web so and we felt when we were making the program that uh especially at the beginning you know it's like uh maybe also setting the tone it's important to bring uh the topics we feel strongly about uh to the forefront uh this is why uh we start basically after continue the story from empowering digital freedom into uh privacy and yes uh here we are um they say there's there's this saying if everybody is smarter in the room than you are then you're in the right place and i here really feel like being in the right place so uh yeah uh good uh good to see you good to see you all but uh so i would ask just maybe uh for starters uh everybody has here very colorful uh history a lot of contributions uh on your uh shoulders so it's uh when i was thinking before the before the panel i was like should i do the intros or not and then i said it'll be too biased and there's too much stuff if i do it so i would just uh give give the word uh to you and maybe uh jordy you can start and then just pass the mic to the next one well i'm jordy i'm mainly a developer and i'm an engineer that's what i really mean i'm not care too much about the history you know a lot of things in in in my background but i'm more i'm more worried about the future and the past in general but uh yeah i was yeah developer since i'm 12 i'm i've been in ethereum space since 2015 been in many contributions but in the last years i've been very much dedicated to the zero knowledge the general developmentology i created silicon rgs and in the last years i've been building uh hermes it's a roll-up payments roll-up for ethereum and now i'm in uh z kvm project mainly trying to do a roll up but with a ckvm in polygon hermes that's mainly a little bit my summary of who am i and where am i maybe danielle if i need to pass the macro it's just daniel that's maybe you oh so i'm daniel i am one of the architects of swarm i've been with the project since 2015 and i have designed some private stimulated features of swarm namely encryption access control and in general i'm very interested in cryptography and its applications in various privacy preserving applications and use cases so [Music] i think we're going to have an interesting conversation about about all sorts of premise related aspects of swarm so i will pass the mic to whom who's the next one okay uh i'll go uh does my sound work yes cool hi uh i'm parasite i've been i've been a free software developer for about 12 years now since it's yeah 2022 uh they did a lot of projects that they were mainly free software and i'm a big advocate of the gpl and of sharing knowledge um i've worked on operating systems i've worked on peer-to-peer networks and right now i'm working on anonymous financial engineering let's call it which is currently a darkfire cool my name is jaya and uh i am chief strategy officer at nim which is a decentralized privacy system um my background is in geography in fact so i have a background in geography and political economy so i'm in the tech space much more on a kind of strategic front and in the kind of let's say how technology influences and impacts society more generally and to my mind privacy is pretty much at the center of a lot of the big debates um and a lot of the big dynamics that are shaping the way that we live together as human beings right now including the the kind of uh it's the question of privacy in the question of data is core to to the whole question of technology and the future of technology at this point in future the internet at this point um as well as kind of wrapped up in a lot of uh the kind of major economic dynamics of today so um i think we're going to have some very interesting conversations and i'm also very excited about um people being so up on zero knowledge proofs in this group because i think it's actually going to be a pretty big game changer for conversations about privacy and a game changer in uh i think both positive and potentially some it's going to bring up some new problems as well so i think we can kind of have a good kind of crunchy discussion on that um yeah awesome awesome so also guys you're you're just just too humble you know it's like because i know i know your backgrounds and um it really sounded like just yeah like brushing over but uh it's uh i would say everybody has like really strong contributions here and um maybe in this regard i would actually also move uh to um to the next question where um before we dive more into the current topics uh it would be great to hear uh how do you see privacy what what does privacy mean to you from from which space do you come it's like um experience shows me uh those of us who are active in this space they also have like usually some unique starting points or their views on privacy and it would be great uh to share it with others so maybe maybe now ladies first and enjoy and pass it on the mic absolutely um so i mean where did i when did i start to get interested in privacy well i mean like i said you know my my background is kind of more looking at uh political economy and power dynamics really so for me privacy is really a question of power and you know uh it's a question of who has power over who who has oversight over who um and you know in that sense privacy is you know to my mind really the foundation of freedom and here i want to kind of clarify what i mean by freedom i don't mean freedom to just be an to whoever you want to be an to i mean freedom in the sense of um having the ability to grow and develop and learn um without scrutiny and without oppression um and that's really the kind of core of privacy for me you know um and i think it's something that we're that we're losing um dramatically you know i think you know privacy the problem with surveillance was it was a big problem even before the coronavirus but like since then you know with so much of our lives shifting on into the digital space um it is actually it's a watershed moment to my mind um and it's really gonna we're only seeing the beginnings of how it's gonna transform um social dynamics um and uh yeah i mean i i can go on and on but maybe i'll stop there and pass on the mic again we can continue the conversation yeah i i agree with you like a lot and it's also quite a bit about summer entity as well being able to like own your own data and just not having to share like when you use a new device or use the internet in general you just accept all kinds of terms and conditions so like take everything i have and also like what i noticed i'm a bit younger than the rest of people on the panel in my generation it's just taken for granted everyone just shares everything on social media and just by default it's like you get kind of like uh expelled from the community if you don't share so it's also like a big influence with young people who just expect to for you to be open about everything and anything can i add to that point a little bit more actually um because i'm in right now i'm in geneva um and doing some events with chelsea manning and she has uh also keeps making some very important points which is about the health effects of the lack of privacy um and how much you know because when you're saying like this kind of compulsion to share you know that that younger generations have um you know i think they kind of many people are maybe like i think a lot of people are aware of the problems of a lack of privacy but there may be less aware of like how that translates into health effects right this kind of thing of constantly being scrutinized and constantly being watched and now we're not just talking about kind of an oppressive state kind of in the background or an oppressive security agency or you know some malicious kind of like you know types like that but we're also talking about just generally being constantly um uh so public facing being constantly up for scrutiny and and kind of um vulnerable to scrutiny in that sense has huge both mental health effects and physical effects you know um and that's i think something that we're going to see more of as well yeah definitely and i mean in terms of health effects like you know the the the dangers of targeting is also something that we can get into later but yeah i i would like to share between my stories you know it's a personal story i i can you know the reason in this society there is a kind of way of thinking that's very inside the people that's if you are not doing anything wrong you don't have to share anything you don't have to be you don't have to be afraid you don't need privacy because you you you don't it's okay you know this is this kind of mind thinking is very much uh inside the current society and the me until i was like 30 or something like that i was very much thinking that way but there was one one one story and one point in mind in my life that this changed radically and that was i was installing some access control in a department store madrid and i was in the security room and i was watching the guy that with the cameras you know this huge big panel of cameras just controlling the the department store and he was just okay he's a guy it was a guy that was to stay there for eight hours very probably a very boring uh job and he was just uh just going to the girls and going into the until the deeds and reading the tattoos of the girls and this was the their distraction during his eight hours job of course the people there were not even aware what was happening but the worst was not that the worst was that at some point uh there were a couple of people just in a cafeteria just doing some you know some business meeting and there had some papers on the table and this guy just point the camera on top of the papers and start reading those papers even taking pictures of the papers that were on the table when i saw that you know i i just uh oh uh this this can this is wrong you know this is uh this is when i click it uh on myself and then i start realizing that the importance uh of the privacy even if you are not doing anything bro uh because at the end uh privacy is important um not for the everydays because at the moment that there will be at some point in your life that you will need privacy and you will require privacy and if you have not been doing privacy for the rest of your life then you are not going to have uh the privacy that day and and this is i know this is an an important thing and and when the information is there you don't know in which hands is going to happen which juice is going to be used for and that's why it's important that by default and this is one of the things it's just right now we share for it's no privacy by default you know i am i'm claiming a world where it's privacy by default and then you're free to to to to share whatever you want of course but by default all the systems should be private and this is the the that would be the default altogether this is my big claim that i want to click but this is very much the my story sorry to be a little bit long but no it was super good to hear and i love this uh privacy by default is also it's a sentence i keep saying over and over again as well and it it connects really much to what parasite was saying as well about you know you don't have digital sovereignty you don't have sovereignty over your data unless you have privacy by default because then you can make an active choice right when you want data to be produced about you and who you want to share it with but if there's no privacy by default you don't even have that choice there's not even that option right there where it is it's like exactly you need to be aware that you are sharing your information if you are aware you share information it's your life you can do whatever you want if you want to share for your full life it's okay but uh be sure that you know that what you are doing yeah the problem is that it's currently just a big button on a website that you click and it distracts you so yeah i would prefer i would prefer i think it's stupid anyway but i would prefer to see a privacy privacy button in the web page that just cook something talking about cookies or something like that yeah it's a little bit related but you know it's uh it's very confusing yes very very on point uh danny you also basically you're you're our chief privacy uh person so privacy can mean actually many things so it can be confidentiality meaning that the communication that we have or the data that we have are hidden from those who are not authorized to see it it can also mean anonymity or pseudonymity when we're hiding our true identities it's also an aspect of privacy and they can be important in in in in various situations so for example even if we have done nothing wrong we have valuables and we need to hide those valuables from crooks so for example we don't want to share our passwords there's a reason we have passwords and there are crooks out there who are out there to to get us to to to to steal our passwords so that's that that's just the most extreme example but in general you want to hide your valuables and also whenever you're playing a game which is similar to poker you don't want to show your hand too early so that those kind of situations are also very common in in real life when you need to be able to to hide your hand at least for a while and that's also something that is a matter of privacy and then of course there's things like private correspondence where you want to express things that you don't necessarily want the whole world to hear so i think that if oh if any of us spends a little bit of time thinking about we can come up with many many examples when we actually do need privacy even if we have done nothing wrong and we're not planning to do anything wrong and so on so i'm really i'm really adamant that those who have done nothing wrong do need a lot of privacy anyway having privacy has nothing to do with it with doing wrong so i think it's a it's a very very dangerous and naive thought that you know i have nothing i have done nothing wrong so i don't need pregnancy uh yes it's a it's very good very good point and it's um yeah it's uh really also great to hear uh your views it's kind of kind of they're connecting uh in this uh this sense is uh yes uh it's jordy also you said before by default all systems should be private and exactly this it's uh yes uh privacy uh also as uh pointed out it's about question of power so we can even speak online privacy determines our economic power if nothing else and other uh other interactions uh i also really liked uh really like the uh parasites i think pointed it out first but also other skateholds this that we are kind of living in these strange times so it's um on one side there is this sense that privacy is important but on the other side also when i enter the privacy space i was like really surprised how few people care about privacy you know and it's like we see we see this uh on one side yes the more we speak about privacy cambridge analytica scandals etc and so forth uh on the other side people just share more and more what's being called by some like the confessional culture so and one bringing this up is actually because kind of this inconsistency so to speak i would say i kind of also notice it in the blockchain space in the web 3 space on one side we hear developers speak about the importance of decentralization and we all feel that but on the other side if infera goes down or if openc api goes down we don't see the nfts or infuria goes down into half of the depths freeze so it's again this like convenience and maybe here my question would be um is it is it more difficult to build private solutions or is this just maybe a misconception or does privacy actually enable new ways of doing better privacy is costly you know privacy is not uh it's not free it's much easier to do things that are not private most of the cases not doing private in general you know there are some exceptions maybe but in general privacy is something that is an investment so it means that you need to spend and i would say that's a long-term investment which is makes everything it's even worse for regular users you know just investing in something that's long term is difficult for people because you if you start if you need privacy today you can start doing something but it's not going to be that private you know because by the fact that you are using maybe some app that is for privacy it already reveals a lot of information there so it's it's privacy is a long-term investment it's a an important investment so it it it's costly it takes a cost personal cost uh cost the algorithms the competition is it's harder if you want to do the things uh privacy and uh yeah we need to be aware that this is not something that comes from for free you know it's something that that takes it's like a little bit like freedom you know freedom is not free you know freedom it's uh has a cost i think it's also go ahead daniel i have a response to that so i and as gregor mentioned uh actually very few people are surprisingly few people are prepared to pay that cost so very often if people are faced with the cost of privacy they decide not to pay it yeah i mean i i i kind of i partially agree with you two on it i'd like it but i think it's like too much of a defeatist position because i don't actually think people don't care about privacy it's more that people are not people don't know how to care about privacy so a lot of people do actually are actually very concerned um and given a viable option uh they probably would you know go for privacy but the problem is that privacy right now still is like most privacy solutions are very complex and quite clunky to use um and it is exactly a question of cost and it's a it's a question of where you place that cost so you know in terms of you know the kind of the work that we're doing with nim we have a kind of very strong opinion about um you know well also due to the kind of the type of privacy project that we are which is privacy at the network layer which means deep infrastructure you know it's privacy is something that needs to be solved at a different layer than user choice you know it needs to be as we've said earlier a default um so that a user doesn't have to actually worry about it it's just built into the way that the systems operate and i think that that needs to be more and more the the way forward plus i also think that we need to start understanding privacy as a precondition for certain types of innovation um so that instead of it being a type of um uh a kind of let's say a protective measure it's also it's also a measure that is forward-looking and that actually like carves out a path for a different type of innovation and a type of innovation that is much more deliberate so again like tying back to the comment about digital sovereignty and so on it's like you know instead of having um you know machine learning training and data sets that have essentially been stolen from people um you know we can have forms of innovation that are much more participatory and much more engaged in a meaningful way um so i think like i think we need to start talking about thinking about and this is also an invitation to developers you know really considering privacy as a kind of invitation for a different type of innovation rather than just a kind of defensive mechanism and otherwise we let things go as they've you know it's like it if we if we try and kind of like have the internet as it operates today plus you know privacy then yes it's just going to be costly it's going to be clunky it's not going to feel right so you know in terms of privacy solutions i think we also need to be more forward-looking of like what are the what are the specific kind of economic and technical and social um affordances that they bring about rather than just costs right we need to kind of try and find the positives rather than just the costs here yeah for many people also like the initial promise of bitcoin and cryptocurrency succeeding and like winning over like uh banks and visa and mastercard was you're not even going to realize you're using crypto it will just be there and like i think it's the same point you're making with with privacy it's just like should be there and you don't even have to care about it it's just enabled yes and it's um giving bitcoin as an example i would say it's also a good good example of how we need to be careful is how many people got like this this false sense of security in the limity of bitcoin yeah and then we saw you know like also online campaigns bitcoin is not uh anonymous and so forth so um it's um i really liked uh jaya i think i'm going to quote you on this in future where you said privacy should be seen as invitation to another kind of innovation i think this this is really something in a way that uh also developers uh i think should look at it's it's not not like this considering as a chore oh i need to add encryption or uh more uh fifa privacy it's like i i'm unlocking new ways of how users are actually can fully experience my solutions by making them private greg gregor just before before going to encryption you know just before going to encryption as developers we are trained to just collect data when you're doing what you're doing an application it's like oh you want to know when something is wrong so you want to have data so the first thing you do just naturally you just go like that and this is a just a mindset i'm not talking just about encrypting it just you just collect data you don't you don't even know what you are going to use yeah yeah you store that data for years this is a great comment yeah yeah okay it's important this is important it requires a retraining it's very tell a developer just hey think the data that you are collecting just think about it just just think what you are collecting are you really going to use this hope this would affect what would happen if this data is uh compromised and with this data is made public at some point i mean speaking of cookies like let's say if cookies was the bad outcome of gdpr then the good outcome is that people actually you know are starting to understand the risks of holding data because there is regulation in place now or that they could get slammed with right so like i think you know there is a there is a slowly we're starting to see a shift in in mentality that like holding data is not necessarily a good thing always for companies i mean it's retraining yeah yeah it's exactly you know it's like i see i see it's very sometimes i forget when uh for example we work with projects in the ecosystem and especially when we uh when we are in discussion with projects coming from web 2.

and there is like so many these little things you know when they're like okay so i don't have user authentication because it's done in meta mask and uh i mean it's like done with their private key etc it's putting things uh um yes upside down and it takes it takes adjustments i would say in a way i would be really happy to see that uh also uh as developers as uh in this space we essentially establish standards where privacy is just a given and we see it as disadvantage i cannot i don't dare it's like in a way not that i'm shopping for anything but i know every time that i go to amazon for every product that i see on amazon that i will get like beverage with 10 more emails doing profiling on me because i just clicked on something and it's um i would for example feel a lot more uh relaxed in a shopping experience if that would be happening in the uh in my own privacy and things like that so yeah i actually saw the internals of booking.com and they use javascript to track how long you're watching uh like a flat or how how how fast you're scrolling and all kinds of things you just collect and then they enhance your experience it is but it's nobody used to stay it's sometimes sometimes i find it helpful you know when we think about the the interactions that we see in the digital world how strange they would be in the physical you know it's like imagine you are on a date and there's just this guy with a facebook t-shirt and sits next to you having dinner and she's like don't mind me i'm just going to take notes you know yeah a postman comes and the letter would be open and say oh i see you're planning holidays here's an offer for swimsuits etc and it's uh in this yes it's like really nobody in real life likes looking across their shoulder and we shouldn't be that uh also in the digital space so here it's maybe a good point to come to the discussion like where are we today uh you know we speak a lot about baptistry there's a lot of buzzwords being thrown around and do you do you see vap3 uh is it a private place does it does it need to beef up is already privacy the core value of that three would i mean i would say privacy like in a sense like is a core value but it's it's like being totally failed you know i mean similarly to decentralization the way that you said it earlier right um so privacy you know it was one of the big promises it was one of the cornerstones alongside the the idea of data sovereignty alongside the idea that you're going to get the chance to decide for yourself um and and that was wrapped up in so many nice promises of web3 right including the fact that like um you know with web3 we're also opening up new business models so surveillance won't will no longer be the business model of the internet because we've got token economics and so with because of token economics we don't need to grab all your data which means that you can have control over your own data you can choose who you want to sell it to or who you want what do you want to use it for um you know all of those kind of very nice promises but privacy kind of very much at the core of that as well um but the truth of the matter is is is really uh the opposite right and i think there's a lot of big discussions that we need to have around privacy in the web 3 space um including like what should and should not go in a public ledger um all the way through to you know the fact that you know the network layer is is not private um so yeah i would say uh yeah yeah so yes you're right um i would say that uh of course if you see the privacy in general i think that we are better that uh maybe two or three years or four years ago just all the analytics facebook and all the stuff at least i think that there isn't better i'm better i don't i don't think it's enough but i think that the values have been okay taking a little better in the society it's still not enough we are still far away but better and the other thing is in that in the web 3 space it's very very young technology altogether and there are a lot of things that needs to be solved of course privacy is one of those but it's not the only one there is scalability security it's about uh usability you know there is a lot of things that needs to be improved and that i think that we are working hard on on those directions because we i think we all agree that this is the way that the world should work but the technology is not ready yet we are just progressing in that direction privacy of course is a core value and is this one of the pieces that needs to be improved but it's very easy all together yeah i would also argue that we're still like very much centralized in some fashion in web3 because we depend on firefox and chrome for example we don't have we have these two big complex browsers and we all depend on a single add-on which is probably metamask or something and yeah there is not much uh also like there isn't much diversity in this way the narrative i'm trying to push is like let's try to go back to the roots let's try go back to the next desktop and engineer a new anonymous ecosystem from here rather than just like being on random websites yeah ether scan and aws and you see the quantity of pieces that in the web 3 are still centralized it's huge that's you know you see and there's how much work is to do there yeah it's become just a layer on top of web 2 right yeah we can say that true privacy is achievable or it's more like a cat and mouse game it's a cat-and-mouth game and it's alarms yeah i agree but that's not but that's not an excuse not to work on it of course i mean i found it you know i found it also very interesting uh just recently um there was the uh the book published which uh doxed the dow hacker and i found the discussions here quite interesting um this even though this hacker took like a lot of privacy precautions and steps ultimately if i understood right he was being identified because of vulnerability in the coin join algorithm in the mix mixing algorithm on bitcoin so uh yeah yeah it's about time isn't it i mean like it's like it is a cat and mouse thing where it's like there's a little bit of a delay but at some point you will be found out yeah well i guess on these notes satoshi is still winning oh yeah but i would say that anonymity is probably the toughest challenge in privacy so if you want to if you want to stay anonymous you need to do it right every time and you know one mistake and and it's gone yeah i mean unlimited is gone yeah yes yes it's uh it's uh it's actually incredible to what links uh this the anonymization processes can go uh a while ago i was also reading just you know like an article on psycholinguistics so analyzing speech patterns and that even though we don't reveal that or a lot of other markers so but before we so that we don't drift off so i will yes it's like web 3 still has the privacy problem still can can be upgraded on privacy uh from what i gather and here would be really good time to let's call it i wouldn't call it yeah like essentially to present also your projects what uh what are uh we didn't spend so much time so maybe what uh we can start with jaya uh with you what is neem actually doing so how where where does niem fit into this chain of privacy in the web 3 um i mean nim is kind of it's a system that kind of like operates both for web 3 and web 2 because it's a kind of network layer system so it sits beneath kind of other chains and daps and um it's a mixnet uh so fundamentally what it does is it takes um packets as they go through the internet and routes them through a number of nodes and across several different layers the nodes mix the traffic with other internet traffic um and adds a little bit of timing obfuscation and passes it passes on to to the destination and so um what that does is it protects from it protects the kind of network layer from large-scale traffic analysis and it protects um internet traffic the metadata of internet traffic um so normally you know even if you're using encrypted messaging whether it's signal or up or whatever else um you know an observer of the network can still kind of register patterns of communication so they can still see like okay how often is is this device speaking to this device what times of the day what size of uh uh you know what size of packet is kind of is is being routed through and then from all that information it can kind of guess pretty much like what is the relationship between these people um we can guess usually you know is it are they sending an image file or or something else so there's like there's a lot of information that you can get from metadata that as kind of surveillance can get from metadata um and in actual fact metadata is you know more easily kind of machine readable so in terms of kind of surveillance that that is based on on machine learning um metadata is quite kind of is even more valuable almost than the content of the messaging so what nim does is it protects metadata and it protects internet traffic at the at the network layer from from large scale traffic analysis um and it sits underneath other applications and chains so um and the way that the mix that operates is you know the more diversity of applications that are kind of routing their traffic through the nim mixed net the better it is for everybody so the more kind of like uh different forms of traffic gets it gets routed through the more the harder it gets for an observer to understand you know what's what's actually happening in the network so it's a kind of like lost in the crowd type privacy um awesome it's a very very important topic uh we also we also see it's uh addressing a lot so today um to be the decentralized warrior so to speak you know it's like one should be running uh also their own note or notes and um we see uh on sporting side we see also questions popping up where there are uh for people who want to set up uh censorship resistant blogs the question is will they see from where i upload things and it's uh basically nim is addressing exactly exactly this uh questions so yeah exactly it's um yeah maybe for a while if we just stick to the node operators before we move uh to the others uh danny uh one of the things you've been also working on i i remember this was already quite a while ago like this i will never forget your demo about plausible deniability and the paper prints and how you demo it okay this chunk can be a mickey mouse or it could be a linux penguin by doing some cryptographic magic can you maybe explain like the precautions on the swarm side that we take for uh that node operators are essentially not at risk and they are basically protected by i guess yes so protecting user data from node operators is not only it's not only to protect the users from the prying guys or the node operators but it's also to protect the node operators that they can plausibly claim that they don't know what they're storing and it is in so this goes to the censorship resistance the permissionless publishing aspect of swarm that if node operators don't know what they are storing first of all they cannot censor themselves they they they don't know what to what to block and what not to block and secondly if they are placed under outside pressure to block certain content they can possibly claim you know in a sense and thirdly even if they are forced to block certain you know pieces of data there can be for example 10 encrypted variants of the same publication and if one is brought down then the public address where it can be read is simply shifted from from the one that has been forced down to the next one and the and then the same time and eleventh one can be uploaded also encrypted so basically when we're playing this cat and mouse game you want to be you you want to be the cat right so you want to kind of be one step ahead in the arm space so uh awesome great uh thank you uh so so okay moving a little bit maybe up the stack maybe here i don't uh also it's not the the right uh description parasite phy dark five um has entered relatively recently the stage but very loudly yeah it's like dark point all about it's like the cryptic the cryptic description is let there be dark so yeah that's that's uh it's uh we're completely anonymous and completely private so we just don't tell anyone what it is i'm kidding it's uh it's a it's a new layer one where we utilize like uh mostly zero knowledge proofs to make new and anonymous financial engineering and just a point to give like projects like swarm and neymar totally complementary to darkfy because you can use them as tr as your data transports so when you make transactions you can anonymize yourself with this but it does this doesn't mean that you are not anonymous while using dark flight by itself we have we have private transactions and we're also building private smart contracts and this means you can have execution inside zero knowledge of any kind of smart contract then this enables you to have like anonymous dials and swaps and basic quoting also auctions and swaps and markets like futures markets everything can be completely anonymous so when it comes for example to dao's you know you don't have biased voting right so usually when you have a vote in some eth uh you can see like oh 90 voted for yes 10 or 8 voted for no i'm going to be biased i'm going to vote for yes in an anonymous system you don't have this you just like completely protect anyone who has voted and they don't like nobody can point a gun to your head and make you vote for something because you're you're not there um the the other thing uh what i wanted to mention was um i'll slip my mind sorry um [Music] oh sorry i i lost my crack of thumb all good no worries uh i would i would pick up in a way where you left you mentioned zero knowledge proofs and in a way that's also your cue it's i remember it's a while ago uh how your statement you said something along the lines i want to get to the bottom of this we spoke in switzerland and you really did go i i would say you dug even deeper than the bottom was in this sense so what is what is the zk evm that you're working on now what is it all about and also maybe just here um complimentary question um i think it was in 2018 at the web 3 summit you had a talk about how to build a self-sovereign nation and there was like a layered approach so maybe also as part of this when you explain the zke evm can you place it on that yeah it's decay the kvm is very much in the infrastructure you know it's in the blockchain now blockchains this is very much about the scalability it's a little bit less about privacy because you know the nice thing of zero knowledge is that they can be used in these two applications and they're very different but the technology is very much the same one is for scalability and the other is for privacy if you want to use both then you need like to use twice and then this one you need recursive zero knowledge you know one for privacy and another form and we are going there this is uh going there the ckbm project is very much related to the scalability so we started by the scalability just to to to to make a lot a lot of transactions two sections per second this is important if you want to go mainstream and of course but of course privacy is is the the it's required you know it needs to go together somehow this is the thing and the the cool thing of the zero knowledge is um in the privacy is that it allows you to uh so when you are proving something about your identity when you're proving something about your data it's not just sharing your data it's about doing a query on your data so you want to share the piece of information the the the bit of information that you want to share typical example is i don't want to share my benefit i just want to share the time over 18. okay this is a query on your data but you can do any query on there so uh you maybe you want to prove that you have an engineering degree you don't need to reveal which university or which grades uh or you want to prove that you are good for an insurance you don't need to feel a full form of a lot of medical questions it's just okay i just i'm okay or i'm at this level so the idea is that you can share only the specific information that you need to each person and just proof just generate a proof that's valid for the person that you are proving so this is the the the two things here and for these the zero technology is what allows very much to do these kind of points and this is interesting because this is uh for me for example on the old gdpr protection and which is the the sense of the law is good okay we can discuss about things but the idea is that i would i would expect that in the future these privacy laws should force to use this technology to just collect only the information that you need for each uh for each piece and this is very important for the privacy like when you go to a hotel right now you give the your id card and they do make probably a copy and they get all your information no no it's just what you need about me it's like okay i'm not i'm not even some list of uh uh find it uh most find that person that's all you need okay i can prove that i'm not at least that's it you can just give me the room okay that's uh you know we've just had like this experience um right now uh i mean i'm in slovenia uh and it's slovenia as also other countries i think it was similar you know we had like just this piece of paper with a qr code with all our data on it that we have to prove like even when going into a different like uh petrol station to uh to pay for uh gas and there was like this somehow help you know that they first scanned that picture and then they said can i see also your personal id so that i know that you didn't uh take friends one and it's like so many discussions around this and it could be in a way trivially easily solved with zero knowledge proofs where also the rights would be accepted if already you know it's a different discussion if this needs to be checked but in case it has to be checked why not zero knowledge yes but unfortunately i don't know anyone in governments who who works with uh like proper cryptography so the most of us who have these skills are in in crypto itself that's kind of unfortunate if we don't push that if we don't push that nobody's gonna if we don't push that the government's nobody's gonna do it yeah i'm very happy you you brought this up this was actually i wanted to bring this uh into discussion a bit later you're ahead of me uh awesome it's uh kind of this um yeah my question would be like doing it you know do we need to remind ourselves of the cypherpunk ethos were basically this kind of skepticism towards the government's uh is expressed and basically saying if we don't build it who else is going to build it i think we have the obligation to push other thing is that they take it but we as a citizens if we understand the governments in right ways so it's like person that represents yourself we have the obligation to to to show them to explain them and to at least to try i would say i understand the skepticism uh it's hard and they have maybe some governments they have another you know other interests and other things but i believe that this is our obligation i would not throw the towel in the first in the first round yes absolutely i also think that there's actually quite a big diversity in terms of like which governments and which part of which governments you know and a lot of this stuff also depends on you know specific visionary people that actually operate from the inside of government making alliances with people on the outside right um and that stuff happens and that stuff is very possible but i also wanted to i'm actually i'm i'm working on a paper at the moment on the concept of digital sovereignty because um it is it touches exactly on some of these questions which is like the role of cryptography um in the question of digital sovereignty but also how many contradictory meanings there is of digital sovereignty right so when a nation state talks about digital sovereignty it's quite a different type of digital sovereignty than when an individual is talking about digital sovereignty right or when a kind of group is talking about digital sovereignty and there is like a strange period right now where there's a little bit of an overlap of interests you know i mean we're seeing that with the the russian ukraine situation and you know nation states are becoming like it's very clear what technological sovereignty a digital sovereignty actually means and what the lack of digital sovereignty uh what kind of consequences that can have um you know in terms of your geopolitical power um and so you know cryptography is this kind of like weird space where on the one hand um you know nation states really do want to have strong cryptographic protections because it's in their national in their interest of their national security um on the other hand they also have a strong kind of desire to have have back doors right but the moment you put in a back door an enemy state can enter through that back door as well so there is this kind of it's it's a bit of a kind of like contradictory game um that that nation states have to play in terms of security in terms of geopolitics in terms of encryption specifically where sometimes i think there are actually like very clear alliances that can be built with like from the bottom up from like ordinary people like pushing the pushing the interest of ordinary people um and pushing pushing the interest of you know kind of pro encryption and pro cryptography line i think is very possible at this moment in time because the awareness of what a lack of strong digital security actually means for for nation states but here is where the zero knowledge technology plays a key a key role here because uh zero knowledge technology is what allows to improve it's not this that you have this balance between privacy and security that you face now that the cool thing of the zero knowledge is that allows to improve both things within without having to sacrifice some of the some of the some of some of the parts um it's probably at some point will still be a balance but the level you know the improvement in in security and in privacy can be much better and this is the kind of technologies that it's not about engineering a balance it's about improving uh the society i think i think zero knowledge proves i am i am like i like i i feel like i want to say it's gonna be bigger than blockchain but i mean that's just a stupid tagline but it's like it is that's that's that's how i felt when i first discovered them man honestly right it's true this is a great great comparison john in the sense like i would here follow up with the question you know when i my first contact with the blockchain was it kind of like happened in a couple of stages so first i was like oh blockchain cool and then i needed some time just to internally process this and then eventually i started to think more in decentralized terms and zero knowledge proves does it have like the same kind of requirements does it change the way how one things about designing systems yeah it does absolutely fine it open doors it opens a new way of uh understanding the the data the understanding that that that so the management of the data and what you can do with that and how you share the data how you can distribute this data yeah it's just a game changer in in that just a reminder zero knowledge that shows zero knowledge was invented in the 80s but actually they were not practical until uh until the 10 years ago or maybe 15 years ago and it's a very recent technology we are it looks like we are very old technology at this point that's a very recent technology and a lot of improvements and a lot of research is still doing and it's very promising but we are very very still in very early stages of this technology so so here i just want to kind of admit that like i have a background in critical theory right so like this so when i first like came across blockchain i mean i've my my background is actually more as a kind of blockchain uh critic um and and i and i have a similar kind of approach with zero knowledge uh proofs where it's you know there is there's always a part of me that looks at the technology like this and then i get very excited about all the kind of potentials and then i immediately start looking through and understanding all the ways that it can go wrong and all the problems that are going to come out of it and like with zero knowledge proofs you know i have this kind of when it comes to the question of privacy you know what is both phenomenal about zero knowledge proofs is this idea of like okay so we can we can have data available for computation but still keep it private right we can have we can run machine learning algorithms on data but still we keep it quiet we can have like all this kind of really fine-grained um engineering of uh what and under what conditions things are revealed and in what kinds of ways which is which is phenomenal i think like as a design space it's like it's absolutely super interesting but what that does to my mind is that it separates out the question of surveillance and control because if you have algorithms that go on to kind of then determine questions around who has access to what under what conditions and what what you need to use you know what you need to prove in order to get access to various things um then you know the kind of we we have the possibility for um an intensification of systems of control based on digital technologies um but still having privacy so they'll be like oh but it's fine it's fine we have privacy but the the element of control that comes with that traditionally would have come with surveillance can still continue and so this this for me is like um that's what i'm trying to keep an eye on when it comes to zero knowledge proofs i think there's a lot there to think through and talk about yeah it's just it's just a technology yeah yeah yeah yeah it's not a technology that can be used for good or for bad there is exactly ways to use it which is which is why we need to talk about how it's going to be used right and that's where the interesting conversation is because it and that's why you know being someone that comes from a kind of background or critical theory i don't just suck things down i'm not like we should never do that you know it's more like we need to have this conversation and it's a very fascinating and super important conversation to have this is a very important point it's uh and this is actually what we also try uh to kind of start and foster here during the we are millions hackathon because exactly it's it's like like you said it's just a technology and it can go both ways also blockchain can be the biggest curse for humanity if used by wrong people and so we are running out of time unfortunately because it seems to me that we just started um but i would still you know i would still kind of push for a couple of questions uh and it's uh one question it has been um i think jordy you said it the first uh today it said like something along the lines i'm not so i don't care so much about the past i'm worried about the future and if we speak about privacy and we mentioned that the you know skepticism towards government they will enable privacy or anything it's uh we can i guess fairly assume that um there will be more pressure against end-to-end encryption encryption in general privacy invasions and so on uh my question would be here a little bit controversial but um i think it would be good to address it do you think that it can be dangerous for a developer to develop such solutions in the future what's your take on this or do developers need to take precautions the interest in what way in the way in the way of essentially you know it's like if we look at times there was a reason why satoshi nakamoto is satoshi nakamoto because the guys who were trying to uh push these boundaries before lots of them ended up in prisons uh so we can we can imagine you know it's like if not operators are concerned uh that um their ips are tracked etc you know it's like in a way what we are here discussing is also privacy can annoying the strongest ones no yeah yeah i i notice this happens as well and also they have many young and talented developers who are completely anonymous on the internet and they keep building new things in on new chains and it's like brilliant stuff and nobody knows who they are so like i think there's still these cyphers who actually care and i think what they should do is also educate other people in how to like handle their online presence and what they do but ego is one thing but also safety is is another thing you should like take care about i hope no the with a good answer is i hope no i can understand that there are reasons there are reasons for having a concern but my worry is nobody should stop developing these tools because they are afraid of this there are many ways to contribute to develop to help in this direction without having to worry for your personal for your personal life actually i think that these kind of anonymity tools they still have a long way to go until they are easy enough to use so that people who are not not developers but let's say writers or bloggers can use them with the kind of safety that would allow for for being you know the satoshi nakamoto of some other community which is not not software development so i think in the future especially if projects like like name succeed that we will see many more of these pseudonymous personalities who have done something great anonymously without revealing their true identity yes yes i i agree it's maybe i would hear ed because i mean also you know it's like thinking about this stuff also in the past and it's um for me the answer is uh actually quite a poetic one i think uh that uh developers uh like like it was pointed out we need to push for these solutions we need to work on that and that actually the strength is in numbers and in open source it's uh for projects that we work on if it would be closed source projects i think we all would have already some kind of visits from some kind of uh you know like people so to speak it doesn't work no this this privacy with a closed source that doesn't work this combination just it's a stupid thing even about that we have seen we have a lot of examples of uh how many you know private applications that have been sold as private applications and then has been no it's cryptography in general uh needs to be open source and there are many examples of private source of all kinds of cryptography that it just don't work so don't even think about that privacy needs to be the developer yes so maybe maybe here as a closing question i think we covered many areas but yes uh in a way the conversation has just started but um with uh i think we established the importance of privacy we established the need for privacy we established that privacy developing privacy centric solutions is not just the right thing to do but also probably one of the biggest opportunities we heard here the statement zero knowledge proofs can be bigger than blockchain so it's kind of it seems like we ticked almost all the boxes uh for the last box to take off i would i would ask everybody here it's like if you imagine that the privacy force for good the global privacy force for good is now listening to you what would you say are the low-hanging fruits where should developers go and pick up the work and continue how what what are the next steps be part of it you start i think it's very important to teach people about open source and free software and also to teach people about development so you should like reclaim like what you can you should you should not just be a consumer you should contribute in any way you can whether it's like documentation or just like being friendly or anything it's just don't be a consumer but be a part of this big great community awesome great little bug reports sorry danny can you repeat uh broke up a little bit on my end write literate bug reports nice uh jordy maybe yeah i would you know we just for me there is one pending thing in the space is the sovereign entity you know having a real having a real bitcoin of self-sovereign energy you know protocol uh uh sessom identity protocol for me this is something that's uh uh uh really important in the space and we need to solve this identity you know claims mainly claims proofs and uh in entities and and solve that and this is it's a key piece you know if you see most of the applications you have a loving password in the beginning so you need we need to solve that in the centralized way if you want and it's it's a it's a very easy way to understand the showing identity somehow but this is uh an important piece it's not the piece it's just a it's like an operating system it's just a piece that opens a full space but we need to solve that you know for them to work then reputation to work in trust us a lot of things in the world but we need to solve that awesome awesome um yeah no i would say just you know i guess to take take uh be kind of creative and take the take privacy as an opportunity for a new type of innovation i really do think that that's quite important um i mean that's more of a general statement than you know we're it with nim we're always we always want to invite um anyone to play around with the mixnet um and so you know if you want to build anything on top of mixnet please you know get in touch um the more people build and play around and and use the mix that the better it is for everybody in terms of privacy um yeah thank you i think thank you very much uh for this i would add i would add to this um i think uh for every anybody also listening to this if you are into zero knowledge proofs if you are into cryptography and privacy all of the projects today i know everybody here is open to just yeah reach out reach out to people here find a project that aligns with your purpose and uh yes it's up to us we are the change so to speak you know we need uh if we are not doing it who else is going to do it and maybe with this uh the parting thoughts for today so to me it seems like clear you know it's like if one needs to decide about the new app or something developing new it needs to be private it needs to have zero knowledge proofs etc i think this we realized today it's it makes sense from all the angles but um maybe also it would be a call to action to uh not just developers i remember a while ago it's been quite a while down he sent me now symptoms article about the intolerant minority uh where basically a small group of people uh by being so intolerant and sticking to the principles uh can make global change and i would invite all of us and people who listen be this intolerant minority when it comes down to privacy and yeah let's move the needle so with this i would thank you all all of you it's been a great pleasure it's been great to see you all uh it's been a while also with some since we spoke and yes thank you again and peace see you soon thank you for hosting and we're back bye everyone thank you for tuning in again um thanks to gregor and all the participants right in the previous panel with their very interesting insights on the state of privacy and how it affects uh web 3 and what web 3 can do to uh increase it and encourage it um we'll kick it off uh in our next panel called developing for privacy anonymization that's the focus as an optimization as a sub-topic within the general theme of privacy as daniel mentioned it's also confidentiality and as i just mentioned it's also um i would say um a um otherwise again a question of power yes uh and in this talk we'll mainly focus on anonymity the availability and the way as a developer community we can help assist in reclaiming it or create it for this we have several speakers tuned in i'm going to ask them to turn on that camera there we go uh our moderator for this talk will be alexandra const and i will give the floor to her in a second let's see kareem thank you for joining olaf thank you for joining i mean you're upside down makes sense because you're in australia but yeah thank you so um first of all thank you all for joining uh for this session and uh i'll leave it to alexandra and herself to introduce yourself so okay hi guys can you hear me all right cool um yeah my name is alex i'm editor-in-chief and journalist at bien crypto and as a journalist i'm focusing on privacy related topics in the crypto space this is why i'm super excited to be here and to hear from you guys and i would say let's start with a quick introduction around i mean do you want to start and tell us a bit about yourself and what you're working on yeah sure thanks for having me it's 4am where i am so just bear with me i might be a bit slower than the rest of you uh okay yeah so i got into crypto in 2013 i moved to the netherlands i worked with a lot of different projects i was a journalist myself for a while as well and then i got involved with decentralized governance and what that could mean in terms of competing with existing state services as well as organizational governance models thereafter i got involved with a couple of other projects like rv or storage or these kind of services and then i moved to mexico and i got involved with workshops and raising awareness you know in terms of privacy and also sovereignty through decentralized services and now i am the founder of tokyo university uh which is the world's first decentralized autonomous university uh it's to compete with the centralized education model and to use distributed technologies to enhance the way that the incentive model behind education so in our model it had never been done before when we first started the top-ranking students are incentivized and also we have a lot of other services included in that that has never really been done before that for me is very interesting because i came to the conclusion that education is the main focal point that limits and empowers people to make better decisions depending on how it is approached and through this i have noticed both through case studies and personal experience that when you have new technologies it's important to educate people the correct way and to be able to provide education so that they can learn about these things so i'm sure many of you can relate to this even today we still have people who don't know what bitcoin is we still refer to blockchain as the blockchain and you know a lot of these things it's just continuing on and on it's because the education isn't being done properly and through that we also created a project uh with a few other people called unchained innovations which is totally focused on privacy and allowing people to kind of step away from big tech applications and services and stepping into more open source alternatives and providing education around that as well as giving people the opportunity to obtain devices that are designed to be privacy respecting so this is kind of in a nutshell what i'm doing thank you awesome thank you olaf are you on yes sure i hope you can hear me well um yes olaf in the blockchain space for about five years or so now a lifelong developer since year 15 and i actually stepped out of the blockchain space for a while because i was very fed up after i had some failed projects with some of the usability issues that came with private keys especially on how you would explain to a lot of people how you could keep them safe after quite a lot of research including the homomorphic encryptions your knowledge proofs i'm now working on my protocol called medium [Music] that attempts to solve this in a non-custodial way so where you can basically have a non-custodial forget my password functionality completely decentralized and safe so that's the one side i'm working on and as part of the zero knowledge proofs research i'm also building a tornado cache style mixer for one of the mid cap coins awesome thank you did you want to add something sorry no i'm fine for my mute button okay perfect how do you do you want to go on yeah let's why not um kareem i'm going to say it in dutch because it's not doable in english steglenberg's my last name it's terrible i'm from animal solutions based in in the netherlands um and we work uh on as well yeah i'm not that much of in the blockchain space and we work on ssi soft sovereign identity um i was i was asked to fill in this spot so i don't know is everybody familiar here or is it required to have a short introduction of what ssi is i know the panelists are but um i could give a small description if that's uh right yes that's right sorry two sentences okay well um this is i we basically tried to um or the ssi space basically or as i describe it try to model sort of take the digital identity model and get it more in line with how a physical identity works in the sense of if you look at basic example as an identity card or a passport you get a document physical document issued by the government in this case and you have that document and you go around proving who you are to different kinds of authorities but you have the authority over over the document and who you show it to and and not and um well in the digital space that is a bit more difficult because digital information is easily cloned modified copied and there is no real way to guarantee that that was actually uh issued to you and it's not a document you got from someone else and ssi tries to solve that um by using uh cryptography which olaf knows way more about some happiness here can fill in the gaps for me um so that's it in a nutshell and with animal solutions we work on mainly in the aries space the our main an open source project hyperledger aries but we are the main contributors for the javascript framework um so we work on the framework level but we also make applications for uh users on top of it or for companies and clients there was a little bit more than two sentences i'm sorry that's awesome thank you i mean i have a question for you because i've been reading a bit about you of course about all of you and i discovered that you have been living on bitcoin only for three years and regarding the current situation in the finance system i wanted to know from you how important is privacy and finance and what i don't know what has been your main takeaway from this period of time in your life yeah thanks there is a more updated version of that so it's about seven years um so that was a long time ago that was published but yeah i lived purely on bitcoin for about seven or eight years uh across three continents uh across more than 10 different countries and i started at a time where there was no bitcoin debit cards or anything like that so i had to find very creative ways on how to exchange cryptos for the services or things that i needed to access my experience is that i guess two different sides to that is that people have forgotten what cryptos were about in many ways it started off at a very as a very different movement what it has become now uh you know i still do a lot of workshops i have two courses one is on uh how to get a swiss bank in your pocket which uh teaches people about cryptocurrencies and the sovereignty around money and the function of it and the other one is around reclaiming digital privacy and freedom which teaches people about privacy and implementations of it for non-take that attend these courses often tell are surprised when i tell them they can buy cryptos in person um they're like what do you mean you can buy cryptos in person um because the notion and the story and i watched it change and a lot of people warned about this has been changed that you can only buy cryptos through centralized exchanges and that's all that people in a lot of cases know and it's important that we note that we live in a bubble and a lot of times we go to these crypto meetings the script of people like right now i don't know how many people are attending this event that don't know anything about what we're talking about and are just learning and a lot of times we're just preaching to the choir and it's just the same group of people going to the same group of events and learning about talking about the same similar topics and rarely does it include other people from the public that don't have these kind of concepts in their mind so when you speak to the public it's a very different notion you know people are just learning about what telegram is people are just learning about what signal is and you know i've been using these tools for uh more than half a decade and similarly for cryptos it's the same it's like what do you mean you can buy cryptos of people and i'm like well it started off as a peer-to-peer currency right so that was the way that we was always done and that's the way that i like to do it you know and they find it surprising that a person could have earned cryptos and never bought it off a centralized exchange and that notion for me is very interesting it shows me where we are and then the narrative and how it's been changed and and how detached the main portion of the population is from the true foundations of behind these concepts and the the true notion of what these tools were designed to do and how people perceive them now so that's just kind of like a small glimpse into my world awesome thank you i often think about how data in general is super let's say fragile because we are entering web 3 and we see like meta is moving into the metaverse already and all the big players are coming and i think plebs are so super important in that space because we form our future and the more privacy focused people are building the future of web 3 and metaverse i think the more we can gain from this i don't know who wants to take on this maybe kareem or olaf what are your thoughts on this you actually may uh add something to this question so um i um i sometimes i i need to remind myself of of the fact that we're losing privacy uh as a society in general and um it's good to uh uh something a physical reminder of that and i know i collect a lot of junk over time in the years but sometimes i look back on this one i don't know if you remember this one this is the 2006 edition of time magazine and the person of the year is called you because of the rise of um social media back then and uh yeah advent of youtube and um it's a reminder of how user-generated content became a de-facto model for web 2 applications and uh how it started to lean on the input of people and as a funny reminder that you just mentioned meta there's another edition four years later specifically on facebook with the uh tagline how it's redefining privacy uh specifically the question is there a limit to how much we'll share and we found that limit it took us almost a decade but yes um you know and it's in this case i would say uh then it's indeed uh important to to address this uh like you just did okay how are we proceeding with the current uh movements by these corporations who are trying to proclaim or claim these new areas of interaction that way yes so i think it's quite interesting when you talk about data collection and privacy and minimization and where a lot of the space is going and this is what you see for example itself open identity and this is not an attack of it but more that it's in an early stage at this point we quite often say okay i do let's do an education and i get some verified credential um and i find this it seems always like a very good like system but the question always comes okay as we know this with how many how easy um people share data is just in the same laziness they also do with trust so that's like okay i trust this university but who says i can trust this university then it's there becomes some entity that says i'm gonna dictate who who's trustworthy or dictator and this is that's usually recreating the pyramid that we already have but with much less privacy because everything that's dictated to be shared or can be dictated to share because okay then we say okay we have to share that you're 18 at certain bars who's going to define that who is going to be the top of this hierarchy that eventually will create itself and i think and that's the same as okay then we say we we can decide what we share okay let's say i need to share my name which means that if i go by an airport they can basically become the new facebook right because then they get to collect all the data and they know it's absolutely correct because that's what the system provides and i think this is where a lot of development or this is i would say this is a certainty it will happen if we don't really think about privacy anonymization on data very well because even the simple concepts of a name is actually completely irrelevant to a lot of interactions i mean for social interactions it's very nice for us humans but for any interaction with the system it's totally irrelevant for example just like age or like maybe for medicine but that's particularly at certain points in time that you need this um and i think this is something that should be uh yeah looked after and i think even from the side of what i mean is going on and the awareness that this can happen and this is happening i think that's very important and also on the side of karim that things like zero knowledge proofs should really be at the core of this all and there's really you really i think should really go from the perspective where should i not use it instead of where should i use it so that's my addition there you know am i supposed to to to say something here also okay no then uh i thought it was maybe an ore or an end i don't know nerd um yeah well i mean i think if i got what you said olaf right it is but you were saying like who dictates what you can ask or not right and i think you have a very very very good point there because it's it's such a difficult thing we have it this i mean we i think most of us here are really deep into the technology um so we are i guess almost technology fast shifts in in the sense it has to be sort of perfect it has to be um but we are we live in a culture where you know we have had web too um people are just used to share everything um and um indeed if you do not have an authority which is not a popular word in this space but um with things like ssi um the the verifier if you will still dictates what you have to provide in information so they could now just they could like decline to offer their services to you based on if you don't like they could they could still give you the the we have all nice like we have beautiful things like selective disclosure don't reveal everything that is in the credential etc but yeah if the verifier asks for everything and um if you don't provide everything the result is okay you won't get our service then what did it help so i think indeed um zero knowledge proof should be at the heart um because also and i think you um we're touching on that if if we still if verifiers can still ask for the same data we actually lose privacy because now they know it's actually true you know it's not we can not just fill in a form with the name or whatever no now nowadays now this data is actually yours um and another thing i i know this in the especially the ssi space is that as a a lot of people um it's sort of almost a religion in a way like crypto is sometimes um like ssi solves everything no it doesn't because also when i pre and i think this is overlooked a lot if i provide you that information you know if you ask me for my my date of birth or whatever and i give it to you nothing withholds you from storing that information selling it to others and the value of the data actually just increased because they can be pretty sure it's actually my date of birth um [Music] i am completely lost on what the original question was but so forgive me um but yeah no i think i think you you have a very good point there olaf i think i completely agree with you awesome thank you how does it look like if i'm a self-sovereign individual in the digital world what do i have to look out for at the moment because i think a lot of noobs are entering the new digital world soon and i think there will be a lot of already pre-made offerings on on how privacy and anonymity could look like there and how could which steps can like normal people go to have like a privacy anonymity driven take on this oh i would if i may i would say it's i think you're right and norm normal people let's let's not call them normal people but people who are not super deep into this uh into this subject um i i don't think you can ask of everyone um to to be as deep into these kinds of subjects and sadly there is indeed a lot of misconception around um okay if i have a wallet now i'm you know if i've identity wallet now i'm now my i'm safe my privacy my data is is is secured well no um what a bit like what happened with bitcoin and crypto you know it was supposed to be um completely anonymous and stuff yeah well not so much really depends on how you go about it um the answer to that i'm still thinking about it um because in a way you know you cannot ask everybody to be a privacy expert or cryptography expert um so would be good if there are organizations that are you know saying okay this this can be trusted and this can't be but then again you have an authority there which uh could also yeah act in ways you don't want um so i i'm afraid i don't have a uh uh ready uh philosophical solution for you here but i'm very interested in olaf's thoughts on this or i mean i'm sorry i know olaf so i'm saying his name a lot i would wonder in this case what did the responsibility be with the initiators of the projects providing these uh i'd say i'd say so definitely yeah i'd say so definitely because i mean because there are a lot of projects also out there that are marketing themselves as super privacy um insuring etc and that is a huge claim to make i mean you can you can say you know you improve privacy a bit fine um but i think you know people especially if people don't know enough about the subject just like scientists for instance you you you trust a certain knowledge authority because you cannot learn everything um so there is a there's a trust relationship there um which i think yeah you have to be very careful um and yeah i think that if you if you say as as a company or as a project lead this is a privacy preserving solution and then there should be consequences if it's not because it's your job basically thank you go on well i was wondering what i mean because he chose the actually the route to anonymize himself in such a way i mean was it in that case um [Music] uh the facilities didn't help at least not at the time when you did it um would it would you still call it an option now for people to go that route and is there enough facilitation by projects due to let's say fully anonymize yourself at least for payments what you did it's definitely changed it's much harder there's a lot more tracking involved cryptos are definitely much more track the problem is now majority of holders come through centralized exchanges whereas back in 2013 and 14 majority of holders actually had it through mining and peer-to-peer transactions um centralized exchanges actually didn't exist when i got involved it was like what mangogs was like one of the first major ones um and that was yeah it's changed a lot and the more people go through centralized exchanges the more they're stamping their id on every single transaction that's being sent um the wallet address on the centralized exchanges don't change so when you ascend and receive majority of centralized exchanges just give you one address when it comes to let's say bitcoin or um other cryptocurrencies where it's supposed to change after every transaction when we consider good wallets so it's it's changed definitely a lot i think that the point that people need to figure out is whether they're a slave or they're a sovereign individual that's a good starting point and i think people should be okay with if people want to be a slave um it's not our duty to tell people to respect privacy or honor privacy or care for privacy all you can do as a person is provide that service and knowledge and if people want to learn more about it they can do so um but to to say that every single tool should be private and privacy should be this central point for every single project well you're enforcing your own ideologies onto like you know how people operate maybe some people are okay with giving away their personal information maybe if they need it for google analytics and they're happy with giving away theirs because in their industry they're it's very useful as a tool i don't like it all i can do is support tools that i think are privacy respecting and just share the knowledge with people who are interested uh to learn more about it so i think the differentiating point for me is very important to kind of acknowledge do you want to be a slave or do you want to be a sovereign individual and slavery can be through many different ways it can be through digital slavery it can be through psychological emotional attachment etc etc and once you establish that then you figure out well who do i want to be then the environment around you can shape with that rather than change things around you as the branch so the ruth problem for me is who do you want to be and what kind of a life do you want so may i ask a follow-up question is that okay yeah um you said um to provide the tools and information or or and if people want to dig into it then they should be able to don't you think that there is a as for us nerds that there is a sort of a responsibility to make it at least as easy as possible so it's so it doesn't have to be a study but that those tools are readily available for everyone who wants to take that route in and that it's pretty easy to take that route instead of uh having to dive deep into what kind of keys are good then how how how trust works et cetera yeah i mean that brings it back to my like for sure um that brings it back to like kind of the comment i made at the start is that a lot of times the very people that are supposed to teach people live in a bubble and they are unable to communicate on a level that can reach the average person so i've been to so many events and i'm not going to make up statistics but majority of people i deal with are unaware that the language and the method of communication they use is not for the average person so they're talking about you know zero you know knowledge kind of systems uh and the average person is still trying to figure out why what's up is not a good idea and that link and misunderstanding between the two worlds is very obvious once you kind of recognize it so for sure language should be very simple it should be in layman's term if you can't express your ideas in very simple forms you should just spend some time maybe learning how to communicate better and you know really start from the start so i know through for example unchanged innovations a lot of people come through and they're just learning about telegram and they don't know what telegram is and they're still giving out their phone number when they want someone to add them on telegram or they give away their email address and it's like well you can set up a username and they're like oh wow and it's the conditioning through other services that never provided such pathways that has led them to go oh i didn't even know this was a thing oh in telegram you can switch off like so people can't add you to a group i didn't know you could do that so these like very small steps compared to like obviously the conversation we're having right now so it's good to recognize where majority of people are and where we are and just creating a very safe bridge for them to cross into and uh yeah this so yeah following up on that for sure that's important yeah yeah now that's also what i meant is with with culture it's like people are just used to throw everything on twitter everything on facebook and that i think that is the most difficult challenge we we will have is to to get that sort of general understanding there i think the world did gave a good lesson the last few years on that so i always said to myself the day everyone understands crypto is a world i don't want to live in and i think that venezuela countries like that already know that so i think it's if we have a nice world we should gradually go there and yeah i think that's important and make the tooling ready um when people wake up to the necessity for it and that's not really a nice outlook or something like that but i hope it will never be needed and we see this and i think one of the first steps a lot of people can do um especially when it comes to crypto money is the first chance that you get it off in exchange get into a mixer that's the first thing and and use it don't just keep it try try to go to bars try to use it get it through a mixer paint it as anonymous and then start using it so the a large circulating supply of the coins that you're actually using is being anonymized from the main central points that are the exchanges um but then again that's for a crypto people who are already in it so yeah but when you now see a lot of people that get new into the space do see this both control of governments on money and banking and you see this now i find it a very interesting discussion or subject that's going on now between ukraine and russian because on one side crypto is bad on the other side crypto is good right so this is a very people can have a look at it and decide for themselves and if if it's a good thing or a bad thing if it's a good thing if they think it's a good thing and they're probably gonna look okay oh this is it's a good thing because governments took power over like bank accounts and stuff like that so now it becomes very close to a lot of people at least subject to discussion and i think that's uh already yeah it's a it's not a nice lesson to be learned but it's so it's a good one i would say so that's a very quick question since i'm not into crypto money uh space that much myself a mixer is that something that that can sort of re-anonymize my um um yes sorry stuff i got okay cool yeah so the answer is you said something tornado case is one of the most uh known ones you send some money in and then a lot of people do that and then with zero knowledge proofs so like you can't track it back to the contract anymore so something going black box something goes out and if that constantly moves then it's essentially impossible to figure out um where the money is um one of the previous speakers mentioned that uh the problem is not just what you're sending but it's also the uh it was jaya from when him who mentioned that it's also the metadata is a problem the fact that you're interacting at all uh with with someone or some organization so um given your advice put everything through a mixer is um let's say if the whole world would do it that's a good and i'd say it's a it would be a reasonable alternative through obscurity uh but in this case wouldn't you just be tagged by default as you'll be one of the few people using it and i'm asking this because i um i was part of a collective to develop a router for specifically for journalists in crisis areas at one point yes they were checked because they were using vpn and so they were so the reason why i'm saying this is why i would say this should be more of a general education point when it comes to crypto because if everyone gets stacked no one's stacked right so if you're just a few people doing it so i've been calling up on twitter as well if you want to donate to any either russian or ukrainian cause use these kind of tools right because use them because then and um anonymized coins get into circulation the more they're there the harder it becomes to say um now you attack yourself yeah if you're the only one if you're the if you're like the how you say the i think the medic i don't know which one bridge that got hacked recently that that basically whitewashed all their money through to their case yeah then it's like it's like gets this wrong connotation but now we get the public sentiment to say okay maybe it's a good thing it becomes a personal security issue and the more we do that i think the better it is and the harder it becomes to actually tag people for it and but yeah on the other question on the infrastructural side yeah if you just obviously you still use the normal internet you could still have you could track things you could and i i am also of the personal belief that if there is some well-organized well-funded group either government or private that wants to find someone they most likely will and you would have to go to such extreme lengths over such a long time that's nearly impossible for everyone but if you want to stay out of the group sweep i would say of okay let me now we just grab a database from binance look at all the id numbers and just match everyone and out goes a taxi event right um i think that's you know that's something i think those are those need to be blocked and i think getting yourself private from these kind of large-scale like global intervention mechanisms is a good thing i completely agree with that because i mean it how bad would it be if if they have to go to such lengths there has to be a real motivation to find someone and that is not going to be everyone so indeed it is these these large sweeps that is the most dangerous and to just a quick follow-up i had today about metadata i i heard a story it's i think it is also dangerous how governments or organizations don't realize that what what you can do with metadata for instance if you get a covet test in the netherlands um you can get your testing certificate like and then you can go to bars or whatever if you were negative or at least not positive but they will only send you they will send you a secure email but only if you're positive so if you intercept that email you don't even have to go into the secure mail like environment online if you just see somebody got that email you know what's up and these are the kinds of things that oops we think about um uh normal people don't but then also the people that should be thinking about these kind of things are also not informed enough um so yeah i think we have a long way to go when it comes to that i'm a bit skeptical but um i just want to add something to what was brought up which was something i bring up in my courses as well because sometimes people come in and they're like wow isn't signal developed by cia anyway what's the point of using it anyway the reason i bring up this comment is because we need to dis differentiate between state surveillance and big tech surveillance and i think it's always healthy to to kind of point the difference between these two out because if you're going on to the state surveillance will get rid of your phone get rid of most of your tech like the level of technology and you know tools that they have like the average person good luck um you know it's it's it's not going to work very well but when we're talking about big tech and giving away metadata to you know facebook and whatsapp and instagram and tick tock and google and microsoft and apple well then there's definitely a lot we can do there's a lot um that we could actually do and quite easily and that's something i kind of just want to kind of differentiate between because for me the main goal is giving away my information which is literally being sold off and it's being used to target me with advertisement and being sold off to companies for a variety of reasons and what kareem kind of brought up is that with the covetous a lot of people used to say well this is being sold off to companies as well because the dna analysis and other things that are available from the tests and they you know people came out like oh this is conspiracy it's conspiracy theories but no we have actual data now that's just come out that's confirming these claims and you know no one signed the agreement saying yeah you can test me for the better group society because we don't want to spread this virus but where's my agreement that i said you can sell this off to like other companies this is very personal information it's like biometrics you know it's not like my email address it's my it's my literally my biometrics so it's definitely an issue and a misunderstanding where people are consenting by design and and and the lack of and the lack of understanding and the power they have to say no um anyway just want to bring up some of the responses and then you even have the people and i meet quite a lot of them who are like who don't who do realize or not the scale but realize that their data is being sold but they're like i have nothing to hide you know so people just i mean that's it's a classic but the people don't realize what the value is of data and how far you can go sorry i'm actually quite like that as well i'm quite freely sharing a lot of my data i actually frankly i most of the time i don't really care i understand ads are being targeted i understand that if there's some political narrative that tries to be pushed to research engines i know that you understand so i'm fine that's a difference but i also i'm finding it damn it damn useful that i can just use my pc and i just search in address and just open my phone it's there right i've i agree really really a lot of convenience in that and i well that's what i said as well before you either have to go to extreme lengths to to really get rid of that or and that's also my that's that's a personal choice of course um i even though i'm quite on the privacy side of things like yeah okay well whatever right i mean it does provide convenience and i think um a lot of people are with me on that on the outside of the bubble and that is if our more private tooling does not provide similar level of convenience it will not be mainstream and i think that's that's up to the so yes so i think in there just being private is only an added value for a very small group but at least you make the conscious choice you know you you know you know what you're giving away and you know what you're getting back so it's a trade-off it's a it's it's uh and i think a lot of people are just they read a lot of privacy this leak there and they're yeah i know it's not really right it's the same as like you have to do a cover test if you want to go to a bar you can make a choice not to go to that's not the same as with google it's not like you really have a choice other than inconvenience yourself extremely big like yeah but that should be a choice no because there there are still a lot of services out there that's just okay give us everything or we won't do business with you and for instance in a google um having the option to say you know what just give me random stuff don't don't don't try to figure out what i'm looking for based on my previous search result then i have the choice but there are a lot of services i mean facebook definitely still is one of them but it was more extreme uh years ago well yeah what other methods did you have if you wanted to communicate with your aunt on the other side of the world you know there it's it's also you get also the social pressure um or whatsapp uh i mean i tried not to have whatsapp while i was still studying but it just you know every important stuff about what you have to do in school and stuff it's all communicated there so you are you're you're kind of also forced but if those platforms at least would give you the option and then still you have to trust them yeah i mean you can that of course i mean that sounds that's that's it's the same as with the privacy laws i mean it's uh rules for d not for me right that's there let me ask a question about it because you brought up conscious and uh those privacy laws are very important of course everyone should have their own copy of gdp or european sports always it has at the place where you're browsing um now i was wondering i keep it next to my browser always i'm wondering each one of you has um [Music] has a company um kadeem you've got animal solutions um hold up you're building udemus projects um i mean you've set up biotopia and you're a part of unchained innovations so these changes these requests they change at the the let's say they have to start with the product so the foundation um has to be let's say privacy aware so by default it has to be uh this would be a choice to opt out i would say rightly but it's a personal opinion um given the fact that you're all business owners uh would you accept um let's say a limitation in your own business practice that would uh prevent you from being able to identify your customers and even further than that uh we had a speaker at the swarm surface school last year melanie rebeck who explained that there's also the opportunity to install something like a golden ticket in your company structure which even doesn't allow you to sell your client data once you're for instance merging or being taken over after an exit so that's that's cool but the question is for your businesses would you accept that can you accept that even in the current context so i'll start because it's very quick we had the choice to put google analytics or whatever analytics on our page and we did it um now we sell privacy so it's kind of an easy choice not to do it yeah you lose something but in our case i think just for marketing purposes it's probably worth it i mean yeah thanks mate uh similarly uh with a lot of stuff i do i limit the amount of information i take because uh yeah it's just it's just by the way the way that it's designed so i can give an example in in the netherlands it started in utrecht and then other places seeds to me uh is pretty well known so ronald and uh now he has over you know the organization has now over 200 locations around the world 1800 workspaces and he's a very fascinating guy to speak to and one thing that i always remember when he said is that he's like we can't through our system collect a lot of information we can figure out what time people have come in what kind of background they're in their expertise and the locations they access you know obviously there's a lot of information you collect we can collect there's a co-working space especially one like sits to me that has a very well designed system behind it he goes but we don't and the reason we don't is because you can't always be like approaching a business this is just his opinion in way of like the more data the more data we need to keep expanding he goes there's other values that you can bring and there's other values that you can gain um by going through other methods that's not just you know going against the foundations of privacy so definitely i do my best personally my own projects to limit the amount of information i collect so even for betopia i don't really ask for a name the main focus is a username i think username is pretty okay to be asked for there's no you know personal information being asked but if people want to the fields are there so the main fields i leave for username email address and that's it and you know there's no kind of data being collected as in as many places that i can kind of think of so that's just my perspective yeah for me it's almost like a sport to not ask it's like if you can get away with any information then just but that's i think that's also one part of the web three right if you uh you might as an application offer a structure on how the data is stored in someone else's location if you can build applications that is that can take the data that's being delivered to them and then provide a service i think those are very interesting prospects because um one of the things in theirs i think it's very interesting is first of all it reduces the cost of your operations massively you can scale because that's this is always also usually a skill problem right because you want to know your customers so you can skill you can do some predictions if you build your tech in such a way that it's that you don't need to have those kind of predictions so if you would say you would run a site tonight because of course ipves needs to do in that sense scale to a certain level but let's say that a large part of every website would be running ipvs then the scale of this underlying system is no longer really relevant as long as your application developer also contributed this network and this is where i would say that the need for any information that you ask is only visual for the user itself if they want their name on the website and give them their names it's like what that means is probably some username something you want to identify with and yeah if you can get away with it then that's also where a bit of the new business models lie i would say and do you hear the baby a lot or no okay that's good because i do um so yeah i do find that uh yeah i see it like a sport can i get away with as less information as i can and that this is actually one of the those examples where i find it very fascinating in this space and that's the of course always the example of shape shift when they actually got forced uh this decentralized exchange that only wanted to do well non-kyc as a non-kyc exchange but they got forced by the sec to basically ask for passports and they morphed into a decentralized exchange with a dow managing it and basically okay well now we don't have fast food because there's no one you can take down and i think that's i think that's a move we're going to see more and more um similarly i'd like to give that example on the availability on this side of things is where you see now i think the anonymous group um also hosted some of the um like a basically a spammer on ipvs and so everyone could open that and then your browser would go and spam all sort of russian websites it's very interesting right because it's an easy way to make a bolt but it's also the one way to solve that particular problem is to run a website in a similar manner and then you don't have a back-end anymore and then all of a sudden it becomes much harder to collect data and then the move to a web 3 privacy and normandy style that becomes much easier so basically if you run some ipvs sites that everyone opens on their page you can basically take the entire internet down everyone's forced to move to web3 including all of the privacy tools including all of the of course there's something wrong but this is it's a way to to make others do it right so i think you made a very interesting point at the start is um business models don't have to be built around private data and that's the thing we often or basically always when we're talking in these kinds of privacy discussions we are talking about companies that have their entire business model relies on data i mean we have we have a facebook that that at some point had to figure out we've probably also seen the great hack or how other thing is called but at some point they were just like oh okay we need to scale but we don't have the money how are we gonna make money so they built their their business model around that now google also partly and you know all these companies these big decks are in the end um doing that but it people often think that to run a business you need all this data but you don't you know if you if you run a business that does something completely different that just wants to service or give provide a certain service or or or product or whatever to its customers you need very little data what about you you do when you run infrastructure because you need some way to make money and i think that is i think what we see now with the big deck surveillance style it's you know it's the logical conclusion of such technology i would say and i think we are here to build the next evolution of this is okay if you want to serve a mill like like a billion people can you do that but i mean i think in all honesty just how facebook looks with a good team of developers this can be built fairly quickly but the back-end infrastructure that that's very difficult so if you can design your applications and go enormity first right because if you don't collect any data then there's you can put on some focus on making things anonymous and then all of a sudden it becomes some value [Music] yeah so it's a logical conclusion i would say that google and facebook became surveillance companies surveillance tech simply because we gave it to them and they saw value in it and it's the values in the aggregate not in a singular person so if you can move away from that um um yeah well yeah but there you also get i think into a code because that's i mean just you mentioned you have infrastructure you need to pay for it completely true um but we are used to free software i think um and because we we could you know there are a lot of things um that i don't know to do apps or whatever the most of the most of the apps in the app store right now are are have have a payment model behind it which i sort of like um not because i mean i also grew up in like uh pirating uh day and age and and software didn't cost me anything which i loved even now i'm a software developer i still like free software but um that's the thing people don't want to pay for a facebook because they have a free alternative they they still pay for it in another way that they don't see that clearly but i think you you don't you know infrastructure can be run without the need to sell private or or personal information well i would say not if you run a facebook site operation in the sense that you can you can keep keep it free as long as you don't require that massive back end all right so and and this is this is where i think like to go back a bit to the subject as well as where anonymity comes in if you can build your applications where something like mata mask i mean it might not be the best tool around but it's there where you can through metamask deliver some data through to a web app instead of like the beta mask asking you for signatures and stuff like that you could build it the other way around and you have like a like a like a like a big derivation structure on where this data needs to live and then all you need to do is to some way deliver that application to the web to your and then you are inserting their data and then no communication is needed right so it's all there it's all on your machine only and this is how you can stay anonymous and of course then of course if you have facebook how are you gonna find how you're gonna have a news feed of course these are indexing problems and those will most likely largely decentralized so you you're proposing a completely peer-to-peer well if you're if you want to go anonymous yeah and that's there's a lot of features that can be used right can okay sir of course you can search but a lot of this personal data a lot of its search information right about uh well what's in the news whatever they don't need your data to give you some answer right so if you have an application that needs to do all the assessing management all that like i've built many websites and there's always some scaling issues also if you get rid of all of that then also you get rid of the immediate cost of developing something after the running cost maintaining yeah you have to maintain i think so then that helps in the anonymity of your personal data if you would go ssi it's the same thing if you would have an ssi system like call back home all the time you have a therapy shift like you have one government one verifier then it's not ssi because the entire application runs on the fact that needs to call back to the government or whatever they could do now it's the government's just the biggest industry right so yeah um so if it needs to call back then you lose your anonymity in the in your immediate uh so that's great and do you want to say something please jump in because yeah yeah for sure very mouthy today go ahead uh i just kind of want to bring up the political party in the netherlands called d66 um i was at an event in uh then half and uh they were they were talking and for me it was very interesting because there was a person from the uk and their model is just like you know don't even tell people about it which is you know the concept around most of the countries but the d66 political uh representative had a very beautiful idea which is that we need to go to school schools and teach people basic programming because then they will learn what it is that they're doing when they're online another concept that it brought up is that people need to learn what it means as as kids when they're sharing stuff online where they're giving away personal information and the consequences these and the ramifications of this and this for me was very beautiful it again ties into bootopia and like you know educating people and giving them that knowledge so they can make that decision whether it's something they want to agree to or not and that for me is is is like the cornerstone on all of this so what does it mean when i'm giving away my information so you know a lot of the concepts that whether it's all our phone carrying brought up is facebook needs to pay for their infrastructure sure i would love to be able to consent hey either we collect information on you and we have to sell it because we have to pay you know for our infrastructure and obviously way beyond that you know investors etc or you pay five bucks a month i definitely would love to pay five bucks a month and be like don't collect anything on me um you know youtube google all of these platforms if they were like we sell your data you pay five bucks a month i would pay up to like thirty dollars a month honestly if i knew that like my information is not being collected or sold off to like i'll support the project if they actually made that an option i would seriously support the project and be like thank you for giving me that option so the concept that i want to kind of bring up is where we're in a world where we think coercion is consent and a lot of times like people are cursed into using various platforms and tools and they think that by default somewhere along the line in law it says you know that that means you've consented like the swap this ah you've done it it's okay we're gonna go sell it and say well no i was kind of maybe i had to do it to enter a premise or i had to do it for my work or flight or whatever but that didn't mean you have to go sell that to like some companies um so it's really important for me like on an ethical level to differentiate to incursion and concern and uh like uh what karim said for his university and this is very common whether it's university or groups or whatever it's like well you need to be on whatsapp it's like well i don't want to be on whatsapp we're too bad we're all on here i downloaded let's just move on with our day well that's not consent now i've been coerced it's like well i want to do good in the university and the only way i can do that now the only option you're giving me is what's up and now like my metadata and who i'm interacting with somebody's being tapped into them i don't know how many people are capable of getting a uh anonymized phone number and getting a vpn a good vpn running so they can anonymize their metadata so yeah just just kind of some ethical aspects i want to bring up to contribute to that discussion thanks for opening that opportunity awesome thank you so much guys i think we are at the end of our discussion already and i want to thank you all for your contributions was super interesting and i want to give over to robert thank you alexander um we went a bit over time i thought okay this let's continue the conversation let's give you some room uh because i wanted to post one final question as we're the last panel today on the reclaim your privacy day uh given the fact that we're right now um in a world which is let's say mostly web 2 dominated still um we've had uh we've had the the fang corporations and we have them we've seen a slow rise in web 3 initiatives and also then moving more into the space in the economy offered by the existing organizations and my question is if we look at initiatives like clearview for instance which has indexed over 3 billion images of people for image recognition facial recognition are we with the focus on anonymization in this panel are we too late for our society to make a change okay we still with the right tooling can we still make a difference it's one all round question i want to ask i think in that case theft will always be theft and it will always be there and this is what i mentioned before is well we might not give to facebook now but we might give it to the airport later we attach some information to that becomes even more valuable i think eventually some law some some mechanism here needs to forbid that kind of aggregation or force any type of aggregation with explicit signed consent since everyone's using keys anyway they can also sign consent for certain actions and i would say that it might happen but the fact that these toolings are so powerful and these aggregates are so powerful and i mean you can do great stuff with it i mean i studied the ai myself i mean it's very good to have this kind of huge database it's very nice i mean it's very dangerous but very nice for scientific buildings in that sense i would say from now on you can still change what's being collected but in you like with what's being collected has been collected and i think that's what i would like to add here as well as last sentence for me is always i go by the saying there is no privacy only secrecy um so if it's out there it's out there it will be collected in some database somewhere i think it's an inevitably that is a that's a beautiful sentence i think i'm gonna have to think about it but yeah privacy is basically is is just the assurance that other people want um which which they can't if if they're secrecy it's a nice one i'm optimistic i guess because why live else um no are we too late i think there are there is big yeah we as i've said there is a big um cultural shift i think that needs to happen that is happening here and that indeed like more leaks and and and stuff is coming out it's like privacy is becoming a bigger thing in in mainstream media i like the word mainstream media but whatever um but people are you know starting to get conscious but i think there is a long road still um a bad but i also love the um the point i mean made this is being self-sovereign also means having the choice to be a slave yeah it should be your choice it shouldn't be forced on you to be private it's it's up to you um which requires some knowledge and uh um yeah information to to make the right choice but that's in the end up to the person itself so thank you cheers i think from my i believe from my point uh going after like the concept behind parallel any place in czechoslovakia or czech republic is is is the way that i like to go about it which is i'm not here to change the world i don't i used to have these concepts in my mind though i believe for me what has changed is understanding that understanding that you create kind of parallel societies and where people can opt into based on their interests and just letting people know hey we exist and if you're up for this come and join us and uh that's been a lot more uh healthy for my psyche rather than going and trying to solve all these like planetary problems because a lot of times people might not care um and there's deep roots as to why they might not care and we can break those down and then they will come to the conclusion that perhaps they do care but that's that's that's very exhausting and you know for me it's just hey here's an opportunity to take back your sovereignty to maybe approach things it's going to require some personal responsibility and that's the part that people really don't like so you know a lot of times if like an apple user wants to come and get like for example a private phone and they're like well everything just works with apple automatically and i'm like well it works automatically and it's simple because they've removed choice when you remove choice things become simple so if you want your sovereignty and you care about these things you're gonna have to learn some new things and it's okay because you're gonna get a lot out of it so it's up to you um so for me again the focal point create parallel societies like these conversations some people can listen to be like well i want to learn more how do i learn more how do i implement things and just provide steps for people to do so so i'm definitely positive and i do definitely see um like what kareem said and everything else that's been discussed and all of everything i'm grateful for the conversations and the topics that have been brought up is that a lot more people are uh caring for these things and you know whether it's through finally being choked to the point of wanting to take that breath um or actually going well it's important now because uh it's something that's changed in the narrative i don't know all i know is it's good and i am positive about it as well and i see privacy definitely becoming uh part of the lame street narrative cheers thank you for the option to be here as well thank you all of you for that message of hope at the end and uh i would like to thank you each in person again uh for taking the time to share your knowledge in this panel today thank you alexandra uh for moderating yeah thank you yeah and um specifically i mean go to sleep now you can i don't know what crazy time it is over there would enjoy your rest thank you very much yeah thank you all it was uh interesting yes thank you very and for everyone watching uh this will be the last panel for today on the privacy reclaim your privacy day we'll be back tomorrow of course um and then let's see we got on the schedule for tomorrow we'll dive in let's see there we go tomorrow is the blockchain and music day we'll have several artists several people building music-related projects and several [Music] ceos as well to discuss what's happening in the space and how web3 can make a difference there be sure to check it out as well if you haven't claimed your nft experience or upgraded your nft for the event you can still do so and i hope to see you all again tomorrow good night everybody