Privacy it is not what you think it is by Sam Harrison

okay sticking with the theme of privacy the title of our next talk is privacy is not what you think it is which deeply intrigues me uh give it up for Sam Harrison CEO of discrete labs [Applause] hello hey did you guys know that this is not beer this is water like I just found that out the other day so I'm not up here trying to get wasted not yet at least all right let's talk about privacy privacy is not what you think it is um let's see here whenever we talk about privacy we're usually talking about in context of data privacy and one of the definitions of what a privacy violation is is the fact that it's an undesired leakage exposure or inference of your private or confidential information I find this interesting because that doesn't motivate me at all right I don't really care when my data gets pulled out I don't really care if Facebook sells it when I think about privacy in this way and the problem with this is that we've come into this land we've come into this era of surveillance capitalism where we really are selling this information for free but let's bring this into our context right let's bring this into the web 3 context so in our context when we talk about ZK proofs when we talk about stuff like tornado cash what we end up talking about really is privacy Solutions are focused on obfuscation but that sets the wrong stage it creates the wrong mental framework for how you actually want to think about privacy because it already sets you up as saying okay privacy is because I have something to hide why am I hiding something am I doing something wrong not necessarily so what I want to do by saying privacy is not what you think it is is I want to change your mental model and I want to change how you think about privacy because if we can do that and if we do it right then all of the dominoes about actually getting privacy into web 3 into web 2 into our day-to-day lives we'll be able to recapture our privacy so let me scare you first though some tales of the Apocalypse so about 30 years ago in California there was a turns out he's a police officer raped and killed many women in San Francisco and it was a cold case they couldn't figure out who did it but they found some DNA but this is you know late 70s early 80s and so they couldn't really match the DNA to everyone to anyone then you know probably about 10 15 years ago there is series of companies ancestry.com 23andMe couple of others like that that turned DNA harvesting into a business model you know they would say oh you know go and figure out who your ancestors are figure out where you come from figure out if you have a long lost sister and they would sell these tests for about a hundred dollars a pop and this one year they sold roughly about three million of them but then they reported something on the order of 200 million dollars in Revenue and the question is okay wait if they're if they're selling it a hundred dollars a pop and they only have two million of them that our math isn't working out so the question is is where the revenue coming from and the answer is they were selling access to their database now in some situations that's really good like we found a killer in this way and I'll walk you through that in just a second and just so you know I'm not opposed to finding killers what I am opposed to is the fact that the law enforcement agency went up there and they said okay we're going to pay you you know a million dollars to have access to your DNA we're going to put our suspects DNA that we found at the crime scene into your database and they found his sister because his sister wanted to know if she had any long-lost sisters or what her ancestry was I don't have a problem with that outcome that the FBI or the local police department went and found a killer that's great that's great outcome I have a problem with the process because normally when you do a police investigation there's something called the expectation of privacy which is enshrined in the United States in the Fourth Amendment this warrant or or a protection against unwarranted searches and seizures and in this situation part of this man's genetic code was found and determined when the police officers and the FBI had no reasonable suspicion that he was guilty normally you have to go in front of a judge and say I have a reasonable suspicion that this person has done something wrong so grant me a warrant to violate his privacy that didn't occur in this situation the company sold this to the highest bidder it sold his it literally sold the building blocks of who he was to the highest bidder and that I have a problem with I don't want Amazon to you know sell my recorded Alexa conversations I don't want Google to sell my private Gmail account all the information that I write out guess what they are we all know that and we've come to kind of accept it much like the frogs in the boiling water slowly over time we come to say you know what that's okay but let's start digging a little bit more into another tale of the Apocalypse and this is always fun for me because my kids love tick tock and I have a really hard time letting them have tick tock on their phones because they specifically say in their privacy policy which I find a very ironic term that you that they will track the way in which you type in words into your phone now to put that in context that's known as a silent Authenticator all right that means that what you can do is you can determine individually through this biometric pattern Who You Are and Tick Tock will gather that those keystroke patterns and rhythms and they'll create a template of that that then they can track you through their app which is fine right they can track you from one device to another device if you've put your you know the tick tock on a different device you're like okay that's convenient but they go a step further and they say if we encounter your biometric template in the wild we'll track you there too I have a little bit of a problem with that now I also this other one is kind of interesting Plenty of Fish so I recently got divorced so I'm discovering the this new dating app world and it's really weird but plenty of fish has some very interesting things that they put in their privacy policy first off they phrase it very interestingly they say you choose to give us certain information when using our service which is 100 true my age my gender my sexual orientation my location whether or not I'm looking for you know something casual or a soul mate or whatever it is I put that out there because they're providing a service to me to be able to have me match with somebody else but the issue I have is the fact that they're willing to share it with 45 other companies see plenty of fish at the sea plenty of fish is actually one of the many dating apps inside the match group and so they will share your private information the information you share with plenty of fish with Grindr with hinge with Tinder ostensibly to make sure that they're matching you with somebody well which I understand that but really what they're also doing is they're increasing their ability to sell advertising they're increasing their ability to Target you specifically and what I find very interesting about Plenty of Fish is they're right on the money because what you're doing is you're choosing to share data to form a relationship and I think that's the proper way to think about privacy it's not necessarily a question of keeping you know the the actual data secret and tight it's actually a question of forming relationships so if we keep on keeping this mental model of saying okay listen I'm hiding information and I want to hide information then we'll always have a problem having people in companies and services give us the Privacy that that is Ours by right so what we need to do is really think about it as privacy being the backbone for a relationship now that's me up there right question mark head guy and there's a bunch of data marks right I'm a funny person I promise sometimes I'm a little lazy I like sci-fi so I have a rocket ship up there I go to church I've had a broken heart I have a family I have a student loan debt because you know who doesn't these days I have an elephant up there which could maybe indicate a political leaning but I'm not sure because the point is by sharing these pieces of information is how I create a relationship with you and I get to choose what sort of information what data I share with other people and institutions I'll share certain information with the government other information with my friends and family at home other information at work like I'm not going to bring my heartache into work at least I try not to but I like I do like to bring my science fiction Fascination into work I find it a lot of fun but the point is is I have the choice to share the data that I want to create the relationships that I want and that's on me so what it comes down to is a question of who controls it because when we're talking about your Googles when we're talking about your Facebooks and your metas and all that stuff the person that controls what information gets shared is the evil Corp right and the problem here is that they are creating a relationship on your behalf that you may not want how many times have you had an advertisement that you're like uh I don't know why you're sending me Christian Singles that doesn't make any sense or like I don't want a relationship with this mattress company it's because somebody else is creating a relationship on your behalf without your consent by selling your data what I want us to think about is the fact that it should be in our control we talk about hiding it we talk about all the technology we have but at the very core the issue of privacy is that you should decide with whom you form a relationship Point Blank but it's not all bad news by the way I don't know who The Optimist futurist is I just thought that was a really cool picture when I searched for something on Google so hopefully he doesn't get mad he's that image I just kind of liked it the the the news is actually really positive because even though the apocalypse may be tomorrow the apocalypse has always been tomorrow and we keep on innovating we keep on creating we keep on finding ways to postpone the apocalypse or as Idris Elba said in what was that Pacific Rim Council the apocalypse and we're doing that with what we have right now the blockchain technology gives us the ability to own our digital assets which is our digital footprints and then we have the decentralization through all of our different wallets and all of our different devices that allows us to have individual control of these granular points and this is where the advancement of zkp really comes in the zero knowledge proofs sorry I'm not going into any technical detail in dkp because it's really complicated but that helps us obscure that data and that's what we've built at findora is the ability not just to hide your information but to unhide it as well so you can mask and unmask your personal data in your control for the amount that you want so my goal here and what I want to do and the reason why I wanted to bring this up is the fact that I can't do this alone Fedora is a great product the engineers that work at discrete labs are amazing but I myself cannot push this all the way I need everybody to start expecting privacy we need to make it a movement where we get our products and services that we have to provide us the tools that we need to individually control our data and expect privacy thank you [Applause] [Music]