How to Beat Surveillance Capitalism & Reclaim Your Privacy – Steven Waterhouse

thanks for coming to my talk know me I like to walk around the stage so I try to be really still this time because there's no mic that allows me to do that but louder I can't speak much louder this is about as loud as I speak Yama - out so hi m7 from orchid one of the cofounders the CEO and I'm here to talk to you about surveillance capitalism how to reclaim your privacy that's me so I am bit older than some of you and I've been around since the kind of early days of the web and back when we all started getting online even before the web the idea what the internet was is this like place of freedom place you could like discover things and chat to people maybe people didn't know something good something bad but it was just like this really cool place where you could just get free like do different things and discover stuff learn things and I think that most of us here we're building things and we're getting excited about different ideas and the idea that you wouldn't be able to do that seems really strange to us so but right now when you use the Internet you're taking a risk I think many of you understand this idea but many people don't get it but it's starting to spread the news of like what's actually happening out there is is getting out there whether it's state controlled state surveillance and censorship or corporations and last couple years we've had Facebook we've had Google we've had tons of hacks tons of situations where we're starting to realize that the thing that we thought was a safe place is actually not quite so safe and when you look out into the broader world where do you relatively lucky in this country yeah we might be concerned about Facebook and the NSA and things are Snowden told us but when you get into other countries you're not only facing a situation of surveillance sometimes this is a matter of life or death when you are trying to uprise against the government there's really oppressing people in situation in Bolivia recently I was fortunate enough to hang out with some of the fellows from the human rights foundation recently and I met people who were leaders in the Hong Kong student protest leaders in the Bolivian uprising and we don't always we're always conscious of what's really happening on the human level here but if you think about it these people can't safely connect the Internet and tweet about what's going on they can't safely connect the internet and communicate with somebody and we're not talking like people who want to go out and you know start an uprising this violin we're talking about people just want to find out and get the word out about what's going on and I have a letter blue sports okay one second charger huh okay I'm gonna keep talking well I also do this so I can do more than one thing at once so the one of the most recent really scary examples of this situation is in the China right now I think you've all probably aware of the virus that's spreading house more rapidly than we realize we're good okay maybe not so one of the really scary things that came out recently is very sadly the one of the guys who was one of the doctors who was trying to spread the word about what was happening on WeChat he died and the surveillance and the censorship especially a sensitive that's happened in China as a result of that's tricked controls on what information can be spread on their idea about they need to control the narrative and they need to control the information going out there really has led to perhaps a slow response internationally and especially in China than would otherwise have been necessary and that trade that the Chinese people are willing to take with the party where they say we will accept surveillance and censorship as long as you keep us safe is starting to switch so we see that the tech that made our lives easier and faster and better has also made surveillance much easier and I think that even in these centralized technologies where we believe that we're building something that is gonna naturally help us be private and all these things that's not necessarily true you can also build stable coins like the Chinese stable coin they're building and you can build in kyc and tracking and all these things really really well using blockchain technology so you can build a system of perfect control okay and so technical issue sir and when we come back to the US and we think about Facebook so yeah it's free but you're also trading it you guys are probably familiar this idea you you you are the product you are the the product that they make money from that doesn't necessarily mean that you should be paid for all that work but at least you should be private and these business models this concepts has been coined as a very intersting book called surveillance capitalism was the idea that the eyes blinking the idea that the business model that was built around the web 101 web 200 architecture was almost like necessary so tided the idea that you were going to build advertising the first search engine one of the first search engines HotBot they were the first people to put banner ads in there and remember everyone's saying like that's a crazy idea no one's going to click on these banner ads and this is nonsense but then you got the dot-com boom and another example is when cookies first came along and I remember thinking that just seems like no one's gonna trade their privacy and why would you want tracking and then we have an enormous app tech market built on that technology and people are starting to question us and the data is starting to support a lot of hypotheses so many years ago I was very concerned about this I was came into the crypto space in 2013 and started a fund called Pantera and then over that period of time my concerns about privacy and surveillance also increased and then three years ago when we started orchid this was a deal but now it's becoming a bigger and bigger deal and so more and more people when you ask them I started become concerned and this is also generationally depend on the younger generation is way more concerned about this so what if we could change the surveillance capitalism what have you could turn surveillance capitalism into privacy capitalism I mean some people here would say that we don't need capitalism at all but that's a completely different conversation but privacy capitals and what if we could build business models where privacy wasn't something that we just pushed out there is another way to get people hooked in and in fact we're just building another surveillance model and with the decentralized technologies that are core to all the stuff that's happening in this building and in the community in general we actually have the opportunity to do this so it's area that we've been focusing on this particular the talk I gave her a few years ago talking about what does decentralized technologies really help you with like what's the killer app so we have Bitcoin where the killer app is breaking the centralized control of banks and of governments and then we have a theorem where at the time the killer app was really breaking the old boys club of Silicon Valley like changing that funding structure can we fund experiments and we've been really focused on breaking the control structures of communications so communication coal structures governments ISPs corporations all the people who want to control what you want to say and control what you want to do and so Virtual Private Networks or VPNs hey push it in really hard it's really hard can we hold up yes PC my computer yeah do I have any other ports I have three more ports this after this commercial break brought to you by Yves Denver so one of the problems problems with many problems with VPNs right now so sorry so one of the problems is it's it's called it it's like a paid man-in-the-middle attack so you're paying someone to watch all your traffic and they say oh no no no we don't log your traffic and you know it's like nothing happens here nothing to see but in reality when the facts come out sometimes they get a subpoena sometimes they get an order and it turns out they are logging your data and there's some good ones and we've actually partnered with many of the good ones I'll tell you in a minute but the other problem is it's not transparent you have no idea what's going on it's not open source they're not going to tell you how they do it and the there are or currently open source solutions around there but the other problem they have is that not incentivize so why would I want to run a bunch of servers for a bunch of people to route the traffic through when you're not paying me like this whole place five minutes okay this whole place is built around the idea that if standardization is cool like having people take ownership of things have a stake in something that building we've seen what happens when you do that with Facebook and don't do it and so our system again decentralized were built on aetherium GRC 20 token and all small contract structures available that we're transparent were open source and we're also internalized and we also figured out and there was a really cool session by my two friends here Justin and Nathan in that room this morning which some of you miss I'm talking about our payments technology so we've developed a alternative to the regular payment channels called probabilistic nano payments we were gonna call it micro payments but that term has already been overloaded so we called nano pay versus are really small and the idea with them is is that we can make payments on a packet level my other side that's sink in for a minute so everyone's worried about doing visa level speeds and so on we do packet level transactions and you can find out much more about that at our booth upstairs I'm not gonna get into the details there it's really cool though so we also have multiple hops so there's a couple of smaller VPNs that offer a few things like multiple hops but we're pushing this out idea idea where you can just string different nodes together in the orchid app and therefore protect your IP information and in addition in the way we do now payments and setting up our different small contracts and all the things that guys can tell you about upstairs we're also able to offer different levels of payment anonymity as well so if you kind of think about it people say oh well what about like all the bad things that might happen and so and I'm like listen you can go and declare VPNs illegal if you like but what we're doing is right you kind of be build the VPN that you expected as in like you pay for it and it is private and no one's logging it and all the things that you thought you're paying for but you actually won't get it the other interesting thing that happening is within this decentralized community it's not just us there's many people and I was a seed investor in Z cash and friends of Zuko that's one of the most interesting projects and that technology runs during knowledge proves I believe is gonna really change a lot of things out there as text another protocol with aetherium there's lots of companies looking at this idea how do we make things private my main exempt decentralized and we're really excited to look at that to partner with people think of at a time but if you want to get in touch with us we will be up at the booth we're handing out free orchid accounts upstairs with little code you can scan and we're very interested in touch with come by and see us were here all weekend thank you [Music] you