Selling Your Privacy: Will It Make You Rich or Rekt?

Transcript

Next we'll move on to the panel discussion. The panelists are Mr. Daniel Exponent and Mr. Edward P. Policer and the moderator is M varene duo. The theme of the discussion is regulations on privacy and AI. Please begin. Thank you. Thank you everyone for being here. My name is Vilen and I am a community organizer of East Oakland and together with me uh we have Edward an attorney who works with rail gun and we also have the co-founder of space computer Daniel. So before we begin this debate, I just want to put this little

disclaimer here that, you know, we are trying to make this panel um or this session a little bit more spicy. So I'm going to play the devil's advocate. So I'm going to say things that, you know, uh may not uh represent my true opinion because we're all privacy maxes here. So before we begin this session, I would like uh our speakers to introduce themselves a little bit more. >> I'll begin. Hi, I'm Edward. I am an attorney that works with Rail Gun and I've been a privacy activist for a very long time. So, uh, if you ever have any questions about DeFi or privacy, feel free to come and say hi. Uh, and, uh, if you want to know more about Rail Gun, you can go to railgun.org and there's a

whole documentation part of that that has a lot of very interesting information that you can check out. >> Cheers. I'm Daniel. So I'm co-founder of space computer. My background is in physics and semiconductors. I've been in crypto for the past 10 years or so. And uh on the one hand privacy maxi on the other hand after long enough time in crypto and being a rather libertarianish uh I also know the tradeoffs. So I think that what would be very interesting for today is to yeah understand that it's not always just simple to advocate for something. You need to understand the nuance.

>> Yeah. So to just kick off this discussion, I want to know you know your general opinion. Daniel, starting with you first. What is your view selling your privacy? Do you think it will make you rich or wreck? >> Yeah. So uh selling your privacy depending on how you interpret it. But if we look at most of what today's internet look like, we have a premium style business model where we are getting a lot of things for free. essentially giving away our privacy. Um, and then we're able to get a lot of wonderful products. I think that in a limited kind of a sense, there's a lot of benefits there. You don't want to like subscribe to gazillion number of

services before you're um really knowing that you're going to be dependent on it. But then there comes a bound of like at some point you need to be careful at how much of your data is leaked or owned by an external centralized intermediary. >> And do you have a respond to that? Uh Edward, >> I really like the topic of this conversation. I think selling your privacy is a much better term to use than giving away your privacy because everyone has the option to keep their privacy. Every time you display yourself, that is a trade that you're making. Usually, it's a very unfair trade, but you have the power to control

that. What is the opposite of privacy? The opposite of privacy is exposure. And people die of exposure. So, I think this is a very relevant topic. >> I like the fact that you talk about, you know, a tradeoff. You know, people have control over what they give. So actually when you think about your interactions on the web today, do you think that you can calculate what your data or what your value is worth? Do you have a an opinion about that?

>> I think we've only just started to understand how valuable privacy is. And the thing is some countries have laws for privacy. There are data protection regulations or privacy laws. Japan has some, Europe has some, Thailand has some. You know, what we don't have is comprehensive ones. Now, the thing is, we can't wait for law. Law comes from how people already treat each other. The way that these terms of service and agreements and norms within corporations uh giving products work become the law later. So, what you agree to and what you give away now will become the law in the future. So we have to normalize when

we deal with each other to say you know what I'm going to say no to these terms of service because there's an alternative that doesn't take my privacy away. So what you choose now the business decisions you make with your individual and business choices about using privacy centric or privacy leaking software which is both out today and both about the same price free. The decisions you make now will be what's normal for people five years from now. You're change makers. So you can change how the norm progresses. So if you choose anti- privacy systems now, you're setting people back in the future. If

you choose pro privacy apps now, then you're going to be great. You know, we have apps like Rail Gun. We have browsers like Brave. There's so many ways that you can be private now. And when people think that's normal, that actually moves pressure onto the bigger companies to prove to you that they're protecting your privacy. Even the government gets leaked all the time. Even Facebook gets leaked. Microsoft gets leaked. Every big company has been hacked. All of them. Every phone provider. Every government agency has been hacked. Everything that like that you've done on the internet in the past, especially the distant past, is public information. So you have to choose now to use privacy tools otherwise uh yeah

you're going to push everyone in the future back. >> And I want to hear from Daniel you know you talk about choice you know you should choose privacy alternatives and then you talk about premium services you know when you sign up for a service like maybe LinkedIn you know you have a one month free trial and then you kind of just get sucked in. So in your view do you think that there is actually a choice for normal consumers to choose you know a privacy uh focused alternative and do you think that um there are many of such alternatives? I wish it's uh it's a bit grim actually because it's so difficult to really preserve privacy today whether it's every phone provider essentially tracks

you right it's something that there's almost no way around it and then it's not just like selling your privacy it's actually much worse it's you're paying in order to get someone use your privacy like for example everyone uses open AI I'm minimizing any exposure to open AI it's like you're paying them plus your basically data is not only being trained on by all means it's basically can be used against you like Sam Alman went on record and said that it could be used against you in court hypothetically. So it's today to choose privacy is basically like to to choose the uphill battle and even though like I'm all in favor it's uh it's definitely like things are are currently stacked against

and I think that it's important to understand not just like how to be uh looking at it as like a binary yeah we're going full privacy or we're going full don't care about it it's like how do we strike it like use rail gun or use uh privacy oriented AI rather than uh the fake open AI and and things like this. Yeah, it's it's really not trivial to preserve your privacy today. It's not a real uh there's no real balance there. >> I'm glad that you point out about the you know there's always uh I guess a compromise that we strike. There's not it's not a binary thing where we can choose you know just privacy or no privacy. I think in a lot of use cases we use some of the applications that may

collect some of our data. So actually when I was talking to people um throughout East Tokyo and ATcon something that I hear is that our personal data is not important and actually it's too specific for companies to be to find it useful. I'm wondering if you have any views on that. Well, I'll tell you one thing. Your your individual data is very useful to criminals who want to hack you or damage you or rob you. And there are a lot of these bad people around enough to make your life hell. And the thing is the if you use privacy tools today like control your DNS, what Ethereum node is your

wallet using? What uh are you using a VPN? Is your balance in a private wallet like rail gun? Is your um phone using uh a browser like uh using an operating system like um an open- source one, right? So like graphing. So these things when people I'm going to actually go back to a story, right? I went to a cyber security conference and I talked to someone that sells cyber security software and one of these was an actual full background check tracing software.

Now I stood right there in front of the guy and he said who do you want to know about? And I'm like that guy. I'm like what's his name? It's like his name's David. It's like okay. He pulled up never met the guy before. pulled up that guy's real name, Telegram, Twitter, uh, uh, his birthday, everything about this guy, how long he'd been using Facebook for, how long, uh, and then he told me other places in the world that that guy had been over the past year.

How do they get this kind of information? There's actually ridiculous amount of location sharing that goes on. And these companies set up little listening notes all around the world, airports, shopping malls, hotels that see where you checked in, where you went, and this kind of thing. So, let's say I'm an employer and I'm trying to hire you. I can just see everywhere you've been for the past 3 years. I can see every Wi-Fi that you logged into, maybe missing a few, but this is last year's technology that I'm talking about. It's going to be way more sophisticated in two years. They'll be able to tell all this just by looking at your face. And I'm not making any of this up. This is currently existing technology. It's worse than Minority

Report, right? It's worse than sci-fi's existed. People couldn't even imagine the level of data that's being scraped about you today. It's really, really insane knowing everywhere you've been for the past three years. Like, it's really, really deep. So this is a currently existing pressing problem that you're being surveiled to a level that you would be incredibly surprised to know about. So look, the question being privacy, you know, is it a trade-off? Yes. So on Telegram, I use my real name. Why? Because if you know about me, I am showing enough about me to know that you can trust me. like revealing information

about each other can be mutual, right? The closer you get to someone, like say you want to marry someone, you're giving up all your privacy to this person. That's great. This is a two-way decision where you mutually reveal privacy to each other, right? And when you can do that with companies and and governments, too, that's great, but they need to give you something in return. So yeah, in the future you'll be able to sell bits of your privacy, but that but you need to be aware of what that person can do with your data after that fact. Are they going to sell it? Whatever. You know, that's why you you can use encrypted services, encrypted VPNs, these kind of things. You know, I've already mentioned rail gun for your priv private payments.

The reason that private payments are are important is because that's the first level. How can you get a VPN that's private if you're paying for it with a credit card? How can you get a website that's private if you're paying for it with your bank transfer? Right? You need private communication, but you can't communicate privately unless you pay for it privately. So, transfer of value is the base level of privacy. And at the moment, we use Ethereum and you can use rail gun for private Ethereum payments to get privacy for everything else.

Yes. So, uh that was really really good and it was very specific about payments and I mean the example that you share is pretty scary. I mean for yourself Daniel have you are you aware of such examples that are so deeply personal and so deeply >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Yeah. So I go to China quite often. Used to go more often and I often think about China. If you want to know what the future looks like, go to China. kind of dystopian in the sense that like a very much um fully surveiled society like the the granularity to which like every social media post that you are sharing or stuff

can influence whether you are afterwards able to buy a train or plane ticket >> is something that is um >> for westerners when when they look at China it looks very dystopian except a few years afterwards it comes to the west and it's branded as consumer protection or something else but it's exactly the same and to that end yeah I've seen so many cases both in China and elsewhere where like I have a a mate unnamed because quite familiar person that uh for whatever reason got on the wrong side of authorities in China and now anywhere they go and take a hotel no matter what province they need to go and register with authorities and sometimes

if they didn't then they'll have police coming to them in and and like knock on their door that same day. And that's like, you know, that's an example of how things can go really far-fetched, but the more systems are being automated and the more tools are getting advanced, whether it's like facial recognition and CCTV everywhere, etc., the the more we're going to this world. So, I think I know like from the kind of grey hat world quite a lot of people that use actual like physical disguise and and things like this to like there's hats for example that project specific LED outside so like you don't get blindsided by by basically disguises from from a camera and facial recognitions.

There's all kind of stuff like this that that you know we think that because we live in a safe and developed world we don't need to worry about. But the reality is that um the more our life becomes digital the more those systems are advanced the more it is becoming commonplace and interactions that normal people can encounter. So yeah, definitely I've seen these things luckily not for me but I've seen it for a lot of people that I know personally. So yeah, but I would say that there is a trade-off. On the one hand, you want to have those privacy oriented tools. On the other hand, you also want to make sure that we're to an extent protected from bad actors, whether it's uh let's say uh black hat hackers, whether it's

uh terrorists, whether it's uh states that are just uh rogue and are essentially like potentially risking uh geopolitical security. So, it's uh there's there's more nuance here. >> Yes. So actually when you were talking about the example um in China, I do myself have an example to share as well. You know the facial recognition software in China is so advanced. Like for example, my cousin lost her bag in a park in China and she went to the police station and using the cameras located in the uh park. He could find out who exactly picked up her handbag, where he lives, what his job is, who his employer

was, and in the end he called the employer of this cleaner who picked up the bag, and he knew exactly what time his shift was, when he went home, and where he stayed. So that This is a real life example and is um it to to to some extent I actually think that you know selling your privacy is not even a consideration because at some point it because to some extent you don't actually have that control like you know like you don't actually know whether or not that data that you think belongs to you actually belongs to you you know you don't have control over that sell or not to sell actually um I just want to point out another real

example. Um it's from New Zealand where I am currently based from. So there is uh this uh Kiwi lady called Liz and she sells her persona, she sells her face, she sells her mannerism, she sells the way she speak to this uh telecom company called Skinny. And what they do with that data and I think maybe she did make some money of it um is to create an AI just exactly like her. So, you know, to some people selling your data, selling who you are personally can empower you and maybe even, you know, make you some money through royalties. I want to know your responses to that.

>> I'm going to start straight away by I hope she doesn't have much money because anyone's going to log into that AI and that I will call her bank and her phone company and they will say, "Hi, my name's Liz. Can I change my phone number to this different number? Yes. Okay. Call the bank. Hey bank, it's Liz. Can I please transfer my entire account out to a different address? And they'll be like, okay. Because they don't have any other way to verify you except your personal information, your voice, your personality, right? So, if I have these things, the name of your first pet or whatever you've made your security question as, your phone number, your address, your date of birth, your bill

paying activity, your name, I can access every piece of account that you have, email, phone, uh, bank, you know, even your government login details. Privacy is wealth. There's no difference. the amount of wealth that you have is totally equal to the amount of privacy you have. So yeah, you got to be careful. And here's the thing, it doesn't matter about just your privacy because they don't care about that. They can guess everything about you by compromising your friends privacy and your family's privacy. So when you log into an app and it says share your contacts and you go, "Yeah, I won't have my contacts in this app."

Yeah, don't do it. because they don't they can just guess everything about you correctly by what your friends are doing and what your contacts are doing. And if they have access to all your contacts data and all your contacts messages, they have all the messages you sent them and all the messages they sent to you anyway. They they can piece together 100% just by what your friends and family do. So it's not just pressure on you. You when they say when your friends say, "Oh, hey, let's talk on Instagram." You say, "No, don't. Let's use signal because because if you know if they're compromised then so are you. So privacy isn't just a wow that's cool thing. It's a are you going to be poor thing? You can't make money if you're not private.

Right? So then let's look at the other the other side. Can you make money if you are private? Well privacy is a spectrum. So actually with difficulty. If you're 100% private, it is actually hard to success in bis succeed in business. You need to selectively reveal private your your information to certain people that you're making a deal with, right? Because I'm a lawyer, for example. I have to keep all communications between my clients private, but I have to let them know that I'm really a lawyer. So I have to share my university bar exam results and real name and contact details with the US government uh the US court system so

that when you check with the New York state courts you can see that I really am a lawyer that's important so that you can uh trust me right so I have made that decision to give up some of my privacy i.e my real name and my graduation and uh bar exam results, you know, prove that I passed the bar to the public so that they know that I'm legitimate, right? So, you can you have to make some choices, right? But the level of control you have will result in how successful you are in the future.

>> Yeah. Um I just want to hear your view Daniel about you know the example that I've given and about you know some some people do actually legitimate think legitimately think that selling who I am or my personal data is actually not a big deal and to be honest can make some money off it. Um and what do you think of that? Yeah. So I think maybe uh it's important to take things in perspective today when we're even before talking about privacy and dystopian examples. We're all um we're all already like out of the caveman era. We like when we are born in a hospital system, we get identity that typically is

associated to the government. We're already like on grid to an extent, right? So like we're we're compromising our privacy compared to the the living in the jungle. Then like comes comes a question of like to what extent and and what are the trade-offs and >> especially with digital system things that get automated at scale it's uh hard to predict everything and on the one hand I'm very much in favor of trying to minimize the exposure that we put out there the digital footprint on the other hand I think that it would be naive like uh Edward was saying that you know you need to reveal selectively. I I have quite a few friends who are really

privacy fanatics. They have like zero social media presence and all that stuff on the one hand like massive respect. On the other hand, it is always much harder to do stuff because whether it's organizing event, going out, doing this, doing that, like commerce, so many more of those things are requiring whether it's that that you'd have a social account or that you'd have some presence or uh services that does compromise your privacy to an extent. Um, and then you kind of want to enjoy the benefit of those commercial uh commercial advancement that happen in the world. So it's again always a trade-off. I think where I see the the problems in u like what could be potentially tragedy of the

commons is when we have things like um massive AI tools that are let's say take large data sets that are otherwise public domain commons and they don't have a way to funnel potential uh like part of the revenue to the origins of it. So it's kind of like the equivalent of um whether it's uh companies that take extract stuff from the environment and pollute and don't actually take care of actually maintaining positive uh let's say um make sure that they recover the the environment after mining or whatever it is. A lot of what's happening today in uh commercial AI is

that it's very much like that. It's exploitation of commons. That to me is like a a bit more of a like at scale tragedy because on the individual level you can tailor you can choose like where you can uh where you can interact more or less and of course like I wish we can have more and more privacy but the things that are really critical is uh yeah how we set the tone to make sure that we don't create a massively um unsustainable way of preserving the commons like data commons.

Do you think that there will be a risk of for example governments um working together with big tech companies trying to maybe use some of the data that they collect as part of their um work that they do as agencies to try and build some sort of um profile to better target for example services or to better target um you know benefits or do better policy making and do you think that that is a legitimate um >> like do good you mean? Yeah, to do good like yeah just wanting to hear your views on that because I also have um another real life example here from the

land of long clouds because the IRS um the DLN revenue agency in New Zealand uh was recently exposed uh in this year for actually giving matter uh Facebook's company to uh a lot of information about uh taxpayers and this was I think in the name of uh public policym and I'm just curious to hear your thoughts like >> okay so I'm going to repeat your question in a short way I hope I'm correct >> does surveillance of you and taking your privacy mean the government might do a better job >> devil's advocate

>> okay so if that's the case you would need equal access to all the government's per government offices personal information as the government has on you. And let's be realistic, that's never going to happen, right? There is a massive knowledge imbalance between big companies and government people and people who don't uh work for big companies and government, right? And you can't have democracy and accountable government if they know everything about you and what you're doing. Because as soon as you disagree with them, they have every weakness on you and every opportunity for blackmail that they

could possibly need to shut you up. So you can't have good government without privacy. It's impossible because corruption is inevitable. There's no country on earth that doesn't have corruption. Everyone has corruption. And you have ambitious people in government at every situation. and no government wants to be voted out and no government wants to resign. So they're going to use your personal data against you every time. >> And yeah, sure, they can make a decision that's good. They say, "Well, hey, look, we did some surveillance and looks like people here like to eat noodles and people here like to eat bread, so we're

going to put the noodles there and bread there." But you don't need surveillance for that. And in fact uh asking people is much better than surveillance. Um not every country is democracy right? Most countries are not um even though they say they are. Uh so you know we don't we we we still have similar results uh in that people can push for political change in any country. But the imbalance of power that happens with surveillance is so strong that there is no hope for policies that benefit normal people

unless the people can have privacy because you need the opportunity to speak up anonymously without fear of being retaliated against. And I'm not just talking about against governments, against powerful companies too and powerful special interest groups. There are some very powerful groups that are not governments that will destroy you if you speak up against them, right? Oh, at least they'll try. But if you're private and anonymous enough, they'll have a really tough time. >> And you, Daniel? So, what do you think? Government and big tech working together to do good with your private data. So I I agree with Edward that the um the very nature of government is to try and uh

retain its power. So they're unlikely to actually be a neutral party when it comes to handling data. There are some places that are more corrupt and some places that are less corrupt. There's no places that are free of corruption. >> I think that probably one of the good examples uh Singapore, right? Singapore is >> y >> relatively decent. Sure, it's like number one in gerrymandering perhaps, but it's relatively decent and less corrupt, like quite a good environment. The the level of granularity to which uh they are surveiled is also quite serious. The services that are provided to the everyday uh citizen is pretty good.

Do I think that it's uh because there's good analytics on every individual? I don't know if it's because of that as much as because there is a benevolent dictatorship of sorts. Um in most countries, this thing just doesn't work. It's uh usually you end up with a minority group, whether it's of a certain um demography or a certain coalition of interest groups that abuses it in order to grow their power. And it usually just minates to smaller and smaller groups. So I don't see a scenario where there's like a oh yeah let's kind of like jolly give our data away to government because we'll improve our public services. It's just yeah I don't see it happening. It's it's not

like the correlation is not between like giving or selling our data to the government to get better services. It's more about like if there is a principled and high integrity leadership rather than specifically data um managing and collection in place. Yeah, I mean I have to agree with those points because you know I'm a I'm very much pro privacy myself. So I mean if you were the government would you with you know more transparent disclosures like in your policy making or in your um cabinet minutes or in the discussions in parliament do you think you you know we could actually mitigate some of these u problems?

Absolutely. Yes, we can mitigate the problems. The future is actually going to be better than we think it will be. It will be okay because people like us will create norms around treating data and data protection and the laws of business become the laws of the state. So when we in business decide to make sure that data is protected, we then start to pressure the governments to make that law so that the other people, the rogue businesses have to comply with our norms. That's how things usually work, right? So we will have

data protection regulations. What is a private key? A private key is just knowledge. It's just data. If someone else knows your private key, it's not your money anymore, is it? So yes, we can first create normal relationships between us in business and private life that create expectation of privacy. This already happens. It's called an NDA. But people don't put a lot of attention to their NDAs. They use ones that they copied off the internet and stuff. But guess what? You can be very creative with your NDAs. You can add little things that are okay, add little things that aren't okay. Write it like a poem. Write it like a a message to a friend or your mom. It's okay. It's

still legally binding even if it's written in normal language, right? So, you can make your sort of NDA and like private agreements between you and your friends and your business partners. And when that's normal, that will be the law in 10 years time, right? So we need to treat data as a valuable commodity and it's going to happen right it already is happening and there's moves towards making data protection a legally required uh thing and you know league and leaking people's data in some places is already a very serious crime. So it's all about catching up and it and and the first step is with business people and technologists and guess what that's what

we are right. So, we start by creating the norms about how we treat each other and with protection of each other's personal data on a peer-to-peer level. And then once everyone feels like that's normal, we then talk to the government to pressure the rogue bad people into complying with the same standards. >> Yes. So, uh that's very inspiring and uh optimistic. I sure want to see this too. I feel a little bit different. I think that so having lived in uh about five different countries some of them are uh better than others in that regard I have a bit more of approach to um hope for the best and expect for the worst. Uh

and to that end part of u part of what I noticed is that when you see quite powerful people often time uh people in technology they wouldn't even give their kids access to screens let alone get them to lick their uh faces for reasons of afterwards potentially being uh replicated by AI or whatnot. So the way that I see it is the future might be great and I hope because we're all making efforts to try and make it but also you kind of want to take a bit of a approach to be resilient in case it doesn't. And personally I live in the countryside in a rather selfsufficient way. You can't really be entirely self-

sustainable. This is a bit of a myth. It's more about like creating support network but just being able to have uh production of your own electricity, storage of your own electricity, >> water, grow your own food, live in an environment with clean air place where you depend less on the goodwill or or a non-corrupt operation of authorities. That to me is is one thing that I think is um massively under addressed like most people still look at the urban hubs as the place to go where with space technologies as mentioned earlier like you can already have a competitive ability to be in the economy in these environments and so like also you can preserve more of your privacy if this is

what you choose to do. Of course you can also uh leak your privacy when you're living in a whoop whoop the in the bush. Um >> yeah but generally I think the world can be better and I hope we'll have more of norms to manage data privacy and data sharing but also like don't expect that this would be done unless you're taking care of it yourself. >> Yeah. I mean, I I I like the fact that you talk about more grassroots pressure and more grassroots uh norms that are set by us and I think this is just one way of driving change. I know that um the time is almost up. I do have one last question for the both of you

because when we talk about progress and we talk about change, we often should think about the young people that are actually driving this change forward in the next, you know, 50 years, in the next, you know, 80 years to 100 years. And what I see nowadays with uh my generation, the Gen Z's, is that social media has made it really easy for people to get that adrenaline rush to be liked, to be seen, to be sharable, and it has really commoditized, you know, my personal data, who I am. You know, I'm endorsing this product. I'm on Only Fans, I'm on Patreon, I'm on Twitch, I'm on Twitter, Instagram, everything. And I just want to kind of you know have both

of you put in yourselves in the shoes of these Gen Z's and maybe think about how we can you know massage the message that actually such uh use of social media or such uh little care about your privacy is going to be more detrimental to you in the long-term future and yeah just wondering if you have any views on that. Yeah. So, I guess there's some uh some negative phenomenons that we're already seeing. Actually, I remember speaking of New Zealand. New Zealand had one of the highest youth suicide rates in the world and much of it was because of social media because rather than in the past when someone was boycotted in school and it was just the class, now it's kind of

feeling like an attack from the entire internet. So, so there's these realities that I think are very important to take into account when educating uh Gen Z and Gen Alpha whatever. And then uh like in in looking at what social media does, the way I see it, it's it's democratizing the experience of being a celebrity. Basically, in the past only celebrities would have paparazzi. Now, like every person thinks that like it's interesting phenomenon to see the breakfast that they eat. And on the one hand, it's really cool. I think it's great that we democratize this experience. um back when Dows just got started as a way of um diversifying regulatory risk for DeFi projects in 2020ish, I remember that um I thought

what Dows are in essence are a way to democratize the ability to be a public servant like shared manage shared resources because Dows essentially are that like governing shared resources and allocating them. So what I would wish what I would wish that we would see and what I would kind of want to see more of is u a way to get indeed more inclusion in Dows for uh for people because governance is much harder than being a celebrity. It's uh you need to think about consequences accountability and it's it's not like a short-term thing. I wish that with more accountability, there would be also more awareness to whether it's my data and how it's being

monetized and and leaked and also just that general sense of I'm I'm here. I'm a part of something. It's not just like passively something that happens to me. It's like I have a say. That's what I would hope that more of a Gen Z would experience. >> Yes. >> All right. So, we're talking about Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Yes. >> Right. Young people, >> I have news for us oldies. They are much better at privacy than we are. Surprise, right? They love disappearing message apps.

I don't think anyone over the age of 50 uses disappearing messages or Snapchat or these other apps. I'm absolutely not promoting Snapchat. It's not good for privacy. But they are already accustomed to making sure that their messaging history is deleted after a certain time. Plus, recently we have laws like what you're talking about. Uh it has now become illegal in most countries to share naked pictures of people online. Even you know that is a privacy related crime, right? So we already have these new laws which are basically based on the problems that you were talking about earlier

>> that are in force today recently passed that make sharing private information of other people illegal an actual crime right and this is not people who signed an agreement like you know the 17-year-old girl with her 17-year-old boyfriend never said hey please don't share these photos maybe she never said that but it's kind of implied that you shouldn't Right. And then after the breakup, you know, he shares them. It's illegal. It's against the law, right? It wasn't before, right? So, we're actually getting better with privacy to protect young people. Um, some people have gone a little bit too far. Australia has just made it illegal to be on social media if you're under 16.

So, you can't have an Instagram account if you're not 16 in Australia now, right? So, they're actually very pro privacy to their point that they don't want kids on social media at all, which I think is a bit of an overreaction. You know, I'm not an expert on this matter. So, um I don't want to talk too much about that. But what we what we could easily do because young people already like pro privacy tech, they just don't know much about it, just tell them which apps to use or even better force the the the schools to make them use it, right?

private messaging systems instead of uh you know ones like Instagram and stuff and they're all going to use it because I tell you what about a 15-year-old they will install any app that they've heard of. They're like, "You know what? Sounds cool. I'll install it." There's no like they love trying new things. So, I think there's actually big hope for the the younger generation. >> Well, uh that is really a contrast to, you know, the the general perception that you know these young Gen Z's they they are just uh farming for likes and farming their information out for you know money and I think uh I'm not sure

if I do totally agree that the younger generation is more privacy centric I think that uh there is a lot more education around consent and what I'm actually consenting ing. So this may not be privacy. It may be privacy adjacent, but I think with more education around what you're actually consenting and what what information you're actually giving out, I think there could be a way to go. I mean on your point about DA there's I think one thing that I see that could be difficult is around participation because like you say governance is hard but like also not everybody wants to be

at the center of every decision. So I think um I mean any final thoughts about how we could incentivize that um level of care? >> Could we get some questions from the audience about >> Yeah. Any any questions from the audience? I think we have one minute left. Oh yes. Yes. So, we have Signal. Signal. There's

uh I like I think almost a billion people use Signal. It's incredibly popular. You can make very large group chats with Signal and do a lot of the same things that you would on a public system. Then you're talking about uh Twitter. People use Twitter because it's not private. Like the entire reason that people use Twitter is because they want the world to know. So that if you want to use Twitter, then you're opting for publicity, right? So let's not talk about that. There's not there's not that's not really like something that needs to be uh really important for privacy, but like um yeah, you know, um something like 500,000 people use rail gun. That's awesome for for private finance. There's uh three 2.3 billion

people use Telegram. Uh Telegram isn't like a privacy app per se, but it has a lot more privacy features than uh most consumer apps, right? >> Facebook, Messenger. >> Oh yeah. >> WhatsApp. >> Yeah. I mean like I like I'm talk I'll always use Instagram because it's absolutely the worst one, right? And it's the one that most people use these days, right? So Instagram Messenger like where they store everything you use Zoom which is the worst app for post they record everything you say on Zoom >> forever transcript and video right so you use Zoom once you're doomed forever so delete Zoom right but yes people use Brave talk brave talk is a fork of Jity

meat which is a really really good free video chat app you can use Brave talk for everything and it means you're going going to get hacked by these like random um dudes with like malware introductions. >> Also, speaking of Gen Z, I noticed I do because we organize hackathons often and uh some Gen Z join, many of them don't actually use Facebook. So, yeah, that that trend is is real. >> Cool. Well, awesome to know. I think there's one more question, Isa.

I wouldn't hope for like I mean I wouldn't hold my breath for policy to come and save us. Kind of the example that that Edward gave about Australia, right? And it's rolling out in I think it rolled out in the UK actually before, right? The ban on access to social media for teenagers. So like I kind of feel like policy is always lagging behind. It's more about actually developing the technologies and gaining the adoption like market share. Um yeah to me this is the only way like that's why entrepreneurialism is the way because that's the way to affect change and policy and the rest catches up later.

>> 10 seconds. >> Okay. There are a lot of people who treat AI as their boyfriend or girlfriend and they reveal everything. So absolutely yes. There was a law recently passed in California which makes it illegal for a bot to pretend they're a human, but there are so many exceptions to that law. But we're getting there. So, we need laws that make bots uh illegal to pretend that they're human. And we also need uh laws that make that regulate what um these companies are allowed to store out of people's personal information because let's face it, it's really really really bad.

>> Well, thank you both. Thanks Edward and thank you Daniel. And we have come to the end of this session. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you very much. Praise.