Privacy as a Lifestyle

Transcript

yeah all right so uh I've been told to introduce this next speaker as a very nice human person so give a huge round of applause for molusco with privacy as a lifestyle yeah so generally speaking uh I will talk more about privacy and security because I think those topics are deeply connected and if we would understand each other better we understand how to serve the people who are at high risk uh lacking privacy right now at the moment uh I'm inesco I am a core contributor to web fre privacy now and the softcore contributor to Nim uh but this presentation is not about

myself and I was sitting there uh listening to a previous speech and then I made this spoiler alert it's the it was a slide somewhere down the rabbit hole of my presentation but it's a finding of my previous year when I was analyzing 400 projects delivering privacy in the web free space 99 of them has no security audits so basically you as a person you need to trust them um on for their words for their marketing words that they deliver privacy for real and then I was asking myself would I be the one who will give give away my life to those projects just because they say they are private and it's a big danger here uh it lead to ethereum Foundation

grant that we are doing right now but I'm going a bit ahead and sometimes we forget what's its stake when we live in fancy towns like Barcelona New York London when we are in the middle of a hyper capitalist Society we forget about the people who are living in the non-democratic countries and uh I suggest you to go to the Democratic uh countries index Global and you would see that around 20 30% of the Glo world countries R La uh Democratic what you can say human rights so you can be prosecuted or even killed in Iran if uh you leak your privacy or if you would share something different than the

general government agenda and that's what it stake when people are doing security audits uh but let's get a bit back o to oh clicker is working one second yeah cool so generally speaking what I'm trying to say this talk will be a little philosophical and I think that private could really help us to understand who we are what kind of life we live and why do we exist in the web fre sphere um and I want to remind you that we still still live in a postco times and personally myself I'm bizarre when people are talking about the metaverse the future the decentralized identity and they forget about the big alienation that we experienced several years uh ago so then don't be surprised

that the internet whatever it's Web Two or web 3 still feels like alienate the space as a lonely space because you are curated by algorithms and there's not many surprises and here's just the footprint of Spain and also there's a war here in Europe not far away just three hours I'm saying this is Ukrainian and for me that's the moment we we should care about privacy about security about human rights about human decency and also what we forgetting that uh that's the word of the last year by Collins it's this constant state of Crisis we is a human beings we like to dream about fleshy new technologies fleshy Innovations uh lots of buzzword in we pre that will come and save us maybe that ultimate uh Z KVM that will

bring much of scalability and then I'm saying let's remind ourselves where we are what kind of life we live and what kind of Life other people lives and this talk is dedicated to a being I don't know Ukrainian expert who's living in Barcelona who is married to Catalan girl blah blah blah blah blah who has some sort income and here's the stuff for you how they could track me no so maybe we could reframe relations and that's where privacy is this kind of powerful sword or what they're doing right now with marketing agencies and Google meta they're trying to crack biases they call it biases and this they call it biases and these are the flows of uh human psychology so they could uh sell stuff

you don't need and basically they er you from this like covid trauma War trauma relation trauma to hyper consumerism and I guess again if we do care about privacy we could Dodge these attacks we could create much more meaningful communities first of all and we strive for them here but when we talk about privacy and web free and if you go with a small community of privacy you would see they're hyper paranoid big brother is watching us Regulators are following us they're fighting with us and I'm saying that fear-based communication is not something that b bonding us or it could bond us for the conference of 50 people but then the question is like how to scale it how to make it really bigger and not be drowned into this kind of

like oh let's uh I don't know let's on binance and go full on dark five for example and my thing is uh as a human person I would love more people to go for privacy I don't want to be a privileged class of technical people who could attest if the protocol is priv who could read the documentation who could uh understand how to check legitimacy of the team and if team is unknown maybe they could trace a transaction that's a pretty privileged position they're now they're existing right now but then the web free uh scalability is there it's when your privacy tool has been used by millions and millions and millions and in this sense how to claim that the

Privacy will be a central point of the future internet is super simple your identity you will be owner of your identity which means it will be private and then you would build the relations with the protocols with the tools what things you want to share it's like attending this conference uh I I I I wrote to my friend they like hey do you want the ticket as Speaker I has plus one he said yeah of course and I'm like oh you need to provide me your full name an email and I'm like how would we do it so we fake him a name and he doesn't want to be doged he doesn't want to share his identity why should he and in this sense again privacy in relation with your identity and your relations

with other ecosystem applications protocols is a good tool to navigate the meaningful questions why do we do what we do and that's 100% private but it's interesting that um humans are complex creatures oh I know these guys they were standing in AQ with me uh and I want always get back to human drama and on Monday we had the hottest uh Day Ever uh on earth and the average temperature lots of the media wrote about it and it's a death sentence and people will die whatever whatever and that's basically again paranoia of the world we live in and I want to understand culturally how we could be more

empowered instead of Disconnected by oh I'm vegan and I'm not I'm for Monero and from zash and I'm from salana and I'm for ethereum this polarization doesn't help um and then I will tell you one good example of the community that strive for connectivity for co-creation but sometimes they could be labeled as a criminals and here I want to change this notion that privacy is for criminals um and I'm a part of a small p2b community uh I I I'm not putting a name here that preserving the legacy of the cinema what they're doing basically they sharing obscure movies for example from Thailand and they are making subtitles so more

Global audience could read them and how they build this social system basically in order for you to download something you need to share something so basically they put the gigabytes that you download and share within the ratio and then if you contribute to the system if you help system to be sustained uh by downloading making subtitles supporting the project then uh you will have bigger opportunities to for collaboration and this is a healthy Community there's there could be fights between oh I love this director that director but what they do they preserve the culture but by I know there's no mainstream movies but some by some IP owners that would would be seen as kind of like oh criminals

Pirates but for Society for us they are doing super great job and to a degree that later some directors went there said we prefer to share with you those movies because we we know you care and the Privacy works the same way so what we're doing right now we're trying to build an ecosystem that will help privacy make mainstream and find the way that people could for example if there are 400 projects at the market claiming they're private have some sort I2 beid here there kind of like L2 beid but for privacy one person could attest the Privacy feature of the every solution and fun fact I asked about 100 people doing privacy Services about how a non

Tei could go and check if your privacy claims are legit and I received 80 different answers meaning that basically Market leaders uh maybe they are okay with going read The Docks but read the docks is not the same as understand the docks and then if there's no security audits like we were seeing here like okay we analyze a smart contract but how it's related with data leakage how it's related if your or RPC leaks the data or your wallets connect your personal data or your privacy policy is false so what we are trying to do here as well with security companies we try to influence so apart from their security audits they will have also privacy security audits

when they will really have a new service when they analyze how data is leaked here and there on all the entry points what data is collected how is it compromises one's privacy and what are the tradeoffs so then when you publish report it will be much more valuable to the people and not just claiming oh what my smart contract is legit no one could steal the money but it's not about stolen money the question is life itself and I believe that the private internet where we are going should be a place for a really diverse crowd and really different people like for example I was uh talking with our Vietnamese colleagues and there and

asking them who needs privacy in Vietnam and web free native person said government I'm like oh gosh here we go so there are markets when trust in government is so big that those tools could Empower State agents like for example in N case how neim appeared it's because um there was a scandal with NSA spy Merkel and European uh government decided to give away uh research Grant to find uh a solution that will be a bit more powerful than tour and will protect for Global adversaries uh but not everyone need those powerful privacy tools like for example someone in Turkey would need

just a VPN to access the Gated uh media's resources and that's how this person's privacy Journey would end and for me and for us the Privacy should be super contextual uh for someone it's a small use case and 90% of the life would be kind of like non-private at all for others if they're at highrisk category like journalists for example working and sharing the media for Wikileaks that's crucial and thumbs up to a team at HH Dam it's like kids of I don't know 17 year old who created a new VK League Wikileaks there during a Heaton and I was pleasantly surprised that those kids they care about uh

privacy and also what's important here when we talk about privacy I found a super cool book in Berlin recently that sometimes and I'm in talk in all these conversation about the future of internet and people talk about oh we need to protect ourselves and then I'm saying but for example in Ethiopia and I'm not sure if JJ is here guy behind the entropy team what they're doing uh they are taking care of the privacy of Ethiopian minority TIG Grans and they don't have any Internet they have an internet they kind of put a stick connect to the mobile phone try to reach any network like that in the sky uh because there's a problem of connectivity and lots of people don't

have notebooks and suddenly when you develop a privacy solution you would be terrified in Latin America oh almost like penetration of notebooks is really small so then whom you serve you serve this privilege take a class of nerds or you serve the people if they are the people that it's interesting that the solutions should be different there should be super simplified and also they have different relation with time Community wealth and everything like that and this really if you apply this to privacy you suddenly understand that it really uh encompasses all the different audiences and we could build much more EMP powerful web free tooling because web free should be kind of better than web to also on a cultural level and uh what I'm trying to say that

we're going to Super complex system of privacy when we won't have one tool but we will have a privacy stack and then thinking as a privacy stack is really cool for your um pres in web free because uh for example in our GitHub we collected 400 projects and there there are 15 categories from defy to decentralized Identity sto decentralized storage and stuff like that but then the uh privacy stack is not still there but I want to imagine it I want to think out how it would even look alike because if you use 90% of the Privacy stack but you Le all your data within then 10% it doesn't work compromises your privacy

your freedom uh your life and then it could lead to a death scenario um and in this sense uh it's gross I Google it and Google it saying hey these are the journalists who had been killed in Mexico and I was talking to my our Mexican CM Community manager like hey let's talk about local use cases on privacy because I'm from Europe I have Western Gaye tell me about your cases and he's saying journalists I'm like why because when do they do investigative journalists and they serve the society the narcos and government and the Army are Fring them to a degree of Google is saying here are the people who had been killed and I was uh uh searching for

like kill journalists in Mexico and generally speaking that's the cost of privacy when vitalik is saying that we should really solve the Privacy issue sometimes people don't understand that that's that's the point it's not about tornado cash hiding uh the sources when you support communities like Ukrainian fundraisers for humanitarian costs it's much much more than that uh for example and I was doing this infographics for some time the dimensions could be political economical and ethical and you as a person you could choose an etical reason uh to care for privacy maybe because you would support certain Iranian Community there are lots of people like in ethereum who are Iranians and they try to understand how to

support Iranian Community or how to support Kurdistan Community or or how to support other people like indigen indigenous people in Brazil super interesting cause and then you would understand that tooling is not there so it's an interesting challenge for l a system to or like ethereum uh found saying we need to have an argument how you would communicate with those people like if someone is saying yeah this North Korea hackers they're the criminals they abuse your privacy tools you need to have a powerful counterargument because then you will lose the those communication and I would rather say go for sensitive audiences like young girls who are stalked online right now who need an extra protection I build my relation

with my daughter for understanding that she doesn't want to show her photos on the internet she hates when we parents uh upload her photo without her consent and we do parents abuse kids uh right on uh themselves basically and it took me years to understand uh I I thought it was a joke but then that's that that's the audiences we should take care about and what interesting that if you go beyond your belief maybe you're agnostic maybe you're believe in vitalic but then there are other people like religious minorities uh that are threatened they could use your web free tools it's it's interesting that not just gen Z people

not just youngster youngster could use uh fancy nfts but also lots of uh sensitive uh audiences like maybe like families with cross border ties like for example lots of ukrainians kids are detained in Russia and then if they ride home uh their communication could be traced uh and it big risk for them and at the same time here's the point of where privacy is super cool like in Russia lots of uh researchers want to move to Oxford or to Cambridge or to other Western universities to continue their research and maybe those people are researching cancer cure maybe they're researching the big cure for the challenges of our society but they need

to have a private messenger private uh document tool for transferring and so that they cannot be traced and these are the tangible practical use cases for privacy and again returning to security audits security audits are not there so basically they don't have a security stack connected with the Privacy stack and my okay I have 20 seconds and I will finish so I know that I was uh using my cat a lot in this talk and without her proper consent so you can uh help Ukrainian animal rights saving animals and also you will have a thumbs up for cyber feminist who uh wrote a cyber manifest a wonderful book that

could really help you to navigate what doesn't mean to live in the world of human SL technology and uh I dedicated to all the nonhumans in the world because sometimes when we think about privacy sometimes when we think about security we lock down only on ourselves uh sometimes there are too many white people in the room too many male uh men uh and in this sense uh they repeat the same pattern on how they scale privacy and it's does it lacks a lot of fluidity there in terms of diversity and inclusion uh and I need to are those uh questions I need to check and we be like

oh there are lots of questions I will answer them all but I I would just summarize here several things privacy is bigger than you think it's not just about transactional privacy transactional privacy is just is just that that the same use cases as uh token or crypto is just one use case for blockchain second there are lot of sensitive audiences so when you develop privacy Solutions you can have a better conversation with whom whatever you're talking media VCS partners team members Etc uh third uh security auditing companies should try and provide an extra service for a privacy Solutions uh it's a new market it's a good Market uh

you could really Empower them and then you can have a tangible use cases like how you uh give more privacy to the sensitive audiences and uh the last one it would be nice to have if the privacy players would really collaborate with each other like recently attec with name integrated and have better privacy and not compete with each other it's it's so boring to see those internal competitions uh especially when people are saying oh we hate each other you're on the same boat you're going the same human rights directions if not you whom else uh thanks a lot and uh questions from here and some questions from the

internet thanks uh we we we have a microphone here maybe someone wants to give me a spicy comment there's can you just give us oh hello yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah I hear it's working okay uh can you can you give us a quick summary of why it's not good to use things like Telegram and Signal uh like so first of PA I think the pro so I used to work with marketing and I know that what marketing is doing with your brain they trick your perception of the tooling so basically when telegram is saying we have we are a private

messenger that's not true you need to turn on the private messaging so basically uh they trick your so lots of people think that it's a private messenger although they don't use the private features I would also say it's a bit towards zcash because in the web 3 we have the same feature like for example Nighthawk wallet within the zash ecosystem uh privacy by default there's no button you need to press private or not transaction and I like this approach in zcash you can choose uh whenever you have a private transaction or not and many people they're not lazy they just not technically savy to pay attention because they're bombarded of all this messaging and they don't have time to

spend to understand how really privacy works with this specific application how uh what are the limitations of privacy what where privacy for example in telegram is exposed instead of being preserved and what's important here the application itself doesn't show much of effort to care about your privacy and I'm Bor this as Ukrainian because ukrainians leak so many data right now like wow to to that specific tool without a proper uh understanding like uh apart from encryption how this information um is used by Third parties and they could inter intercept those that content

super easy uh and second tool was WhatsApp or what signal ah signal uh so with signal I would rather say this notion that what bothers me with signal is that majority of privacy tooling they lack uh proper business model signal is donation based and majority of small web free also tooling are the based which means their business model is not sustainable so signal is private right now because they are not owned by corporations and basically they're using uh Progressive encryption and they encrypt everyone there's no optional privacy but what will happen if those big donors would go away and there will be they they won't

have money to sustain the ecosystem so in this sense what matters is to not just think about privacy features as of now but what will will happen like in the future especially when you transfer all your communication with signal I know that Ukrainian Army uses signal as by default Tool uh as opposed to everyone else they don't even use that's funny WhatsApp has been engineered in Ukraine and was acquired by meta and I guess uh one good feature to follow if to understand if it's um service is private or not if human rights organizations and journalists are using it why because journalists are at high risk around the world especially when

they do investigative journalism and they send sensitive data and they communicate uh kind of anonymously in this sense and a good just signal what professionals are using and human rights organizations sometimes they work with the sensitive groups like for example I was talking with Alona from Ukraine Dao and we were talking with the people from irand Dao and they were set uping organization decentralized and I'm like saying guys if you uh open a group in signal and you invite every member there being someone let's say an agent of Iranian government would be there he would dox all of you because he will be inside of your group so tooling is just

the one thing how you use tooling whom you invite in those groups how you name your uh uh nickname but then you expose your phone number and that's what uh is a weekly think of signal you still need to expose your phone number and not many people are that savy because they're just uh not that uh Tex heavy they just use their this one uh phone number that has all the data footprint uh apart from the internet so the usage and a culture of privacy that's what we're trying to build actually with web free to showing that apart from saying yeah this tool is private no let's think out how we use it why we use it and when privacy ends

especially with the tools like rail gun we were in talks like if you add ZK sync and you have this complex or 1 inch and you have this complex defi structure there should be a moment when you share the data with the thir party and it leaked maybe in your close system there's a private transaction here and there but then those transaction you could lead to another transaction and then they're they're exposed so you need to create we as a community we need to create guides videos explainers and we are doing this a bit uh how privacy could work as a culture and simplify the same simple language like no not many buzz wordss buzz words are for technical people

yeah ah thanks thanks a lot uh I uh yes we have a new speaker for developer report and stuff like that thank you very [Applause] much