How To Beat Surveillance Capitalism And Reclaim Your Privacy

Transcript

good afternoon I'm here to talk about an approach that we've developed at orchid to privacy using aetherium so I've been doing this tech thing for a while and when I first got into it was very exciting the internet was just this place where there's a lot of ability for freedom of expression freedom of just kind of finding people like you which at the time when I was at Cambridge which was a funny little town in the middle of England just wasn't you know I wasn't

the same thing just finding people who were into the same stuff as you whether it was the kind of research I was doing the internet suddenly opened that up in a very exciting way but now when you use the Internet and I'm sure you're all very familiar with this idea it's risky you are making implicit or explicit trades of your information of your identity in return for convenience in return for fun in return for things that are actually essential to your life and you feel like you don't really have a choice but to to make that trade this is both corporations and states so the situation that happened a couple years ago with

Facebook and poor old mark ending up in front of the Senate and then last year when they try to get into the crypto space with Libra is one example of the trade that's happening and people becoming very aware of in corporations and then in terms of countries we're very fortunate really in the West in the kind of countries we live in most of us live in that we're not under direct like super heavy surveillance there's definitely a lot of leaks and the previous talk has outlined some of these things but the kind of surveillance and censorship is happening in many countries right now would just

be unthinkable to to most of us and you don't have to go very far it's a little bit difficult to get in a plane to China right now but getting the plane to China and try using the websites that you used to using and you'll find that it's a very different world and so really what happened is the tech that was there to make our lives easier and allow us to explore and get access to information and share it has actually made the surveillance and the censorship much easier also so current news the very tragic events that are happening globally right now we've covered 19 was really shone a spotlight on what's

happening globally both around censorship and surveillance the the outbreak in China was detected before the Chinese New Year people were aware of it but information was censored to the extent that most people had no idea that something like this was happening and so everyone traveled it's the is the largest migration every year globally and I think we can now see the effects of that situation unfolding globally in terms of surveillance there's now an app being widely used among citizens in China and it has a green or a red

sticker a QR code on here and if it's green you're allowed to move around if it's red you're not so it's like William Gibson has this expression that the future is already here is just unevenly distributed and this sounds like something out of a dystopian sci-fi movie that we'd all be watching and saying this is just just crazy like it's like a black mirror episode this isn't gonna happen in the world but it's happening right now it's happening right now and it's affecting millions and so the idea that what you're using is free has a catch and the catch is that you're the product every single one of you is the product that's making these

companies billions of dollars every year and that's a trade that you're making every day whether by choice whether you're aware of that trade that trade which I'm sure many of the audience are or whether you're unaware of that choice which a lot of people are and this business model has now been termed surveillance capitalism and our idea really is what if we could turn this business model for surveillance capital into kind of I guess privacy capitalism people are now getting very conscious of what's happening so the idea that you can kind of keep pulling the wool over people's eyes is starting to change so what if we could break this up so

we're in the business of decentralizing things everyone's here is like very excited about let's decentralize everything you centralize all the things so what are we just centralizing here so let's take a look back into some killer apps that we've had in the space Bitcoin is really the first color app and everyone's like what is the killer app of Bitcoin I'm like well the answer is it's Bitcoin it's decentralization is about breaking central points of control the central points of control the Bitcoin broke were nation-states and banks it allowed you to have a place that you could store your wealth without the oversight without the control of someone who could just lean into your account and take it away from you want a with the etherium the centralized point of control was

really the old boys club of Silicon Valley the VCS and the Angels who decide when they anoint a company and say this is the new thing we're gonna invest into this instead of theorem enabled us to have a crazy idea our company was one of those crazy ideas and get that funding from a global population who then have a stake in that ecosystem so this idea of what could we do differently is very important to the way we think about things or care one way and it's not a panacea for all the things I've talked about but one way you can protect your privacy online is using a VPN but there are pretty big challenges with existing VPNs one way to

think about a VPN is there's a paid man-in-the-middle attack so you're paying somebody to take your data and transmit it and return to you the data you're looking for and as long as you trust the person in the middle it sounds familiar right then everything's fine the other problem with VPNs is that this is not transparent there's really no open source frameworks for building VPNs on your own and if they are they're kind of complicated to use and the approaches that are more open are not incentivized so these are kind of the approaches that we took when we were designed to orchid the other thing that we figured out is that and we had a reference to cryptic kitties in the previous talk is that if

you guys remember when cryptic kitties came along and also the different ICO booms it kind of shut etherium down things just got really slow gas costs went up everyone's like oh my goodness which ICO is happening today or what crypto kitty craze is happening today so with orchid what we're doing is we're paying no providers as part of this distributive VPN network so if you think about the speed and the scaler which we need to do that on a data level this does become like a quite a challenging problem to do this on a public blockchain like aetherium so the technique we developed is it's very interesting and it has actually some potentially kind of tangential applications outside of bandwidth is what we call probabilistic Nana payments

and the idea is is that instead of paying each of the know providers in the network an unchain payment for a small amount we send them a ticket and that ticket most the time is worth nothing and every so often it's worth a lot such that the expected value over a period of time is the same as if we actually paid you on chain and this enables us to do payments on a data networking levels every single packet that we send has a payment associated with it we also add in multiple hops there are a couple of VPNs who have a technology they call double VPN source like two hops and the problem with this approach is that it's within the same VPN company

so if you're using a well-known VPN and you're using two hops it's still done within that VPN company so if you don't trust the VPN company it's not helping you to have these multiple hops in our architecture different providers can be hopped between and the advantage of this is it allows you to have IP anonymity across the network in the end what we're trying to do here and we definitely get a lot of questions about is this something that should exist but we're trying to give you the VPN you expected we're trying to give you one that doesn't log data and gives the anonymity that you were paying for we are of course also very supportive or a number

of other projects within the space I was a seed investor in Z cash in the old days and we're big fans of stark wire and some of the other companies like Alice tech in the space that are looking at privacy we are here in Paris there's a couple of my team members in the back there look for is in the big purple hoodies and we are both is just behind the stage and right out there I'm available all day for questions thank you very much does anyone have any other question or anything to ask any yeah thank you for the talk I was wondering what do you think about and

how would it be possible to implement such a system like privacy by design in the sense that more than having the the citizen having to protect himself by default we can ensure some privacy of data and maybe you know have more permission asking like rather it's companies or our government they will have to actually ask for the for the data they need more than yeah and I think if I can get the question I think you're talking about the idea of decentralized identities and owning your

own data all right yeah yeah so this is we are a company that is focused on privacy tools so this is essentially our first tool we launched it in December and it's live it's this isn't uh we've been working on over the last three years we definitely have ambitions in other areas such as distribute identity we're working on things like firewalls for your can for your phone there's a whole suite of things this is just kind of the base layer that gives you the IP anonymity and then you can ideally move up from that but I think this is a great point does anyone knows yeah so how do you share that

the VPN doesn't store any data so if you're using just a single hop so just you like kind of like a standard VPN in our architecture which you can we can we can give you the iOS or the Android app and show you how to use it right now then it is similar to using a standard VPI as you're suggesting if you use multiple hops than the person at the end who's really the one who has access to the website that's being requested doesn't know what your IP address information is so logging you at that point doesn't have any effect it's not helpful for yes it's an Onion Routing approach as there is a technique yeah

and you can add in multiple hops along the way we've also done a lot of adversarial attack modeling because obviously if you're using a public blockchain like we are then you have to start thinking through what are the source of the funds and how do you model those things so we've got a lot of thinking around that there are kind of best practices guides to how to use it and in our future applications we'll be putting those things in by default so that you'll have easy approaches to do that let's go taking all the photos so that the work you've been doing and the product you're building is absolutely paramount like ah I want to try it because it's not available in my country on the Google Play thing so first

question when would it be available and what's your country friends my friends and come talk to us afterwards I'll do and how can I become a service provider can I can I become a node to relay the hops come talk to us afterwards we have a interesting approach for that to you so the interesting thing about that's kind of like a whole talk in itself what we figured out is is that even though payments or trust less and so on and blockchain service provision is not trustless so if you're potentially logging me or potentially doing JavaScript injection and kind of all these kind of issues right so and this is the advantage of it is the one advantage significantly of integrating

working into the browser as is done by some other projects so our approach to this is to create trust networks within orchid so you can specify essentially who is the curator of a specific trust network and then you can become part of that network and be a node provider within it what we've done initially when we launched is we partnered with I think six or seven different I think it's about seven now VPN providers so we went through and checked companies like paa liquid all a and we looked and talked to them and said okay we need to know that you guys are good people we need to know that you're doing things that we believe in and it's it's been interesting partnering with VPN companies when we

were also potentially disruptive to it but the space is so fragmented that's this kind of approach up she makes a lot of sense doesn't recursion you know one more question um is there a an application of orchid for say protecting nodes that would be validating interim to or it also prefers take care all the professors take blockchain that would require to hide the IP of their nose or something that's a great idea and let's talk about that it's very understand thank you what stops a government like China from

making it illegal to run or use orchid and doesn't that sort of make some fragility to what you're doing or government like the United States yes I agree or France and in recent weeks China has cracked down on VPNs recently because they are concerned about the spread of information apparently concern about spread of information from outside China into China about what's happening with covered nighty know how people are thinking about it so yeah we're not in the business of setting policy or regulations like I said we're trying to give you the VPN you expected if some government decides the old VPNs elite are illegal then obviously we'll be challenged with launched against that country and that is a challenge right

now in terms of marketing into China or Russia or Turkey do you think that's a solvable problem or just the nature of power I think I would actually look more to Apple and Google in terms of the control structures because they're the ones that the government can lean on and decide that I mean that the Apple AppStore in China you cannot get a lot of VPNs or if any and so people come in and site loads apks with on android in a country like that you're always going to have people who are more highly motivated or are sort of traveling internationally back and forth and therefore have access to that and you can only hope that those things end up spreading and the word and that

information e something i realizes that you don't always need every single person in a country to have access to information maybe you need a few people who can then spread that information hopefully in the right way thank you thank you I recently also launched a little mailing list plug on my mailing list here if you want to get my sort of more recent thoughts on this on a daily bit what about a weekly basis I'd say this is my substract link thank you would anyone else like to ask any other question all right thank you very much is really one of the closest and [Applause]