Transcriber: Raquel Inácio Reviewer: Annet Johnson
Imagine an online world in which privacy is leading:
no personal advertisements, no cookie pop-up,
and no company will own your personal data.
Who wants this?
Hey!
You are ten minutes away from knowing how we can reach this.
My name is Daphne Muller.
I research the future of the technology industry
with a specialization in privacy.
What will the future of technology look like?
Many believe that it will be about more:
more personal data collection and more artificial intelligence.
Is this how we will progress?
To find out, I looked at two fields that heavily rely on this:
the advertising industry and crime prevention.
Advertisers want to collect as much data as possible about you,
so that they better understand what you want.
So far, the main result is personalized advertising.
In other words, an ad for a product you already bought.
I can see what my partner will buy for my birthday.
What if advertisers would progress with privacy?
The Dutch broadcasting organization NVO designed their own advertising system
and they don’t collect your personal data.
They show ad space on the context of the site.
So on an article about the raising gas prices,
they could show an ad for an electric bike.
They made progress.
Their online advertising revenues went up by 37 percent,
and they no longer have fake bitcoin ads on their site.
Let’s have a look at the second field:
crime prevention.
I read a leaked secret phishing report of the Dutch police.
They wanted a connected network of sensors and algorithms to predict a crime
before the crime is committed.
What could possibly go wrong?
It’s just like the film “Minority Report” where Tom Cruise has to run
because he’s accused of a crime he might commit in the future.
And can you even imagine how much money this madness costs?
A relatively simple app like “Corona Melder,”
the Dutch corona notification app, costed 23 million euros.
I can only begin to imagine the budget for this project.
If I would have access to that budget,
I would invest it in ideas that are proven to be effective.
In Norway, prisons have been redesigned.
The recidivism rate for first-time offenders dropped by 43 percent.
They made this progress by treating their inmates well
and giving them proper job training.
In Denmark,
the police of Aarhus reduced the number of traveling jihadists by 97 percent.
They made this progress by strengthening the social network of young muslims
who wanted to go to Syria.
If we want to make progress and live in a saner world,
I recommend investments in human sanity instead of artificial intelligence.
(Applause)
There’s more.
(Chuckles)
The two fields that most heavily rely on personal data and artificial intelligence
for their “innovation” apparently don’t need it.
They can make better progress with ideas that don’t require personal data,
that don’t require artificial intelligence, and that are more effective.
Therefore, my hypothesis is that this counts for nearly every field or industry.
But isn’t this easier said than done?
After all, data is good new oil isn’t it?
Let’s play a game.
You, the audience, have to find a profitable tech company,
except the big five:
Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and you can win an Apple.
(Audience) Twitter!
No, Twitter lost one billion dollars in 2020.
(Audience) HP.
PHP, I don’t know.
You win an Apple.
(Chuckles)
(Audience) Spotify.
Spotify lost 580 million euros in 2020.
DuckDuckGo is a privacy technology company.
I will come back to that a bit later.
(Laughs)
Dell I also don’t know.
You win an Apple too.
Uber actually goes the extra mile in this competition.
Wait, I’m not done with Uber yet.
Uber lost 6.7 billion dollars in 2020
and 8.5 billion dollars in 2019.
This is one million dollars per hour!
What is their strategy?
Well, for example, Uber offered a taxi service that is way too cheap.
And they wait with raising their prices
until all the other existing taxi companies are bankrupt.
So they seem to have a drive to become a monopoly.
The academic term for this phenomenon is platform capitalism.
Many tech companies want to become this platform that everyone depends upon,
and to get there they find growth much more important than profit.
So this means that most of these technology companies
don’t grow so big so fast only because of their technology or their data ability,
but also because of their monopolization strategy
and their ability to make losses for seemingly unlimited amounts of time.
This raises three questions:
First, is platform capitalism good for innovation?
After all, the monopolization of the tech industry leads to less competition,
and competition is the basic ingredient of capitalism to stimulate progress.
Second,
is platform capitalism a financially healthy business model
for smaller players in the market?
I interviewed the CEOs of two privacy technology companies.
What is their strategy?
Well, in contrast to Uber or Spotify or Twitter,
they don’t rely on venture capital.
Their products are free for individual users like you and me,
and they have special licenses,
and they offer their technical expertise to very large enterprises.
And they are making progress.
They are growing and they are profitable.
Third,
is platform capitalism good for society?
I know that most of us are probably using WhatsApp or Google.
Most of us are accepting or perhaps tolerating
the role that big tech plays in our lives.
Every now and then, we see scandals in the news.
Perhaps you have heard of the recent Instagram scandal
of the mental health of teenagers,
or the Cambridge Analytica scandal where presidential elections were corrupted.
Is what we see in the news just the tip of the iceberg?
Professors, like Shoshana Zuboff from the Harvard Business School,
as well as investigative journalist firms like ProPublica,
and human rights organizations, like Amnesty International,
say that these problems are structural.
Of course you know that they collect all our data.
But do you know how this data is analyzed?
Facebook collaborated together with Microsoft Research
and the University of Cambridge
to analyze the correlations between your likes and your personal attributes.
They concluded that, if you are a man and you like the actress Katie Griffin,
you are very likely gay.
Do you like Halloween?
No?
Then you’re likely white.
And if you like curly fries, you have a high IQ.
(Laughter)
So if you don’t ditch Facebook after this talk, please like curly fries.
(Laughter)
The question is, though, can this act of categorizing people,
even on sensitive topics like religion or sexuality or ethnicity,
can that ever be in the spirit of non-discrimination?
Freedom from discrimination is a human right.
And what many people don’t know is that privacy, including digital privacy,
is also a human right as defined by the United Nations.
This begs the question:
can organizations who rely on personal data collection
ever be respectful of human rights?
And if not, are these organizations and technologies good for our progress?
Because of the concerning behavior of the tech industry,
there is a counter movement.
The number of people who want new ethics in the tech industry is rapidly growing,
and many of them can develop software.
They collaborate online, often in their evening hours,
and they find it important that software is free.
Not only free as in free beer,
but also free as in freedom from Big Tech.
Good, solid, and competitive alternatives already exist for web browsers,
search engines, video calling, file sharing,
even for navigation software and smartphone operating systems, everything.
Whom of you raised your hand in the beginning when I asked:
“Who wants an online world with privacy?”
What are you waiting for?
What you want is already there.
Start with changing your browser and your search engine.
I use these technologies myself and you will like it:
you will see far fewer advertisements, your internet can feel faster,
your phone battery can last longer,
and most importantly, your human rights are respected.
In Europe, schools, universities, and governments are already changing.
Imagine what our future looks like, if privacy continuously grows like this:
all of us will be your new privacy tech, none of us will be tracked,
perhaps technology companies could compete against Big Tech,
perhaps some big tech companies will go down like Nokia did around 2006,
even the police might reconsider their vision.
If we want to make progress, we have to collect less personal data,
and if we do so, we will get better innovation,
financially healthier business models,
more competition in the market,
and most importantly, more humanity.
Privacy is progress.
Thank you.
(Applause)