Translator: Michele Gianella Reviewer: Federico MINELLE
In the '90s there was a motto characterizing the Internet,
namely : "On the Internet, no one knows if you are a dog."
And the goal of that motto was to make it clear
how easy it is, on the Internet, to be anonymous.
This has changed a lot over the years.
In my opinion, the year 2008 marked this change mostly.
The question I ask myself today with you
and I asked myself for long is:
in the future, in 2020, or even later,
will we become increasingly anonymous
or will we become less and less anonymous on the Internet?
And which of the two options could we consider to be the best?
The first question is: what happened in 2008?
In 2008, something very interesting happened.
That is, social networks became a large-scale social phenomenon.
And social networks, indirectly - this was not their primary goal,
but in an indirect way
they made it more and more difficult to be anonymous on the Internet.
If you play poker, there is a motto
that lets you understand why this phenomenon of lack of privacy
is partly due to social networks.
That is, the motto is this:
if at a poker table,
you don't spot the loser in five minutes,
you are the loser.
(Laughter)
It means that we are the product of these social networks.
Namely, almost all the social networks
earn through the advertising industry.
The connection between these two industries
that seem very loosely connected,
is the fact that the goal of the advertising industry
is to sell products to all of us.
And social networks, as well as many other tech companies,
have a mind-boggling amount of data about us.
The general idea is,
if we can use this data to better understand
what the individual consumer is interested in,
then we will have a greater chance of persuading that consumer
to spend their money.
The advertising market
makes about $529 billion a year,
which is a huge amount of money.
We are talking about the GDP of a Country like Belgium.
Added to this phenomenon, which is a purely economic,
there's another problem, a more psychological one.
Over the years, several researches proved
that if a user has to choose between privacy or security,
and comfort or convenience,
they will almost inevitably choose comfort or convenience,
if the risk is perceived as remote.
That is, if we do not consider risk as a realistic thing,
then we will most likely choose comfort over security or privacy.
The reality, however,
is that if I now asked you to take your clothes off,
how many of you would be willing to do so?
I think no one.
The reason is that, clearly,
you perceive this, and I'd perceive it too,
as a dangerous situation.
Embarrassment and decency would make me feel quite bad
if I decided to take off my clothes.
The point is that on the Internet,
we daily take off our clothes and we feel "protected",
or better we have this false sense of security,
because these social networks and most of the sites we visit,
are difficult to understand for the individual user
and at the same time, again, they give us this false sense of privacy.
Now, Borat is a nice way to explain the problem.
The reality is that more and more often,
over the years, we see teenagers commit suicide
for what their schoolmates post on Facebook,
as well as on other social networks.
There is another problem:
not only we are naked,
and people spy on us when we are on the Internet,
but everything we do is constantly recorded.
Again, trying to make a comparison with real life,
it's as if you were living in London.
For those of you who went to London,
there are cameras everywhere.
So every day we wake up in our online lives,
do things like going on Facebook,
or checking our bank accounts, etc.,
we are completely naked and we are recorded.
Now, the point is that when I talk about recording,
I mean about 600 terabytes of data volume per day.
If we wanted to turn this into video hours,
we would mean about 150,000 movies of two hours each.
If someone wanted to analyze or watch the data
collected by a single company in one day, i.e. Facebook,
that would take 35 years.
It's incredible if you think about it:
it's as if Facebook was collecting 35 years of video hours
on all of us every day.
The obvious question is: why would I care?
As a single citizen, as a single user, why would I care?
Because eventually this system works perfectly for all of us.
It's the typical phenomenon of free-riding:
namely, we can use services free of charge
and these services improve our lives.
So the question we ask ourselves is:
is this a problem, or will it become one in the future?
My answer is yes.
One of the problems we now have with this frantic collection of data
is the fact that, as I said earlier,
no human being is able to analyze
that amount of data collected every day.
So we rely on machines.
Specifically, we rely on algorithms called machine learning algorithms.
Bear with me if you are experts,
but machine learning is basically statistics
applied with computers to large amounts of data.
The problem is that, by its nature, statistics have an intrinsic error.
Therefore, one of the questions that we often ask ourselves,
that people who deal with this topic ask themselves,
is how to minimize this error,
otherwise when I use the machine learning algorithm,
it is likely that I make wrong deductions about a certain person.
Now, machine learning algorithms are normally used for two purposes.
The first is to classify entities,
like defining the gender - man or woman - rich or poor, etc.
The other thing is gathering information about someone,
in such a way, again,
that if we look at it in the advertising perspective,
we understand what may be of interest to a particular user.
But there's a problem with that.
This means that we are basically increasingly outsourcing
increasingly important decisions about our everyday life to machines.
Now, there's one thing
that machine learning algorithms can't do today, and probably never will:
that they have no empathy.
Hence, if we have this data stream
that goes from our birthday until today,
and like everyone else we've made mistakes in the past
or there are things we'd rather not mention,
the machine learning algorithm won't care at all about that.
The ML algorithm acquires data, analyzes them, and gives us some answers.
In addition, the chance
that we actually understand what the algorithm does
is practically zero.
On the contrary, it is almost worrying:
if you talk to any person who deals with neural networks,
he will tell you that certain decisions
that improve the results of neural networks,
have no explanation.
In other words, parameters are changed
and why those parameters should work better than others
is a question no one can answer.
We will find ourselves in the future,
unfortunately much closer than we think,
dealing with institutions that use these algorithms
to make important decisions about everyday life;
and because of the above mentioned issue,
we will not be able to refute these decisions.
Now, I don't think this happens very much in Italy,
but I think it does in the United States.
Machine learning, applied to what is usually called Big Data,
is already used today to understand
how costly your health insurance premium must be.
It is used to understand
how high the interest rate on your mortgage should be,
and whether to grant you a mortgage.
It is used by governments to correlate the activities of people
in order to see if they were involved in any attack,
rather than any other criminal act.
Now, William Gibson, a popular science fiction author,
recently wrote on Twitter
that one of the questions he often asks himself,
when he sees new technology,
is, what would North Korea do if it had access to this technology?
The point is,
we are implicitly creating a technology we don't understand
and that would potentially give a country like North Korea
the chance to create on the Internet the equivalent of a totalitarian state.
That said, unfortunately I often anticipate bad news
and the goal of this talk is to try having a positive view
because, again, the Internet and the sharing, in general,
in the past improved, and still improves, our lives.
And, in very practical terms,
without the Internet I would not have a job.
So it is important that the Internet survives
and that sharing survives.
And also, it is important to keep the concept of free riding
for otherwise the so called third world would not have access,
could not pay for the Internet resources
that we all use today.
There are four things I think we can do, as citizens,
to improve the situation.
Some of these require we work together with institutions and companies,
while others can be done individually.
The first thing is, require companies
to have some sort of expiry date on the collected data.
I mean, the idea is:
okay, you can collect as much data as you want,
but after, say, 30 days, six months, a year,
that data must necessarily be deleted.
This allows us to have the famous right to oblivion,
and makes it arder for companies
to apply algorithms on historical data
that perhaps we wouldn't mean to share
had we known that that type of algorithm
would be used to process those data.
The second proposal is to have labels,
much like food's nutritional labels.
These labels must be put on websites and applications,
both on mobile phones and on computers.
Why? Because in reality, the legal vehicle for companies to grab our data
and do what they want with our data,
are these contracts, often called EULA,
and these contracts are not made to be read by human beings,
they are made by lawyers
so that there's almost no chance that a human being will read them.
In addition, these contracts are made in such a way that fundamentally,
the moment we access a site or download an application,
we are giving complete control of our data
to a particular company.
This thing is slowly changing
on, for example, operating systems like iOS,
the one that runs on your iPhone.
When a certain application wants to access the camera,
rather than the contacts,
an alert pops up asking you:
"Do you want to give permission to this application to access the data?" -
But that's not enough.
You should also make it easy to understand to each human being
what you mean to do with that data.
The third option is to have the ability to pay for services.
For example, if you are fond Facebook users,
you should have two options:
the free option,
where Facebook has the right to collect your data;
and the paid option, where you pay either a monthly subscription,
or on consumption,
but Facebook, at that point,
shall not be able to collect data about you.
Now, this is something that is already happening:
there are services provided by Google and other companies
that are moving in this direction.
But it's still not enough.
The fourth option is the only thing
you can actually do today when you go home.
That is, using privacy-friendly tools.
Tools that make it harder to track people on the Internet.
They are tools that block the sites that show you the advertisement.
They are tools like Tor.
Tor is more or less an online labyrinth:
when I go to a site,
it is impossible to figure out, for the site owner,
where the connection comes from.
So, it is impossible for the site owner to understand that it is me.
Or potentially, something like Bitcoin,
which makes it more difficult to link a financial transaction
with a natural person.
The problem with privacy tools
is that they are often used as a bogeyman by governments -
not only by totalitarian governments, but also by our governments,
even by governments like UK -
because as they guarantee more confidentiality and more privacy,
they are also used by terrorists and criminals for their activities.
The problem is that today
these are the only available tools we have to protect ourselves.
So it is important that they remain legal for as long as possible,
until this type of problem is solved.
Now, the question is: what will happen in the future?
Well, I hope that in 2020
we will have the chance both to be dogs on the Internet
and paradoxically to have a stronger identity on the Internet.
That is, almost a one-to-one mapping
between our virtual identity and our real identity,
to do things like vote online,
or open a bank account without signing any kind of contract.
The point is that it is essential to promote both things,
otherwise we will be in a totalitarian state on the web.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)