Translator: Susan Farmery Reviewer: Hélène VERNET
Today, I would like to talk about innovation and privacy
because people do not often connect them together.
To me, however, this is absolutely necessary.
I have a question for you.
Has any of you here ever thought:
'My private life, my data, I don't care because I've basically nothing to hide'?
Yes.
Who considers themselves as a pretty good and honest person in their life?
Here we go! So it is obvious that we have nothing to hide
because at the end, what will people discover?
Well, that I am a normal person,
and that my life isn't particularly interesting.
If you want to, we're going to do a little experiment, OK?
Please get your phone and open your last chat.
Don't choose it, it's not important.
Use any messaging app, and open the last conversation.
Are you there ?
Now hand your phone to the person next to you.
(Laughter)
OK.
All right!
(Laughing) OK, OK!
How many people here,
how many people looked at the conversation
that was on the phone they were given?
Did I tell you to read the conversation?
(Laughter)
That's it!
How many people felt a bit anxious when handing their phone to their neighbour?
(Laughter)
There you go.
And yet, the person next to you, you know exactly who they are.
You can see if they start doing something
they aren't supposed to do with your messages.
Now, tell yourself something.
Each time you give green light for company to collect your data,
you are actually doing just that but with people you don't know,
whose real interests you know nothing about,
and against whom you have virtually no recourse.
And to me, this is a real issue today.
In fact, we have completely disconnected
the real impact of the misuse of our private data
from our use of technology.
Except that in the 1990s, when we were offline,
questions surrounding personal data weren't a popular subject
since there was very little data around as we spent most of our lives offline.
Nobody knew what was happening with us.
But each time we started to connect a device
with the help of more and more technology,
more aspects of our lives became increasingly digitalised.
As a result, today, we have reached the point
where we produce so much personal data
that so few companies centralise,
that all of our lives have really started to be exposed.
And that is the real danger.
Twenty years ago, we could say that the issue of privacy was secondary,
but today the world has changed because data is everywhere.
And that scares me
especially when I start to look at things such as the amount of data theft.
Yes, here, you see only a selection;
it doesn't show everything that was stolen.
Now once again, you could think:
if there are as many data thefts as there are humans on the planet,
how come I haven't had any problem?
Well, an increasing number of people are subject to 'ransomwares',
that is when computer hackers steal your data
and send you a message saying, 'If you don't send me bitcoins,
I'll send everybody your photos that you really don't want people to see.'
So, when you give your personal data to a company,
you are also potentially giving it to a hacker,
and that could cost you lots of money, and if you refuse to pay,
I can guarantee they will go public with this information.
So don't think that because it hasn't happened to you yet,
it won't happen to you in the future.
So to me, privacy issues are security issues.
We must be able to feel safe on the Internet.
We mustn't be permanently afraid that our data is going to be stolen.
Secondly, we must understand that as these companies collect your data,
they gradually end up creating a profile of you that is so precise
that they know things about you you don't even imagine.
The other day, I was talking to someone about a book I wanted to buy.
I hadn't bought it yet, and I received an advert for this book.
Nobody had heard me talking about it.
In fact, what I and my friends had looked up on the Internet
had enabled companies to profile me so precisely
that they understood what I was interested in,
a little bit like in a puzzle.
At first, you don't quite know what it is,
but each time you add a piece, it becomes clearer.
That's exactly what happens with your profile and your personal data.
Customisation or targeting can be good, for example, in the context of health.
It's important to have a personalised health.
But unfortunately, it is usually used for the wrong reasons.
It's used to try to keep you hooked on these different platforms.
You know this feeling, on Instagram, when you continually scroll,
and you don't know why you keep scrolling like an addict.
In fact, you have been so well profiled
that the contents shown to you is so interesting
that you end up quite simply never getting bored of it.
Unfortunately, it goes further than this.
They also use nudge techniques to push commercials onto you
with one single aim that is not to give you something you need,
but to make money at the other end.
Your personal data is used for targeted advertising
that allows them to make money.
Except that in most cases, these are products you don't really need,
sold by companies you don't really want to do business with,
and unfortunately very often, with money that you don't have.
So to me today, the problem with targeting
relates overall to manipulation issues.
And we've seen that with Cambridge Analytica,
when it was used to manipulate political opinions.
If I know exactly what you like, I know exactly what to show you
in order to make you think such and such thought.
It was done on a massive scale.
So, privacy issues are addiction and manipulation issues,
and protecting your privacy means protecting some freedom of thought.
But that's not even the worst in all this.
What scares me the most is that we are finding out
that the more someone uses a social network,
the less diverse is the content they see.
It means that as you keep feeding your data to a social network or a company,
this company gets to know you so much better
that it ends up locking you inside your own bubble.
Obviously this is interesting because in your bubble,
everything is comfortable and you fell good.
To me, where that can be seen is during elections,
as if by chance, all my friends vote the same as me.
Where are all the others?
It's because the algorithm knows what I like to see,
and rather than risking losing me with something I don't like,
I become targeted.
And it's really, really dangerous when we start to lose diversity
because, in fact, we also know that innovation comes from diversity.
Studies have shown that the most innovative companies
were those that were also the most diverse.
Now we're going to do a little thinking experiment.
Imagine that the colour red represents the area of technology.
And you are someone interested in technology.
If each time, you are exposed to technological content,
what will happen after a while?
Well, you will eventually just become a better technologist,
and becoming more of an expert isn't that bad.
You have just reinforced your existing knowledge.
But you haven't come up with anything new.
You have only deepened your existing knowledge.
Now let's take another example.
Imagine that this time,
three parts of your content is technological,
but that you start to look at things relating to art.
Like with modelling clay, mix red and green, and it makes yellow.
So now you have something new,
neither art nor technology but something in between.
Now you add business and suddenly,
you have such diverse information, you can see the whole spectrum.
You are no longer confined to the field you already know,
you can now see what is happening at the intersection of these different areas.
And in the end, this is really what we call "innovation".
So when you are locked inside your own bubble,
you lose your ability to innovate
because you lose the ability to see the whole spectrum of possibilities,
and how these different things are linked to each other.
So to me, privacy issues are fundamentally innovation issues.
It is really, really important that we keep our ability to innovate.
Now, how can we protect our privacy?
Well, quite a lot of technologies exist.
First, the concept of 'privacy by design' should be well understood.
It is the idea that we will protect your privacy
not by asking you to trust us but rather by guaranteeing
that, at the levels of technology product and business,
nobody will ever be able to misuse this data.
For example, homomorphic encryption is very simple.
I want to use a service without revealing anything at all.
Let's imagine that you seek restaurant recommendations,
but you don't want the person at the other end to know where you are.
Well, you need to encrypt your location on your phone.
You send it to the person who is going to give the recommendations.
This person has no idea where you are without the code of the encrypted data.
They send you a kind of answer that is also encrypted
so they don't know what they've recommended,
and you decode it on your phone.
That way, you are able to use a service -
in this case, customised restaurant recommendations -
without ever disclosing where you are.
Until recently, this kind of technology didn't work so well,
but today, we are merely a few years away from making sure
that it works for everything, even artificial intelligence.
Next, there's the issue of centralisation.
We certainly don't want one company to get the monopoly on all our data
because it would mean that this company could potentially decide
how all the people using their service should think.
Here too, lots of people are working, through blockchain especially,
on decentralising the control of personal data.
Lastly, there's GDPR. It's a fifty-fifty. Who thinks GDPR is good?
Ah, that's good!
In the US, it's zero, they don't like it.
It's really good for three things.
First, it allows you to be forgotten.
If you're not happy, you can leave and be forgotten.
Second, it allows our data to be retrieved and sent elsewhere.
If you think that company A doesn't share your ethical values,
and that another company offers the same service,
you can transfer your data without having to start all over again.
In some cases, you can even have the right not to be profiled,
if it would have a serious impact on your life, for example.
The regulations coming into effect today
allow us to break this vicious circle related to our personal data
that ends up reinforcing our bubble
without giving us any possibility of recourse.
So, encryption, blockchain, and the regulation of our personal data
are tools that are absolutely needed in order to protect our privacy.
So why am I talking about all this?
I'm talking about this because today, we face two choices for our future.
We have that one.
That is if we choose to keep doing what we're doing now.
Well, it is heading for disaster.
If we carry on being confined in our own bubble,
how are we really going to make a difference?
Everybody agrees that things aren't heading in the right direction.
At one point, we must realise that if we lose our ability to innovate,
then we'll never manage to prevent this kind of disaster.
Do you fancy living on Mars? Some people propose that as a solution.
No! Nobody wants to go and live on Mars.
I'm very happy to live on Earth.
It's a lovely planet with beautiful beaches, and I love Paris, no way!
So what I'm trying to propose here is something different.
What I'm proposing is that we succeed in creating a true positive future,
a future in which we have managed to resolve all these problems.
But to get there, we need to increase our ability to innovate,
thanks to technology, rather than staying stuck inside a bubble
that is going to lead us straight to a catastrophe.
And that is why everybody must fight to protect their privacy
and to break the vicious circle in which we've been for the last 30 years.
Thank you.
(Applause)