[AUDIENCE] Normally it's quite expensive to get privacy, right?
You need to do something in order to get financial privacy. That's why it's so hard to explain that
this thing is a basic right. You're spending effort to get privacy, therefore you must be hiding something.
Now we have these new technologies like signature aggregation and second layers that would actually
make privacy cheaper. That's really nice, because then you can say, "Of course I'm getting privacy.
Why would I spend more money to not have privacy? It's easier to explain to people, to explain to governments.
Do you think that's just lucky coincidence for us, or is there more to it?
Do you think that might change again, where we get to a situation where privacy is expensive again?
[ANDREAS] That's a really great question. I think it's very insightful too. The reason
we can afford more privacy is because privacy -- like any other feature can be through the use of technology --
made less expensive. As you scale up, you reduce the marginal cost of all kinds of products and services.
Privacy is really just a service or feature of markets. When you have increased supply of privacy
at lower marginal cost, it drops the price.
There is inherent demand for privacy around the world. Most of the inherent demand for privacy comes from
places where governments are appalling, where banks are unaccountable, where people are afraid
to express opinions because of the consequences. Somebody was talking about it earlier today,
I think it was Giacomo: censorship resistance doesn't matter if you don't have privacy.
Because then you can apply extrinsic, extrajudicial consequences to actions.
As a result, the cost of not having privacy goes up too. Not having privacy is also a kind of product that
has a price attached to it. In many places in the world, the price is your life.
Part of the difficulty with privacy as a good that is both produced and consumed is that
the implications of losing your privacy are either externalised to society as a whole
or they are distant from the proximate cause. Meaning that: you lose your privacy today
but you go to jail six years later based on something from your browser history today.
You lose your privacy today, and you have a democratic government.
Then, in a wave of nationalist populism, you end up with a fascist government two years from now.
They still have your browsing history.
All of your "highfalutin" ideas about human rights are an indictment against you.
Does anybody know the origin of the phrase, "Let a [hundred] flowers bloom"?
Does anybody know that? [AUDIENCE] Mao.
[ANDREAS] Mao. Mao Zedong created a program in immediate post-revolutionary China,
[around] the idea of openness.
To "let a [hundred] flowers bloom," to allow the explosion of creative expression, even dissident opinions.
People believed it. They bloomed; all the bloomings were carefully recorded and catalogued.
Then the purge happened. They murdered hundreds of thousands of intellectuals who had believed the idea.
What they don't tell you is "let a [hundred] flowers bloom" immediately preceded
one of the greatest ethnic and intellectual cleansings in China. Political cleansing based entirely on allowing
people to speak, carefully cataloguing that information, and then a few years later indicting them for it.
One of the problems with privacy is that you lose your privacy every day,
but you don't pay the price for that until perhaps a lot later, and you can't immediately identify the moment
at which your loss of privacy goes from something that is an inconvenience to a deadly risk.
The more developed, democratic, open, and secular the country you live in is,
the less you see a direct correlation. The other problem with privacy is externalization.
Part of the reason we see these massive populist movements,
all of the problems we have with nationalism and extremism on public forums, has a lot to do with
the erosion of privacy. The erosion of privacy erodes democratic institutions.
As democratic institutions get weaker, they serve people less. As they serve people less, extremism flourishes.
We pay a price in Western democracies, where our democracy is getting weaker and weaker.
Part of the reason for that is the erosion of privacy... the ability to track the electorate, know their opinions
and how to feed them just the right amount of stimulus to their dopamine receptors,
how to keep them docile and entertained by cat videos so they don't pay attention, so they can be enraged
by the fact that someone said something or someone took a knee at a sports game.
Don't pay attention to your government committing genocide in Yemen. That's the erosion of democracy.
It happens precisely because of erosion of privacy.
Privacy affects freedom of speech and freedom of association. As you start losing these principles,
in these human rights, democracy gets eroded. Eventually you get fascism.
That's when you start paying the ultimate privacy cost.
This fundamental problem of externalization and distal proximate cause is why privacy is so difficult to price.
There's only one price for privacy that works: free, everywhere, all the time.