There’s a lot of great insights in this talk with Meredith Whittaker at SXSW. It’s refreshing to see someone talk so straightforwardly about privacy and the incentives that shape our current notions of innovation and progress:
I particularly like how she articulates why we should care about privacy:
Look, everyone’s always had something to hide… you all close your bathroom door, right? You talk to your best friend in your moments of crisis. The same way you talk to your boss. Do you think out loud when you’re working through an idea. Do you tell your new friend you met at a bar the same thing you tell your oncologist? No, no. We have different relationships. We have a need for intimacy. We have a need for safe spaces to think.
We have various relationships that are modulated in different ways with different people. And we have a world that is defined by various power asymmetries in which those in power can often weaponize or misuse intimate information about us, information about our preferences and our patterns and our relationships and our vulnerabilities. So there’s no world we have ever had, however many changes we’ve seen where people don’t care about privacy. However, we have made privacy into this sterile, bleached, technocratic concept that feels like we don’t have a stake in it. We don’t think about what are the things, the precious things, the democracy, freedom of thought, freedom of expression, intimacy that privacy actually guarantees as a fundamental condition.
There’s a clarity of purpose that really makes Signal stand out from other communication or social tools:
I want to contact my friends. I have a, you know, I want to relate to other people. And that’s like, I don’t I don’t pick my friends based on whether they care about privacy. I pick my friends, whether on whether they’re cool, you know, whether I like them, whether when I hang out with them, I want to keep hanging out with them or I want to go home. Right? Like. And and that’s the world we want to live in. Not one where you have a sort of, you know, it’s technological ideology leading, you know, our relationships.
And some good insight into the economic incentives that it takes to maintain a privacy focussed tool like Signal, as well as the kinds fo things that shape the development of tech:
…we’re looking at a landscape that’s a little bit perverse, frankly, where you have, you know, let’s give an example. Right. You have a like some defense tech startup is white labeling an AWS API and calling it innovation. And they’re getting billion dollar valuations and Signal is, you know, fundraising, even though it’s, you know, probably one of the most vital technologies used by every military in the world, right. So, you know, there is something deeply, deeply broken about the economic paradigm, about the incentives in tech.
And for now, what we’re doing is everything we can to protect what Signal is. Because if Signal, you know, if we shut down Signal today, we couldn’t rebuild it, right? You can’t rebuild a network effect in a saturated market. You can’t rebuild the gold standard reputation that has been developed day by day over a decade, by people inspecting our code, looking at our cryptographic systems, looking at what we do, improving it. There’s an ecosystem built around it that you can’t just snap your fingers and and do. And, you know, that’s one of one of the lessons around communication networks, right. The network effect is really powerful.