ZKPodcast: Privacy & P4 with Liz and Chris from Least Authority

Transcript

[Music] welcome to zero knowledge a podcast where we explore the latest in blockchain technology and the decentralized web the show is hosted by me Anna and me Fredrik in this episode we sit down with Liz and Chris from Lisa authority to talk about privacy transparency confidentiality and their private payment protocol p4 in today's episode we want to talk about a couple

things we want to talk about privacy we want to talk about security and we want to talk about p4 with us today is Chris and Liz from least Authority hey guys hey hello and Fredrik hello so we were talking about this before I wanted to say the p4 protocol but I was told that protocol is in is in the name is in what it's one of the four p's so maybe you guys can just explain what is p4 yeah so the name people are means private periodic payment protocol and it's kind of a double plan word so on the one hand it is an homage to s4 which is our simple secure storage service this is a a cloud backup and file synchronization service for which P 4

was originally designed and intended but it's also on the other hand a critique of bitcoins bit 70 which is named the payment protocol and which is something that's been widely criticized Danish design so on the one hand it was criticized for being highly centralized around the existing x.509 certificate authorities infrastructure which is you know this really closed and centralized markets and it's also been criticized for being open to kyc and a and math AML style identity surveillance using client-side certificates so what we wanted on the one hand we had this very specific motivation to accept payments in a way that's consistent with the values of our existing s4 service since you know we offer this private by design

storage service which can't read or modify data but on the other hand we also kind of had this broader motivation to try and tackle this bigger an overarching problem of accepting subscription payments with crypto currencies and to do so in a privacy-preserving manner but I mean that's that that's a really hard problem in maybe we should talk more about it I'm just thinking our audience doesn't really know that much about you guys yet why don't we also do a little bit of an intro let's start with Liz yeah tell us a little bit about yourself actually you've already been on this podcast Ohio a while ago what number are we at now I think it was I think you were a number like 10 yeah or something like that what number are you on now seven d70

something like that so tell us a little bit about yourself yeah um well I'm Liz Stein Inger from least authority I'm not gonna say a whole lot about me can I talk about least Authority sure more interesting I think yeah we're we're a Berlin based company but we have a team of mostly remote people around the world working on mission where we genuinely care about security and privacy we care about people being able to have the freedom to operate online in a privacy-preserving way and so we look at so we do things that enhance security to enable more privacy on systems we do

this through things like security audits and security consulting with other projects and other companies and we also do some software development of our own with contributions to open source projects and just activities within the community we care about privacy by design you know helping people to understand these topics so yeah we just do a lot around that something I don't think we'd dug into much when you were on this show before was why did you get involved with this like what was the trigger that may do you think like this is something that I have to work with I've cared about open source personally for a long time I think that's actually what we talked a lot about at the last episode for me personally I really care about just people having the freedom to

choose and also the freedom of information I think that transparency is really important information is power and if people aren't able to have private communications then being transparent to the rest of the world kind of disempowers people in certain positions and it empowers other people in other positions and so I think it's really important within society for us to look at this scale of transparency versus privacy and where do we enable certain power structures and so my background was more an open source and transparency and getting information out to people and I worked on that side of things and then I realized that I also need to work on the other side of things and

then so I came over to the the other side of security and privacy and started working more in this Basin and Chris this is your first time on the podcast so why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself yeah so my name is Chris Wood and I work with Lisa authority primarily on the product side of the company as a developer so my official job title is actually lead UI and UX developer but I always say it's a little bit misleading since right now I'm the only UI and UX developer so there isn't really anybody for me to lead and secondly I spend an increasing amount of time wrestling with problems and designing systems that extend I guess beyond mere UI and UX work so for example key recovery systems payment

systems secure communication channels built infrastructure and security and so on and so forth so that being said I tend to think of myself I think more broadly as like a privacy engineer or a privacy architect that is as someone who's primarily concerned with building and designing more holistic software systems that maybe cultivate preserve or otherwise aim to protect user privacy and other related rights and values so of course that often involves making existing crypto systems and security applications more accessible and easy to use but it also involves I guess designing new systems from the ground up that are more difficult to abuse by attackers so specifically because they might incorporate privacy by design

principles from their very inception so things like end-to-end security client-side encryption anonymous identities and so on beyond that I am a free software the kids I've been using free software pretty heavily I guess since the late 90s early 2000s cryptocurrency enthusiasts as well before joining Lisa's Authority I spent over a decade teaching philosophy as a professor in various places across Canada so my background like Liz is is a little bit different in that I was kind of observing this from the outside and then realized that I needed to get involved more directly and to build tools that could be used by ordinary humans what I'm curious when you say free software what is free software to you do you are

you a stall - tor anything that is open-source yeah I would put myself more in these stall minused category so I I don't even know if I have any closed software in my house actually my phone is entirely free software my TV is totally free software pretty much everything is free software so but a part of the reason that then I do that isn't just for the ideological reasons but I'm also very curious as to what some of the challenges are to actually you know live a life that is aligned with only using free software so I I like to kind of challenge myself in that regard to not go over to the dark side as much as possible what was that

word you just used so Stallman is I guess a computer science professor that sort of founded a lot of the free software movement I don't know did he write GPL or is it just like do I just associate that with him for some reason I don't know but he's he's like this figurehead in free software movement he is quite a character he yeah he is the founder of the free software movement I believe he wrote most of the Emacs text editor the GCC compiler I don't know how much of the GPL he wrote I believe it was him and a few other people but yeah he's been pretty heavily involved with this for quite a long time what I'd like to hear kind of going back

to your question Frederick the huge Tesla's was like the why like why you got in can either of you pinpoint maybe like an occurrence or some vent or something that you that happened either to yourself or externally that really made you realize how important this was or how threatened our privacy is and how and what the impact of that could be every day I read the news sorry no it's every day we see all these different articles about how our information has been leaked but for yeah I'm for me an exact moment that's such a weird thing I don't think

people I don't think maybe it really has it's like maybe a period of time then maybe it's like was there a turning point for you was there a point where like you actually trusted most systems and then all of a sudden you were like there is something broken here I mean I definitely I hit a turning point but more on the transparency topic and when I realized that in how much information is actually power but I was working for the US federal government helping with the information dissemination program they basically collect all this stuff this all this information that the government is publishing and then try to make sure that it gets disseminated to the public and that's that's when you start to realize that there's really

important information in these in these publications and these documents in these books that can really change the course of people's lives even something like knowing like water quality like EPA the Environmental Protection Agency in the United States would put out reports and stuff to read those then you can make more educated decisions in your life and so you start to realize how powerful information is but then it's interesting because now it's privacy I wonder like privacy sounds like the opposite of what you're describing it's like you were like oh the information is important we need to get it out there but privacy is actually kind of the opposite and I yeah but this is also the conversation that comes up with open-source software you know the conversation of how is open-source code

more secure than closed source code and a lot of people it's it's it is that kind of backwards thinking but it's this idea that there are certain things that need to be open for assessment and then there's other things that need to be closed if you are a company or an organization that's making claims about your software you need to be able to open it to like prove that there's that other people can independently verify that this is what this is doing what you say it will do and then you compare that to the individual user of that software and that an individual user of the software they are not in that position of power there's like this different balance that happens and I think that this happens with governments versus the individual

this happens with corporations versus the individual and so when you get into these collections of people that are organized for a particular purpose they should be open and accountable for what they're doing but then the power structure versus an individual they need to that individual needs to have control over their information because it's it's just them they're you're alone and and then it also comes into identity Chris I want to throw the question over to you do you have sort of a turning-point moment or did was there something where you are like wait a second something's wrong or was it like a slow kind of realization yeah that's that's a really good question because like I

could probably point to a whole series of different moments that might have led to I guess where I am right now but I mean historically I've always been I guess something of a turbo nerd if want to use that term and so I've been mostly adept at computers and if something didn't exist and I wanted it to exist I would try and create it myself so with regards to like joining lease authority I was pretty disappointed in all of the current cloud storage services that were out there so I just kind of decided to start hacking on my own and a couple of people kind of found out about it and the way that it complemented Tahoe l le FS which was yes for service and so I kind of joined lease authority just

through my own I guess selfish motivation of trying to create a better cloud storage tool but beyond that though I think I have kind of observed this this gradual cultural shift where everything that we see now is moving online and as somebody who grew up on IRC in the 1990s I kind of know how bad computer security is right and like just how terrible things can be if the systems aren't properly here so for me I think yeah I started to kind of discover cryptography I guess in the late 2000s I won particular high opening moment I was reading Bruce

Schneier textbook I think it's called applied cryptography and there is this one section in it where he is talking about how much energy would be required to brute-force attack a 128-bit key and essentially the answer is that it is secure until the universe ends right like you would require so much power that you have to burn through the entire energy of the Sun in order to like brute force attack this specific key so I had this kind of realization there that wow you know if you use cryptography you can secure things in a way that not only guards them against you know guns and explosives but that actually uses the very laws of physics themselves to

protect your data which to me is like going to be automatically stronger than any safe or gun or any protections made by humans right so there was kind of this like really metaphysical realization where there's like these laws of the very universe that can be exploited in a way to actually protect people in ways that you know is or trustless I suppose wow I never really thought about it that way that's cool I actually - you're pointless of like if there's a specific moment that kind of makes you realize something I think in in most people's case it is a very gradual thing where you kind of slowly realize something I actually got this

question earlier today if I got involved and blockchain stuff because of ideology or because of technology like am I just interested in the tech or is there an idea ideological goal in it and I mostly like 90% joined because of the tech it's just like interesting code to write and like interesting problems to solve and then over the past two years I would say it's almost it's gone like maybe not completely flipped but certainly like 50/50 or or more towards ideology because because I've like you keep see especially being in this space you keep seeing these stories of like Facebook abusing their power or Google abusing their power and like you meet people

like Tim Tim berners-lee who's like saying that you like regrets creating the web because it's become the centralized tool of control of election manipulation and all the other bad things and you're kind of like well actually things are pretty bad we need to do something about it we need to make something better but it's curious like my end of my answer to the person earlier today was like still pretty hopeful I think we can do something but what do you guys think in terms of like do we can we actually make a difference can we prevent the these powers that exists from from taking the control that

they have yeah it's always an interesting question to think that can you even separate ideology and technology I think that you I think that you saying 90% vs. 10% it seems to me like the best way to to think about that that it's like a scale but you can't ever go fully off one way or the other other way otherwise why would you be interested in the technology or vice versa yeah yeah can you solve it well humans Oh humans I think we're quite cyclical and some of the things that we do we try to course-correct through our actions and then we find ourselves going the opposite direction too far and I think that it's sad to hear that people would regret like that

Tim berners-lee regrets the internet because at the same time it did so much good for people and yes it's been and twisted for some people's power but I think every technology that we create is going to do that and so I think if you go into technology and technology thinking that you're going to solve problems and that it's going to be a static end that's incorrect that it's much better to go into technology thinking that I'm going to help the course-correction for a period of time and then I hope somebody else comes along and course corrects me later and that's just a it's a much more reasonable approach to the technology yeah because I think what can happen if you focus too much on the ideology side of it thinking that you

know what's best first off that's a bit of hubris then that we should all be humble about the technology we've great and then yeah if you think that then you're gonna get caught up in that and drinking the kool-aid I don't know if that's a good phrase to use but you're gonna get caught up in the ideology and lose track of the actual technology isn't the expression the road to hell is paved with good intention absolutely yeah not a lot yeah everybody who creates technology they they create it they have it I think Elsa this goes to the technology without ideology I think that that's also absolutely false that every time you create technology you have some sort of belief system that is functioning behind what you design and what you create you might just not be

fully aware of it you might not be completely intending certain things but there's those beliefs and biases are getting baked into whatever you create and so it's much better to just be aware that you're doing that but yeah your ideology comes through I think I totally agree with everything that Liz said I think it would be kind of a mistake to think that there is some sort of overarching goal and that once that goal is achieved that everything is good it's just kittens and puppies and unicorns and rainbows we have to always be continuously kind of refining our commitments and our goals along the way and of course those goals and commitments might change as things shift and develop themselves anyways when it

comes to privacy specifically my issue or like that the thing that I battle with is actually not technology because I I have some sense of the technological solutions that exist to address privacy problems my issues more with like you said humans just people aren't interested in privacy most people don't care about privacy and are happy to give all their data to things right now I feel like when when Facebook and all of these things came out and people were like some friends of mine started to share a lot and then you've read these stories of people who like would share every moment of their lives with the world that was nuts to me having been born in the 80s and like growing up in

the 80s and 90s pre-internet a little bit I was always taught not to share everything you don't you don't like tell people your social security number you don't share your password you don't like you don't do that and then I'd see these people sharing so much of their lives and actually I became far more open and far more like sherry than I used to be and now there's sort of a sense of like wow I totally I don't think I got swept up in it the way that some people did but I definitely I shared a lot of stuff on Facebook pictures my face like those things that in the past week I would have been very wary of yeah well Facebook was created to help you share it so you were being set up through user

interfaces through encouragement through like all these different things like the technology was built to encourage you to share not to encourage you to be private but this goes back to that point that your history kind of brought up this idea of the privacy and the transparency yeah because and I think that's sort of where we're Chris maybe a lot of your work comes in where it's if what you need to find you guess what you're looking for often is this way to design a system where the right things are kept private and yet a lot of things are checkable and there's a lot of things that are transparent yeah and it's this balance that needs to be made correctly yeah we should definitely talk about this and I think this problem is

especially difficult when we're talking about crypto currencies and accepting payments for subscriptions specifically which has kind of been this this issue that we've been grappling with at least authority right because on the surface level that seems like using crypto currencies for payment seems to be antithetical to like the subscription model right because the cornerstone of like subscription usability kind of comes down to this notion of pre-authorized payments where you are authorizing some other party to do certain things on your behalf but then when we're talking about crypto currencies the kind of primary a lure at least within Bitcoin is to be your own bank that is to remain completely independent of these third-party payment processors right now of course there are

some efforts like EW 37 that aim to provide subscriptions on the blockchain right but those kind of lack privacy so you have this radical transparency where everything is on the blockchain and everybody can see what people subscribe to but you know maybe you don't want to do that so yeah there's also this other end of the problem which are the privacy concerns so if we kind of set aside for the moment the issue of how difficult it is to buy and use cryptocurrency and how rare it is for merchants to accept it I want to say that it can be relatively easy for a sufficiently technically inclined person to make you know this one-off purchase that doesn't disclose very much data about themselves so I

could go down to the farmers market for example in person with my phone and I could tunnel home through a VPN to like my Z cache full node and remotely broadcast the transaction over tor that would be sufficient to purchase a chicken without telling the merchant anything about myself right in this like totally private manner but I mean this feels pretty extreme and in most just what no yeah couldn't you also just pay pay with cash yeah totally right but when when we're talking about like societies of the future and how everything is going online I think in in the future it's going to be increasingly rare to actually pay with cash right we we see in Sweden right now cash is pretty much non-existent nobody uses it

anymore and so we're gonna be seeing more movements like this where everything's gonna be done online we see things with apples payment system and one on Android how do I know what it's called and cryptocurrencies are kind of supposed to be an alternative to these things right so I think your example of going to the farmers market to buy a chicken for that maybe but but what if I want to do an online order of a chicken yeah it depends on who in the game you ask like if you talk to an average Bitcoin er probably quite a lot of them would say well then you're depending on the government what you don't want to do

- yeah of course the others definitely the government is the third party payment provider here yeah she's true actually yeah the papers value is trusted because of their yeah because their position in the world yeah their power yeah yeah and it's and it's tricky to when we're talking about subscriptions as well because like you could do a one-off payment in like a fairly private way but if you're entering into this like subscription type of relationship like say I'm going down to the farmers market every day to buy a chicken right I start to leak all kinds of metadata that could then be used to personally identify me right so if for example you know the farmer sees

a black motorcycle show up just before I appear before him and if it disappears later the farmer could start to know that hey maybe I Drive a black motorcycle and you know over time maybe the farmer can begin to profile me he could predict my chicken consumption habits you know maybe one day I buy a lot of chicken until the farmer can deduce that I'm throwing a party with chickens or then maybe this one week comes along where nobody eats chickens maybe it's a religious holiday where people eat fish instead and if I don't show up that week you know maybe the farmer can know that I follow that provision and you know of course this is just a silly example and I probably should have thought more before I started speaking but the essential point kind of remains that even if we have

this like totally private transaction that reveals no information about me the behaviors that I partake in before and after certainly can be used to I guess profile me right and so and given enough time and repetition we'd kind of produce enough meta data points that more complete behavioral profiles can be built about us and so if we're like absolutely serious about privacy we kind of have to take those sorts of things into account right because like right now we have lots of options for you know periodic payment protocols like things that aren't private like credit cards and VIP 1337 and we also have options for private payment protocols like Z cash shielded transactions or Manero but

we don't actually have payment protocols that are both private and periodic which is kind of something that we're struggling with right now and hoping to solve and how it measures your example may sound a bit silly but this is obviously things that are happening everyday all the time like whenever you go shopping in Amazon they're profiling and you're starting to see ads on the rest of the internet and you're constantly being manipulated to try to get you to spend more money on things you probably don't want and like I've worked in the software as a service industry where profiling quote unquote s-- users is like that's what you do that's what you do to get your business profitable you you look at the behaviors and and the

subscriptions of your users and there are services to cross-correlate your subscriptions with other services subscriptions so that you know like oh this guy is a big spender over there and he likes that feature on that service I'm gonna upselling this feature on my service and get more money this happens all the time and to me to me privacy is really about control over data so like what you're talking about like transparency versus privacy what do you share or not share to me it's all around like having control over what I share with whom absolutely you should have the choice and I think that that's yeah that's what we try to do with privacy enhancing our privacy protecting technologies is to give

people that choice and and to help educate them about like what are the repercussions of sharing information in this particular scenario because this is also a difficult thing about privacy too and transparency is for each individual where you draw the line for those things it's gonna be different and to help people kind of exercise that and I think people get privacy you were saying earlier that maybe people don't really think about privacy or they don't need privacy as much these days or don't want it or whatever and I think people do just they're just not trained as well in the digital world because of these business models because of these kind of these companies health people have handled data for the last 10 years 15 years it's been in a way that

we've all kind of been trained like you were saying to earlier that you've been you were trained to share and I think we just kind of have to train ourselves to you know come back to the other side of okay wait I need to I need to think about this decision I can't just go along with what the company is what the whatever their people want me to do I need to make a real decision here and we can do that in other areas of our lives like are physically privacy about our bodies privacy about the places that we live we're all trained as children we're trained maybe not all people but a lot of you know it varies from culture to culture but there's always some type of keeping something to yourself versus sharing with other people around you whether

it's actually used the term privacy or different things you know there's different ways of looking at different cultures but it exists that as humans we want to keep some stuff to ourselves but do you think I mean I like you I like your idea of course correcting and I like it in this context especially because if you like if you look at younger people right now do you think that they are getting more private do you think do you think they care more about privacy because what I see is like a younger generation sharing way more than we did even if a younger generation might be more culturally attuned to sharing and less towards privacy privacy altogether will never disappear from them and so I think that there will be course correction inevitably because they'll they'll realize that some things

may be missing or that something's not comfortable and maybe they'll correct it some other way I think our generation kind of like started out from you don't share anything at all and then we've been trained to share more and it kind of went overboard and I think we're kind of pulling we are old enough to sort of see the news and see through some of the behavior manipulation that company is we're trying to pull on us and we were starting to pull back a little bit and the but the younger generation I agree to some extent are sharing much much more but they're also doing it in like snapchats where they're just sharing with the people that they select who they want to share with and it's ephemeral quote-unquote it's not really because you can but but like

conceptually at least to them they think that it's ephemeral and will disappear after 24 hours so in some in some ways I think they're more conscious of public internet wide sharing and that whatever you put on the Internet is there forever and so kind of steered themselves towards these sir that lets you share with a smaller circle or friends in some way it's so you think that there's almost like an unconscious limiting of information even though they're using services that aren't really secure in any way like at least conceptually yeah that actually makes sense because people want privacy they do people do want to control what's shared about your I mean it's just natural we don't want to go around just telling everybody what we're thinking

what we're feeling we want to present ourselves a particular way this is I this comes back to that whole identity that we we in different circumstances show different sides of ourselves and with different conversations we share different knowledge about ourselves and so I just think that that will never fully disappear so these comments of privacy is dead or you know the younger generations aren't going to know privacy the way that we did know they'll figure it out they'll just find a different way because it's just human let's go back to the p4 case because I think the example that you gave Chris was really it was actually I liked it it was it's cool like it I think we could get inside it but what would it like I kind of want to I wanted to think of like a real live case of something like this like how

would somebody actually use it would have been an individual would use it to pay their subscriptions or would it be like companies using it I both actually because again do you have the relationship of a customer to a merchant you have somebody who is basically paying for a service to the merchants and there are activities in and what they do like Chris was talking about that metadata that they're they're leaving the profiles that being can be created about them the the customers should have some control over that data not only should they know that data that but they should be able to determine who they share that with who who knows these things about them and you can't have any of those choices without privacy

features basically that if you have everything open then the person loses that control over that data and so we give people that control over that data and then if they do want to share it they can but at least they have a choice but yet this metadata that there there are activities their purchasing activities have you know I think that this also becomes more important as we get into territory where people can start to maybe even customize those types of things with new technologies like cryptocurrency is being able to do micro transactions like we're seeing all kinds of cool things happening that you could start to really instead of signing up for plan a B and C you could have like customized plan for you and then because because you now

have these different choices that you can do because you can do micro payments and certain things and so all of a sudden the metadata is much more personalized than perhaps it even was before so there's the level that Chris was talking about with these chickens and like you know if you're going to the chicken sort of even from that example those start to see like what somebody's religion is and and I think that the more fine and the more granular we get with the options that we give people the story becomes even more detailed too and so it becomes even more important to have some element of choice of what you're sharing and I think a lot of what we see with the current services is that if you need to go stop one of your subscription payments you have to go to

the the merchants website you have to go to their service and you have to go make those choices there you have to tell them to stop charging you why why should they be the ones controlling that information the customer should be able to say on their side what they want to do with their subscriptions they should be the ones who have everything centralized for themselves as opposed to maybe even having to go to five different merchants to change your subscriptions and stuff yeah and then like those service providers like to make it as hard as possible to shut it down like their that that's a trend in sized businesses is like the general like growth hacking trick for the past couple of years has been don't allow a user to shut down their subscription on

the site they have to call in to do it because that prevents people from turning it off and it just keeps them on on the payroll for it or like you must give us three months notice or you must give us yeah it's actually like a killer feature of PayPal in some ways is if you subscribe to something through PayPal you can go in on PayPal and shut down that subscription so you and kind of centrally managed it still relying everything on PayPal but it's still it's one step up and it's sort of it's actually I think that people talk about is like oh no you should you should sign up using something like PayPal because it gives you that control that gives you the power to shut it down yeah I think what Lou said earlier is is basically it right like in all of our

other products we really try to adhere to this privacy by design set of principles so we really want to put power into the hands of the users but we kind of noticed this great inconsistency because on the one hand you know we provide this great cloud storage service which has some really great privacy and security properties but on the other hand when they go to sign up for it you know they have to use something like stripe or charge be this you know third-party set of providers in which case you know they just start to lose a lot of that privacy right from the get-go and so I think on the one hand yeah we really want to accept payments in a way that's consistent with the values and the the design that we

already have in our products and on the other hand I think we just want to set a higher standard right we kind of want to maybe motivate other people to try and do things the right way to kind of give power back to the users themselves I think that this giving people the power that I mean this is the idea of with cryptocurrency too and you know decentralization and removing some of these third parties and being able to I think you said earlier be your own bank but yeah there's this idea that you should be able to do decentralized with your payments and so that works wonderfully like Chris was saying with one-time payments but that doesn't work so well when you start having any kind

of patterns or connection or this like the this these different pieces of data that you can sew together or you can you can correlate with other data that's available out there and so that's that's what we were looking at with p4 is trying to look at that that periodicity side of it but p4 from what I understand p4 what it provides is like privacy subscription but it's not really like your data you pick and choose which data is shared as far as I understand it it's private yeah right but do you see sort of a future where if you wanted to share your patterns that you could do that I think this is an idea that's been floated this idea that you could like sell your data if you wanted to and actually make

something from that if it's used in studies or you know demographic profiling then you would get something from it but P 4 itself doesn't do that no I understand no for us we were looking at that foundational step of how do you take what's out there how do you take the technology that exists today how do you put it together to give people this private periodic payments and how do we how can we write it out and then this protocol this kind of critical way this kind of like mapping to have other people see you can do this too this isn't some sort of like crazy proprietary thing that we own it was just it's just us proving a point that this these technologies exist to help people with privacy you put them together in this particular fashion and

here are the things that you get here are still the the data that might be potentially leaked in different spots here's the data that is not leaked and so this is how you this is what kind of privacy that you get and when it comes to sharing it back again I mean step one the foundational piece is the data has to be with you and if you had controlled a data than sure if you want to have if if all your subscription metadata all your subscription details all that information you have it on your local machine you have it under your control and no one else has it then now you're in a really great position right now that now the tight the the roles are switched and you can say to other people sure I've got it if you want to see it I

can sell it to you and we we've been doing that in a whole different backwards fashion for the last however many years with these business models where we get the the free product in return for that data but then we can never change our minds we don't have as much granular control and so if you just switch it to the other direction where you give people the control for privacy to begin with but they have the privacy then it's up to them if they choose to share it they could copy and paste it and just post it on their website or something they could sell it whoo yeah you could get all kinds of real interesting business models could could stem from that but the first step that we were looking at is that you get that control back that you get that privacy I

want to dig in a little bit more technically on p4 on what it actually is like practically is it a spec a set of instructions and app or toolkits or what is it yeah so this is also the interesting thing but like Chris was saying earlier that this is this is a that what p4 was more of the protocol in the sense of a set of instructions because it's not necessarily outlining completely new technology it's more about here are some pieces that exist today and this is how you can put them together in a particular fashion to get privacy this is how you you put all these pieces together for privacy by

design and like I said there's some analysis there coming back to why we actually did this we had challenged ourselves because we looked and we say okay we operate this service it's based on Tahoe L AFS at least the 30 file store which offers client-side encryption sharding of this data before it leaves the person's machine and then distributed or decentralized depending on how you set it up storage for people and that incorporates a lot of what we believe it gives the control to the people of their data the storage servers that are storing the data don't need they don't need to know anything they're theirs they're stupid in a sense they don't know what they're storing they

just have a bunch of like shards of ciphertext and that's that's good that that fills out our beliefs but then we were charging people with stripe and credit cards and and that's how we had to do it because that's how you accept payments and then we said we and we were looking at the the personal data that we were capturing and we're like oh okay so the service itself we get nothing but for payments for the service we're getting all this personal information what are we doing wrong here there has to be another way and of course there's another way there's private crypto currencies out there and we just looked at Z cache in particular because because we just we knew about it and we thought it had the features that we liked and so we started okay well we can accept Z cash

humans great that solves the the private transaction part but we need to have reoccurring payments we need this periodicity for the subscription and that's where we started to see that you know okay oh there's some patterns there there's some data that can be correlated so how do we remove that issue - and so for us we were trying to solve an existing problem we weren't necessarily we do like to think about the future and what cool things this could lead to but we had a problem today that we wanted to fix and so that's it's more of that kind of instructions on how to do that now and I have to say that it's not the most elegant solution because that would be the like for five-year vision right that would be we could we could come up with

such an elegant cool thing and we definitely do talk about that and think about that a lot but for now for using now there's stuff that's already out there and so how do we put it together and yeah have you have you already implemented that for your own service and it's it's in place when we first set up to do this it was a matter of trying to be consistent with the values and the services that we were already providing and so we thought well hey as a first step we could just accept Z cash payments and and that'll kind of take care of things and so originally that was kind of the scope of our work was that we would figure out a way to accept Z cash for the S for service and so we started kind of planning on how to do

this from an engineering side and we would meet maybe once a week to talk about this and before each of these meetings just thinking about all these other problems that we did not address in last week's meeting and so it felt like for about a whole month every meeting was us going through all of these other problems and trying to pull in other technologies to help solve those problems like the metadata collection and how to do these periodic payments right because yeah so a user can easily bootstrap a subscription but then how do we kind of prevent metadata leaks from happening you know during that process so we talked about maybe we could use tor there and yeah it just

kind of ballooned from there where we were continuously trying to solve problems that we had recognized in previous versions of our own work and that's kind of what happened for about a whole week and then we or a whole month and then we ended up writing this paper and kind of put it out there to get some more feedback from people it's that we're is that the stage where it's out right now like is this I guess the question is like is this a protocol that somebody could run with is this something that you're basically saying you're putting out in the world and you're saying like hey here's a kind of quick solution for something that is clearly needed go for it yeah absolutely you could implement what's there now there's lots of room for interesting solutions and we so we ended up including a future work section at the

end of the paper which I think in some ways is almost more interesting than you have to you have to read the whole protocol book before it to kind of get the stage and then to understand the foundation of what's possible but then in that future work we have like a paragraph of something that could be six papers in and of itself because there's these because once you get that foundation then there's all these interesting things that you can build on top and different ways that we can expand existing technology for example we to things in terms of messaging that we looked at was with Tahoe laughs there's ways to do messages within the system so we're thinking okay that could be really a different Avenue for perhaps

serving invoice information or for perhaps doing support or something and so we're like okay yeah we want so that's in the future work solution we want to do more on this in this area in that direction and another one that we noticed there too is the encrypted memo field for Z cache could also be another method for sending like certain particularly certain data back and forth in a more privacy friendly way to be able to have the merchant and the customer have these kinds of exchanges of information in a different way and that super it so I think there's so much potential and all in just those two areas and lots of areas to do more interesting technological stuff yeah at the same time though I think we were very cognizant of not wanting to design

a system that only works for our service right we were also trying to make this as generalizable as possible which is I think part of the reason why we don't require z cash for right like if you wanted to use Manero like that would work too similarly with our in band tat laughs communication channels if like a service provider is providing something like Netflix or like a streaming video service while they're probably not going to use something like Tahu laughs there so they would probably have some other way of communicating the status of their subscriptions so the design as it is in the paper so far is kind of like a I think it's a pretty good trade-off there where all the tools that we list and the

ways that they're used can be adapted by other services that are not our s for service do you hope to go into all of that future workers up yourselves or is that like not within the scope of what you do at the company no some of it we will go into definitely that's um that's what we're looking we're doing a lot of conversations right now about some of those areas and and what we're gonna be doing so you'll probably hear more from us on that front in a few months do you think do you also look for partners or other groups to join and sort of run with parts of it absolutely I think we would we would be very happy if people just took that and just implemented it

for themselves I think we would we would feel a great sense of accomplishment because we contributed to the to the bigger world towards these goals that we care about you know and hey enabling privacy for people giving them back control over their information and stuff so if another service wanted to implement it then we would think that was awesome and then yeah if there's some way that we could partner up and help we'd be interested in discussing it I think one of the things that I've learnt is like in the Box chain space is sorely lacking is product ization of things I mean if we look at the centralized third-party services that we use today something like stripe it's literally like drop in two lines of HTML on your website and you can accept payments and subscriptions and

everything and to get to that same level you need like some some toolkit for a service provider to just drop something in and then you need like on the other end for the user that comes in that website and signs up there needs to be something meta mask-like or whatever that actually shares like crates saying like transactions and signs them and does all that stuff and getting the UI right for this getting the like the toolkits right the SDKs right and then getting all the backend infrastructure that's needed right for all of that like that in itself is such a massive amount of work and I kind of hope that in the

spirit of this space it isn't one company that does all of it and provides all of these things on a platter like that that everyone kind of works on creating something together but who knows well I think if there's I think if there's opportunity for one company to create it there's an opportunity for multiple to create it somebody just has to smoo starts it we put out some information about how to how to start doing the foundation this like base piece and yeah again I hope that many people run with it in different directions and then I think that we get a healthy healthy ecosystem of different products and protocols and things and as long as privacy is somewhere in there we'll be happy that's crazy I mean what you described to like this idea of like

a company swooping in and providing everything like in a lot of ways Google did that with a lot of things Facebook too like building languages building toolkits easy pieces to build things and then all of a sudden they're they have the keys sort of to the basis of what you're doing not that they misuse it necessarily it's just that they have that and in an open-source space like I guess you're depending on like iterative work library building building on that do you find like watching it for a long time do you find it goes fast or slow open-source not just general open source Blake this kind of this privacy protecting stuff do you see like an uptick on that do you

feel like more groups more open-source devs or just jumping in on that stuff I mean that's an it's an interesting thing to think what what does it mean for a whole community to learn privacy so I mean there are there are people who already understand what it means to do something privacy by design there's plenty people out there to divert their attention to new projects in the space that's one with one approach another thing is to take the to help educate the people who are in the space who might not understand what it means to do privacy by design and what it means to have all this information gathered what what personal information even is what things could become personal information if correlated with other data things

like that and I think that that's another piece that has to happen I think there's there's different routes basically that need to be pursued to help people understand privacy and then also just the general awareness of privacy helps with that then there's definitely been an uptick of that in the last few years I remember working in the space years ago and I'm sure Chris at the same experience that we you know you're around and you're watching and all of a sudden okay if a couple more people don't look at you like you're crazy and then a few more people are and then and then and some people start to actually be interested in what you have to say they're like privacy that's not that's not crazy you actually are saying something interesting and then before you know it all kinds of other people

are like oh yeah privacy is good and then and then gdpr comes along here like oh my gosh even the even the government is doing something about you know privacy for personal data Wow yeah we're definitely not crazy anymore so there's been a change over the last few years but yeah I think Chris is that's Chris it's near experience too right yeah I think the other definitely has been a change like myself I was talking about surveillance systems you know like long before the Snowden leaks and all all this stuff in it I mean lots of it sounds kind of tinfoil happy if that's a word and people kind of doubted that the these sorts of systems were possible like now we know that they are but I think in

terms of the uptick that we've been seeing where people are suddenly more Pro privacy I'm I'm a little bit suspicious that it's actually that genuine because I think a lot of companies like just at the end of last year they were kind of rushing to comply with the looming GDP are right we we don't know if they really want privacy or if they're just kind of saying that because now legally they have to maybe a more recent example might be the whole Facebook tobacco where they now you know like a few years ago they were essentially saying that privacy is dead and that now it's all about sharing and you know all of that jazz whereas now they're saying that they want to transform Facebook to be this more private platform and you have all of these Facebook bosses and executives

who are essentially saying that yes of course we agree with privacy meanwhile like one year ago they were saying the exact reverse so I'm not sure whether you know they actually care about privacy or whether they're just doing it to kind of correspond to what the law is saying or what the general sentiment is of the users so I guess we will have to wait and see I mean hopefully they are I think though I think this is what's interesting that even if they're not genuine it still helps us because basically they think that it's a selling point now and so even if some company is not genuine about enhancing people's privacy they're now talking to their users about privacy so any of those users who didn't care about privacy

before all the sudden are like wait privacy Facebook thinks I should care about privacy or some you know some other company thinks I should care about privacy so maybe I should care about privacy and so now all the sudden you've helped educate more people about privacy so even if there's like fake companies are fake marketing out there they're still helping our cause and in the long run true Facebook in particular I think was so sneaky because I think when it first arrived it was private before that there's MySpace which was not Facebook was the private version of these sort of Friendster social media things proto social media do you remember that it was like oh I only accept my friends and only my friends see what I do and

therefore it's private and then it's like that's why you shared and then you shared everything little did you know that there was just like overarching algorithm machine kind of like going into your stuff and pulling pulling parts of it out without revealing your photos in particular but like they would reveal all these other things and now they're switching back so it's just interesting cuz it's like yeah unfortunately it's hard to trust specifically that company because I feel like it creeps up on us yeah this is where that whole you know I it makes me want to laugh when you're like private social media that's like private transparency social media like

the whole thing about social is like interacting with other humans and yeah yeah it like but of course there's different levels of privacy and you know versus the other end of the spectrum of completely public and stuff like that so yeah I kind of get the angle but I also yeah again I think it is if anything that just helps people think a little bit more about what it means to share Who am i sharing it to and why am i sharing it to them yeah even if I don't trust the companies that are saying this stuff but I just think it's good that people are thinking and talking about it because then maybe they'll realize how much how much control they want and who they want to share it with I think the part that worries me more is that just

any kind of lack of transparency from companies about what actual data that they hold about people because it's one thing if I if I if I think I have power to share a photograph with my friends versus my larger circle of followers versus the whole general public but what about what about all that correlated collected data about me what about my that metadata what about they had racial recognition stuff yeah what about all the stuff that they are what about all of that data collected together and this is parallel to the subscription data that like maybe one payment in of itself maybe one share in and of itself is not such a big deal but when you start collecting all that metadata and you start collecting like to see these patterns all the sudden

companies can know things about us that we don't know about ourselves because we don't have access to the full pool of data and that's the part that that that kind of transparency about that level is what is way more concerning to me that yeah Facebook and and I feel like we're picking on poor Facebook or his book isn't the worst company out there but like any company that collects lots of data on us they know things about us about these patterns and that we should know too and so again coming back to privacy I think the best thing that we can do is just we have control of that today de to begin with and then we know what it is we even start running our own algorithms at home yeah III think through our conversation there's been maybe this

conflation of two terms which are confidentiality on the one hand and privacy on the other so I think when Anna was talking about Facebook as being a private social network I think maybe what she meant was that it was a confidential network in that you're still sharing but you're only sharing with the people who you want to share with right so you are essentially empowered to determine the scope of your sharing the scope of your transparency but I think what we're talking about privacy there's there's like a different sense of it that's not merely confidentiality I think privacy is like a broader social value and that we're maybe facing the challenge of whether or not we want to preserve privacy on like a grander cultural scale and I think that's

becoming a much more difficult thing to defend because yes I mean teams these days maybe they only want to snapchat with certain people and they might think of that as privacy but what that actually is is confidentiality and what maybe we want to encourage is for this this more global adoption of true privacy because as we see you know there's been this massive collection of metadata about us and it's going to you know cause this this fairly radical cultural shift so I mean we we could talk about something as silly as like that black mirror episode called nosedive I don't know if you all have seen that but in the show generates this every time this girl yeah and and like

she basically lives in this world where every every person and every action essentially gets a rating from 0 to 5 stars and whether or not you can move upwards in society is going to be determined by your personal credit score and we're seeing this happening now in China where like the Chinese government is essentially hoovering up all of this data about what people do what people purchase right and and they're using that to determined I guess where they fall in the kind of stratified society and so I think if we really want privacy we have to look at it far beyond your confidentiality and look at it in terms of like a rule or a cultural thing yeah so unfortunately I think we we have

to wrap at some point it's a bit been a very fascinating conversation and I could keep talking about this forever but before we sign off are there any places that people should be looking for your stuff for the p4 paper where can I find more where can I read up on this if you want to see the p4 paper that we have published you can find it on our website it's on our blog we did a post about it and we can also add a link here to yeah no problem we'll put it in the show notes well thank you both for joining us thanks for having us yeah thanks a bunch it was fun and to our listeners thanks for listening thanks for listening [Music]