| : [♪ Μουσική Ελεύθερη Μουσική Στ discs Μ. Ξ. Τ. Εκτύπ Airbnb Βדάσ Καλημέρα σας. Συγνώμη, δεν μιλάω ελληνικά, so my talk will be in English. And I want to speak to you about technology and control. Our society is being changed by technology and I would say from many aspects for the better. Things are much more convenient, information is accessible everywhere, we don't get lost, and our smartphones have become our friends. Today I want to talk about the flip side of the metal, is that we believe we are controlling technology, but to some extent technology is controlling us. And let's just go back to history. I grew up in the 60s. In the 60s Europe had an iron curtain and it was nowhere as visible as in Berlin, where there was a wall separating East and West. And in school I was taught, we are the good guys and they are the bad guys. Because we are free and they are not free to travel, they are being surveilled all the time. In East Berlin there was Stasi. And Stasi was a police who kept files on everybody and was watching everybody's lives. And they were using friends, family members, colleagues to watch on everybody who was suspicious. And if you want to see what it means in practice, I recommend you watch the movie, The Life of Others, where this is explained in full detail and you can feel it better. We'll come back to this later. So every moment you search something on the internet, or you send a message to WhatsApp or iMessage or Skype or for the paranoid among you through a signal, or you upload information in social media, all this data ends up in the cloud. And the cloud is a large number of computers controlled by large internet corporations where they collect all your data and they do this to give you services, but of course they also do other things with this data. And the cloud is seen as something very positive and convenient, but I'd like you to take the view of Richard Stallman, the father of the free software movement, and he said the cloud is somebody else's computer. So your data is not on your computers, it's somebody else's computers and somebody else is in control. There is massive amounts of data we are producing today and I will not have time to go through all the details in this slide, but just in one minute, 240,000 photos are uploaded on Facebook. 350,000 tweets are being sent. 400 hours per minute are uploaded on YouTube. So even if 700,000 hours are watched every minute, we'll never be able in our lives to watch everything on YouTube. So there is a massive amount of data being processed in this magic cloud. And of course we're going further because we're creating smart cities and I heard that also Patras is going this way. Many cities try to put sensors everywhere to detect weather information, traffic information, where people are, what is happening in town, where there is big events. And of course this can be very convenient to organize things, but of course it can also be very intrusive. And in general we are watching a deployment of technology called the Internet of Things, where every object will be on the Internet. Some people say in a few years there will be 20 billion devices, others say 200 billion, but it's many more than today because today only 4 or 5 billion devices are on the Internet. And they will be in our cities, in our cars, in our homes, and I think in 10 years also in our bodies. So we will all be on the Internet all the time. And you can decide not to have a smartphone or to leave your smartphone at home, or you can decide not to have a Facebook account, but the IoT will be unavoidable, very intrusive and stealthy. So the legal idea of you can opt out if you don't like it will be gone because the only way to opt out will be not to go to the city or not to enter a car. And of course the IoT will produce lots of data, and this is known already for many years as the big data revolution, where more and more data is being collected at very high speed, high variety and enormous volumes as I showed you, and people believe that by analyzing this data we can make the society better, we can improve health, we can improve traffic, we can improve government. So there is many positive sides to this. What I want to show is that there is also negative sides to this. One of the big data systems you have been part of already for a while, at least if you're on the Internet, is the advertising ecosystem. And I will just use here a quote by Andrew Lewis, if you're not paying for it, you're not the customer, you're the product being sold. And in fact, all services on the Internet or most are for free, but in fact what you do is you pay with your data, and this data is used to generate advertising revenue in the tens of billions of dollars, all based on your data. And the slide behind me shows a very complex ecosystem because you may think only of the big companies, but also hundreds and thousands of small companies are processing your data every time you visit the website, every time you post a tweet, every time you upload a photo, and this ecosystem goes from advertisers, companies who want to sell things, to publishers like newspapers or companies with websites, and it processes your data to show you the optimal advertisement. And this is how money is being made today on the Internet. So there is a first problem with this, and this has been identified as the filter bubble. You have the impression on the Internet that you can see and find everything, but in fact what you see and find is very confined. Google only finds a very small fraction of the Internet, or what you see in your news feeds is very much biased and has a narrow view of the world. And so this is dumb because the way companies do it this way, they will get more clicks and more time and more attention. They try to optimize their revenue at the cost of narrowing your view. And so while you think the Internet would bring people together, what we see is that we see more polarization as a consequence of this filter bubble problem. There is more problems because as humans we should know by now, if we build big systems, they go wrong. And you see here behind me an oil disaster. We also have seen unfortunately the nuclear disaster in Japan. So as humans we always believe that our systems will be good, but it turns out that the bigger the systems, the bigger they fail. And if you have time, I invite you to go and look at this website. You'll get the slides. The URL information is beautiful. And there you see all the biggest breaches of the last year in a very visual way. The bigger the breach, the bigger the bubble. And it's always about tens and hundreds of millions of data items. So in the last weeks in the news was Equifax in the U.S. We've also seen Anthem, a healthcare provider. We've seen MySpace, the old social network. We've seen Yahoo. We've also seen dating sites or sites for people wanting an affair. And they all lose their data by the tens of millions. I'm an engineer. I don't understand this. If we can't protect data, why do we allow people to collect it? Because eventually if we collect data, it will end up in the wild. That seems to be what we're seeing. And maybe step back and think about this as pollution. When I grew up, the rivers were polluted, and the sky was black like we now see in big cities in China and India. And apparently pollution now is less visible, but it's still there. There's just different pollution. But pollution is a consequence of individual benefits. I get a car. I get some product. But everybody else suffers from my individual benefits. And I gave this talk last week, and somebody made a very nice cartoon, which is actually much better than my picture, which actually shows how all our data we produce in our social networks and our IoT systems actually is polluting the environment. And so maybe we should think more about data as pollution and actually reduce data we spread and avoid abuse of this data. There is another actor, and this is the government. And to be honest, most people didn't know too much about this, but thanks to this guy, most of us have somehow heard of what's happening at the government side. I guess you all heard of Edward Snowden. So he actually leaked many documents showing what governments are up to, not only the U.S. government, but also the U.K. government and many other governments. And more or less, he summarizes their slogan as, collect it all, collect all information you can get, know it all, and exploit it all. Who has an iPhone here? So it's very nice because the NSA makes slides about iPhones. It saves me time to make my own slides. I can do more productive things in life. This is slides done by the NSA. And they say, who knew in 1984 that this would be Big Brother and the zombies would be paying customers? Let me repeat that. The NSA calls the iPhone users public zombies who pay for their own surveillance. And it's the same for Android users, by the way. There is no difference. There are also public zombies who pay for your own surveillance. So I think if you look at the privacy debate globally, what you see, you have three major players because so far I talked mostly about industry. But there is also government. And in Europe, we tend to trust our governments, most of us do at least, or trust them more. We tend to distrust the companies. But actually in the U.S., it's the other way around. Now what we see with technology is that industry is collecting big data. Industry is collecting IoT data. And industry is creating advertisement ecosystems. What we learned from the Snowden program is that the governments go to industry and ask for this information. And this is one of the programs is the PRISM program. It's very well named. It shows the government has a view on what's happening in all the data in the cloud. And so the government has now lost the incentive to stop companies from collecting data. Because the more data companies collect, the more data government has as well. And so think now back of my story. What we've built now is something which was called by the anthropologist Jeremy Bentham, the Panopticon. He designed a long time ago at the end of the 18th century, a prison where the guards would be watching the prisoners all the time. And the idea was if people are watched all the time, they will behave properly. In the 19th century, these prisons were built, two of them in the UK. And guess what? People didn't like them. Because we don't like to be watched all the time. And it can be abused by governments for discrimination. Being watched all the time instills fear. Being watched all the time makes you behave properly. Because if you don't behave properly, maybe your kids will not be allowed to go to a certain university. Or maybe you will not get insurance anymore. Or maybe you will not get the job you wanted. And so it can be abused heavily by governments. So it has shifted the power from individual to government. And if you think of Stasi, the Stasi could only have dreamt of such a system. So it's very strange. In the 70s I'm told that the Stasi is terrible. And I wake up 40 years later and in fact we see that our governments and industry have built exactly the system the Stasi could only dream of. Isn't that bizarre? So what we're told as citizens is that to get security you have to give up your privacy. And I could give a long talk about this but I don't have the time. But I think this cartoon shows that transforming privacy into security is not a very pleasant experience. I don't think this family will be very happy in their home afterwards. So this sounds all very gloomy and doomy. So Karl Popper said optimism is a moral duty. We should believe we can do something about this. And I think the first point I use actually the Palace of Knossos as an example. Architecture is politics. The way the internet is architecture and organized with everything going to central places in the cloud is political decision. And we can actually build an internet where data stays local. And a good example is Skype. Skype was a European company offering telephony services with no central servers. But what happened to Skype? It was bought by a U.S. company. It was made centralized. So by having such centralized systems you become vulnerable to failure by hacks by other nation states and by data breaches. So what we should do is rethink the internet and stop putting all our data in the cloud. It's not very smart to do this and it's actually possible to do it differently. So think of this smartphone here. This has 50 times more power than a great computer from the 80s. Yet the smartphone industry tries to convince me that this phone is too stupid to actually tell somebody which advertisement I want to see. Whether I want to see something for a trip or for a car or for some other service. No this has to be done in the cloud. Why can't my phone decide that and tell the cloud show this guy this kind of advertisement. So we should keep data local. Those machines are powerful enough to keep our data under our control in our devices. Sometimes you have to pull data and it's a bit technical but I'm a cryptographer and we've invented in the last decade some magic. Where you can encrypt your data, protect your data in the cloud and still get value out of it. Still compute on the data without showing your data to anybody. So this is something which was science fiction 20 or 30 years ago but it's actually reality today. And finally I think we have to have open systems. We should really think of the internet as an open infrastructure. It's the basis of our society. It should not be based on secrets. And if you think what internet has done, in fact on the internet the powerful are opaque. You don't know what the big companies and governments are doing. It's a secret. It happens in their big computers and they can't tell you or they don't want to tell you. While you as a user you're completely transparent because everything you do is being traced and followed. And if you think about this it should be the other way around. The powerful should be transparent and the user should have some privacy. That's the kind of society we want to build. That's the kind of society I think we invented in the enlightenment. And we worked very hard to develop this and with technology we kind of turned the tables in a few decades time. I think the main message is we can actually turn this around. So my generation witnessed the internet as a fantastic big machine developing with billions of devices in the cloud. But somehow we messed up. We didn't embed the society values of Europe in the internet. We let other countries, other continents put their values in our social infrastructure in our networks. So the next generation, and I'm happy to help you, we should rethink things. Build new IT infrastructures which are distributed. They will be hacked less and they will protect our data more. And I think Europe should take the lead there to actually create open systems where the powerful are transparent and we get our privacy. Thank you very much for your attention. [♪ Music playing in the background for the end of the video. The End. |
