Is Privacy A Winnable Battle? | Andy Yen, Founder of Proton
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AI like social media is intentionally designed to be addictive. In fact, you know, some of these AIs will even change the way they talk to you to cater to, you know, your personality and sort of what is senses is is the sort of answer that that you want to hear. And that's a really scary thing. You know, you mentioned that AI maybe knows you better than some of your best friends. I would actually argue that in not so long from now, the AI could know you better than even you yourself. Oh my god. A lot a lot of us humans are not so self aware about who we are. Right? AI will actually be able to
Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of digital privacy. This is Ryan Sean Adams. It's just me here today, so I am here to help you become more bankless. The question, is privacy a winnable battle? This is a very important conversation between myself and Andy Yen. Andy is the CEO of Proton. They are the makers of ProtonMail. I'm sure you've heard of it. Few things we discuss. Solving privacy in AI, how tech companies are screwing us, EU chat control legislation, encryption as a civil liberty, his views on crypto. Also, I think my favorite part of this episode is that it comes wit
Hey. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. And I think between the world of crypto, the world of encryption, which you're in, and the world of privacy, a lot of intersections. So, we'll have a fun conversation to go through some of these pretty important topics as you say.
Very important topics and definitely some common cause. So you're the founder of Proton. This is one of the world's largest consumer digital privacy companies. I believe there's a 100,000,000 users of Proton worldwide. On a scale of one to 10, I feel like you're the perfect person to ask. So, Andy, on a scale of one to 10, how screwed are we on digital privacy today? Like for a normal person, they're using the the typical web stack of Gmail, they've got an iPhone, Instagram, whatever, ChatGPT, how screwed are they?
I think it really depends on who you are. Right? The average person is probably quite screwed if I'm being completely honest. And I would say the more technical sophisticated people are have more means to protect themselves, but it's gonna become harder and harder as, you know, the if the current trends go on. So what we see actually people talk about AI and I think you mentioned AI as well and what AI is actually doing is it's simply an extension of a trend that's been going on for fifty years because fundamentally AI is it's actually a better and more efficient way for humans to communicate
Well, this episode is definitely for awareness. But it also I hope, toward the end, we prompt to some action, some small steps maybe. And first steps you could take, because privacy is definitely a journey. But there are some steps you can take that are relatively easy, and you can start them now, and then you can keep improving over time. That's the journey that I've been on personally. But since you brought up AI again, let's let's talk about AI. So ChatGPT, tools like Gemini. If I'm using a chatbot type tool, like something like ChatGPT, who can see my chats? So can employees at these compa
it's kind of all of the above, and that's kind of the the the scary thing. Right? So so let's let's break that down piece by piece. Of course, tech companies can see it because they are recording and essentially, you know, analyzing and saving every single conversation you ever have. So everything you ever type in is being recorded and more or less permanently retained.
Like, precisely, they'r
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