# The Commodification of You by Seven Waterhouse (Devcon5)

- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2020-10-09
- Duration: 11:39
- Topics: blockchain, smart contracts, distributed ledger, ethereum
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-tgIEALVJQxc
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgIEALVJQxc

## Description

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https://archive.devcon.org/archive/watch/5/the-commodification-of-you

Corporate interests monitor and harvest our every contact and click, exploiting the fact that we rely on the internet for nearly every facet of our lives. They delve deep into our digital selves so that they can commodify our identities. For years, they’ve succeeded with only a whisper of pushback. 
What can we do to know what is happening to us and take back some control from our digital identities?
In this talk, attendees will learn: Recent scandals highlighting the danger of the current collect-predict-sell data monetization model; Where technology can and can’t help us as we navigate our digital lives; What we can do to educate ourselves and others to sway public opinion on privacy.

Speaker(s): Seven Waterhouse
Skill level: Beginner
Track: Privacy
Keywords: commodification, data, monetization, general

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Devcon is the Ethereum conference for developers, researchers, thinkers, and makers. 
Devcon 5 was held in Osaka, Japan on Oct 8 - 11, 2019.
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## Transcript

I'm here from orchid and gonna tell you some stories about things happening in the world of privacy and the efforts of many people have turn you into a product and what you can do about it so the concept of privacy is something which is actually pretty new used to be that there really wasn't any privacy you lived in villages and everyone kind of knew your business and you what you're going if you want to be private you literally had to like go away and go into exile and you got really private and so as we started creating societies which were based more around cities and much more tightly coupled interactions the the idea of privacy started kicking up because people were saying hey I've got all these people around me I need to have some more more time to myself some more of the ideas of my own information being private and the internet changed that again the Internet then connected us in a very real way and turner's in some like a global village but the price of mission to that global village is your privacy increasingly today doesn't have to be this way but this is essentially how this environment has evolved John Perry Barlow wrote a very interesting piece many years ago essentially a declaration of independence of cyberspace and that concept of how we were gonna build the internet back then has unfortunately not really held true in many of the ways that the internet is working today back in 95 there were only 16 million people online and by 2016 we were 3.4 billion and the 2016 the United Nations made a resolution where they said that instant access was also a human right a basic human right and then by that point in 2019 we have 4.3 billion people online and those people all of us are creating this many bytes of data per day like kind of crazy rights a lot of a lot of zeros and what kind of stuff is that was lots of Instagram lots of tweets lots of other stuff like everything and tons of this data is just getting recorded is like profiles of each of us like the meatrix like we had this party other day really is like the matrix like we think they've got they've got you there's a festive information and in addition the Internet's not really one internet anymore you've got the u.s. which is extremely heavily corporate controlled and monitored and kind of everything's for free but the price is you you've got Europe which is kind of a nanny state model of like we're gonna take care of you gonna make sure you're private but we're gonna put this GDP our stuff in which actually has some negative consequences - that's unintended repercussions of what that does China we know was extremely heavily censored and controlled and then in other parts of world we're doing experiments where we're just deciding whether we want to turn the inside on off here and there in Russia the last experiment was turning off parts the internet to stop telegram being used and Freedom House does a survey every year and a study which tries to determine exactly how private we really are in the world especially on the Internet very interesting set of studies they do and that conclusion is it's getting worse the idea that the Internet is becoming more free and more private as it's actually getting a lot worse all time and here's Mark sorry so obviously Facebook going quite a bit of trouble and so we're talking right now is the concept of corporate control against net corporate control of surveilling you of censoring you and one of the unfortunate things right now is that there is this perception that everything's okay right now you know we had the movie we came to a little shut down like everything we find but it's the same there are probably like 20 companies copycat of payment America that are going to be the same thing in the next set of elections probably on both sides this time and really all that's happening is that it's just propaganda you know we're finally woken up to the fact that not only we are we marketed information for products also market information for how to think and this been happening for a very long time before the Internet and the internet just made it a lot easier to do so this idea that the things that made just like more fun and more convenient have also made it a lot easier to track you and this is from where I'm from originally in England we have more closed-circuit cameras per person than anywhere else in the world we're really good at this stuff you got nothing on GCHQ the NSA it's just you know like a little fun little sister cars in the GCHQ we got you ironically my dad I used to work with GCHQ back in the day so I know what that means so we don't really want to live this way we don't want to really you know we live in this world where we have to wall ourselves off and go into exile if you want privacy we want to live in a world where we connect and we get to share things or friends so but what if you woke up tomorrow and you just couldn't access these sites what if you're like oh man like suddenly my internet just doesn't work and you can do this by the way if you just take a plane for two hours west you can have this experience it's pretty cheap from here so and it's pretty hard to work around these these firewalls and restrictions on content so what do you do well one solution is VPN and the the challenge of VPNs is that they're not all created equal oh yeah by the way this will we're building so this is a little bit pitchy but not always like tell you some good stories so we're building a decentralized VPN and we're building it on aetherium come on and people ask me why we built it on a theory own unlike was the only decentralized small country platform and they're like well on to some other ones and like you ever the hardy centralized so we're doing it with you guys [Music] the retailer market has gone mainstream so three years ago when we started this company people were still little bit like wow he what you guys going after the privacy space to really care about privacy is this a big deal and then we've had a few interesting events since then which people are started realize that it is a big deal and VPN usage globally has been increasing there are parts the world where there's just really heavy restrictions one strange thing is there are parts of the world where satire is bounds like you don't have to actually be ironic online it's like not okay which i think is really ironic so not all VPNs are created equal as I said the the main issue is centralization so what you're doing with the VPN is you basically paying someone else to man-in-the-middle attack you see you like a hey here take all my traffic and here's some money like cool yeah I can trust you right but you don't know you don't really know whether you can trust them they might be logging your data some of them have prices set so low that they have to have some of the business model and what they do is they sell the data to hedge funds they sell a data to other people they basically take your information and sell it just like you are hoping that you wouldn't have to happen like you trying to get out of that but actually making worse so that's one problem and some of them have logging practices and they say they don't log and turns out some of them do you find out later it's also transparency is you there are starting to become some of the VPNs now that actually open-source their technology many of them do use open source standards and toolkits but it's very few of them that just say here's our code and the world that we live in we understand and we believe that this is important so there is a transparency to see that for sure VPNs also have typically only was essentially one connection between you and the VPN and then to the rest the Internet you can improve the your protection security by actually putting in multiple essentially multiple relays between you and the ultimate exit site and that's one of the features that we bring in with Orkut and finally it's kind of hard to just go up and spin up your own VPN other techniques such as tor and other overlay networks most people do this in a volunteer basis so we've been working on we believe that having the ability to easily spin up and receive compensation for running nodes in a system like this will be an easy way for us to build better VPNs in the future and finally most VPNs have to tend to have a very well known well known traffic signature which means that the firewall is able to easily detect that and filter the information out we've been working on a solution to fix that and so this is the pitch piece we're offering a better DPM it's open source it's built in etherium right it's secure and it's decentralized and we're launching this year so we'll be launching in December this can write that down if you like and we're launching a mobile client first primary mobile client as our focus we're partnering with a number of bigger players in the space and also in the VPN space and we're hoping to try and address a number of the issues that we've found in the space of VPNs and in privacy we have an internal roadmap we're going to be improving upon these things and increasing the amount of not only knowledge that we're sharing about this but the kind of tools that we're building to improve your privacy and I think I'm a little early but oh yeah this final thing so we think it's time for privacy which is a big market and the crypto market to join forces and we hope that in the future notice ourselves but other people will be inspired to look at this industry in these spaces of private communication and use the kind of all the brains and resources we have in this community to work on these problems together thank you [Applause]