Personal Privacy and Safety in the Surveillance Age with Jameson Lopp

Interview location: Skype
Interview date: Thursday 18th October
Company: Casa
Role: Infrastructure

In his book, Nineteen Eighty-Four, published in 1949, George Orwell wrote about a dystopian future where the government subjects the population to omnipresent surveillance. That day is here, but the surveillance isn’t just that operated by the government; from Google scanning emails to Amazon recording your conversations with Alexa, Silicon Valley behemoths, hungry for data to provide their clients with more innovative advertising solutions are operating surveillance operations of their own.

These advertising solutions range from the innocent use of location data to recommend nearby restaurants to the more sinister use of data to influence elections, as seen with the Cambridge Analytics scandal.

There is a small but growing group of people who are rejecting this form of surveillance and business is responding. Privacy tools have gone from niche to standard. Opera includes a built-in VPN, Brave blocks ads and allows for Tor tabs for anonymous browsing and DuckDuckGo has placed personal privacy at the centre of search.

A lack of privacy protection can lead to a multitude of problems:
- Hacking
- Personal attacks
- Extortion
- Unwanted attention
- Damaged careers

Despite the risks of not taking control of your privacy, there is still a general lazy attitude towards it. Integrating privacy as standard and simplifying the user experience is why companies such as Brave and DuckDuckGo are growing. They are making privacy easy.

In this interview, I welcome back Jameson Lopp to talk about his approach to privacy and his recent Medium post on the subject: A Modest Privacy Protection Proposal - How to reclaim your privacy in the surveillance age, as well as Jameson updating me on progress at Casa.

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