Hi, my name is Jaya. I'm part of the Nym team, where we build privacy software for the age of artificial intelligence. Privacy for me is the ability to decide who knows what about you and when and under what conditions. Um, it is uh the conditions for us to grow as human beings, to make mistakes, to learn from our mistakes, to think freely, um to experiment, um and to relate to people from a place of truth rather than pretension. I suppose neo-cypherpunk, if I was to give my opinion about what I'm hoping that it's going to be or is, um is a more collective approach to privacy than the original cypherpunks.
Um, the original cypherpunks, you know, were very prophetic in their understanding of how the internet would lead to a system of mass surveillance, um but a lot of it kind of came from a sentiment of uh the individual kind of closing off and becoming super private. Um, the neo-cypherpunks I'm sensing much more of a kind of collective atmosphere. Um, we're dealing with problems of a very large scale that require a kind of collective approach. Um, that's also what we try and do at Nym. We're defeating, you know, effectively mass surveillance with a form of mass privacy at the infrastructural level.
Um, so it really it requires a kind of collective effort um to to really, you know, move our core infrastructures forward in a way that uh can support our fundamental rights. You know, there is there's many different ways of answering that question, what are my favorite privacy tools, um because, you know, it depends how deep you want to go on the kind of technicalities. And I think many times when people answer a question like that, um they try and be, you know, as cool as possible with like the latest newest tech. Um, for me privacy has to be usable. It needs to be something that's like practical for ordinary people.
Um so on that level, you know, I really tend to kind of favor the ones that are already out there being used by, you know, thousands of of users. Um so you know, I have a lot of appreciation for um what Moxie and Meredith have done have done with Signal. I use Signal on a daily basis. Um I have a lot of appreciation for the people at Proton. Um I know there's kind of been various, you know, uh scandals and so on, but they really are a good team that are trying to do the best and push the needle um forward when it comes to privacy tools for our kind of ordinary day-to-day needs.
Um and of course, you know, I think what we're doing at Nym is is very very valuable. Um so I would definitely recommend people to use Nym VPN um as much as possible and also integrate with the network. Um we're trying to build something that is, again, very usable by ordinary people. So um yeah, that's uh and maybe if I could add one more um and also kind of quite curious right now with the Moxie's latest privacy-preserving LLM um uh uh confer.io.
So um these are the tools that I'm kind of playing around with. They're kind of highly usable tools that are, you know, doing the basic things that we need, right? Messaging, uh you know, collaborative docu- documents, um VPNs, you know, it's like these everyday tools um built with privacy by design and kind of really accessible to general audience. So that's probably what I'd what I'd go with, yeah. Mhm.
Um so what we've built at Nym is we've built a a privacy network, which is effectively a network that sits on top of the regular internet and um routes your traffic in ways that are private. So um usually when you're using the internet, um your uh traffic information is going across networks um that are very visible to everybody that are running those networks, so they can kind of analyze your traffic patterns and uh see where you are by looking at your IP address. they can understand what devices you're using, and they can understand a lot about you as a person um when they're analyzing this type of data and metadata. Um so, first of all, what VPNs do is they route your traffic through an extra hop. Um so, you know, people can't kind of see who you are and who you're speaking to.
Um but what we try and do it at Nym VPN is we make a decentralized network. So, where, you know, with ordinary VPNs, you're just routing it through, you know, the VPN servers, um and then you give all the information to the VPN company. Um what we're trying to do is create a kind of like decentralized network where you're not giving all your information to anybody really, but just bits of information that nobody can really kind of deduce the full picture of um to, you know, spread across a network and routed in secure ways um to protect both your metadata and your data. Um and uh and also obscure, you know, where you're speaking from and who you're kind of contacting, what websites you're visiting, and so on and so forth. So, um it's really a way to kind of stay anonymous online um in a way where you're kind of you regain control of, you know, who you're speaking to and when, and you don't have all these thousands of intermediaries gathering your data and analyzing, you know, who you are and and who your social network is and what you're doing in your life.
Um so, yeah. So, if I imagine a world where everybody is using VPNs, um I mean, first of all, if everybody's using VPNs, we can probably get rid of VPNs entirely and instead build the network that has security built into it from from the ground up, and that would definitely be the ideal scenario. Um but what VPNs do offer people right now um is, you know, first of all, of course, better security, better better privacy, uh but also many cases censorship resistance, um which is becoming increasingly important um not just for, you know, the kind of typical parts of the world, but um where people have faced kind of internet censorship for a long time, but increasingly also in the West. Um and increasingly, you know, as as the internet is splintering into geographical regions, VPNs can allow you to access, you know, information from diverse sources. Um and in that sense, remain more free in terms of, you know, who you're speaking to and what information you're accessing.
So, um for me in many ways, it's it's a fundamental tool to, you know, retain some freedom online and and retain open connections and censorship resistance.
Automatic transcript — names and jargon may be misspelled.