The Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal, is now over for this year and some of us are already looking forward to the installment of 2020. While there were more than 70,000 attendees on-site in Lisbon for this year’s Web Summit, many others could not go, unfortunately.
Former National Security Agency contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden spoke last week at the Web Summit technology conference in Lisbon about cybersecurity and privacy. The author of the memoir “Permanent Record” spoke via video link. You can watch the pre-recorded version of the talk below, which was prepared in case of connectivity issues during the live event.
Key Takeaways
- In 10 years, all online communication will be encrypted;
- Governments are alarmed by the rise of encryption and the reduction of mass surveillance. The result is increased in state-sponsored hacking;
- Governments that employ companies as surveillance contractors can use legislative means to coerce these companies to make products that are not secure and aimed to help with mass surveillance. In fact, this is already happening from the 5-eye jurisdiction countries;
- Companies, therefore, need to consider who their ultimate customers are – the people or the government. Facebook users are not its customers – they are its product;
- GPDR is not enough unless the 4% of global revenue fines are actually imposed on bad Internet actors like Google, Amazon, and Facebook;
- Today’s Internet is ultimately a commercial space, to the users’ detriment;
- This can be mitigated by regulating data collection and not allowing companies to retain data about people for longer than they need them;
- Trust is a vulnerability in the context of information security.
We hope that all of you who could not attend this year’s Web Summit would also find this to be useful information. Privacy is not valued by all but everybody should be aware of the facts and how their data is or could be used.
YouTube: Snowden Addresses Privacy and Data Usage [Web Summit 2019]
Photo credit: The feature image has been done by David Fitzgerald for Web Summit via Sportsfile.
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