Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
AI, like social media, is intentionally designed to be addictive.
Chapter 2: Why does privacy matter more than ever in the digital age?
In fact, some of these AIs will even change the way they talk to you to cater to your personality and sort of what it senses is the sort of answer that you want to hear. And that's a really scary thing. You mentioned that AI maybe knows you better than some of your best friends.
Chapter 3: How can AI chat logs compromise your privacy?
I would actually argue that not so long from now, the AI could know you better than even you yourself. Yeah. A lot of us humans are not so self-aware about who we are, right? AI will actually be able to exploit the weaknesses of personality that even you are not aware of in order to compel you to keep using it and do what it wants.
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.
Chapter 4: Why do AI systems know you better than you know yourself?
Andy is the CEO of Proton. They are the makers of ProtonMail. I'm sure you've heard of it. A 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.
Chapter 5: Can Big Tech ever genuinely offer real privacy?
Also, I think my favorite part of this episode is that it comes with a little bit of homework. There's some level ups. And I genuinely want you to consider the homework. I want you to consider leveling up your privacy in 2026, like make it a project. Because going bankless is about freedom and you lose your freedom when you lose your privacy.
I think a number of factors have accelerated this, most notably AI coming on the scene.
Chapter 6: What makes Proton's Lumo AI different from traditional models?
And I want you to accept for a minute the framing of this episode as we get into it. What if your AI chatbot isn't your friend? What if it's a sycophantic super genius designed by a company to trick you into feeding it more data and then using that data to gain more leverage over you? Even if that's a little bit true, don't you think it's concerning?
There are ways to opt out and we explore them in today's episode. Let's get right to it. So Bankless Nation, there is a confluence of things happening in the world right now. There was a Coinbase data breach earlier this year that leaked customer email address information, phone number information. I know the crypto industry has been hit with in real life attacks.
on crypto people, particularly those who haven't been able to keep their information private. We live in a world of AI tools. We don't know what they're doing with the data. Like what is ChatGPT doing with the data? I don't feel like I have much control. I have personally adopted the entire Proton stack. I've done this lately to drastically improve my privacy and security posture.
And I think every crypto user should go investigate it and take a look at it. So all this to say, it's a very good time to have an episode with the co-founder of Proton. Andy, welcome to Bankless. 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 hopefully 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 100 million 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? For a normal person, they're using the typical web stack of Gmail. They've got an iPhone, Instagram, whatever, chat GPT. 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 have more means to protect themselves, but it's going to become harder and harder 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 50 years.
Because fundamentally, AI is, it's actually a better and more efficient way for humans to communicate with computers. And so it's not dramatically changing any of our business models, but actually it's accelerating the existing models that already exist. So if you think about search algorithms,
the information that you give into Google search, which allows Google to build a very detailed profile about who you are. Well, an AI conversation with, say, Gemini, that is way more intimate, that is getting much more information about you. So what Google is able to do is they're probably able to accelerate by a factor of five or 10 their existing business model with the advent of AI.
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Chapter 7: How does the EU's chat control legislation threaten privacy?
And as part of the lawsuit, they tried to require OpenAI to actually retain all the conversations because they wanted to use those conversations as evidence in their lawsuit against OpenAI. So that's the thing. Now, what is even worse sometimes is then there's also the inadvertent breaches that happen.
When you give something into OpenAI, in ChatGPT, you're actually contributing to the knowledge of ChatGPT. So the information that you give it becomes part of its brain, so to speak.
And if it's talking to somebody else, there's actually a very real possibility, and in fact, quite high likelihood, that information that you've given it can then be regurgitated out and shown to somebody else as part of another conversation. Because that information is now in the corpus information that is used to train and give answers to these models. And that has happened, right?
If you put a password into ChatGPT and someone's very smart in problem engineering, they can get ChatGPT to spit out the information that you gave it on accident. And then, of course, there's also bugs. I think there was a couple examples of data breaches where an AI company
accidentally left something open and revealed all the chats or sometimes the chats were, I think there's even one case where the chats were accidentally opened and indexed by Google, in which case anybody can get access to them. And that's the nature of information. Once you put it out there, it's out there. You cannot really take it back.
You may be able to sometimes force them to delete it, but that may or may not be too late, depending on your threat model. So unfortunately, the answer is it's all the above in that whole list of things that you gave me. Because when you put it into ChatGPT, it is unfortunately no longer your data. You can now borrow USDC against your Ethereum and Bitcoin on Coinbase.
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Chapter 8: What practical steps can individuals take to reclaim their privacy?
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So this would be like, you know, name, email address, physical location, all of the personal data. If something like Google Gemini or ChatGPT had a data breach, maybe this, at the level of sophistication, maybe this would be a well-funded state actor or something. I don't know. There are some parties that could probably do this type of thing. What's the worst-case scenario?
Would they really have access to every...
users logs chat logs and be able to leverage that in the future yeah they would have your chat logs and depending on what you say to chat gpt that could be quite compromising and you know there are some people today who use chat gpt for relationship advice for personal advice it is their psychologist it is maybe even their virtual girlfriend or boyfriend as the case may be
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