Brendan Eich: belief

Transcript context

…Right. The consciousness of privacy as something where you're unsafe if your tracked grew. Initially, it was like, I don't care, trap me. I have no privacy. Just make my experience more personal. Then it became, wait a minute, there's some third party or seventh party, seven degrees of Kevin Bacon. There's somebody in Russia who's tracking me, that's no good. There's somebody playing games to trap me around the physical world using geofencing. That's possible with ads. It's been done probably by malicious actors. There is spy stuff going on. People realized that this was a bigger problem than just, something somewhere has some dossier on me. Because once you have a dossier on a server, it's very likely it's going to get copied or leaked. It's going to be in 100 servers or 1000 servers. You won't know where it is or to what bad uses it will be put. Meanwhile, privacy law was coming up in Europe that in its own abstract ways, sometimes without defining its terms, did use common sense notions about how we interact. Which Steve Jobs himself wants to talk to Mossberg about in very plain terms. Which is, privacy means you don't get my data unless I know I'm giving it to you for a specific purpose that benefits me and there's a quid pro quo. That's what the GDPR tries to do with purpose limitation or purpose specificity. When you consent to those cookie dialogues, which are all misregulated, mismanaged, and nonsense. I'm not defending them. GDPR, like all regulations, is full of unintended consequences. What they're trying to do is say, do you consent to let a tracking cookie be set, let's say, for some essential or inessential reason? There are carve outs for essential reasons when you go to a search engine. It's a first party, you're giving it data to get better results. There's an essential purpose there that can justify some kind of data being processed. It isn't necessarily tracking because it's only at that search engine. When you're dealing with all these sites that throw these cookie consents, click here to learn more and there are 300 vendors. If you want to opt out, you have to go click on them and often there's no page there. There's a 404 HTTP response. There's no phone number, there's no way to opt out. It's a complete fraud that you can opt out of this easily. That's also against the law in many places in the world, not just Europe. A lot of these privacy laws are coming up around the world. This was sort of concurrent with the rise of Brave. The consciousness about privacy is still growing and that's helping us because we were at the forefront and doing this R&D I mentioned which made us fast and efficient. You're seeing others jump in with DuckDuckGo always had a more private search front end on Bing. It's pretty much Bing still for the keyword search. They had mobile browsers now. They're adding desktop browsers and other products. ith DuckDuckGo always had a more private search front end on Bing. It's pretty much Bing still for the keyword search. They had mobile browsers now. They're adding desktop browsers and other products. Like I mentioned, Apple gets fair credit for privacy concerns that I think came directly from Steve Jobs in Safari private windows and third-party cookie blocking. Apple rests itself in privacy with some justice. Now even Google's trying to claim this event, the privacy sandbox to save its business. I mean, to save the world, sorry, and ram it through standardization and into other browsers. Let me ask David's question a little bit more specifically, why is a private computing experience important to you personally?…

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