How SmarterEveryDay's 4privacy can, and cannot, meet its goals
5.1 Key Insight: Privacy products that seek investor returns while handling sensitive user data face an inherent conflict of interest, and must earn trust through radical transparency about their funding, technical limitations, and incentive structures.
Drew DeVault examines SmarterEveryDay's 4privacy Kickstarter project, a privacy-focused product promising end-to-end encryption, decentralization, and user control over personal data. While praising Destin's ability to communicate privacy issues to laypeople and the project's commitment to open source and zero-knowledge principles, DeVault raises serious concerns about the project's investor-driven funding model, its misleading claim that users can revoke access to data after sharing it, and the extraordinary technical ambition required to build a novel cryptosystem with federated protocols. He argues the $175,000 Kickstarter goal is woefully insufficient for the scope described, and that outside investor money creates dangerous incentives around private user data. DeVault urges 4privacy to adopt radical transparency about funding, publish their whitepaper for public review, and honestly communicate the system's limitations to users.
8 If a journalist in a war-torn country depends on you to keep their documents private, and you fail, they could end up in prison or a labor camp or splattered on the wall of a dark …
7 Growing consumer awareness in privacy issues over the past decade, combined with a generally low level of technology literacy in the population, has allowed a lot of grifters to ar…
7 When you press the 'revoke' button in the app, and it dutifully disappears from their phone screen, the private information is still written on a piece of paper in their desk drawe…
Tech CriticismInternet & Protocols