privacy is dead
I spent my last three mornings raising disputes for 80+ fraudulent transactions amounting ~ $3k, because my card details appeared in some online data breach.
I added my card for a “faster” checkout and to make the purchase, but now its gonna take 4 months. So much for a “fast” checkout. What’s even more frustrating is that I have to deal with customer support in Dubai while I’m in the US, and that is a 12 hour time difference!
so all in all, I’m in the US with both of my cards blocked.
Privacy is like natural disasters in that people don’t care till something happens around them. Then once someone in their circle gets affected, they are cautious for 2 weeks or so, and its out of mind again.
But here’s the catch, unlike natural disasters, once your data leaves your device, it is permanently available in some corner of the internet.
“but what can they do with my data, I got no secrets, my data is boring and not valuable”
Let me paint you a picture…
I want you to take a deep breath, and envision the next paragraphs as vividly as you can
Imagine a regular day in 2030, you wake up in your cozy new apartment after a busy Friday night. your job is going well, you are on track for a promotion and your manager is finally happy with you, it’s a sunny day, you might go to the park and blow some steam off after a hectic work week.
2030, where all of your mundane internet operations are handled by your “assistant”, it knows about your favorite morning coffee and prepares it for you (yes we have humanoids in every household here in the future) and a glass of liquid IV, your eggs are ready and just the right amount of cooked, it even ordered your favorite berries, its been a good morning so far.
your phone buzzes, you turn to your phone and notice a text. It’s from someone who claims your photos, tax identification number, texts, banking records, medical history, that person you’ve been interested in for the past few weeks, address, why you got fired from your previous job, that socially inappropriate joke that kills in your friend circle, even what’s inside your bedside cabinet, will be shared with everyone who has even heard of you and more.
unless you transfer $48,725.58 to the hacker (yes that’s specific because they know how much money you got in your bank account). You brush it off and it buzzes again, and there it is, everything they claimed they have on you, and a picture of your parents smiling and having morning coffee sitting in the living room you grew up in.
blindfolds are off. privacy is dead.
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This isn’t far-fetched as AI invades deeper, its already happening on some level, and the more digital information is available about you, more of a target you become.
this is not to create a scare but to make you cognizant of the fact that this is in fact very real and increasingly probable, made possible by your “boring” data that you don’t care about. So next time your AI suggests ‘faster’ sync, ask: At what cost? and remember everything comes at a price.
soon the AI glasses viewing and recording everything we see, speak, interact with, places we visit, food we like
the humanoids in our homes will be keeping a tab on everything that goes on in the most intimate part of our lives. This includes conversations and live feed of our homes, cars, with our family, friends, kids, parents.
the lines between whats acceptable to share and whats not will be blurred, with incremental encroachment stretching the personal space thinner and thinner, till it won’t exist any more.
all our lives will be streamed directly to cloud, where the “trusted” providers will safeguard it and provide us with AI enabled experiences.
“thats fine, its making my life easier and better”
sure but it’s also placing a permanent crosshair on your back, you’re always a target now, at the complete mercy of hackers who are constantly looking for vulnerabilities, burglars who are looking for easy targets.
“but my data is more secure with the company, and they never get hacked”.
this is a common misconception and it’s actually more commonplace than you would think, over 50 breaches just in this year affecting approximately 5.62 billion customers. with still a few months left, 2025 is on track to exceed 2024’s 10 billion+ affected globally. (See if you can find a household name here)
tech companies are always looking for sticky users, who come back to use their product. The best way to do that is to ingrain the products in our lives and homes, increasing our dependence on them, and bringing in recurring users. and we will be locked in, in the same way that now it’s super difficult to switch phones and drives, imagine that but 100x more difficult.
this actually makes attacking these companies more lucrative for the hackers since they have to spend less time in targeting scattered individuals, its like all the collected treasure hidden in a single vault, its a much bigger payout
in other news surveillance as an industry will boom, with more and more data to be processed, every activity is watched, every conversation listened to, every habit, purchase tracked and monitored, every text you send will be scrutinized
that just means there’s now more data up for grabs and more cracks to be exploited
and believe it or not it will happen, security will not scale as fast as the attack vectors (Read Anthropic’s latest report here)
People often ask me, why am I building “Edith - on device AI“? Just do it on the cloud
We believe that even if you don’t have secrets to hide, your private life is still nobody else’s business. its merely drawing boundaries and making a conscious decision to protect you and your closed ones
In fact making it on device and privacy preserving gives us a better chance to impact the most intimate parts of your lives and create a better experience. With the ease of mind that you can search through all your data without
someone looking over your shoulder.
privacy isn’t dead yet, but it soon will be if it continues like this.
The choice is yours.
Edith is going live soon, would love you to try it out. Join the waitlist here