Saving the planet vs. Privacy
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00:00
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:00
How can you make a net station that can be used to save lives? The problem is that many people in the private sector can't. Our next speaker is going to talk about this theme of saving the planet versus privacy. How to design green tech property.
00:21
Please introduce Frank Rieger from Kars Computer Club. Thank you for joining me in me giving this talk in English.
00:45
I see none. One. Okay, so I'll give it in English. Okay, let's start with some basics. The Kars Computer Club is an hacker organization and as such we have some ethical guidelines.
01:05
One of these guidelines is what to do about data. And we distinguish between public data which we strive to use and make more public and get into public hands and make useful things with them.
01:20
And private data which needs to be protected. And already some talks this morning were about where is the line between public data, private data and what could be the benefits of making private data public or not. And my talk is a bit more specific about what could be achieved and what
01:44
are the risks of public and private data usage in terms of saving our planet. We recognized recently only a few years ago that this planet is somehow finite. That there is no second planet somewhere around the corner that we could use.
02:03
So we have physical resources that are somewhat ending in a foreseeable world. And the bad news about that is that these physical resources, energy, power, wind, water, food, they are also the foundations for the virtual worlds that we love so much.
02:25
So if there is no energy then there is no Facebook which is kind of bad. So the idea has been coming up that these resources need to be divided somehow, made properly available.
02:42
And we used to think okay let's say water, water is something that we have in abundance. So there is enough water on this planet, basically it's blue so there must be enough water for everyone. But the reality is not as in this very nice picture from Iceland, but it's looking more like that for most people on this planet.
03:04
Only a few thousand kilometers south water is really something that is daily topic of debate. And it needs to be rationed and it needs to be properly segmented for everyone so that everybody can live. And in large parts of this planet for water there is one jug per person per day rule.
03:25
Meaning that you can get one gallon jug and go to the water pipe or the spring and fill it only once a day. And this is what you need to live with, not just opening the shower and let it run because the phone rings. And so the mechanism used here to distribute a scarce resource is social pressure.
03:49
If you're using too much water then things are getting bad for everyone so everyone is making sure that you're not using too much water. And so we're having a tradition in Europe also for social pressure, it's looking a bit more different.
04:03
And there have been people suggesting okay if you're using too much energy, if you're using too much oil, if you're using too much water then there should be a digital pillory. Where people are put up that are using too many resources and that will be made public.
04:20
So is this a real alternative, is this something that we really want to have, is this something like a society that we strive for or is this something that we should avoid? Now we can say okay this is all far away, Africa, yeah their problem not ours. So turns out this is simply not the case. This is a picture from the second largest water reservoir in California last summer.
04:48
And so the seventh largest economy in the world, namely California, is now on the verge of a perpetual drought. Meaning water is not there anymore, it's just gone because of climate change or weather changes or whatever you believe in.
05:06
And it's not just water that's gone there, it's also energy. So they have perpetual blackouts in the system. So at some point of the year, mostly in summer when everybody is running their climate
05:20
control, their air condition, they need to switch off electricity for large blocks once in a while. So everybody gets power every two hours. So there's an emergency system of rationing already implemented. The next thing that we will run out, not in the sense that it's not there anymore but not enough anymore for everyone, is of course oil.
05:48
Just last week the US Army published a report that they expect severe oil production shortages by 2050. Meaning that by this time there will not be enough oil on the market to fulfill demand.
06:05
Which means in a normal system that the prices go straight up. Which in turn means that only rich people can afford to drive cars or fly around the world. We're nearing a situation in some areas where we cannot just say money should solve it all and just who has money can afford resources.
06:30
Especially in the case of water, everybody would say okay, everybody has the right to drink. In Arab culture for instance, refusing to give someone who is thirsty water is a massive cultural offence, it's something that you just cannot do.
06:46
And so we're coming back to social pressure. Does it work? We're having these people driving around with these and there are stickers coming up that put these things in perspective.
07:03
But interestingly it doesn't really work. So social pressure alone doesn't seem to make people buying smaller cars. If you look at the line up of the current car manufacturers, they're making bigger and bigger and bigger and thirstier cars.
07:21
And then they're just having one SUV that has some hybrid thingy attached so that it looks a little bit more green. Or they then call it the blue tech or whatever they have so that they can say it's more energy friendly. Still one and a half tonnes of metal is used to drive around, I don't know, 80 kilograms of human.
07:46
Which does not fit with the resources of anything. So these things are driving our public, few people care. Some care but it doesn't really affect them.
08:01
So is rationing an option? Basically allocating resources based on a per capita thing. If done badly this looks like this. This is a picture from rationing of gasoline in South Africa.
08:23
They had some problems due to a strike there. And there has been several cases of this around the world like in Iran and Mexico. And the system of rationing has been around for a long time. So we basically had throughout all the wars and after the wars we had rationing in society not just for food but also for gasoline.
08:46
Interestingly they used these rationing stamps to put war propaganda on there to remind people why they don't get more gasoline now. Which is maybe an alternative for resources that are really scarce.
09:05
But suggesting today that we put in gasoline rationing may cause a political uproar. But if you look at the price development of petroleum it might at some point be unavoidable.
09:23
There are areas however where putting in, using money as the factor to drive people to behave more responsibly actually work. This is the curve of electricity production from the book.
09:46
So that's how it should look like. So having the basic load which is blue, that is the load that is always there because of factories, of coolers running, stuff like that. Then you have the middle load which is people waking up, switching on their toaster, taking a shower.
10:04
And the taking a shower actually reflects in the yellow mountain there at the top. Then you have the midday peak where lots of people switch on their microwaves and the evening peak where people switch on their TV. This is theory.
10:20
In practice the problem that power networks encounter is that people are beginning to not adhere to these projections anymore. And that the power production does not adhere to these projections anymore. So if you look at the, this is the curve of wind energy during three weeks in September last year.
10:48
And you're having the blue curve which is what is actually producing wind energy and you're having the green curve which is the projection. Basically that's what the energy companies calculated from weather data and prognosis what the wind power should be.
11:06
So you see there's a certain gap between, there's over and under powering. But the whole wind and solar power thing is by definition bursting. The wind is here and the thing that's there or is not there, the sun is there or is not there.
11:23
So you cannot really rely on them like the way that you can rely on a nuclear power station or in carbon emitting coal power plant. So that means that the power needs to be somehow shaped either in production or in consumption.
11:42
And so now there's this nice little idea that's called smart grid. And what the basic says is we're having elastic consumption on one hand where people can say okay I'm switching on my washing machine when power is cheap and plenty.
12:01
And I may just during the peak hours where power is really expensive not use so much electricity. Like I'm not showering during peak hour because electricity is more expensive then. That requires that the information that power is expensive now needs to go down to the customer.
12:22
And the customer then either needs to decide or his household things like washing machines and coolers need to decide for him that power is cheap now. So there are two basic ideas of that. The basic premise is however that power pricing is getting more flexible.
12:44
So currently we're having power that you basically pay per kilowatt hour. If you're lucky then you're having a night day tariff but that's about it. In future things will be much more chaotic. And so the idea is now to use intelligence in the network power meters to
13:04
put these two things together to level out demand so that it matches the production. So now the data that is being produced by these smart meters can be fascinatingly interesting.
13:24
We're having here the usage patterns of a one person household. And it is closing quite a bit of data. So if you look at that data for a week, a month, a year you can see how often that person showers. How clean is he?
13:42
From that you can probably deduce if this person has some cleanliness mania. You can see how often he goes to the fridge at night. When he's at home. How often you wash your clothes because the washing machine is running. How often you cook.
14:01
All this kind of data can be seen from such a smart metering system. So this is I need to say data from a very advanced system that actually has each power plug and each appliance in the household being metered separately and controlled separately.
14:21
So that you can actually say this appliance is important enough that it needs to run at all times and this appliance just runs when it's cheap. This is the most advanced form of smart metering. So the interesting question is now does the network need to know? Does the network actually have to know that I just opened my fridge or that I'm taking a shower?
14:48
Or isn't it just enough that my smart meter knows that and just controls the household appliances based on tariff data that is being pushed down from the network? So in a perfect world my smart meter would just get the data from the network telling
15:04
me okay in two hours power is probably really cheap because the wind is going to blow. And you shouldn't shower before six in the morning because it's really expensive just the nuclear power stations are online. But energy companies are of course want this data.
15:24
The reason being they see themselves as the next big data companies. Knowing a lot about customers is something that venture capitalists love. So if you're having lots of data in your company then your valuation goes up. So if you look for instance in what the valuation calculation for social network companies is that's quite interesting.
15:46
Social network companies are sold by venture capitalists based on number of users, time spent on platform and volume of data shared per user. And with this power data the power companies think about getting into the same segment gathering more data.
16:06
From that we can generate our first demand which is give the data to the people not to the corporations. If it is sufficient to reach the goal of saving energy by just getting the data down to the people
16:21
and having them make smart decisions or having their appliances make smart decisions for them if the people are too stupid. Then it should be sufficient to do that and not push the data up to the network. There are plenty of other problems with these smart metering things. One of them is in a typical smart meter you have in about 4 megabyte Linux system that is running there.
16:44
And as you know our operating systems are not getting much more secure by the day they sit there. And these smart meters are built to be there for 20 years. And you say okay then we just update them through network.
17:00
Through network means at this time 9.6 kilobit which is less benefit than you have through your mobile phone in a really bad coverage zone which means these smart meters will never get updated. But it is a different problem. If it doesn't work out then we can play blink lights on whole parts of the city.
17:23
Another problem that we are about to get into the next level of discussion is road use. So there is only so much road and we cannot build much more and there are way too many cars for the roads that we have.
17:41
Cities are congested. People cannot really drive anymore. In Germany it is more or less okay still but if you are looking in neighboring countries like the Netherlands there you have basically the situation that they cannot get to the road all at once anymore because there is not enough road anymore. And so the Netherlands is introducing a road tech system that is based on a GPS based recording system into every car.
18:09
What they are doing is they are saying okay we will record by GPS all movements of all cars at all times. Which is something that sounds interesting from a data perspective but if you look at
18:24
it individually what we have in here is a map data with superimposed GPS positions. We can see very precisely what people do. They are stopping at the coffee shop, they are stopping at the supermarket, they are going to prostitutes, whatever they do.
18:43
But you can see very very detailed based on the location that they leave in such systems. And again it is not really necessary. The only thing that you want to do is limit road use. Making people use less of a scarce resource.
19:00
That is the ultimate goal, not collecting more data. So that is the thing that needs to be remembered. Of course the whole thing is also a huge money driver. So people really want to make lots of money with it by selling the devices and doing dubious stuff as the data but still.
19:22
Again anonymizing the data would be sufficient to achieve the goal. So you could just aggregate the data in the car and upload and aggregate road usage amount and bill it once a month or something. So the same thing with the power meters.
19:41
You are just paying a power bill monthly so your smart meter doesn't need to transfer more data than what you use during the month. Same thing for road use. So whenever these systems are installed you are seeing two factions. One is we want to have as much data as possible and the other is let's keep it minimal and still achieve the goal.
20:08
The interesting problem is the privacy expectations of people seem to be getting vastly different when we are moving out of the virtual space to the physical space.
20:21
People are quite happy to disclose all kinds of personal data in virtual environments. Putting up their photos, who are their friends, usual things. But as soon as it comes to sharing for instance the physical position permanently. Basically needing to opt out if they don't want to share their physical position.
20:45
These services interestingly don't get used as much. So if you look at all these mobile location-aware startups, most of them crumble because the user retention is getting low. So people are enthusiastic the first week.
21:02
Then they notice okay I need to sync all the time if I want my position here to be disclosed. Do I really want it? Or do I just want to opt out and disclose my position if I want to disclose my position like when I'm looking for the party.
21:20
So we see here that there seems to be a relatively hard line that people don't like to use privacy controls if it affects their everyday real-world life. So then they just expect I don't need to care about it and I don't want to complicate my life even further. So as a rule of thumb, people want more control over their data in a default way the more it affects the physical real-world life.
22:03
Interestingly, Jeff Jarvis in the morning had a very enthusiastic argument here, let's share all our data because we get huge benefits from it. The interesting question is what benefits precisely please. So please can someone name the benefits and not just say there will be lots of benefits.
22:23
The only benefit that I can see so far from most data collection efforts is private data. Private data is just more company value. There is not so much benefit for the user as a rule of thumb. The benefit for the user can normally also be achieved with anonymized data.
22:46
For instance if you want to know where to build new bicycle roads. There is data that could be achieved by installing cameras and recording every bicycle that is driving by. Or you could just collect anonymous data from typical bicycle route planning systems and see where people want to drive.
23:07
You don't need personalized data for that. The same thing for medical data. So there is no real need even for Jeff Jarvis to disclose his personal medical history. It would have worked as well on an anonymous forum for the sufferers of illness that he has.
23:24
We also need to remember that storing private data is not free. So there is always this mantra here let's store more data because it will be beneficial at some point. We need to come to a point where we weigh between what benefit we actually get from storing and using private data.
23:44
Versus what are the risks. Is it really worth it? And then we notice there is of course a loss of freedom that you have from having more privacy. Energy consumption of data is not trivial. So we can say as a rule of thumb today that a typical server that you install in a
24:04
data center is using as much money as it costs within one and a half years in energy cost. And the costs are rising. So if you are buying a server today the cost that it consumes in energy is possibly higher during its lifetime than the amount that you pay for the server itself.
24:26
Of course servers break, hardware break, people are costing money to repair the stuff and keep it running. And one of the things in non-material costs that you need to take into account is data loss. Data loss happens.
24:41
So we can conclude from last years of data scandals that there is no data that is perfectly secure. So all the big companies have data scandals, all of them have lost data. Some of them have lost data that was very very important to the people that were affected. And so we can conclude that you need to assume that any data stored is data that will get lost.
25:06
So the resulting loss of reputation and trust needs also to be taken into account. So we need to ask is there really a net benefit from storing certain data.
25:24
So this is something that we need to do every time when we do a new project. We need to discuss these problems and we need to weigh them against each other. So there are some ground rules that seem to evolve. One is automatically data about real world behavior should be by default private because people expect it to be private.
25:48
Even if they are driving on public grounds with their cars they still expect their movement profile to be private. The reason being that even if it's public ground in a big city you are having an expectation of anonymity in public.
26:06
That's why you are living in a big city. So of course you don't have that if you are living in a little village where everybody knows everybody. But here you can just walk down the street or drive down the street and have a reasonable expectation of no one knowing you. And that's the key differentiator here.
26:23
So if you incentivize people to give you data like giving them cheaper power rates or giving them gadgets or whatever. If you incentivize them to give you data that should be explicit. You should say okay I'm giving you this gadget because you give me this data and this is what I want to do with the data.
26:45
And if you don't want to do this anymore then here's the button for it. And we need to consider that this is basically the situation that we are currently discussing. So we are discussing all fair weather, beautiful situations scenarios.
27:06
But the world is going to look more like this within 10 years. So it's not like we are free to assume that paradisiac situations like these today where we all have enough money, enough energy, enough food are sustainable for the long run.
27:21
And so we need to discuss today what we want to do then. One of the things that really strike me is how little people are really willing to use technology to save privacy. So there are methods around to achieve the goals that we have for saving the
27:41
planet and using less resources and having more colorful websites or whatever without invading privacy. So it's not really a problem we just need to think about it and use the existing technology. So one of the things that is very dear to me is there are technologies for anonymous secure micropayment out there.
28:01
You can just use them. So there are even open source implementations you just need to use them. And you can build for instance smart power meter systems based on these technologies. One thing that really strikes me again and again when I read about it is what do you think is the most successful business model in terms of number of users worldwide?
28:27
Any guesses? It's actually prepaid GSM. Prepaid GSM has the largest number of users in any business model worldwide.
28:43
And why? Because it's anonymous and the user decides what he does. So the control is completely in the hands of the user. And this I think is a nice conclusion for my talk. Thank you very much.