Platforms built by people in…Platforms in authoritarian regimes sometimes justify their censorship by saying that, “Oh, we’re protecting people against dangerous thoughts.” words like civil society is banned because it may lead to mobs and protests and chaos, and so on. No person in the free liberal societies can accept ...

It’s only through consumer right protection and the civic hackers and the maker’s [laughs] movement that we can set a new norm that is only normal if they cannot eavesdrop into our postings and is not normal at all if they start to profit from the private communications that people ...

If a instant message provider doesn’t provide end to end encryption, there’s a backlash against them providing such services that may sell the content of the conversation to the highest bidder for our attentions.

The most a attacker can do is to disrupt the service, but they cannot compromise the privacy of our two one to one private communications. Private instant messaging is something that we have seen more and more people start demanding.

If I send instant message to you, even if it’s through a third party like Signal, people demand to reveal the source code of Signal to make sure that they cannot intercept the message that’s encrypted from my phone to your phone and any intermediaries, people in the middle cannot ...

When they run their own systems, taking control of more and more of their interpersonal data, people will start demanding encryptions.

It’s almost impossible for an individual to do an audit of an entire data censor of the public cloud, which is why nowadays people rely more and more on free software and open source components and publicly audited so that they know that the individual building blocks are trustworthy.

When this is somewhere abstract, the public cloud, the Google Cloud, the Microsoft Cloud, the Amazon Cloud, it’s very difficult to pinpoint which computer is leaking the private information.

If this is free software, that is to say hosted by one of the three friends on their phone or their computer, this is very easy to verify and it leaks to a tabloid or whatever. Of course, you blame that friend [laughs] because they host the photo album.

This is not about ownership, but rather about control, about making sure if the three friends agree this selfie is for the three of them, any place that stores this photo need to respect their collective will.

However, if people store those collective memories like selfies and so on, in platforms that are not respecting the privacy of the people in the room, then anyone who take a selfie of three friends posting on a non trustworthy platform also compromises the privacy of the two other unfortunate ...

All these are in the public domain. In personal data, by definition, is things that between you and me, between my family, between a close group of friends.

When we talk about personal data, it is not the same as air quality or water quality. The airboxes are environmental science. In science, of course, we publish. There’s no harm in publishing. Actually, without publishing, there will be no science. The same for journalistic reports, or the court proceedings, ...

I think it’s about, as you said, control not ownership. Google knows all about me, but not telling me. [laughs] Otherwise, if I forgot where did I place my wallet, I’ll ask Google. Google will let me know. Maybe Google knows, but doesn’t let me know.

Right now, talking about personal data. It’s not the same thing. What can the PRC do when they know the air quality?

Anyone around the world more than 200,000 computer volunteers can help backing up our websites by donating their hard discs and so on. We got a lot of interest from community, from the protocol lab which runs this protocol of IPFS and so on and builds us more democratic allies ...

I said publicly to the press that we invite everybody to attack us and if you can take us down, you would also take down the NFTs, the Board Ape Yacht Club, pictures that people were crazy about in 2021, 2022. By tying ourselves to the InterPlanetary File System, we ...

This hybrid cognitive coordinated warfare in the cyberspace is what we face every day. In a way to not confuse dialing to keep a website busy and actually taking over control of the website on the same hour when the drill started, we put our ministerial website moda.gov.tw online on ...

The lives have never been seen. It’s 23 times higher than the previous peak in a single day. When those websites were disrupted, like dialing to keep a line busy for a few hours, the information manipulation, the conspiracy theories like the bad hackers have taken over the presidential office ...

Now, those cyber attacks are sometime amplified by information manipulation. In 2022, August, when the US Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan, immediately afterwards, there was a drill by the so called People’s Liberation Army around our vicinity. At the same time, the Presidential Office website, the Ministry of National Defense ...

In Taiwan, we face millions of cyber attack every day. In 2021, there was around five millions a day which is more than double the year before. We are under a lot of attack from abroad to try to disrupt the systems to decimate people’s trust in the institutions, in ...

Learning from Uber, from the ride sharing economy, without giving up control to the companies like Uber, that is the main consensus, good enough consensus for the Taiwanese society and I suppose in many other societies as well.

There already widespread community organize themselves, like temples and churches in Taiwan, who already run their own Uber like fleets way before Uber invented the system.

The same technologies that power does digital transformation can also be used as tools for authoritarian control, for surveillance. Without going into maximal state or maximal cooperation, we need to remember the plurality is here.

More and more things will be decided not by the people or their representatives, but by who happens to own a majority share in those computational platforms. Or, on the other hand, maybe the state in some authoritarian regimes will decide, “Oh, that’s enough. Let’s nationalize everything and make the ...

Because the digital technologies, if they are only owned and controlled by profit seeking actors, there is a sense of centralization. Meaning more and more control of data is concentrated in the hands of just a few very large shareholders. These environments, that agency, the decision making power in democracies ...

I believe civic hacking and the maker’s culture can help shape the digital world to match the societal values, to match the ideas. For generations and generations, people hold as important human rights, human agency, and so on.

It exists in a symbiotic relationship with the national government and local governments, in democratic societies by people making their own future, but also willing to share this design so many other people, even not in your community, can enjoy it together.

Maker community is also about merging. When an emergent way of, for example, making the air qualities measurement devices is generally understood by people as good, that they’re good to contribute their research, their models, their trends back to the decision makers, and to build collectively the civil IoT projects.

A maker’s culture makes sure that when people think that’s the governments, the less than 100 stations isn’t doing a proper government’s job, people can fork the government, meaning that taking what’s existing, not writing it off, but learning from it and taking it to a different direction, a grassroots ...

Just as a hacker is someone who understand the system and think out of the box, a maker is someone who use easily accessible components and make this alternate vision reality for their community. A hacker sees a new way of doing things, but makers make it real, at least ...

It is symbiotic with the democratic society where people set the agenda, but it’s not satisfied with just setting that agenda, but also working with the representatives or the referendum to get their points across and that is how we make real impact with non personal data collected in stewardship ...

“Let’s have a referendum about water quality in our city, Shinju city,” and so on. When there’s community movement behind those data practices, they’ve become alive with the voluntary sectors, donations, rallying, protesting, and so on.

This promotes this collaborative production of data. Once you’re a producer of data, that makes sense, makes impact for your community. The community will give you feedback, the Committee will say, “Oh, I like to receive alerts when it’s unusually bad in air pollution.” The community would say,” Oh, this ...

The students, of course, they’re already happy that they can provide the numbers closer to their parents place so that your family can plan their hiking or whatever based on the contributions they make at the school. More importantly, they can also take this hardware and have a copy, like ...

If all the neighbors said the quality is very bad, but their airboxes, the quality is very good. Maybe there’s something wrong with the physical equipment. The same for the trend and analysis.

OK. How would it be? In an airbox example, the students learn about data stewardship, not just as a theory, but as a daily practice. They need to look at the airboxes that they collectively maintain, to collaborate it with the results of nearby Airboxes in the neighboring school.

Do want me to talk about airbox, which is not personal data, or Google profile, which is personal data…

Yeah.

Starting a metric effect conversations just like what we had in the mask availability and fairness of reasoning when it comes to pandemic. That map, the mask visualization map actually came from the air pollution visualization map with the same infrastructure and some of the same community members.

This is funding the commons, working with the people, not for the people. And so, this participatory democracy project would eventually form the backbone of not just air quality, but also water quality and many other environmental movements. Even the local scale referendums when it comes to water quality.

Also, to offer higher precision calibrated components so that the power and the resolution as to say the likelihood for it to be correct, the accuracy in the civil society can be better by offering this research for free funded by the state.

Now in other authoritarian jurisdictions, that would be the time where the government starts saying, “Oh, these air qualities are low quality, low cost, therefore not to be trusted.” However, in Taiwan, the government allocated funding into the civil IoT project to first complete a puzzle to measuring industrial areas ...

The students also formed the backbone of measuring the air quality to inform their parents’ decision of whether to go hiking that day and so on. Because of that, the civil society emerge with a very complete picture of how the air pollution is like.

People contributed their balconies, their houses to host PM 2.5 measuring devices, the air boxes, and because it is open source, open data, and open hardware, the research itself is also open. People very quickly formed data coalitions, coalitions of schools. The teachers also want to teach about data stewardship ...

The state at a time only had less than 100 measuring stations for PM 2.5. However, people cannot make informed decisions if they do not have closer to their neighborhood what the PM 2.5 level is actually like.

Yes. In Taiwan, we care a lot about air qualities, especially around 2012 when PM 2.5, the very small particles and the harm it causes to our respiratory system was understood by the people.

The air quality in Taipei is this one, but the solid cities…

Yeah. Thanks to the Gutenberg project.

The Open Street map, the Lennox Foundation, or the nonprofits that are already the bedrock of the Internet. Then extend it to more parts of the Internet such as, of course, community discussion.