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So our speaker is the chief technology officer at an-an-anonymy. Anonymy Labs. I practiced

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that about 20 times and I just butchered it. So the speaker is also from Australia where the

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prime minister says the laws on mathematics no longer applies. So it seems all of our pseudo

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crypto only works outside of Australia. Good thing you're here. So here to present on this talk

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the future is fake identities, ladies and gentlemen, Paul Ashley.

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Thank you. Does that sound alright? Does that sound good? So this, what I'm going to talk today

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about is some work we've been doing over the last three years. So Anonymy Labs is a

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start-up that was started just over three years ago, has an office in Australia and an office in

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Salt Lake City as well. And the name Anonymy, and it is badly spelled, but that's really, you know,

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when we came up with that name at the start like three years ago, it was because we were thinking

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about anonymity, right, about anonymity and so we thought Anonymy Labs kind of sounds right.

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But I'll kind of give you a little bit of background of why the company was started. So if you

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have a look at the way the internet has evolved,

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over, you know, over the last, I guess, 20 years, there's a couple of sort of major

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problems with it. One of the problems is, is this kind of sense of permanence.

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Permanence. If you have a look at, you know, if Harry and I can't have a discussion, we can

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each express opinions, we can sit in the back and talk, and it's kind of

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ephemeral, like that, the fact that that happened and the opinions we gave sort of just disappears and that's

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what the real world is. You can have conversations with different people and no one's tracking it, no one's like keeping track.

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But if you take it to the internet, it's the exact opposite. Everything you do online is

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kept permanently. And, you know, it's pretty unfair to people. So I even saw when I arrived into

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the US on Monday, I saw, you know, headline, Republican

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Congressman, please explain tweets from 1990 or, no, it was blog, a blog from 1990

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and I thought, well, it's pretty unfair because at that age he was probably 20 years old and he was probably drunk and,

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you know, who knows what else was going on. So the sense of permanency is, I think, a real problem.

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for people. So everything you search on, every time you send messages, every time you

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go shopping or sell something, you're kind of leaving this digital exhaust everywhere. So I think that's a really big problem.

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The second problem is the problem that

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there's a complete imbalance, right? It's asymmetrical, the relationship between, say, yourself

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and the data brokers. If you think about the big companies, the Googles, the Facebooks,

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data brokers. Is everything OK?

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The data brokers, there's an asymmetrical relationship to the average person. Like once

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you've gone online and done something and they have your data, you've lost control of that data. They

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can do whatever they like with it. They can aggregate it. They can sell it. They can advertise to you.

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You really have no control. And, you know, there's a couple of ways, you know,

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they've been trying to address that. Government regulation with privacy policies and all that on websites.

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But at the end of the day, let's face it, anything you do online that's captured by another organization,

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it's pretty much out of your hands. So I think we looked at the Internet and said, well, there's

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problems in two of those spaces, right? It's permanency of the data. And the fact is that you can't control

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your own data. So what's Anonymy Labs all about?

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I'll just bring all this up. So we're all about trying to give people back control to say,

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well, I can decide what about me is exposed in any transaction

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I'm doing. Like if I'm emailing, if I'm texting, if I'm calling, if I'm shopping or selling,

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or dating or whatever, I'm going to decide what it is about me that's kind of made

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public. And this is the idea of, you know, anonymity. Full anonymity means

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the person at the other end or the company other end knows nothing about you. And then there's kind of different

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grades all the way down to having full, you know, your full

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data being exposed. And depending on the transaction, you're going to be somewhere in between.

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So what we're trying to do, so we're effectively a software development company and we're trying to build tools

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to enable you to have anonymity and to the level that you want to have it

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and be able to control what of your personal data is exposed out there.

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So if you have a look at the moment, when we started the company three years ago,

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the topic was pretty hot, but it's nowhere near as hot as it is now. Like literally every

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day you can see, you know, different stories about either the government or

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a big company, you know, Facebook or whoever invading people's privacy and

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or major hacks or anything. So this has become a really very hot topic in kind of

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in normal people now. Normal people understand that there's a problem, which even when we started the company

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three years ago, wasn't as short as that. But you have a look at some of these,

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even, there's even stories about things like Signal. If you have a look at the Signal app, people are saying

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that's a great app. Look at the security protocols and look at all that. But then people start to think, well,

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even that privacy app is asking for your cell phone number, right?

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If I've got your cell phone number, I can go to a data broker and get 100 pieces of data on you,

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right? They also want to have access to your address book and share it with other people. So even

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privacy apps are sort of starting to come under a bit of question about whether or not they're really doing the right thing.

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And obviously, you know, if you're giving your data to Yahoo and they have 500 million

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user accounts deleted. So again, you've lost control of your data. You don't even know where it is.

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And then, you know, this happened, you know, in the last six months and all of a sudden it went up higher

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again. All of a sudden people were starting to think about end-to-end encryption and all this. But I don't think anybody actually knows

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whether it's going to be worse or better. Like, it was already pretty terrible. And now, like, when

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Trump comes in, is it going to be better or is it going to be worse? I don't think any of us really know. But I think the situation is pretty much

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the same. You've still got, all of us are in a really, a spot of weakness

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in that anything we do online is captured and sold and traded.

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So this is, you know, this is kind of our statement. Living your life

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online shouldn't mean leaving it online. So just because you want to do all these things online or even

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offline, offline might be I want to sell something on Craigslist or I want to go dating or something.

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It doesn't matter what sort of interaction you do. You don't want to suffer all those things on the right.

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You know, identity theft. You don't want to be mined. You don't want to suffer credit card fraud and all those kind of things.

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So there's a bunch of things that you want to protect yourself against.

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So how did we come up? What did we come up? So that was kind of the why. What about the how? Now, how did we come up?

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How are we going to do this? So we're, the bunch of us, you know, I hate to admit

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it, but we've all been working in security more than 20 years. Some of us maybe

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more like 25. And, you know, if you think about computer security, one of the

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fundamental technologies that's used in computer security is this idea of a proxy.

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So whether you're in government or whether you're in a company or at a university and you're sitting in your lab

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in a university and going out to the internet, odds are you're going out through a proxy server and the idea

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of that proxy server is it can control the traffic that's coming through. It can look for malware that's coming back and all that

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and give your computer protection from the internet. So what we did is we've applied

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the same concept to identity and said, well, what you need

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is one or more proxy identities, right? When you go out to the internet, don't go out with your primary

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identity. And by primary identity, it's like my name, my home address, my cell phone number, my email

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address, maybe my IP address, all those things that really identify me. And our

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argument is you should have one or more proxy identities and do all your interactions online

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and offline with a proxy identity. So in the same way, the proxy identity is protecting

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the primary identity from the internet and all the people and organizations that you're dealing with.

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So we have this, we use the term pseudo.

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I mean, we came up with the word pseudo because of kind of pseudonyms and that kind of technology, but

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pseudo is what we call this proxy identity. And I've just got a few examples here.

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So where you might want to use these proxy identities. So one example is I've got to go and

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sign up to some sort of program on the internet. And I do this all the time. It might be that I'm signing up to download a white

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paper or I'm signing up for something that I want to get points through.

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And then I make a decision. Do I really need to give all my details to that organization? You know, every

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time you go to sign up for anything, they just want everything. But do I have to give my information? Why don't I give

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my proxy identity information? So what I do, depending on the situation, I either give my

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real name or I give a different name. And I certainly do never give out my cell phone number, never give out a personal

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email address. And so we have the concept of you should give out your pseudo details when you're

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doing that sort of thing. And here, another one, create and delete temporary phone

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numbers for calling and texting strangers. There's a whole lot of

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different reasons why you need to talk to strangers, right? You might be dating, one of those online dating. You might

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be, you know, getting some work done at house and you have to give a number to a plumber.

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And there's a stack of these situations. You might be on Craigslist and you need people to call you to talk about what you're trying to sell.

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So all of these reasons is you need to give them a phone number, right? So in that case, I might

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say, well, I'm still going to be Paul Ashley, but again, I'm going to give them a pseudo phone number. So I'm going to use my

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pseudo that I used for selling for those interactions. So that's another example.

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The old disaffected WhatsApp user. So if you look at the history of WhatsApp,

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and this is a great example of a privacy app gone bad. When WhatsApp started, it was a closed community.

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They went and added all the nice crypto and everything was great. And they had really good, strong

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privacy. Then Facebook came in and bought them. And Facebook said, don't worry, everyone. Everything's going to remain the same.

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Until like a year later when Facebook said, well, actually, now we decided we're going to mine all that WhatsApp

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data. So now they know who all the WhatsApp users, who's talking to each other. And as I said, even though they have end-to-end

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encryption, the metadata is probably more valuable to Facebook than what's happening in the messages,

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even if they can't look at those. So there's that kind of use case as well. So one of the things that makes us

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think about is if we've got two people who want to communicate, they should be able to email to each other

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end-to-end secured message, voice calling or video calling to each other. And everything

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should be end-to-end encrypted. And then even purchasing. So you want to be

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able to purchase online. I want to be able to go onto a site and not use one of my plastic credit cards. So we

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thought about that as we allow you to create a virtual credit card, completely anonymous, has no link back to you. And then

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you can go and use that when you're shopping. So again, you've got that barrier between you and who you're dealing with.

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Searching. The way we look at searching is you should be able to search

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as a proxy identity or as a pseudo. What that means, what does compartmentalized browsing

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means? It means if I'm in pseudo one and I'm in the browser, then I'll collect cookies and bookmarks

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and history and all of that. And then when I change over to pseudo two, all of that gets put away. You bring up

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the state for that pseudo. And now I'm browsing as that pseudo one again. I'll get cookies and all that. And then when I swap

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to the next one, it's compartmentalized again. The idea is there's no way that anyone can track you across your

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browsing, across your identities. Great

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use case. People use it a lot for work. So I'm at work and I need to give phone numbers to all sorts of strangers.

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Give again. Use your pseudo work number for that. Good way to

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protect children because you can go and create accounts in a pseudo name and email and all that.

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And the kids can go online without giving any information about themselves. And in general, I think the

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philosophy here is never again go online with your real information. Only go online

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with pseudo information. And that way your footprint is being reduced. And so the chances of you

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having identity theft and all these other problems has been reduced.

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So we have a pretty important, what we call our taxonomy, which

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sort of explains how we're doing this. So imagine you're at the top there and you've got a real name and

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a cell phone number and you've got your personal email address and you've got a bunch of credit cards.

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That person then creates a bunch of these pseudos, right? And each of those are either

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in the same name or a different name. They'll have different phone numbers, different email addresses.

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They'll each have different virtual credit cards attached to them. And the idea is now you can go out with these

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proxy identities and start to do all these things. So example, I come to RSA or come to

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Black Hat, right? So I might want to spin up a phone number and an email address for Def Con

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or Black Hat. And I start to give it out to people and I'll get their details and I'll put it

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into my RSA address book. And then at the end of the conference, I'll decide which of those

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people I want to interact with to go forward. And I might even then promote those address

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details up to a pseudo or even up to my primary details. And then the rest of the stuff I might just put away. And then

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I might just delete that email and phone number. So kind of that relationship is stopped. And then I might have

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a different pseudo with different details for work and parenting. So I have a son who plays soccer.

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So all my interaction with all the parents and the club and all those things I do through a pseudo.

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So at the end of the season, right, I can just stop that if I want. And all the people I've interacted with, I can just

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decide whether those people I want to interact with in the future. So it gives you an idea of what we're trying to do

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here and then shopping again, that you do it again, you know, in a compartmentalized way. And so

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if you look at that, my actions, we want to be able to browse as a pseudo, call as a pseudo, message

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as a pseudo, email, purchase. I want to be able to mute them. Mute them means,

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you know, even though I've used this pseudo to sign up to shopping, if they send me any email or messages, I just

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kind of don't want to even be bothered with that. So that's what muting means. Filtering means being able to look at all your pseudo.

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and see what's coming in. I might be able to delete a pseudo. If you delete a pseudo, then everything's

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gone. I might want to reset or archive pseudo details. So these are all the kind of things that

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you might want to do with the pseudos. And the idea is everything offline and online, you're now doing

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with pseudos rather than the real person. And that's the concept of the proxy identity.

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So just an example here. So if you have a look on

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the left there, so that's me. And I've got all that primary identity

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information. Then for each of my pseudos, I have an email, phone, even

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we want to get to delivery address. So you can have a delivery address and, you know, cross-docking. You know, we might

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have a separate address book for the pseudo, virtual credit cards, and a separate pseudo-based browser. So you

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imagine each of your pseudos, and personally I have about five or six pseudos, and each one of those has all

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that information that's different. And then you can even go to a step further where you say,

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when the pseudos get to apply to different accounts and situation, I then want to be able to

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do what we call with activities is, I want to be able to easily create an account within a pseudo.

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I want to store that information so I know what pseudo information I use for an account. And then again,

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depending on the situation, I might want a separate email, phone, address book, virtual credit card, depending on the situation.

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But the idea is, is you can apply these pseudos very easy to the real world.

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And then we thought, you know, what are the pseudo capabilities? So this is really everything that we're building.

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So if you look at pseudo management, I want to be able to create a pseudo

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I want to be able to outfit a pseudo. Outfitting means giving it a name,

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giving the pseudo an email address, a phone number, all those sort of capabilities.

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Having an activity feed so I can see what all my pseudos are doing, and eventually be able to delete a pseudo if I want to.

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Some pseudos you might keep for all time. Other pseudos you might create just for a situation.

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When it's finished, you delete that pseudo, so all traces, that's gone. And then we talk about

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in-network and out-of-network. So if you've got your pseudo, I want to be able to call out-of-network.

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I need to be able to call any sort of number. I want to be able to SMS, MMS to that number.

189
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I want to be able to email from that pseudo. And then we've got in-network on the right there.

190
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In-network means the other end's also got a pseudo, and you want to be able to communicate.

191
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So then we believe everything should be end-to-end encrypted, so end-to-end encrypted messaging, email, voice, and video as well.

192
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And then on the payment side, we want people to be able to easily spin up virtual credit cards

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that can have, you know, that can be one time, multiple use, reloadable cards,

194
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and be able to fund those through multiple sources.

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If you have a look at, like, PseudoPay at the moment, we allow you just to buy a virtual credit card with Apple Pay, right?

196
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And that keeps you completely anonymous to the place that you're purchasing from.

197
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And then browser, again, I talked about compartmentalized browsing.

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On top of that, you need to do address protection, so you're going to need either a VPN or a proxy or Tor

199
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or something to go with that when you're doing that browsing, so they can't track you through the network.

200
00:16:50,040 --> 00:16:53,060
And then you need to be able to do things like block ads, block trackers,

201
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stop fingerprinting and all that.

202
00:16:54,520 --> 00:17:00,060
And the idea here is to make it really difficult for an organization to track you between different pseudos.

203
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And the My Activities is what I talked about is we want you to really easily be able to create a pseudo-based account somewhere,

204
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store that information away, and be able to launch into that account as that pseudo at any time.

205
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So that's kind of the thing.

206
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And if you have a look at the platforms, iOS, if you have a look at iOS, you can go to the App Store

207
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and you'll see Pseudo, you'll see PseudoPay.

208
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We're sort of finishing Android at the moment.

209
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We've just about released the web version, and we're going to do desktop stuff as well.

210
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So something that's really important to us is that we don't know who you are.

211
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Like if we're really going to provide a level of anonymity to you, then we can't even know who you are, right?

212
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So the idea is we have no idea who you are, and then hence when you're interacting with our pseudos out there,

213
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there's no way they can somehow use us to try to find that out.

214
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So here's all the things that we don't do.

215
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And it's actually different.

216
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If you have a look at most of the other security apps, you know,

217
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if you look at telegrams and the signals and the WhatsApp and all that, they don't do these things.

218
00:17:58,460 --> 00:18:00,680
So this is one thing that makes it a little bit different.

219
00:18:00,800 --> 00:18:03,580
So the first thing is we never ask the user to register an account, right?

220
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You'll never see in our apps you're doing any registration.

221
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We don't ask for phone number.

222
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We don't ask for email address.

223
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So we don't ask for your cell phone number.

224
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We don't ask to get access to your contacts so that we can share it with everyone.

225
00:18:14,660 --> 00:18:18,360
We never ask for any of your personal information.

226
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So there is no personal information that we are capturing.

227
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We don't track any of our users.

228
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We don't track any IP address information.

229
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So anything that we do see, we make sure that's gone.

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We delete that.

231
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So if we do see any of you coming in through an IP address, we make sure that's deleted.

232
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So if anyone comes in later to our back end and says, oh, I want to find out what's going on,

233
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we literally don't have any information about you.

234
00:18:39,560 --> 00:18:45,600
And we don't sell any of the user's information to third parties like data brokers, advertisers or anything like that.

235
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And we never hold cryptographic keys.

236
00:18:48,600 --> 00:18:49,960
If you have a look at a lot of technologies,

237
00:18:49,960 --> 00:18:54,300
and you've seen a few examples, especially around kind of some of the secure emails,

238
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they hold the user's cryptographic keys.

239
00:18:56,760 --> 00:18:59,180
So we make sure that we never hold your keys.

240
00:18:59,480 --> 00:19:05,020
So the only way that someone can attack you in this system is they've got to get access to your device,

241
00:19:05,060 --> 00:19:07,640
like your iPhone or your Android phone, and get access to that.

242
00:19:07,780 --> 00:19:11,340
So what we've tried to do is make the attack surface very, very small.

243
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And a lot of our philosophy is in that.

244
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There's actually a podcast that's really good called the Privacy and Security Podcast.

245
00:19:19,140 --> 00:19:23,760
And a lot of the concepts that we've tried to implement, they talk about on that podcast.

246
00:19:23,940 --> 00:19:25,480
So it's something that I would recommend.

247
00:19:27,620 --> 00:19:29,040
So what are the apps we've got?

248
00:19:29,120 --> 00:19:34,860
We've got one app called PseudoApp, which is basically a communication app for your identities,

249
00:19:35,000 --> 00:19:35,800
for your proxy identities.

250
00:19:36,120 --> 00:19:37,860
So you can spin them up.

251
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You can see this person's got about five identities.

252
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You can call.

253
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You can text.

254
00:19:41,120 --> 00:19:41,540
You can email.

255
00:19:41,680 --> 00:19:43,240
All of that from your identities.

256
00:19:44,020 --> 00:19:46,220
We also have another app called PseudoPay,

257
00:19:46,380 --> 00:19:49,120
which is really about you creating virtual credit cards.

258
00:19:49,140 --> 00:19:52,720
So you can go any time and create a virtual credit card.

259
00:19:53,380 --> 00:19:57,900
And it happens just at the right time that I'm finished, ready for questions.

260
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That's OK.

261
00:19:59,800 --> 00:20:01,140
I think I'd like to open it up for questions.

262
00:20:04,060 --> 00:20:06,180
If you can come out to the microphone, that would be great.

263
00:20:16,060 --> 00:20:16,780
That's perfect.

264
00:20:16,900 --> 00:20:17,400
That's what I wanted.

265
00:20:17,400 --> 00:20:18,060
Give people time.

266
00:20:19,380 --> 00:20:19,900
Yeah.

267
00:20:22,840 --> 00:20:23,540
Excuse me.

268
00:20:25,940 --> 00:20:26,980
The PseudoPay.

269
00:20:27,040 --> 00:20:30,260
Can you comment more about how that actually works?

270
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What sort of dollar values or currencies can be used?

271
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Could I use this to launder money?

272
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You know, things like that.

273
00:20:37,320 --> 00:20:37,620
OK.

274
00:20:37,740 --> 00:20:39,420
So there are a few different questions there.

275
00:20:40,900 --> 00:20:45,940
So in terms of requesting a virtual card, I think at the moment we allow virtual cards

276
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up to about $500 a month.

277
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And at the moment, it's only U.S. currency.

278
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But we're going to be adding, like, Canadian currency, E.U. currency, and other countries'

279
00:20:55,100 --> 00:20:56,180
currencies as we go along.

280
00:20:57,340 --> 00:21:04,080
But at the moment, the way you buy a virtual credit card is if you download PseudoPay in

281
00:21:04,080 --> 00:21:06,320
the iOS app, it just says, you want a card?

282
00:21:06,420 --> 00:21:07,000
What's the value?

283
00:21:07,120 --> 00:21:07,940
Let's say it's $200.

284
00:21:08,060 --> 00:21:11,280
And then we get you to buy it from us using Apple Pay.

285
00:21:11,480 --> 00:21:11,880
Right?

286
00:21:11,920 --> 00:21:14,700
And the idea is we've not captured any credit card information.

287
00:21:14,980 --> 00:21:17,380
The only thing that's gone to the payment processor is, like, the PseudoPay app.

288
00:21:17,380 --> 00:21:17,400
So we're not going to be using that.

289
00:21:17,400 --> 00:21:18,140
We're going to be using, like, this Apple token.

290
00:21:18,300 --> 00:21:23,140
And we're trying to create this level of distance between you and the virtual card, and then

291
00:21:23,140 --> 00:21:24,620
the virtual card to where you're going to use it.

292
00:21:24,880 --> 00:21:28,800
I think the idea is, like, what we're trying to achieve with that virtual card is if you

293
00:21:28,800 --> 00:21:31,980
go and use a card somewhere, so I'm going down to an online bike store and I want to

294
00:21:31,980 --> 00:21:36,540
use the card, you don't have to give any of your information because that card can't

295
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be linked back to you.

296
00:21:37,500 --> 00:21:41,620
And, in fact, it gives you kind of that protection of your credit cards because even if that

297
00:21:41,620 --> 00:21:45,300
site gets hacked, you know, you'll have used that credit card, and maybe there's a little

298
00:21:45,300 --> 00:21:47,360
bit of balance left on it, but you're not exposed by it.

299
00:21:47,840 --> 00:21:51,780
Normally, the idea is you get a card, you purchase something, and then we just refund

300
00:21:51,780 --> 00:21:53,700
the balance, whatever you've got left on there.

301
00:21:53,800 --> 00:21:54,780
So that's how it works.

302
00:21:54,860 --> 00:21:56,040
What about money laundering?

303
00:21:56,200 --> 00:22:01,480
So I think money laundering is a problem, but there's a lot of protections in the system

304
00:22:01,480 --> 00:22:02,680
against money laundering.

305
00:22:04,420 --> 00:22:09,600
So there's a whole bunch of places that you can't use PseudoPay cards, that the banks

306
00:22:09,600 --> 00:22:10,980
won't let you use PseudoPay cards.

307
00:22:11,180 --> 00:22:16,480
So for example, you can't use PseudoPay cards to go online and buy other cards.

308
00:22:16,480 --> 00:22:21,300
So there's a lot of protections already in kind of the banking system for that sort of

309
00:22:21,300 --> 00:22:25,680
– and we have a bunch of kind of algorithms running in our back end that we can try to

310
00:22:25,680 --> 00:22:27,060
detect when people are trying to do it.

311
00:22:27,180 --> 00:22:31,020
The main thing people want to try to use it for is money laundering, right, if they can

312
00:22:31,020 --> 00:22:31,780
use it for money laundering.

313
00:22:31,920 --> 00:22:33,960
So we put protections in our back end.

314
00:22:34,040 --> 00:22:37,180
We've been kind of taught a lot about how to put protections in, and the banking system

315
00:22:37,180 --> 00:22:38,460
already has a lot of those protections.

316
00:22:38,720 --> 00:22:41,360
So they usually can pick up money laundering by behaviour.

317
00:22:41,660 --> 00:22:45,380
Even if they don't know who the person is, they can say this card is being used in a

318
00:22:45,380 --> 00:22:46,240
suspicious way.

319
00:22:47,500 --> 00:22:48,160
Great talk.

320
00:22:48,680 --> 00:22:52,340
I think many of us probably have done this on an amateur level for ourselves, trying

321
00:22:52,340 --> 00:22:52,800
to do it.

322
00:22:52,900 --> 00:22:56,060
I love the way you've done it, so you have a dashboard, you can manage your identities,

323
00:22:56,420 --> 00:22:56,900
you remember them.

324
00:22:57,280 --> 00:22:58,540
A couple of questions for you.

325
00:22:58,740 --> 00:23:02,300
So I'm assuming because you don't know anything about us, when Facebook buys you, it doesn't

326
00:23:02,300 --> 00:23:04,400
matter because you don't know who we are and so.

327
00:23:05,100 --> 00:23:08,880
I can tell you now, we will not be bought by Facebook or Google or one of the big data

328
00:23:08,880 --> 00:23:09,180
brokers.

329
00:23:09,400 --> 00:23:10,340
Like, it's not going to happen.

330
00:23:11,260 --> 00:23:11,980
But yeah.

331
00:23:12,240 --> 00:23:15,820
So do you think that because of – you mentioned money laundering.

332
00:23:15,820 --> 00:23:20,640
Do you think for other reasons that intelligence services or others will become very interested

333
00:23:20,640 --> 00:23:23,460
in kind of pushing you to sort of give them information?

334
00:23:23,620 --> 00:23:24,100
Yeah.

335
00:23:24,100 --> 00:23:29,800
So the question is about will other organisations be interested, probably police forces, government,

336
00:23:29,940 --> 00:23:30,460
things like that.

337
00:23:30,520 --> 00:23:33,680
And I think the answer is I suspect yes.

338
00:23:34,060 --> 00:23:38,000
But I mean the way we do it, it's like we're not anti-government, we're not anti-police,

339
00:23:38,040 --> 00:23:38,960
we're nothing like that.

340
00:23:39,060 --> 00:23:42,780
We're not trying to be anti-government, special.

341
00:23:43,420 --> 00:23:45,500
What we do do is –

342
00:23:45,500 --> 00:23:45,800
Yeah.

343
00:23:45,800 --> 00:23:51,740
What we do is if we get requested for information, like lawfully, we will respond in to that

344
00:23:51,740 --> 00:23:53,220
lawful request, right?

345
00:23:53,340 --> 00:23:58,820
The answer though in probably just about every occasion is we probably don't have very

346
00:23:58,820 --> 00:24:01,380
much that can help someone because we're not keeping data.

347
00:24:01,540 --> 00:24:02,620
We don't know who you are.

348
00:24:02,680 --> 00:24:03,980
We've never asked for your cell phone number.

349
00:24:04,020 --> 00:24:05,800
We've never asked for an address or an email or anything.

350
00:24:05,940 --> 00:24:10,300
So it's – the amount of information that we have, maybe there's some breadcrumbs

351
00:24:10,300 --> 00:24:12,740
that we'll – you know, this is what we've got, but it's pretty minimal.

352
00:24:12,940 --> 00:24:14,260
My last question for now.

353
00:24:14,660 --> 00:24:15,780
So give your thoughts about that.

354
00:24:15,780 --> 00:24:19,020
You talked about inventing a time machine because right now you're – from this day

355
00:24:19,020 --> 00:24:20,440
forward, people can use you, right?

356
00:24:20,600 --> 00:24:24,400
But they've got breadcrumbs on the internet from before and all the things they've done,

357
00:24:24,520 --> 00:24:28,680
which I'm sure there's various ways – have you thought about how you can help

358
00:24:28,680 --> 00:24:31,620
people clean up their past as opposed to just going forward?

359
00:24:31,740 --> 00:24:32,200
No, no.

360
00:24:32,240 --> 00:24:36,100
We really – we've thought a lot about that, but I'm not sure that we're going

361
00:24:36,100 --> 00:24:36,920
to try to do that.

362
00:24:37,040 --> 00:24:39,880
What we're going to try to do – so to give you an example, let's say you have

363
00:24:39,880 --> 00:24:41,520
an account in your name somewhere.

364
00:24:41,740 --> 00:24:43,560
What we would say is delete that account.

365
00:24:43,820 --> 00:24:45,140
Go and create a fresh account.

366
00:24:45,780 --> 00:24:50,380
Under a pseudonym, with your pseudo, with a phone number, email address, perhaps a different

367
00:24:50,380 --> 00:24:51,800
name, maybe even the same name.

368
00:24:51,900 --> 00:24:52,860
It depends on what you want to do.

369
00:24:53,320 --> 00:24:57,740
But it's like we're saying replace it, and I know personally I've been using

370
00:24:57,740 --> 00:25:00,300
pseudo for probably 18 months.

371
00:25:00,400 --> 00:25:04,500
It's been out in the app store since January last year, and I think I've pretty much

372
00:25:04,500 --> 00:25:09,720
replaced every single account not to ever use my cell phone number, home address, email

373
00:25:09,720 --> 00:25:11,220
address or anything like that again.

374
00:25:11,400 --> 00:25:15,080
So it does take a little bit of time to clean up all the things, all the mistakes you've

375
00:25:15,080 --> 00:25:15,440
already made.

376
00:25:15,780 --> 00:25:16,360
Thank you.

377
00:25:18,820 --> 00:25:19,940
Two questions.

378
00:25:20,180 --> 00:25:22,320
One in relation to data removal.

379
00:25:23,440 --> 00:25:31,320
Given that you will eventually have users from the EU, what does GDPR compliance look

380
00:25:31,320 --> 00:25:39,000
like for anonymity for the company, for your company?

381
00:25:39,120 --> 00:25:43,820
And the second question is what's the company's business model, given that you're not hawking

382
00:25:43,820 --> 00:25:44,460
data for money?

383
00:25:44,600 --> 00:25:44,840
Sorry.

384
00:25:46,540 --> 00:25:46,940
GDPR.

385
00:25:46,940 --> 00:25:47,780
Is it GDPR?

386
00:25:48,480 --> 00:25:49,540
Got it right?

387
00:25:49,620 --> 00:25:50,020
GDPR.

388
00:25:50,040 --> 00:25:54,200
Our expert is here, our chief security officer, who's been doing all our GDPR work.

389
00:25:54,680 --> 00:25:56,020
What was the other part?

390
00:25:56,540 --> 00:25:57,240
Business model.

391
00:25:57,420 --> 00:25:58,420
Our business model.

392
00:25:58,540 --> 00:26:00,160
So how do we make money?

393
00:26:00,340 --> 00:26:05,620
So even if you go into pseudo app now, what you'll find is you can spin up pseudos for

394
00:26:05,620 --> 00:26:08,980
free, and you can get some certain amount of phone number, but there's a limit to that.

395
00:26:09,140 --> 00:26:12,880
And once you go over that limit, then you'll start paying, like it costs you 99 cents to

396
00:26:12,880 --> 00:26:13,820
reset a number.

397
00:26:14,120 --> 00:26:15,760
If you're calling to kind of invest in your business model, then you're going to have

398
00:26:15,760 --> 00:26:17,880
an expensive location, you've got to buy credits in the app.

399
00:26:18,120 --> 00:26:22,500
So there is parts, places in the app where we can do it, because we want to get to a

400
00:26:22,500 --> 00:26:26,460
place where we can recover our costs through some of those things.

401
00:26:26,540 --> 00:26:28,340
So people going, okay, I want to spin up a new number.

402
00:26:28,420 --> 00:26:32,260
We'll charge 99 cents, and that might cost us 30 cents to spin it up or whatever.

403
00:26:32,440 --> 00:26:37,420
So there is parts in the app where we can already get revenue, but there's quite a bit

404
00:26:37,420 --> 00:26:41,680
already free in the app in that you can get like nine pseudos now with phone numbers,

405
00:26:41,740 --> 00:26:44,680
but it's after that where you'll start to get charged, and depending on who you're calling

406
00:26:44,680 --> 00:26:45,280
and stuff like that.

407
00:26:47,200 --> 00:26:50,560
GDPR, I guess you could take it offline with Neil, because he'd be much better to answer

408
00:26:50,560 --> 00:26:54,440
that question, or I could get him up here, but maybe we'll just go to the next one.

409
00:26:56,240 --> 00:26:59,520
Why did you choose Apple Pay as your payment process?

410
00:27:00,640 --> 00:27:02,220
So this was in our initial version.

411
00:27:02,320 --> 00:27:04,460
We're going to be adding other funding sources.

412
00:27:04,480 --> 00:27:08,700
So our first funding source, there's kind of a couple of reasons.

413
00:27:09,120 --> 00:27:14,660
One is, so if you're going to get a $200 virtual card off us, we need to get $200.

414
00:27:14,680 --> 00:27:17,320
And so we thought about how could we do that.

415
00:27:17,760 --> 00:27:21,220
One way, and we wanted to do that without having to know who you are.

416
00:27:21,600 --> 00:27:27,560
So one way is we can try to capture a credit card detail in the app and then pass it down

417
00:27:27,560 --> 00:27:29,420
to our payment processor to do that.

418
00:27:29,520 --> 00:27:31,780
And we're like, a couple of problems with getting a credit card.

419
00:27:31,860 --> 00:27:35,920
One is that it sort of gives us a breadcrumb to who you are, and the second thing is it

420
00:27:35,920 --> 00:27:39,700
kind of opens us up a little bit more to fraud, so I can steal your number and buy a pseudo-pay

421
00:27:39,700 --> 00:27:40,340
card, et cetera.

422
00:27:40,460 --> 00:27:43,580
So we went with Apple Pay because it sort of gives us both protections.

423
00:27:43,580 --> 00:27:47,500
It protects us a lot from fraud because to use Apple Pay to buy something, you've got

424
00:27:47,500 --> 00:27:50,380
to put it into your Apple and it checks with the bank account and does all that.

425
00:27:50,620 --> 00:27:54,960
And at the same time, it gives us complete protection because we don't have any personal

426
00:27:54,960 --> 00:27:55,420
information.

427
00:27:55,680 --> 00:27:57,220
We've not had to capture a credit card.

428
00:27:57,280 --> 00:27:57,820
We don't know anything.

429
00:27:57,960 --> 00:28:01,760
All we get when you do an Apple Pay is like this long Apple Pay token.

430
00:28:01,880 --> 00:28:05,540
It's like this long, and we pass it off to the payment processor and they know how to

431
00:28:05,540 --> 00:28:06,260
process that.

432
00:28:06,440 --> 00:28:11,500
So it protects us in that we haven't had to get your credit card information, so we're

433
00:28:11,500 --> 00:28:12,280
not exposed to fraud.

434
00:28:12,280 --> 00:28:16,660
But we also, it kind of fits our philosophy of not knowing anything about you.

435
00:28:16,980 --> 00:28:18,060
And just one last question.

436
00:28:18,380 --> 00:28:21,100
What kind of analytics do you store on the back end?

437
00:28:21,160 --> 00:28:24,320
So like what kind of metadata or analytics kind of algorithms?

438
00:28:24,540 --> 00:28:27,320
Like what aggregation would you be doing on your back end?

439
00:28:27,400 --> 00:28:31,760
So on the back end, I mean, we do, we are interested in a couple of things, right?

440
00:28:32,140 --> 00:28:38,560
One is we use Mixpanel in the app itself to understand what features people are using.

441
00:28:38,680 --> 00:28:40,240
Now, that doesn't tell us anything about the user.

442
00:28:40,380 --> 00:28:42,260
We just know that, oh, no one's using it.

443
00:28:42,280 --> 00:28:43,540
Or someone's using this, or someone's using this.

444
00:28:43,740 --> 00:28:49,120
So we kind of understand things like, oh, people got, you know, five screens into onboarding

445
00:28:49,120 --> 00:28:50,100
and dropped out or something like that.

446
00:28:50,160 --> 00:28:51,220
So that's the Mixpanel side.

447
00:28:51,460 --> 00:28:52,960
But we, again, we're not capturing it.

448
00:28:53,000 --> 00:28:55,860
We're very, very sensitive about not capturing anything about the user.

449
00:28:56,100 --> 00:28:58,940
And in the back end, it's sort of these general things we want to know.

450
00:28:59,060 --> 00:29:02,660
So we don't capture any phone numbers or anything like that, but we need to know things

451
00:29:03,140 --> 00:29:08,460
like, in general, like what are the top email domains that people are using?

452
00:29:08,500 --> 00:29:10,220
Because that kind of tells us how people are using it.

453
00:29:10,220 --> 00:29:14,380
So if you have a look at the moment, we know that, yeah, out of our users, Craig's list

454
00:29:14,380 --> 00:29:15,160
is like the highest.

455
00:29:15,240 --> 00:29:19,720
Like, if you think about what you might use pseudo identities for, it actually exactly

456
00:29:19,720 --> 00:29:21,160
matches up what people use it for.

457
00:29:21,200 --> 00:29:22,100
So they use it for dating.

458
00:29:22,320 --> 00:29:23,360
They use it for shopping.

459
00:29:23,480 --> 00:29:24,360
They use it for selling.

460
00:29:25,940 --> 00:29:26,980
I think that's kind of it.

461
00:29:27,020 --> 00:29:30,580
And so we kind of want to understand what are the top email domains, because that tells

462
00:29:30,580 --> 00:29:31,500
us where people are using it.

463
00:29:31,760 --> 00:29:34,200
So we're not using analytics.

464
00:29:34,320 --> 00:29:37,660
We're using analytics just a little bit to understand how customers, if they're having

465
00:29:37,660 --> 00:29:39,060
problems in the app and things like that.

466
00:29:39,700 --> 00:29:40,200
So there's that.

467
00:29:40,220 --> 00:29:41,960
You always want to capture a little bit of that data.

468
00:29:43,540 --> 00:29:45,580
So if anyone's got questions, you have to come up here.

469
00:29:45,680 --> 00:29:46,320
Oh, we ran out of time.

470
00:29:46,700 --> 00:29:46,960
Okay.

471
00:29:47,280 --> 00:29:47,760
Thank you.

472
00:29:48,980 --> 00:29:49,420
Thanks, Harry.