Kombucha Privacy

Protecting Your Privacy - It’s My (F\\\*ing) Job

2021-02-25T00:00:00-06:00

There’s a line from a (somewhat trashy 🤭) old 90s rock song that’s always stuck with me.

Now the music fans are restless

As they watch the stage show lights

Oh the countdown brings you closer

Underneath the stars

And when we come they want it loud, yeah

I love my f***ing job

Oh yeeeeaaaaaaaaah

Buckcherry, Crushed (1999)

When I first heard this song I thought, now there’s a man who knows his place in this world. People who listen to freaking Buckcherry aren’t in it for subtlety or nuance or vulnerability.

They want it loud. Really f***ing loud.

They want brash, unapologetic rock and roll, with blistering guitars and lyrics about how much the singer loves cocaine and sex and destruction and other cliched, over-the-top rock star stuff. Lead singer Josh Todd and the rest of Buckcherry have been happy to provide all of this and more, and according to Wikipedia they’ve made a decent living doing it for 20+ years.

It’s their f***ing job.

So if you buy tickets for a Buckcherry concert, you don’t have to worry that you might have to sit through an evening of whiny hipster pop or smooth jazz or anything other than loud freaking rock and roll. If Buckcherry suddenly switched to playing smooth jazz, their next concert would sell approximately zero tickets, and no venue would ever book them again. So it’s not just that they love playing loud, crass music. It’s also that their livelihood depends on it. As a result, Buckcherry fans know exactly what they’re getting, because the incentives are perfectly aligned, and everybody is happy.¹

On the other hand, if you watch, say, The Super Bowl Halftime Show hoping for face-melting, paint-peeling, I-wish-I-was-born-earlier-so-I-could-be-in-Motley-Crue hard rock, you’re going to have a bad time. The NFL might bring you a rock band in some years, but most other years it’ll be pop or country or R&B. And this is a surprise to no one, because we all know that the NFL doesn’t really care about rock music. It’s secondary for them. The music is just there to get you to watch the football game and its endless stream of commercials for junk food and car insurance.

OK, so where am I going with all this?

This is a post about incentives.

If you use Kombucha Circles to keep in touch with your friends and family, you don’t have to worry that we might start tracking you around the web with sneaky supercookies, or listening in on your device’s microphone, or any number of other creepy things that advertising companies do when they are pretending to be search engine companies or social network companies.

They can do this stuff, and get caught, because their customers – that is, the advertisers – are totally fine with it. Privacy is a secondary thing for them, like hard rock music and the Super Bowl. They may sometimes talk about how important privacy is, but only because that’s what they need to do to keep you coming back for the potato chip ads.

If Kombucha did any of that stuff, we would immediately get caught too. But then for us, our corporate life expectancy would be something that you could measure in terms of hours, not days.² Because you and everyone else would abruptly cancel your service, and we would be left to pay the bills for a lot of servers and bandwidth that we suddenly wouldn’t need anymore.

The idea behind our subscription-based business model is that it aligns the incentives. When I set up the company, I wanted to structure it such that the privacy we provide doesn’t depend on me being a good guy or doing this out of the kindness of my own heart.

That way, if the company needs to take on a large round of investment capital, or if I get hit by a bus or win the lottery, the basic deal between the company and its users doesn’t change. Even if the company were run by the greediest bastard you can imagine, I want that bastard’s greediest, most profit-maximizing move to be to carry on just as before, working for our users and making cold hard cash every month.

Why does this work? It’s simple:

Our users are our customers.
We don’t have advertisers.
We don’t track you to sell ads.
And we damn sure don’t sell your data, to anyone, ever.
You’re paying us to provide you a service, so we work for you.

Protecting your privacy is not just something that makes us feel good — although it does that too.

It’s our f***ing job.

Oh yeeeaaaaaah.

Support Circles on Kickstarter

If you like the idea of a secure social app that works for you, and not for advertisers, then you can help us get Circles off the ground. Back the project on Kickstarter and you can also get a big discount on your first year of membership.

With the likely exception of the Buckcherry’s fans’ neighbors. cf, “I don’t always listen to Buckcherry, but when I do, my neighbors do, too.” ↩
Now it’s possible that this whole thing might come crashing down anyway at some point. Maybe people aren’t willing to pay for privacy after all. OK. If so, then we will go bust, and I will go back to academia or get a “real” job. But I guarantee you: If we fail, it won’t ever be because we spied on our users or betrayed their trust. ↩

Introducing Kombucha.Social Circles

2021-01-12T00:00:00-06:00

I stopped using social media several years ago. There was never a single moment when, in a fit of rage or anguish, I posted a final message like “I QUIT!” and closed my account.

In fact, I’m pretty sure that all of my accounts are still technically open. You might be reading this right now because I got back into one of those accounts and posted this article there.

I was more like the main character in the movie Office Space. He hates his job, but he doesn’t actually resign. He just decides that he’s not gonna go anymore.

Originally I quit social media because, as a new faculty member in cybersecurity and privacy, I had learned a lot about what those platforms do to collect every conceivable piece of information about us. It felt wrong for me to be feeding into and supporting these systems that I knew were bad for people.

It wasn’t hard to quit. Most of the people that I wanted to hear from didn’t post very much anymore, even back then. And when they did, the algorithm usually decided to show me something else instead.

On top of all that, it feels a little weird talking to all your closest friends when you know there’s someone (or more accurately, some thing, an “AI”, or an “algorithm” in popular terms) looking over your shoulder the whole time, hurriedly jotting down every word that you say and poring over every pixel of every image that you share.

Yuck. It’s creepy. And yes, they really do that.

Much of the experience living without social media has been great.

I only hear about the miserable parts second-hand from other people, or from articles that I read online. I’m sure I don’t need to list all the bad things here. If you’re reading this, then you know what they are. By all reports, the experience has only gotten worse since I left.

On the other hand, I’ve missed out on a lot of good stuff too.

If you and I used to be good friends in a different town, I’ve probably not kept in touch as well as I should have. I’m sorry for that.

When our daughter was born, many of my friends from years prior didn’t find out for a long time. (Some of you may be finding out now. Sorry!)

Similarly, many of those friends have also had new babies, moved to new places, and generally done amazing things that I haven’t heard about. Many of us have also lost parents or suffered other personal tragedies, and I wasn’t there to send even the small comfort that can be shared through a screen.

That really sucks too.

To make a long story short, I’ve missed you all.

But I’m not coming back to the legacy platforms of the past. Their basic business model is killing our privacy as individuals and driving us farther and farther apart as a society.

If you want to get in touch, I’ve built a new system that we can use.

The app is called Circles, and it’s the first of what will hopefully be several privacy-preserving tools from my new company, Kombucha Privacy. We’re launching the iOS app in beta this Spring, with the Android version to follow (hopefully) later this year. (Update May 2021: The iOS beta is on TestFlight – let me know if you want to try it out.)

Circles looks and feels a lot like a typical social network, but it’s based on a wholly different model, with security and privacy built in from the start.

It doesn’t depend on hoovering up every last detail about your life in order to sell you ads, and it doesn’t need to stir up conflict, misery, and strife in order to keep you “engaged” as you endlessly scroll through inflammatory garbage and low-effort junk, just so it can show you even more ads.

Instead, we protect the content that you share using state-of-the-art end-to-end encryption. Even as the service provider, I can’t read your messages or look at your photos unless you intentionally decide to share them with me. We don’t sell ads, and we will never sell your data to anyone. We don’t track you around the web or collect any more information than we need in order to operate the site.

If you and I know each other and you’d like an account, let me know and I’ll help get you all set up. Membership will always be free for everyone I know (or have known) from the real world, for as long as we can keep the lights on.

If I don’t know you, then you’re still welcome to try out the beta version of Circles for free. (Update: The beta will be available to the public in Summer 2021, probably in early July.) Then when the beta ends, if you like the service, you can subscribe for a small monthly fee that helps to pay our expenses for servers, storage, bandwidth, app store payment processing, and all that jazz.

We’re still working out the exact numbers, but the price will probably be in the neighborhood of about $5/month.

I’ll post another update when the beta version of the app is ready to try out on Apple’s TestFlight service.

In the meantime, we’re also working on some crowdfunding options if you’d like to support what we’re doing.

Update (May 2021)

Circles is now on Kickstarter! The campaign will run from mid-May until June 23rd. All of our Kickstarter backers will receive big discounts on their first year of membership. Plus, we’re offering a limited number of lifetime subscriptions that never expire for as long as we can keep the service running.

Circles: A secure social app for friends and family

Towers of Babble

2021-01-08T00:00:00-06:00

In the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), we have a story from the ancient book of Genesis about the Tower of Babel.

As the story goes, in the years after Noah and the Flood (the one with the ark and all the animals marching two by two and all of that), humanity was just starting to get back on its feet after being nearly wiped out in the great flood.

At this time, some people got together in the city of Babel. They decided that they would work together to build a huge tower (or possibly a pyramid?) that reached to the sky. They were going to show the rest of the world how great and smart and powerful they were.

The Genesis story doesn’t say exactly how far the people of Babel got with this tower project, but we are told that in the end it was a complete failure. Perhaps this was the first massive boondoggle in the history of engineering and project management. It certainly wasn’t the last.

We don’t know how much the failed tower project cost, but we do know why it failed. And why else? It was a communication breakdown.

Imagine the scope and scale of the teams required to design and build a massive tower to the sky, with only primitive tooling and no automation. Imagine the complexity and the challenge of keeping all the moving pieces in sync. If you’ve ever built a house, or if you’ve done another project that required coordinating between different contractors, plumbers, electricians, etc, then you know a little bit of the pain that the Babel tower architects must have felt, even on a good day.

And then, however it happened, communication broke down completely, and work came crashing to a halt.

It isn’t really clear from the story exactly how this happened. The traditional Sunday School version is that one day, out of the blue, God randomly assigned everyone a new language, and that was that. Suddenly you could only communicate with 1/n of your friends and family and colleagues.

However, the text from Genesis is a bit vague here. Ask anyone who’s ever worked on a large enough project, and they can tell you stories that would make you believe it’s equally possible that the total communication breakdown happened between teams and across sub-cultures that were involved with the project.

Stone masons versus carpenters.

Fans of a steped pyramid design, say, versus proponents of a sleeker design with smooth sides.

Architects versus builders.

Labor versus capital.

People who like the color blue versus people who prefer red.

People who say “po-tay-to” versus people who say “po-tah-to”.

Regardless of the precise mechanism of how it happened, the communication broke down, and people gave up. They didn’t just quit the project, they left the city entirely, with dozens of splinter groups heading off in different directions and sticking together only with others who spoke their language.

It sounds a bit like the backstory in the movie The Matrix, doesn’t it? All of humanity, united and celebrating our own technological brilliance, only to crash hard soon afterwards to suffer the consequences of our hubris.

In The Matrix, the technological achievement was AI – a genuine, general artifiical intelligence as smart as or smarter than a human.

In the real world when The Matrix premiered in 1999, humanity’s great technological achievement was the Internet. Suddenly we were all connected, and we could communicate instantly with anyone, anywhere in the world. It was glorious!

Certainly this new level of connectivity in the post Cold War period was sure to usher in a new era of peace, prosperity, and harmony.

Or was it?

One of the major problems with the big social platforms of the 2000’s is that they attempt to cram everyone on the planet into a single, giant, unified online space.

This sounds good at first.

All your friends are there – yay!

And various famous people who you admire – yay!

And better yet, you don’t even have to go and seek out content from these people. The platform provides an algorithm (some might even call it an AI) that will automatically show you whatever it thinks you’d be interested in.

But then, your friends and heroes are not the only people on this platform. There’s also the random guy who sat next to you in high school Geography class. And the girl who sneered at you in front of everyone in 9th grade because your clothes weren’t cool enough.

Hmmm.

Come to think of it, if you’re younger than a certain age, all of your highschool teachers are probably on there, too.

And your ex.

Plus the crazy guy down the street with all the political signs in his yard – and we all know that guy posts a lot.

Pretty soon, this idea doesn’t sound so good anymore.

You have to wonder: The people who designed this new tower of babble, did they really expect everyone to just get along?¹

But back out here in the real world, life is messy. It seems that many of us humans can’t even make it through a family reunion without harsh words and spilled drinks.

So how should anyone expect us all to get along online? On a screen, we don’t even get the facial cues and body language and all the other little organic things from the real world that help to remind us that other people are human too, just like us, and just as deserving of love and compassion.²

Even if you don’t accept the story of the Tower of Babel as a historical fact, it still provides a powerful lesson in human nature. It just isn’t realistic to expect everyone on earth to coexist peacefully in the same space for any prolonged period of time.

In the social sciences, research from anthropologist Robin Dunbar and others suggests that humans can comfortably maintain connections with only about 150-250 people.³ Everyone past about number 250 falls into various shades of “random stranger”.

So, what are we to do?

Option 1, which the big social platforms are attemtping now, is basically to keep an uneasy peace in our new online City of Babel (“Cyberbabel”!) by policing this digital megalopolis using a combination of human and automated machine patrols.⁴ These patrols do the best they can to find and punish bad behavior, but they have to be careful.

The rulers of Cyberbabel can’t afford to have too many residents chased away. After all, this mighty tower of user-generated content isn’t going to build itself. So the rulers tend to tolerate all but the worst transgressions between the various warring factions, sometimes for years, before finally deciding to exile this or that clique or clan when the cumulative strife gets to be too much.

It isn’t pretty, and basically everyone is unhappy.

Option 2, which we are pursuing in Circles, is to minimize the conflict from the get-go, by not attempting to cram everyone into the same online space to begin with.

To totally and abruptly switch metaphors for a moment: Imagine you have two atomic nucleii.

It’s much harder to guarantee safety if you insist on slamming the two of them together at very high energy. Sure, you could put in place all the structures and people and procedures that you need to keep people safe in and around a reactor. But you’ll have a much easier and safer time if you simply refrain from starting a fusion reaction in the first place.

Get the picture? Great! Now let’s go back to talking about people and communities.

The simplest strategy to minimize bad behavior (and the resulting misery) is to give people space to do their own thing, to talk to the people they want to talk to, and to not be bothered by anyone else. Instead of forcing everyone into a giant towering megalopolis to build a single structure that stretches to the sky, let people grow their own sprawling organic network of little communities with their own squat little houses and playgrounds and gardens.

It doesn’t look nearly as impressive, but the quality of life is much higher.

In fact, this is basically the model that the world uses right now with email and instant messaging. And it works surprisingly well. When was the last time you heard about someone being booted off of Gmail or Signal Private Messenger for being an obnoxious jerk? Or, have you ever known anyone who had to take a break from email because their day-to-day experience with people on it was just too awful?

I’m sure that unfortunately all of these things do still happen sometimes, but the severity of the problem on those networks must be orders of magnitude less than what we’re all seeing on the major social platforms every day.

Giving people space is not everything, but it’s a really good start.

In Circles, like with email or with Signal, we don’t show you any content that is not intended for you. And on the flip side, we don’t share your content with anyone who’s not authorized to see it.

Thanks to the end-to-end encryption, we couldn’t do either of those things, even if we wanted to. When you post a message into a circle, the only people who can decrypt it and read it are those who have been invited and accepted into that circle. We also can’t boost or de-prioritize anyone’s messages based on their content, because we can’t access the content. We can’t mess with your emotions or attempt to stir up controversy by boosting the most inflammatory posts.

Our only real choice is to show you the messages that were posted into your Circles, in the order that they arrived. Just like your email provider does, or like the postal service. No more and no less.

What Circles has in common with the big social platforms is their convenient “pull” model for communication. Nobody has an inbox, and we don’t “push” messages to recipients in real time. It’s not like sending an instant message, where there’s an implied expectation for a response.

Instead, you can feel free to post whenever it’s convenient for you, knowing that the people in your network will come along later to pull the latest updates whenever it’s convenient for them. And with just a few taps on a screen, you can see all the latest updates from everyone in your Circles.

… Now of course, there are limits to this strategy too.

Nobody will have a good time, regardless of how quaint their little piece of the world is, if you let a Viking longboat full of raiding warriors settle in next door and continue to act like Viking raiders.

But that is a topic for another day.

Support Circles on Kickstarter

If you like the idea of a saner, safer, “social” way to connect with your people, you can help us get Circles off the ground by backing the project on Kickstarter.

Answer: Actually, yes, back in the 1990s and early 00s, many of us eager young techies really were that naive. Myself included. Clearly, we were wrong. We are truly sorry, and we humbly repent. ↩
This is almost, but not exactly, John Gabriel’s famous Greater Internet F**kwad Theory. ↩
Dunbar’s number ↩
Hmmm, there’s that pesky “AI” again. ↩

Kombucha Privacy

Protecting Your Privacy - It’s My (F\*\*\*ing) Job

Support Circles on Kickstarter

Introducing Kombucha.Social Circles

Update (May 2021)

Towers of Babble

Support Circles on Kickstarter

Protecting Your Privacy - It’s My (F\\\*ing) Job