Jaya Brekke on Mixnets and digital privacy's inflection point
As data collection becomes the default for the internet, it may be time to move beyond fear and towards real tools that give people control
As a follow on from my Sunday digital privacy rant, I thought I’d publish an interview I did a while ago with Jaya Brekke, CSO of Nym Technologies.
Nym has been working for some time now on developing and launching a mixnet – a privacy tool first conceived by “godfather of cryptocurrency” David Chaum which provides privacy far beyond those afforded by standard VPNs. They launched the mixnet in 2022 but integrated it into their VPN product earlier this year. Jaya goes how it works in more detail below so I won’t butcher it, but using that as a cornerstone of our conversation we explored the idea of privacy in a digital age.
Jaya felt that in 2025 we are at an inflection point, where the awareness of companies’ mass data extraction is widespread and a desire for control is growing. Jaya traced the roots of the current surveillance ecosystem to the early days of the internet, when infrastructure was built without privacy in mind and quickly co-opted into business models reliant on mass data collection.
This model, which is still dominant, has blurred the lines between convenience and coercion and she argued that the resulting erosion of individual agency is playing out across rising fraud, phone addiction, mental health issues and geopolitical instability. Importantly, she emphasized that privacy isn’t about having “something to hide,” but about preserving the basic integrity of how we make decisions and relate to one another offline within digital environments.
However, rather than trying to scare people into caring about privacy, Jaya believes the next wave of progress for digital privacy lies in developing easy-to-use tools that restore a sense of control. The anonymity afforded by things like mixnets are a large part of the solution, increasingly urgent in an era of pattern-recognition AI. As models grow more powerful, so too must the infrastructures that shield us from their gaze.
Key takeaways:
We can naturally choose who we tell what in the physical world. In the digital world data is collected and sold on without our knowledge or control over where it is going.Tools for digital privacy are, at their core, preserving the natural control we have over our personal information in the real world. The consequences of this lack of a focus on digital privacy like addictive design to rising fraud and mental health issues are now surfacing in deeply personal and societal ways.
The economy around data and lack of digital privacy was not an inevitable outcome of the internet. In the early days of internet development, data was seen as an opportunity for the development of a new business model where services are free but data is extracted and sold on. This has snowballed into the internet we see today.
People are starting to care more about digital privacy, as seen with growing numbers of VPN downloads, adoption of the Signal app and a shift of Big Tech marketing messaging to a focus on encryption and privacy. Jaya believes that driving this shift further will come from the creation of meaningful, easy to use tools for privacy protection, rather than messages that drive fear or mass usage of cookie banners.
Zero knowledge proofs which allow users to prove things about themselves without sharing sensitive data (linking to an explainer because a true exploration of what these are will complicate the flow of the newsletter) offer one part of the solution. But they need to be developed and enhanced by things that improve consent and governance control to be truly effective with the rise of pattern recognition systems like AI.
Privacy won’t be ‘solved’ soon, but the next decade could establish foundational norms and infrastructure that shift the digital baseline toward individual agency and trust.
Food for thought:
Brett Scott has written a number of really interesting essays since, but in late December he wrote about Surveillance Capitalism. Fundamentally, it’s a year-in-review of changes and continuities in surveillance capitalism, including business imperatives, regulatory moments, and big tech responses, serving as a good primer for the the situation we are in right now in regards to digital privacy.
"Unpacking the Privacy Paradox: What Do People Really Want?" Explores the gap between expressed privacy concerns and actual online behavior. It discusses why usability, habit, and economic incentives perpetuate the paradox and also covers attempts to address this with new UI/consent frameworks and privacy engineering – it’s from 2021 but still very relevant.
This paper on Sage Journals revisits the arguments set out in Shoshana Zuboff’s “The age of surveillance capitalism” and reframes the narrative in the context of risk. The paper argues that surveillance capitalism, by extensively collecting and connecting behavioural data, creates systemic risks that can cascade across society. This deep integration of digital networks increases vulnerability and threatens individual autonomy. It urges reconsidering the economic model driving such pervasive data exploitation.
The Grey Market substack recently went into an exploration of data collection and its evolution into data informed pricing, as seen with the Delta Airlines and their recent announcement of a new flight ticket pricing model. I thought it was a good example of the types of outcomes corporate surveillance can create.
Philosophy Bear, also recently, went into a more skeptical take around the “privacy paradox” which states that is not truly a paradox because people view privacy as a collective social good protected by laws and norms, not just personal vigilance. True privacy requires secure rights like the right to be forgotten to prevent abuse in unequal power dynamics. Ultimately, privacy is a societal arrangement to shield individuals from constant surveillance and judgment, rather than merely individual behaviour.
Isabelle Castro
How about we start off with you introducing yourself and telling us a little bit about what you do?
Jaya Brekke
Sure. So my name is Jaya. Jaya Klara Brekki. I have a very fancy title that says I'm Chief Strategy Officer at Nym, which basically means I run around and I solve a lot of problems as we build this very epic privacy infrastructure. My background is quite varied. I come from a background in political economy, digital geography, in fact, also the arts, so quite an interdisciplinary background, but have been working in the field of decentralized technology for probably about 15 years at this point, both on theoretical side and on the practical implementation side.
Isabelle Castro
Cool. 15 years is a long time.
Jaya Brekke
Yes, it is a long time. Three years at Nym. Or maybe it's four years now, actually. Four years at Nym.
Isabelle Castro
I'm looking forward to going into what you guys are doing. But first of all, I kind of wanted to broaden the scope a little bit. Talk to me about the state of privacy right now. Digital individual privacy.
Jaya Brekke
Yeah. So the state of privacy right now is kind of at a pretty major inflection point when we're talking about personal privacy. For a lot of people, privacy is this nebulous thing. It's a bit hard to understand what it really is, what it means for you in your day to day life. But I think if we kind of compare the physical world and the digital world, we can kind of illuminate some important things that have changed very much in the last 10 to 20 years.
So in the physical world, when we go about our day to day lives, our assumption is that we are relatively aware of who it is that we're speaking to and also have some kind of subconscious control over what information we're revealing to who and when and under what circumstances. And a lot of this stuff happens quite naturally. You're born with an understanding that your mental thoughts are your own until you choose to express them. And when you express them to people you know who they are and so on. That has been changing radically in the past 10 to 20 years as a result of digital technologies.
So now when we're engaging with the online world, the norm is that when you're sending a message or you're browsing online, you actually have hundreds, if not thousands of entities actually watching what it is that you're doing and then using that information for various things. So your data points then get extracted, sold on to data brokers. Data brokers and sell them on to companies or governments for exploitation, either commercial or for kind of security analysis or other forms of exploitation. So we're in a very strange moment in human history where fundamental ways of engaging one another have radically changed in their quality.
And so I think what's happening right now is the consequences of this radical shift are finally coming to the surface on a very personal level. You see this playing out in everything from phone addiction, rise in mental health problems, increases in fraud, you know, all these different elements that the exploitation of data actually kind of enables. So, you know, your data, your personal data goes on to feed an algorithm that can then inform the development of more addictive scrolling features and so on and so forth. Which means that people have this compulsion to be online more or use platforms more, or your data gets sold on to a broker that then sells it on to, you know, a set of cyber criminals that then use it for fraud purposes and stuff.
So we're seeing this radical rise in fraud, we're seeing a radical rise in security issues, we're seeing a radical rise in mental health problems. And none of this, I believe, is, is a coincidence. So that's just on the personal level.
Zoom out. And then we start to also see what the consequences are on a macro level and a geopolitical level. And how, you know, the exploitation of data also enables people to take advantage of certain moments, intervene into public debates and undermine trust and the spread of disinformation, misinformation, etc. On all aspects, all sides of the political spectrum. So this is not a partisan question. The nature of the digital infrastructures that we use that are actually enabling new forms of exploitation which are being used from a number of different actors across both the political spectrum and in the commercial world.
Isabelle Castro
Okay, so is it a problem that's created by technology inherently or is it just like how technology has developed?
Jaya Brekke
It's a kind of complex interaction between what a given set of technology allows for, the affordances of a technical infrastructure, and then what actors find out about those affordances and the best place to exploit them. I think it's also important to add the kind of economic layer on top of that. It's around not just the affordances of the technology, but where the economic opportunity lies. This is where we have this kind of. There was this moment, right. The Internet kind of has evolved in a way where privacy was not at the core of the considerations from the early days. It was developed under circumstances of “let's share knowledge”. It was an academic kind of environment. And the focus was very much on the potential positive outcomes rather than what are the kind of aspects that can be exploited. So there's a number of people back in the 80s that were aware of like, okay, wait, we're building an infrastructure that actually allows for surveillance. This is not going to be good. The imagination around that, at that time, was state driven surveillance. So it was very much like, you know, authoritarianism and we're going to have a state that's going to surveil everybody and control them. Which to some extent was true. But actually what also played out was that a new business model was created on top of this affordance. So the fact that core communications infrastructures were spreading across the world. Those communication infrastructures allow for data extraction.
“We're in a very strange moment in human history where fundamental ways of engaging one another have radically changed in their quality.”
A few people noticed that data could become very valuable and switch their business model from one where people pay for services to having services offered for free in exchange for silently gathering everyone's data in the background and scraping the Internet for information for exploitation later on. So mass surveillance effectively became the business model. And this is kind of like a history that' very well described in Shoshana Zuboff's book around surveillance capitalism and where it's kind of clear that there was like a deal that was struck between government and Big Tech in the US to actually allow for this to happen. Which paints an interesting set of pictures of who are the actors that are most well placed to actually advocate for privacy.
Where I think both Big Tech companies and states, don't really have the incentives to guarantee your privacy at the end of the day. The temptation to want to know everything about people is too high, let's say.
Isabelle Castro
I speak to a lot of people about this, friends too, and a lot of the time I get the response, you know, that they don’t have anything to hide so its not really a priority to focus on. Why should the average person, you know, like the everyday user of the Internet, the masses, why should they care and why now? And how can we make them care as well? I think that's another element.
Jaya Brekke
Yeah, I would argue that most people actually care. You can see evidence of that in the VPN market is growing quite a lot. We can also see evidence in, some of the Big Techs like Apple and WhatsApp and whatever are putting privacy at the forefront of their communications and advertising campaigns. We can see a huge adoption of Signal app. So there is definitely market signals that people care and people want privacy as a baseline. And I think people are.. there is this a subtle feeling of being out of control. And I think that's very much this kind of feeling of I actually don't know what happens when I engage with, you know, digital technologies as they operate today.
So I would say like the communications around the potential threats have been done quite a lot. I think it's time to kind of shift the narrative away from like trying to threaten people into caring about privacy to instead enabling them by providing real world tools that give people real world support solutions right here now and actually solve that problem of feeling kind of out of control. So yeah, that's. First of all, I think people care. What was the other part of your question?
Isabelle Castro
How do we make them care? I guess I asked that because, I mean, I've talked to people around what I've been writing about and they're almost like, oh, they can have my data because it gives me personalisation. And there is like, whenever you talk about kind of data sharing incentives people lean into, especially if they're going into personalisation. I guess that's what I mean in terms of people not caring about kind of sharing their data and that their data is so kind of easy to access, they don't even care about turning off the cookies and that's quite an easy thing.
Jaya Brekke
Yeah, yeah, no, that's a good point. I think personalisation, that's like a kind of area that I think could do with a lot of innovation. Seeing how the GDPR regulation rolled out was eye opening for me because I realised like, here's a piece of regulation that was designed with all the best intentions from the regulator's side, but in terms of kind of real world impact for ordinary people, like you say, it just becomes these like weird cookie banners, right?
And that made me realise just what a missed opportunity it was to actually develop something that.. to carve out the kind of space for innovation around the GDPR that would exactly kind of look at topics like how can you allow for personalization while still making sure that people's data is protected from bad actors. Are there ways of opening up kind of like interesting new decision making processes around what people's data should or should not be used for. So for example I could imagine that like ordinary people, if they were for example, given some empowering way to understand if their data was being sold on to be used for automated drone strikes or if it was sold on to be used for cancer research or if it was sold on. Do you know what I mean? So it's like this concrete understanding of what your data is used for, when and how is a potential area of like huge empowerment, new forms of engagement with how people actually affect one another.
But right now people just don't have that control. And sure, there's some personalisation that can happen as a result, but there's plenty of those other, potentially very damaging effects that also happen. So. Yeah, so I hear you saying that, you know, there is a bunch of people that probably don't care or, you know, but I don't think caring is the thing that we need to address. It's actual kind of change, like an actual empowering new functionality and new ways of doing things that needs to happen.
Overall, there's so many things that one must care about today. So I don't think that's where we win the kind of battle, really.
Isabelle Castro
Okay, yeah, interesting. So I'm assuming you think technology is part of the solution. What are some of the technologies that you're most excited about in solving?
Jaya Brekke
Well, technology is part of the solution, I think. I think as soon as people understand that technology is, you know, it effectively becomes the kind of physical laws that you surround yourself with. So if those laws have your rights baked into them, you're good. Right. If you, if those laws of the physical world that you're in don't, then you're in trouble. And actually when we're talking about large scale infrastructure, it becomes quite important because it's harder to undo once something kind of rolls out on scale. So I do think technology is very important. The technologies I'm very excited about are, obviously first of all, Nym, what we're building, you know, quite an advanced Internet traffic routing protocol, something called mixnet technology.
And on top of that Mixnet, we're building an extremely powerful VPN, possibly one of the most secure or at least kind of privacy enhanced VPNs that exist out there. So that I'm quite excited about because it is effectively a kind of new technology that hides not just people's IP address from like a website or a service, but actually hides their IP address and their metadata and everything from the end service, to the actual, you know, servers that their traffic gets routed through, like any actor that's watching the network. So it's a very secure form of communication. The potential impact of that is absolutely huge. It's quite hard to disentangle just how powerful it can be. And then I'm also quite excited to see how zero knowledge proof technology is going to play out.
That's a bit more of a kind of thorny subject that, you know, we can go into a bit deeper if you want.
Isabelle Castro
Yeah, yeah, no, I've really enjoyed seeing how zero knowledge is developing. But I want to stay on Mixnets for now because that was, I mean, that was proposed ages ago. Right, David Chaum? Yeah. How has it been kind of trying to build that? You said that you joined them three years ago.
Jaya Brekke
Yeah, I think it's actually four years ago now.
Isabelle Castro
How has that been kind of like trying to build this thing that people have been working on for a very long time and now we're finally seeing what that looks like in real life.
Jaya Brekke
Yeah, it's been very exciting. I mean, it's especially exciting right now because it's like all these massive pieces are finally kind of clicking together into this global infrastructure. So it's been a roller coaster, but it's like, it's just absolutely incredible to see it actually coming together now. Should I just briefly explain?
Isabelle Castro
Yeah.
Jaya Brekke
So what a mix that actually does is it takes, if you imagine someone watching the entire Internet and they're watching packets, which is effectively your communications moving across the Internet. What you can actually do now, especially since we've, machine learning algorithms have come some way, is you can analyze those patterns of communication and you can learn a lot about people. So a kind of good metaphor, real world metaphor to use is, your communications might be like a letter that you've written. And then when you've written the letter, you fold it up and you put it in an envelope. So that's the content of your message. And we can say the envelope is end to end encryption, right?
So you're encrypting it, meaning you put it in an envelope, nobody can see the contents, but then you write your address on there, which is your full name, where you live. And then the postal service also sees, when you're sending it, how many letters you're sending to this address. And just from that information, you can learn a lot. So that's the metadata. So the data is inside the envelope and that's protected through end to end encryption. But the metadata, meaning where you are, where your destination is, who you are, the size of the envelope, the thickness of the envelope, you know, all of this, like, information about the information, so to speak, is fully visible. And that's the case for the entire Internet right now. And it's not just fully visible, it's completely unprotected by law. So there's no regulations that protect this information.
There's no technology that's currently protecting this information. It is readily available. It’s not very big in size. So the size of this metadata is very easy to gather. You can gather a lot of it and it doesn't take up much storage. And it's very easy to analyze. And so you can learn everything about a person's relationships, their state of mind. There are lots and lots of things that you can learn from analyzing this metadata.
So what we do is we protect exactly that metadata and we do that by, you know, if you continue the envelope metaphor, we put three additional envelopes outside your envelope, and on each of those envelopes we just write the destination for the next, hop through the network, and we add five hops that your envelope passes through before it reaches the end destination. Question is, why five? And that's to make sure that there's no. At. There's no point at which any of the kind of actors that are passing your envelope on can see both you and the final destination. And then not only that, your envelope then gets shuffled with other people's envelopes.
So at that point you know, not just the actors passing your information around, but even someone watching the entire network can't actually understand who's sending what to who at one point. So it's effectively an anonymizing layer for the Internet. That means that patterns of communication are protected, not just the content. And of course, we live in an era of pattern recognition technology. And so protecting patterns is becoming kind of increasingly important. So, yeah, that's what the mixnet does, in essence. And yeah, the idea has been around for quite some time. The building blocks haven't quite kind of been ready, but it seems like everything now is kind of lining up to actually becoming a real thing.
Isabelle Castro
Yeah. For people who are new to this, just briefly, how does that differ from a VPN, a normal VPN that, like NordVPN, for example.
Jaya Brekke
So a normal VPN will, so say I have my envelope, I've written kind of like my address and then your address on there. So I'm trying to send this to you. A normal VPN will literally just kind of sit between us and I pass it to that VPN and then pass it to you, which means that you won't be able to see where I am, but the VPN provider can. So all the VPN provider does is it removes the, IP address, who sent the message and so on. They shift that from kind of like the final destination to themselves. So effectively what that means is you have to fully trust the VPN provider.
They can see pretty much everything that you're doing. For some people, they think that they find that's good enough because all they're really looking for is to have an IP address in a different geography in the world that allows them to access some TV show or something like this. But our aim is something else. Our aim is to actually provide privacy. And there's a lot of people out there that really need that today and increasingly so, because we have, you know, a kind of global situation where people's rights are under attack and general kind of instability and insecurity. So, yeah, our focus really is on providing real privacy and not just kind of removing the source of trust to ourselves.
If you really kind of go deep in the VPN industry, the problem is also sometimes those VPN companies, not only do they kind of move the source of trust to themselves, they sometimes also sell user information. So they kind of effectively act a bit as honey pots. But providing these kind of services, you have people that are kind of using them instead of the Clear Net, so to speak or instead of doing their usual kind of stuff online and then at that point, they start gathering data and selling it on.
Isabelle Castro
How has that been, building it in the UK? Because, I mean, we've seen some crazy things come out recently in regards to end encryption and encryption in general. Have you come up against any challenges?
Jaya Brekke
I mean, not yet. I mean, we have to see how it kind of plays out in the UK. Really? The other difference between Nym to other services is we are a decentralized infrastructure, which means that with our service, the People that actually provide the service are independent operators all over the world. So there's usually a little bit of flexibility there where, you know, effectively we're a software provider and then you have, you know, independent entities that choose to adopt that software in order to offer privacy and secure routing services to end users. We have to see how that plays out now with what's going on in the UK.
Isabelle Castro
I'm interested to see how it plays out in the general sense. Just thinking about more and more powerful AIs. Because it reminded me of when you said technology recognising patterns. How is more and more powerful AIs going to affect this need for something that kind of masks it?
Jaya Brekke
Yeah, it's. It's hard to tell quite yet, to be honest, but it's a very profound and interesting space to me because what we're effectively talking about is this topic of entropy really. This also comes to the core of cryptographic technologies. You know, if you look at what is cryptography, what is encryption? Encryption is, you know, taking advantage of things that currently cannot be calculated in order to use that to secure something.
So making something incalculable allows you to take advantage of that and turn it into a kind of security property that you can then use in encryption that is like a constant game of like cat and mouse at both the small level and then kind of larger scale level. At the small level it's like you have new encryption standards that are constantly being developed and created. And then that kind of has echoes also in the world of AI, meaning in the sense that like machine learning technologies and AI is all about trying to discover patterns in what otherwise looks like randomness or chaos. Whereas cryptography is trying to take advantage of randomness and chaos to secure something. So there is this like, very interesting, quite deep interplay between the two.
And that's kind of the space that we're operating in also is kind of intelligibility, intelligence and then kind of like becoming obscure, the unintelligible and also what can kind of emerge between the two in a sense. So it's an incredible kind of philosophical space. It's an incredible space for innovation how AI will affect the need for privacy. It will affect the need for privacy in a lot of different levels. Both at this level of analysing Internet traffic, where we're going to need, you know, stronger and stronger forms of like, security to secure our basic communication channels. But it will also, it also already deeply affects privacy in the sense that artificial intelligence was founded on surveillance in the first place, right?
“Machine learning technologies and AI is all about trying to discover patterns in what otherwise looks like randomness or chaos. Whereas cryptography is trying to take advantage of randomness and chaos to secure something.”
So we can talk about the kind of training data, for example. So it's almost if you think of AI as one end of a kind of like almost like a data pipeline, right? Where it's like you have, one end you have data being produced and captured about the world. That data then gets sold on to data brokers, etc. Etc. And then, you know, you have a kind of a data set that feeds the training of a model or whatever. There is like, questions of privacy at both ends of that. The implementation of artificial intelligence on people to understand their lives, but also the actual development of artificial intelligence in terms of the training data from the in the first place.
I believe that privacy technologies as an intervention into both of those can be incredibly powerful and really change the game because it means that all of a sudden people will have the chance to actually decide what do we want to train this AI on? What data do we want to actually expose about the world for automation through AI technologies? And then conversely also, what needs to be shielded from kind of the use of AI for kind of in either security or commerce or whatever else.
Isabelle Castro
In my writing, I've found that zero knowledge proofs, which we mentioned before, could be quite fundamental in this. Let's explain zero knowledge proofs first and then I'll ask the question that I was going to ask.
Jaya Brekke
Explaining zero knowledge proofs. I hate every time.
Isabelle Castro
This is why I was going to avoid it, but we probably should.
Jaya Brekke
I mean, in simple terms, I'm not going to try and explain it. I'm not going to try and break it down. I've actually there's like, I feel like every time I see a podcast where this happens unless it's like specifically intended to explain it always gets kind of quite muddled and. But the effect is something along the lines of, you know, zero knowledge proof technology allows someone to prove that something is true without having to reveal the underlying data. So for example, it allows me to prove that I'm over 18 but without having to reveal when my actual birth date is or anything else about me. And that happens through some very clever cryptographic kind of bits. Let's say that I'm not going to try to explain here, really.
Isabelle Castro
Yeah. So my question was going to be is, are zero knowledge proofs really the main technology that could be kind of fundamental in ensuring this kind of future where we can share and choose what we share and how long for and all this kind of stuff, or are there other technologies that you're kind of like looking at as well, or not even looking at that you're aware of?
Jaya Brekke
I think zero knowledge proofs play a role, but they play a kind of ambiguous role to my mind, because if you, I mean, if you look at the origins of zero knowledge proof technologies, like the initial paper written by, Shafi Goldwasser and a couple of others, some of the motivation there was in fact this question of how can we, in a kind of world where there's going to be a growing demand for privacy, how can we ensure the continuous availability of data for things like training machine learning algorithms? And realizing that this was kind of really the source of the development of this form of cryptography made me realize that it actually shifts the kind of the terms of the debate around privacy in really fundamental ways.
Because so what we're actually, what I'm actually saying here is like, you know, zero knowledge proof technology would allow for people to continue to train a machine learning algorithm, but on encrypted data. So that means that, okay, no human is seeing what the data is, but it's still enabling machine learning. So it's like it's still visible to the eyes of the machine, so to speak. And it raises this question of like, what is privacy really? Is it simply that kind of like I am shy to show myself naked in front of this specific person, or is it that, you know, I don't want to be revealing information to entities that, who, I don't know what they're going to use that information for.
If it's the latter, and we actually believe that there is like a basic kind of human integrity that's violated the moment when, you know there's information that's being revealed about you that you have kind of no control over, then zero knowledge proof does not protect your privacy when it's still enabling machine learning algorithms to learn from it. You need something else on top of that. And that something else is that consent layer. And that consent layer needs to be much better than a cookie banner. Like it needs to be something that actually is meaningful to people and is meaningful and is easy to use. So some, in some way or another, automated in terms of its enforcement also. And there's a bunch of people that are working on this.
There's this idea of data trusts where it's like instead of you having to make all decisions about every single, you know, bit of data that you're sharing, when you do XYZ online, you kind of like hand that kind of governance, over to a trust that manages when and how and under what conditions your data gets used. I'm not actually sure how far these data trusts have actually come and how popular they still are. But that was an idea, you know, circulating about five years ago or so.
Other people also feel like blockchains have a really strong role to play there. Because blockchains are all about consensus rules basically.
So yeah, there's a number of other things, but zero knowledge proofs in and of themselves. They're just one building block and they're a building block that can be very easily used for privacy washing. So you know, basically enabling some of the worst things around surveillance while claiming to protect people's data because it can't be viewed by humans, so to speak.
So yeah, it's an interesting space and it's an interesting kind of time. I don't think it's anything that's going to affect the kind of public debate for the next 10 years or so because it's very hard for people to understand. But at a deep level, it's a very important set of debates. But because it goes to the heart of what we actually mean when we're talking about privacy. Like what are the things that we really value about privacy and what are the things that we actually find potentially damaging when it comes to surveillance. And it's kind of reaffirming those core principles, not just at the individual level, but at the societal level in order to find the best ways to enforce them and honor these principles and rights in the digital space. So yeah, I mean, the digital space has, it's effectively building blocks. You're building architectures, but those architectures have a different set of laws and the usual laws of physics, let's say.
Isabelle Castro
Do you think privacy can be solved in the next five years? Or if not, then how long do you think it's going to take?
Jaya Brekke
I don't think it could be solved in the next five years. Definitely not. I think some important building blocks will be there in the next five years. And I'm hoping that there’s some clearer thinking on the core principles that can also start to resonate more broadly over the next five years. Solving the privacy problems. When it comes to kind of like digital tech, how long will that take?
Isabelle Castro
Or maybe that's never going to be solved. Do you think it would be solved in the first place?
Jaya Brekke
Well, like, I wouldn't say it's never going to be solved. Like, it's, of course, it's difficult. And I'm going to say this, and I can already hear like the engineers and cryptographer, my company being like, what are you talking about?
Because in real terms, it always feels like a cat and mouse game. So by solved, I don't mean fully solved as in it's a done deal. Technically, it's, you know, nothing more needs to be done, but more like. What I mean by solved is that there is a strong understanding in society what the baseline requirements should be for something to be considered a usable piece of tech. And that I have hopes that we can kind of win some battles there. And hopefully we can see that if we do our job right we can see that in the next 10 years.
Isabelle Castro
Well, that's actually really optimistic. Thank you so much I've really enjoyed this conversation.
Jaya Brekke
Yeah, thanks for having me.