Protecting Data Will Be Key As People Grow More Aware Of Risks: David Garrity & Mattias Bergstr

Bloomberg Markets AM with Pimm Fox and Lisa Abramowicz.

GUEST: David Garrity, CEO of GVA Research, and Mattias Bergstrom, CEO of Quantum1Net, on how big media tech like Facebook will handle GDPR, quantum cybersecurity, and protecting data

Full transcript below:

Bloomberg – Pimm Fox: The issue of online privacy and online data, for example, Facebook, which of course owns Instagram, has been limiting the amount of data developers can pull out on its users, but many companies have figured out a way to work around that, they just get this army of “bots” in order to read public social media data just like a human being would do, but is there a way to forestall this compromise of privacy? Here to tell us more is David Garrity, Chief Executive of GVA Research — you can follow David on twitter, @GVAResearch, Also with us is Mattias Bergstrom. He’s the executive of Quantum1Net, he joins us from Tenerife, Spain, and you can follow Mattias on Twitter, @Quantum1Net. David Garrity, if one were to follow GVA Research on Twitter, what kinds of privacy would be available, not only to you, the person with the twitter handle, but to those who then may be visiting your site or engage with you over the internet, what kind of privacy do you believe they can expect?

GVA Research – David Garrity: Well, currently to the extent that it’s hosted on Twitter, there is no privacy, all the information is exposed, however with the advent of GDPR, the General Data Privacy Regulation going into effect on May 25th 2018 in Europe, the world’s largest developed economy market with over 600 million consumers, consumers will now have a choice as to how they can better control their data. What for us makes things interesting with the GDPR is that the European Union has historically been pretty aggressive in policing technology companies. With Microsoft, Intel & Google, The European Commission went after all three, now with GDPR we think Facebook is going to be in the crosshairs as European Union enforces GDPR. Meanwhile, it will be interested to see if Angela Merkel, who is meeting with Donald Trump today actually, brings up GDPR to see what the US going to do to cooperate. Now with respect to Quantum1Net and CEO Mattias Bergstrom, I think it’s interesting here that the company has been involved in developing the standards around GDPR and has products that are available for consumers and businesses to use now to better protect their data, and for that I’d like to turn it over to Mattias.

Quantum1Net – Mattias Bergstrom: Thank you David. So, we are opening up our quantum safe service platform; we’re going to provide two initial services right now, which is Teleporter™, a peer to peer messaging and file transport application and that’s followed very soon by a new generation of secure VPN which we call DPN, Distrubuted Private Network. Also, today I got the news that our third party developers are developing a twitter kind of service that is going to be deployed on our platform inside of the next three months, that’s news for today.

Bloomberg – Lisa Abramowicz: David, I want to get back to you, I want to talk a little of what the implications of GDPR are. Right, I mean it’s going into effect late May 2018. People are dismissing privacy concerns with Facebook, whose shares rose 9% yesterday. Do you think people are too sanguine about the effects from these European regulations?

GVA Research – David Garrity: I think what we saw in the Facebook rally off the March 2018 quarter results was a relief rally. However, I think that we have to look at with respect to the news of Cambridge Analytica and from that the attendant greater consumer concerns around privacy is how aggressively the EU enforces GDPR. Bear in mind that prior to GDPR consumers didn’t really have any choice, it was basically ‘you go on the internet, you expose all your data’, period.

Bloomberg – Lisa Abramowicz: So explain what could happen after this rule goes into effect.

GVA Research – David Garrity: Under GDPR consumers have the right to control their data, to say where it can be stored and how much of it is actually stored, if there’s data that they don’t wish to have exposed or wish to have recorded, they have the right under GDPR to ask for it to be erased.

Bloomberg – Lisa Abramowicz: Okay, so how does this work with Facebook, for example, where people are literally putting their data on, aren’t they basically saying “Okay, we’re giving it to you”?

GVA Research – David Garrity: Under GDPR, people will now have the right to go to Facebook and say “Look, you know, these post on these dates, I don’t want those there anymore, and I don’t want them anywhere on the internet”. I think it’s interesting to look and see platforms like Quantum1Net will help to facilitate that.

Bloomberg – Pimm Fox: Mattias, how do you describe quantum encryption and why is it better than the current level of encryption that is available to those on the internet?

Quantum1Net – Mattias Bergstrom: Quantum encryption means that it has a perfect random – we use quantum mechanics to achieve perfect random which has absolutely no patterns, so by having no pattern there is absolutely nothing to be able to analyze and find the key by computing it. So, you’re removing the whole idea of cracking keys that we’ve had for a long time, that a hacker opens a key and steals a key. In the world of perfect random there are no such possibilities because there is no key, nobody can come and tell you “Where’s your Key?” –  it’s generated on the fly from a perfect random number set.

Bloomberg – Lisa Abramowicz: Mattias, I was just wondering, how much interest do you have in your site because frankly the Facebook results seem to show that people just don’t care where their data goes, at least not yet.

Quantum1Net – Mattias Bergstrom: It’s probably correct, I think there’s a lot of misunderstanding on how the data is used and that’s why people don’t care. I think it’s more a question of people will care when they understand how their data is used. I think that right now, most people don’t understand that, okay I’m sharing this data but what can be done with the data. I think that’s an informative level that hasn’t reached the public yet.

Bloomberg – Lisa Abramowicz: Okay, so in just 30 seconds, what can be done with data that’s so scary?

Quantum1Net – Mattias Bergstrom: Well, in reality we could say that everybody likes targeted advertising which the platform is for, I don’t want to see things that aren’t relevant to me, right? So, targeted advertising is a positive right? But we have to remember that propaganda is a kind of marketing and you’re getting that through these datasets that exist, you’re giving nearly everybody the possibility of having a really, really good propaganda tool, right? It’s quite scary the amount of things you can do using “bots”, artificial intelligence and datasets. So, I would say that it’s propaganda that becomes the problem from having what we want, targeted advertising.

Bloombeg – Lisa Abramowicz: Thank you so much Mattias Bergstrom, CEO of Quantum1Net, David Garrity, CEO of GVA Research – thank you both for joining us.

Additional thoughts:

Facebook Congressional Testimony Appears To Lack Overall Unified Theory As To How Best To Regulate Social Media To Ensure Data Privacy

While Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg forsook his trademark hoodie sweatshirt to testify before Congress earlier this week, the overall impression was left as Facebook shares staged a 5% relief rally that Congress is not yet coming to grips in an organized way as to how best to go about regulating social media to ensure data privacy. Questions have been raised as to whether the numerous issues that need to addressed following the Cambridge Analytica 2016 election data sharing scandal are something that Congress has the political will to address. To this end, while it may be on some level satisfying to witness Zuckerberg sweating under the kleig lights, we are left with the view that while Congress will ultimately act to impose greater regulatory oversight on social media the hope that data privacy can be secured is a fanciful one. The technology infrastructure on which the internet operates is too porous or otherwise compromised to allow the data that has already been gathered to be fully expunged. There is no putting the genie back in the bottle. If we are active on today’s internet, we must accept that we are exposed in plain sight. Despite the dire prospects, bear in mind that Facebook still faces fines from its violation of its 2011 FTC consent decree that are likely to run in excess of $2bn. Zuckerberg may be out from under the lights, but Facebook and the social media sector are by no means out of the woods or, in DC parlance, the swamp.

The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR, in force as of 5/25/18) Will Cover The World’s Largest Developed Economy Market – A Template

As discouraging as this may sound, there are significant legal jurisdictions where data privacy is considered a fundamental human right as embodied in the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights wherein citizens have the right to have their data processed fairly, to know what data an organization holds about them and what it is doing with those data. The EU is putting into force its General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) on May 25th and in doing so will establish standards for data privacy that will impact all firms dealing with the data of EU citizens. As the EU is the largest single unified market in the developed world, the GDPR will set a standard that very likely all companies will have to meet. However, as the GDPR has 99 articles and 173 preliminary comments, it is arguably the most complex regulation the EU has ever produced and as such will pose a daunting task for companies to interpret and implement. Important to note that compliance will be important as failure to do so could risk fines of up to 4% of a company’s global revenues. As such, the GDPR has teeth. In the process, companies are likely to rely increasingly on third-party vendors (think IBM and other IT outsourcers) to both structure and maintain data storage and management operations. To this end, as data management undergoes a restructuring in response to regulatory regime change, there is an opportunity for new vendors with new technology standards to emerge and prosper.

Developing Technology Products To Ensure GDPR Compliance And Greater Security – Quantum1Net (Q1N)

As it has been working on developing more secure technology incorporating quantum encryption and distributed peer-to-peer networking, Q1N is deploying a quantum encrypted peer-to-peer messaging & file transfer application, Teleporter(TM) that is GDPR compliant. The company has been working over the past year with clients in Europe such as law firms and other professional services organizations to have a product to which they can transfer their activities with the May 2018 implementation of GDPR. Q1N will also have a distributed privacy network (DPN) that will operate on a distributed computing platform which will represent a material upgrade to existing virtual private networks (VPN). With GDPR, there is the opportunity to develop and deploy a new layer atop the existing internet that will incorporate quantum encryption and distributed computing which will offer meaningful enhancements to both data security and data privacy. Q1N is pioneering these efforts with products that both enterprises and consumers can adopt now.

For more information, please find below:

1) On the product front, here is the 4/3/18 press release announcing alpha test availability of Teleporter, Q1N’s quantum encrypted peer-to-peer messaging & file transfer application,

2) Github link providing more materials on Q1N platform, revenue nodes, product description,

3) The Yellow Paper discussing Q1N technologies, and

4) On the risk quantum computing poses to Bitcoin and blockchain, a National Review article published Wed 2/28/18.

#quantum1net #teleporter #GDPR #facebook #quantumcomputing #mattiasbergstrom