Building a More Private Future

Naomi Brockwell opens her CactusCon 2024 keynote by using Orwell's 1984 as a lens on modern life. She argues that pervasive surveillance is now ordinary rather than dramatic: phones, smart speakers, cars, doorbell cameras and data brokers gather constant streams of personal data, and governments draw on much of it through programs revealed by the Snowden disclosures and mandatory financial reporting. She frames the stakes around two risks: power shifting toward centralized companies and states, and the chilling effect monitoring has on speech, dissent and personal growth, since digital records outlast the laws and norms they were created under.

The middle of the talk looks at authoritarian examples and at how quickly freedoms were lost in past crises, then turns to what builders can do. She recommends collecting less data, protecting what is kept with strict access limits and encryption, and following research into homomorphic encryption. She also urges companies to write clear privacy policies and developers to support open-source privacy tools.

In the closing question-and-answer section she offers individual steps: move email and calendars to end-to-end encrypted services, use Signal rather than SMS, choose privacy-focused browsers, and set message expiry. Her takeaway is that privacy should be the default, and that small changes within one's own network can spread.