Rand Hindi is a gifted and atypical serial entrepreneur, who founded his first social network company at age 14, started his PhD at 21 and holds two graduate degrees from Singularity University in Silicon Valley and THNK in Amsterdam. It comes as no surprise that he was selected for the “30 under 30” by Forbes and TR35 by MIT Technology Review. These days, he is on a mission to change the way our private data is handled and to protect our privacy. Using artificial intelligence, cryptography and blockchain, his company, Snips, aims to achieve this goal.
At the CryptoBlockCon conference in New York City, we got to sit with Rand and talk. Our discussion spanned from the value of data and its usage to privacy issues to the future of blockchain and the economic system. Rand, a true thought leader, explains why with blockchain we have a second chance, as a collective community, to better our life and calls everyone to join the “blockchain revolution”.
CV: Hello. I'm here with Rand Hindi from Snips and he's going to tell us a little bit about his vision and why he is in the blockchain space. So, tell us a little bit about yourself and how did you get to Snips?
RH: Hey, thank you for having me. So, I've been coding since I was a kid. I started when I was 10 years old. At 14, I started my first company, back in 1999. It was a social network that worked out pretty nicely. One of the things that I realized then was that it felt wrong that I was able to just snoop into people's private messages that they were sending each other. So, this whole idea of privacy started to become a central theme of what I was doing. At 18, when I went to University in London, I started doing Machine Learning. - learning how to teach machines how to do things, or Artificial Intelligence, which eventually led me at 21 to a PhD in Artificial Intelligence applied to biology.
My current company, Snips, I've been running for five years and our objective has really been to create Machine Learning and AI technologies that guarantee privacy by design. So, I’m really trying to merge those two different things, because, fundamentally, one of the most complicated and challenging tasks we have today is privacy. Because, if you don't start thinking about ways to protect people's privacy, then you end up with the kind of abuses we've seen with Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) and Cambridge Analytica and all the other absolutely terrible, manipulative, anti-freedom things that could happen.
CV: Why do you think blockchain is the solution for privacy?
RH: When you talk about privacy, there are two types of privacy. You have something that is called privacy by Trust, which is when a company tells you: “trust me with your data. I promise, I'm maybe going to delete it or I'm not going to do something bad with it”. But privacy by Trust equals no privacy whatsoever. Because the government can come and say: “give me the data”, a new CEO could take over and not do the same thing and plus why would you trust the company with your data, if you don't know how they're actually doing it.
On the other hand, you've got something called privacy by design. The idea of privacy by design is that you’re mathematically guaranteeing privacy in the way you're building your technology, your business, your product. An example of this could be end-to-end encryption in messaging apps. It's impossible for someone building an end-to-end encrypted messaging app to read the messages because there is no way for them to decrypt the messages. This idea of privacy by design is very powerful. Because it means you don't have to trust a company with anything. Because there is nothing for you to trust them with. At Snips, privacy by design has been the central thinking of everything we've been doing.
From the first day we’d got created in 2013, we decided that everything we were going to build, machine learning wise, was going to guarantee privacy by design. So how does that relate to blockchain? One of the most effective ways to guarantee privacy is by combining three different things. The first one is doing what we call Edge processing. Rather than sending data to the cloud for processing, you can do it locally on people's smartphones or on people's TVs and things like that. The second thing that you want to do is decentralized encrypted machine learning. This is a really cool piece of technology where you're not just spreading the calculation of machine learning on a bunch of different computers, you're actually doing it encrypted, using things like homomorphic encryption, multi-party computation. Meaning that even those who are processing the data on the network don't actually have the data. They have an encrypted version of the data. When you start combining traditional cryptography with machine learning, with Blockchain, then you're able to offer the exact same thing that people do centrally by sucking up your data into their servers, but in a completely decentralized, completely private way.
And of course, one of the very nice things about that is that you can also pay people for contributing to your data.
CV: So that's the incentive.
RH: Exactly. There is a financial incentive for users of your system to send you their encrypted data to help you make your system better. Because you can pay them back in tokens for having done that without them having to trade off privacy. This is not “I'll pay you for your data”. This is “I’ll pay you for contributing your encrypted data to make my product better”, which is very different.
CV: If let's say I have data and I want to use your product, who am I paying exactly?
RH: Just to clarify a little bit. What we do at Snips is we build voice assistants. Things like Alexa or Siri that are hundred percent private by design and decentralized. Using these technologies we just talked about – encrypted machine learning, blockchain, we're able to offer an alternative to Alexa that doesn't require your data to ever be visible to anybody else but yourself. You can put the smart speaker in your living room, nobody is ever going to listen to you or your kids, because your data is never going to be sent unencrypted anywhere on the planet.
This is really important. Because if you want people to feel safe using a voice assistant, they need also to be safe knowing that their data is protected, that their kids are not under surveillance, that they're not being manipulated. Because the more data you give away to big companies, the more those big companies can hook you into their services and manipulate you, whichever way they want, and this is really something that's import...
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