Why I support privacy

Special thanks to Balvi volunteers, Paul Dylan-Ennis, pcaversaccio, vectorized, Bruce Xu and Luozhu Zhang for discussion and feedback.

特别感谢 Balvi 志愿者 Paul Dylan-Ennis、pcaversaccio、vectorized、Bruce Xu 和 Luozhu Zhu 的讨论和反馈。

Recently, I have been increasingly focusing on improving the state of privacy in the Ethereum ecosystem.

最近，我越来越关注改善以太坊生态系统中的隐私状况。

Privacy is an important guarantor of decentralization : whoever has the information has the power, ergo we need to avoid centralized control over information.

隐私是去中心化的重要保证：谁拥有信息，谁就拥有权力，因此我们需要避免对信息的中心化控制。

When people in the real world express concern about centrally operated technical infrastructure, the concern is sometimes about operators changing the rules unexpectedly or deplatforming users, but just as often, it's about data collection.

当现实世界中的人们对集中运营的技术基础设施表示担忧时，有时会担心运营商意外改变规则或使用户失去平台，但同样常见的是数据收集。

While the cryptocurrency space has its origins in projects like Chaumian Ecash , which put the preservation of digital financial privacy front and center, it has more recently undervalued privacy for what is ultimately a bad reason : before ZK-SNARKs, we had no way to offer privacy in a decentralized way, and so we downplayed it, instead focusing exclusively on other guarantees that we could provide at the time.

虽然加密货币领域起源于 Chaumian Ecash 等项目，该项目将数字金融隐私的保护放在首位和中心，但最近它低估了隐私，这最终是一个糟糕的原因：在 ZK-SNARK 之前，我们无法以去中心化的方式提供隐私，因此我们淡化了它，而是专注于我们当时可以提供的其他保证。

Today, however, privacy can no longer be ignored .

然而今天，隐私已不能再被忽视。

AI is greatly increasing capabilities for centralized data collection and analysis while greatly expanding the scope of data that we share voluntarily.

人工智能极大地增强了集中数据收集和分析的能力，同时极大地扩大了我们自愿共享的数据范围。

In the future, newer technologies like brain-computer interfaces bring further challenges: we may be literally talking about AI reading our minds .

未来，脑机接口等更新的技术带来了进一步的挑战：我们可能真的在谈论人工智能读取我们的想法。

At the same time, we have more powerful tools to preserve privacy, especially in the digital realm, than the 1990s cypherpunks could have imagined: highly efficient zero knowledge proofs (ZK-SNARKs) can protect our identities while revealing enough information to prove that we are trustworthy, fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) can let us compute over data without seeing the data, and obfuscation may soon offer even more.

与此同时，我们拥有比 20 世纪 90 年代密码朋克想象的更强大的工具来保护隐私，特别是在数字领域：高效的零知识证明 (ZK-SNARK) 可以保护我们的身份，同时透露足够的信息来证明我们是值得信赖的，完全同态加密 (FHE) 可以让我们在不看到数据的情况下计算数据，而混淆可能很快会提供更多功能。

Privacy is not about standing apart.

隐私并不是要分开。

It's about standing together.

这是关于站在一起。

At this time, it's worth stepping back and reviewing the question: why do we want privacy in the first place ?

此时，值得退一步回顾一下这个问题：为什么我们首先需要隐私？

Each person's answer will be different.

每个人的答案都会不同。

In this post I will give my own, which I will break down into three parts:

在这篇文章中，我将给出我自己的观点，我将其分为三个部分：

Back in the early 2000s, it was popular to have viewpoints similar to those epitomized by David Brin's 1998 book The Transparent Society : technology would make information all around the world much more transparent, and while this will have downsides and require adaptation, on average it is a very good thing, and we can make it fair by making sure that the people can surveil (or rather, sousveil ) the government as well.

早在 2000 年代初，人们就普遍持有类似于大卫·布林 (David Brin) 1998 年出版的《透明社会》一书所概括的观点：技术将使世界各地的信息更加透明，虽然这会有缺点并需要适应，但总的来说，这是一件非常好的事情，我们可以通过确保人民也可以监督（或者更确切地说，sousveil）政府来使其公平。

In 1999, Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy famously exclaimed : "privacy is dead, get over it!".

1999 年，Sun Microsystems 首席执行官斯科特·麦克尼利 (Scott McNealy) 发出了一句著名的感叹：“隐私已死，克服它吧！”。

This mentality was common in the early conception and development of Facebook, which banned pseudonymous identities .

这种心态在 Facebook 的早期构想和发展中很常见，Facebook 禁止假名身份。

I personally remember experiencing the tail end of this mentality at a presentation at a Huawei event in Shenzhen in 2015, where a (Western) speaker casually mentioned in an offhand remark that "privacy is over".

我个人记得在2015年深圳华为活动的一次演讲中经历过这种心态的尾声，一位（西方）演讲者随口说道“隐私已经结束”。

The Transparent Society represented the best and brightest of what "privacy is over" ideology had to offer: it promised a better, more just and fair world, using the power of transparency to keep governments accountable rather than repressing individuals and minorities.

透明社会代表了“隐私已经结束”意识形态所能提供的最好和最聪明的东西：它承诺一个更好、更公正和公平的世界，利用透明的力量让政府承担责任，而不是压制个人和少数群体。

In hindsight, however, it is clear that even this approach was a product of its time, written at the peak of enthusiasm about global cooperation and peace and "the end of history", and it depended on a number of overly-optimistic assumptions about human nature .

然而，事后看来，很明显，这种做法也是当时的产物，是在全球合作与和平以及“历史终结”的热情顶峰时期写成的，它依赖于一些关于人性过于乐观的假设。

Primarily:

主要是：

Today, there is no single major country for which the first assumption is broadly agreed to be true, and quite a few for which it's broadly agreed to be false.

如今，没有一个主要国家被普遍认为第一个假设是正确的，而且在很多国家中普遍认为第一个假设是错误的。

On the second front, cultural tolerance has also been rapidly regressing - a mere twitter search for phrases like " bullying is good " is one piece of evidence of this, though it's easy to find more.

另一方面，文化宽容度也在迅速倒退——仅仅在推特上搜索“欺凌是好事”之类的短语就可以证明这一点，尽管很容易找到更多。

I personally have the misfortune to encounter the downsides of "transparent society" regularly, as every single action I take outside has some nonzero chance of unexpectedly becoming a public media story:

我个人不幸地经常遇到“透明社会”的缺点，因为我在外面采取的每一个行动都有一些非零的机会意外地成为公共媒体报道：

The worst offender was someone who took a minute-long video while I was laptopping in Chiang Mai, and proceeded to post it on xiaohongshu, where it immediately got many thousands of likes and reshares.

最严重的罪犯是有人在我在清迈用笔记本电脑时拍摄了一段长达一分钟的视频，然后将其发布到小红书上，该视频立即获得了数千个点赞和转发。

Of course, my own situation is far from the human norm - but this has always been the case with privacy: privacy is less needed for people whose life situations are relatively normal, and more needed for people whose life situations deviate from the norm, in any direction .

当然，我自己的情况与人类的常态相去甚远——但隐私一直都是这样：生活状况相对正常的人不太需要隐私，而生活状况在任何方向偏离常态的人更需要隐私。

And once you add up all of the different directions that matter, the number of people who really need privacy ends up being quite a lot - and you never know when you will become one of them.

一旦你把所有重要的不同方向加起来，真正需要隐私的人的数量就会变得相当多——你永远不知道什么时候你会成为他们中的一员。

This is a big reason why privacy is often underrated: it's not just about your situation and your information today, it's also about the unknown unknowns of what happens to that information (and to how it affects you) going forward forever into the future.

这是隐私经常被低估的一个重要原因：它不仅关系到您今天的情况和信息，还关系到这些信息在未来会发生什么（以及它如何影响您）的未知因素。

Privacy from corporate pricing mechanisms is a niche concern today, even among privacy advocates, but with the rise of AI-based analysis tools it is likely to become a growing issue: the more a company knows about you, the more they are able to offer you a personalized price that maximizes how much they can extract from you multiplied by the probability that you will pay up.

如今，即使在隐私倡导者中，企业定价机制带来的隐私也是一个小众问题，但随着基于人工智能的分析工具的兴起，它可能会成为一个日益严重的问题：公司对你的了解越多，他们就越能够为你提供个性化的价格，从而最大限度地提高他们从你身上榨取的金额乘以你付款的可能性。

I can express my general argument for privacy as freedom in one sentence as follows:

我可以用一句话来表达我对隐私即自由的一般论点，如下：

Privacy gives you the freedom to live your life in a way that best suits your personal goals and needs, without having to constantly balance every action between "the private game" (your own needs) and "the public game" (how all kinds of other people, intermediated by all kinds of mechanisms including social media cascades, commercial incentives, politics, institutions, etc, will perceive and respond to your behavior)

隐私让您可以自由地以最适合您个人目标和需求的方式生活，而不必不断平衡“私人游戏”（您自己的需求）和“公共游戏”（各种其他人在包括社交媒体级联、商业激励、政治、机构等在内的各种机制的中介下如何感知和回应您的行为）之间的每项行动）

Without privacy, everything becomes a constant battle of "what will other people (and bots) think of what I'm doing" - powerful people, companies, and peers, people today and in the future.

如果没有隐私，一切都会变成一场“其他人（和机器人）会如何看待我正在做的事情”的持续斗争——有权势的人、公司和同行、今天和未来的人。

With privacy, we can preserve a balance.

有了隐私，我们就可以保持平衡。

Today, that balance is being rapidly eroded, especially in the physical realm, and the default path of modern techno-capitalism, with its hunger for business models that find ways to capture value from users without asking them to explicitly pay for things, is to erode it further (even into highly sensitive domains like, eventually, our own minds).

如今，这种平衡正在迅速被侵蚀，尤其是在物理领域，而现代技术资本主义的默认路径是进一步侵蚀这种平衡（甚至进入高度敏感的领域，例如我们自己的思想），它渴望找到从用户那里获取价值而不要求他们明确付费的商业模式。

Hence, we need to counteract this effect, and support privacy more explicitly, particularly in the place where we most practically can: the digital realm.

因此，我们需要抵消这种影响，并更明确地支持隐私，特别是在我们最能做到的地方：数字领域。

There is one common reply to the above reasoning: the disadvantages of privacy that I described are largely disadvantages of the public knowing too much about our private lives, and even where abuse of power is concerned, it's about corporations, bosses and politicians knowing too much.

对于上述推理，有一个常见的回答：我所描述的隐私的缺点很大程度上是公众对我们的私生活了解太多的缺点，即使涉及滥用权力，也是企业、老板和政客了解太多。

But we're not going to let the public, corporations, bosses and politicians have all this data.

但我们不会让公众、企业、老板和政客拥有所有这些数据。

Instead, we'll let a small group of highly trained and well-vetted law enforcement professionals see data taken from the security cameras on the streets and the wiretaps on the internet cables and chat applications, enforce strict accountability procedures, and no one else will find out.

相反，我们将让一小群训练有素、经过严格审查的执法专业人员查看从街道上的安全摄像头以及对互联网电缆和聊天应用程序的窃听中获取的数据，执行严格的问责程序，并且没有其他人会发现。

This is a quietly, but widely, held position, and so it is important to address it explicitly.

这是一个悄悄但广泛持有的立场，因此明确解决这个问题很重要。

There are several reasons why, even if implemented at a high standard of quality with good intentions, such strategies are inherently unstable:

即使出于良好的意图以高质量标准实施，此类策略本质上也是不稳定的，原因如下：

From the perspective of an individual, if data is taken from them, they have no way to tell if and how it will be abused in the future.

从个人的角度来看，如果数据被从他们身上获取，他们就无法知道这些数据将来是否会被滥用以及如何被滥用。

By far the safest approach to handling large-scale data is to centrally collect as little of it as possible in the first place.

到目前为止，处理大规模数据的最安全方法是首先集中收集尽可能少的数据。

Data should be maximally held by the users themselves, and cryptographic means used to enable aggregation of useful statistics without compromising individual privacy.

数据应最大限度地由用户自己持有，并使用加密手段来聚合有用的统计数据而不损害个人隐私。

The argument that the government should have the capability to access anything with a warrant because that's the way that things have always worked misses a key point: historically, the amount of information available to be obtained with warrants was far lower than what is available today, and even what would be available if the strongest proposed forms of internet privacy were universally adopted .

认为政府应该有能力通过搜查令获取任何信息的论点，因为这是事情一直以来的运作方式，这一论点忽略了一个关键点：从历史上看，通过搜查令获得的信息量远远低于今天，甚至如果普遍采用最强有力的互联网隐私形式，所能获得的信息量也是如此。

In the 19ᵗʰ century, the average conversation happened once, via voice, and was never recorded by anyone.

在 19ᵗʰ 世纪，平均对话仅通过语音进行一次，并且从未被任何人记录。

For this reason: the entire moral panic around "going dark" is ahistorical: the average conversation, and even financial transaction, being fully and unconditionally private is the multi-thousand-year historical norm.

出于这个原因：围绕“走向黑暗”的整个道德恐慌是非历史的：普通对话，甚至金融交易，完全且无条件地私密是数千年的历史常态。

An average conversation, 1950.

一次普通的谈话，1950 年。

Exactly zero words of the conversation were ever recorded, spied on, subject to "lawful intercept", AI analyzed, or otherwise viewed by anyone at any time other than the participants in the conversation while it is happening.

对话中的任何单词都被记录、监视、受到“合法拦截”、人工智能分析或在对话发生时被除对话参与者之外的任何人在任何时间以其他方式查看。

Another important reason to minimize centralized data collection is the inherently international nature of large portions of global communication and economic interaction .

尽量减少集中数据收集的另一个重要原因是全球通信和经济互动的大部分内容具有固有的国际性。

If everyone is in the same country, it is at least a coherent position to say that "the government" should have access to the data in their interactions.

如果每个人都在同一个国家，那么“政府”应该有权访问他们互动中的数据至少是一个一致的立场。

But what if people are in different countries?

但如果人们位于不同的国家怎么办？

Certainly, in principle you could try to come up with a galaxy-brained scheme where each person's data is mapped to some lawful access entity that is responsible for them - though even there you would have to deal with a huge number of edge cases involving data that relates to multiple people.

当然，原则上你可以尝试提出一个银河大脑方案，其中每个人的数据都映射到负责他们的某个合法访问实体 - 尽管即使在那里，你也必须处理涉及与多人相关的数据的大量边缘情况。

But even if you could, it is not the realistic default outcome.

但即使可以，这也不是现实的默认结果。

The realistic default outcome of government backdoors is: data becomes concentrated in a small number of central jurisdictions that have everyone's data because they control the applications - essentially, global techno-hegemony.

政府后门的现实默认结果是：数据集中在少数中央管辖区，这些管辖区拥有每个人的数据，因为他们控制着应用程序——本质上是全球技术霸权。

Strong privacy is by far the most stable alternative .

强大的隐私是迄今为止最稳定的选择。

For over a century, it has been recognized that a key technical component making democracy work is the secret ballot : no one knows who you voted for, and furthermore, you do not have the ability to prove to anyone else who you voted for, even if you really want to.

一个多世纪以来，人们已经认识到，使民主发挥作用的一个关键技术组成部分是无记名投票：没有人知道你投票给了谁，而且，你没有能力向其他人证明你投票给了谁，即使你真的想这样做。

If secret ballots were not a default, then voters would be accosted with all kinds of side incentives affecting how they vote: bribes, promises of retroactive rewards, social pressure, threats, and more.

如果无记名投票不是默认情况，那么选民就会受到各种影响他们投票方式的附带激励措施的影响：贿赂、追溯奖励的承诺、社会压力、威胁等等。

It can be seen that such side incentives would completely break democracy with a simple mathematical argument: in an election with N people, your probability of affecting the outcome is only roughly 1/N, and so any considerations related to which candidate is better and which is worse inherently get divided by N.

可以看出，这种附带激励将彻底打破民主，用一个简单的数学论证：在有 N 个人的选举中，你影响结果的概率大约只有 1/N，因此任何与哪个候选人更好、哪个候选人更差相关的考虑本质上都会除以 N。

Meanwhile, "side games" (eg.

与此同时，“附带游戏”（例如。

voter bribery, coercion, social pressure) act on you directly based on how you vote (rather than based on the outcome of the vote as a whole), and so they do not get divided by N.

选民贿赂、胁迫、社会压力）直接根据您的投票方式（而不是根据整个投票结果）对您起作用，因此它们不会除以 N。

Hence, unless side games are tightly controlled, they by default overwhelm the entire game, and drown out any consideration of which candidate's policies are actually better.

因此，除非严格控制边线游戏，否则它们默认会压倒整个游戏，并淹没对哪位候选人的政策实际上更好的任何考虑。

This applies not just to nation-scale democracy.

这不仅适用于国家范围的民主。

Theoretically, it applies to almost any corporate or governmental principal-agent problem:

理论上，它适用于几乎所有公司或政府委托代理问题：

The fundamental problem in all cases is the same: if the agent acts honestly, they absorb only a small share of the benefit of their action to the entity that they are representing, meanwhile if they follow the incentives of some side game, then they absorb the full share of those benefits.

所有情况下的基本问题都是相同的：如果代理人诚实行事，他们只会从他们所代表的实体的行为中获得一小部分利益，而如果他们遵循某种附带博弈的激励，那么他们就会吸收这些利益的全部份额。

Hence, even today, we are leaning on a lot of moral goodwill to make sure all our institutions don't get completely taken over by a chaotic maelstrom of side games overturning side games.

因此，即使在今天，我们仍然依靠大量的道德善意来确保我们所有的机构不会完全被副游戏推翻副游戏的混乱漩涡所接管。

If privacy decreases further, then these side games become even stronger, and the moral goodwill required to keep society functioning may become unrealistically high .

如果隐私进一步减少，那么这些附带游戏就会变得更加强烈，而维持社会运转所需的道德善意可能会变得不切实际的高。

Could social systems be redesigned to not have this problem?

可以重新设计社会系统来避免这个问题吗？

Unfortunately, game theory pretty much explicitly says that this is impossible (with one exception: total dictatorship) .

不幸的是，博弈论几乎明确地表明这是不可能的（有一个例外：完全独裁）。

In the version of game theory that focuses on individual choice - that is, the version that assumes that each participant makes decisions independently and that does not allow for the possibility of groups of agents working as one for their mutual benefit, mechanism designers have a very wide latitude to "engineer" games to achieve all kinds of specific outcomes.

在注重个人选择的博弈论版本中，即假设每个参与者独立做出决策，并且不允许一组代理为了互惠互利而合作的可能性，机制设计者有非常广泛的自由度来“设计”博弈以实现各种特定结果。

In fact, there are mathematical proofs that for any game at least one stable Nash equilibrium must exist, and so analyzing such games becomes tractable.

事实上，有数学证明，对于任何博弈，都必须存在至少一个稳定的纳什均衡，因此分析此类博弈变得容易处理。

But in the version of game theory that allows for the possibility of coalitions working together (ie.

但在博弈论的版本中，允许联盟合作的可能性（即。

"colluding"), called cooperative game theory , we can prove that there are large classes of games that do not have any stable outcome (called a " core ").

“共谋”），称为合作博弈论，我们可以证明存在大量没有任何稳定结果的博弈（称为“核心”）。

In such games, whatever the current state of affairs is, there is always some coalition that can profitably deviate from it.

在此类博弈中，无论当前事态如何，总有一些联盟可以偏离现状并从中获利。

If we take the math seriously, we come to the conclusion that the only way to create stable social structures is to have some limits on the amount of coordination between participants that can happen - and this implies strong privacy (including deniability) .

如果我们认真对待数学，我们会得出这样的结论：创建稳定的社会结构的唯一方法是对参与者之间可能发生的协调量进行一些限制——这意味着很强的隐私性（包括否认性）。

If you do not take the math seriously on its own, then it suffices to observe the real world, or at least think through what some of the principal-agent situations described above might become if they got taken over by side games, to come to the same conclusion.

如果你不认真对待数学本身，那么观察现实世界就足够了，或者至少思考一下上面描述的一些委托代理情况如果被副游戏接管可能会变成什么样子，从而得出相同的结论。

Note that this introduces another argument for why government backdoors are risky.

请注意，这引入了另一个关于政府后门为何存在风险的论点。

If everyone has unlimited ability to coordinate with everyone on everything, the outcome is chaos.

如果每个人都有无限的能力在所有事情上与每个人协调，那么结果就是混乱。

But if only a few people can do so, because they have privileged access to information, then the outcome is that they dominate.

但如果只有少数人能够做到这一点，因为他们拥有获取信息的特权，那么结果就是他们占主导地位。

One political party having backdoor access to the communications of the other can easily spell the end of the viability of having multiple political parties.

一个政党通过后门访问另一政党的通讯很容易导致多个政党的生存能力的终结。

One other important example of a social order that depends on limits to collusion in order to function is intellectual and cultural activity .

依赖于对勾结的限制来发挥作用的社会秩序的另一个重要例子是知识和文化活动。

Participation in intellectual and cultural activity is inherently an intrinsically-motivated public-spirited task: it's very difficult to make extrinsic incentives that target positive contributions to society, precisely because intellectual and cultural activity is, in part, the activity of determining which actions in society are positive actions in the first place .

参与知识和文化活动本质上是一项具有内在动机的公益性任务：很难制定针对社会积极贡献的外在激励，正是因为知识和文化活动在某种程度上首先是确定社会中哪些行为是积极行为的活动。

We can make approximate commercial and social incentives that point in the right direction, but they too require heavy supplementation by intrinsic motivation.

我们可以制定指向正确方向的近似商业和社会激励措施，但它们也需要内在动机的大量补充。

But this also means that this kind of activity is highly fragile to misaligned extrinsic motivations, particularly side games such as social pressure and coercion.

但这也意味着这种活动非常容易受到错误的外在动机的影响，尤其是社会压力和强制等附带游戏。

To limit the impact of such misaligned extrinsic motivations, privacy is once again required.

为了限制这种不一致的外在动机的影响，隐私再次成为必需。

Imagine a world where public-key and symmetric-key encryption did not exist at all.

想象一个根本不存在公钥和对称密钥加密的世界。

In this world, securely sending messages across long distances would inherently be vastly more difficult - not impossible , but difficult.

在这个世界上，安全地远距离发送消息本质上会更加困难——不是不可能，而是困难。

This would lead to far less international cooperation taking place, and as a result much more would continue to happen via in-person offline channels.

这将导致国际合作大大减少，因此更多的合作将继续通过面对面的线下渠道进行。

This would have made the world a much poorer, and more unequal, place.

这将使世界变得更加贫穷、更加不平等。

I will argue that today we are in exactly that place today, relatively to a hypothetical world of tomorrow where much stronger forms of cryptography were widely available - in particular, programmable cryptography , augmented by stronger forms of full-stack security and formal verification to give us strong assurances that this cryptography is being correctly used.

我想说的是，今天我们正处于这个位置，相对于明天的假设世界，那里广泛存在更强大的密码学形式 - 特别是可编程密码学，通过更强大的全栈安全性和形式验证形式增强，为我们提供了正确使用这种密码学的有力保证。

The Egyptian god protocols : three powerful and highly general-purpose constructions that can let us do computation on data while at the same time keeping the data completely private.

埃及神协议：三种强大且高度通用的结构，可以让我们对数据进行计算，同时保持数据完全私密。

An excellent source of examples is healthcare .

医疗保健就是一个很好的例子。

If you talk to anyone who has been working in longevity, pandemic resistance, or other fields in health in the past decade, they will universally tell you that the future of treatment and prevention is personalized, and effective response is highly dependent on high-quality data, both data about individuals and data about the environment.

如果你与过去十年中从事长寿、抗流行病或其他健康领域工作的任何人交谈，他们普遍会告诉你，未来的治疗和预防是个性化的，有效的应对措施高度依赖于高质量的数据，包括关于个人的数据和关于环境的数据。

Effectively protecting people against airborne disease requires knowing where the air quality is higher and lower, and in what regions pathogens are emerging at any given time.

有效保护人们免受空气传播疾病的侵害需要了解哪里的空气质量较高或较低，以及在任何特定时间哪些地区会出现病原体。

The most advanced longevity clinics all give customized recommendations and treatments based on data about your body, food preferences and lifestyle.

最先进的长寿诊所都会根据您的身体、食物偏好和生活方式的数据提供定制的建议和治疗。

However, each of these things are simultaneously massive privacy risks.

然而，这些事情同时都存在巨大的隐私风险。

I am personally aware of an incident where an air monitor was given to an employee that "phoned home" to a company, and the collected data was sufficient to determine when that employee was having sex.

我个人知道一个事件，一名员工给公司“打电话回家”时收到了空气监测仪，收集到的数据足以确定该员工何时发生性行为。

For reasons like this, I expect that by default many of the most valuable forms of data will not be collected at all, precisely because people are afraid of the privacy consequences .

出于这样的原因，我预计默认情况下许多最有价值的数据形式根本不会被收集，正是因为人们担心隐私后果。

And even when data does get collected, it will almost always not be widely shared or made available to researchers - in part for business reasons, but just as often because of the privacy concerns involved.

即使数据确实被收集起来，它也几乎总是不会被广泛共享或提供给研究人员——部分是出于商业原因，但同样经常是因为涉及隐私问题。

The same pattern is repeated in other spheres.

同样的模式也在其他领域重复出现。

There is a huge amount of information about ourselves in our actions in documents we write, messages that we send across various applications, and various actions on social media, that could all be used to more effectively predict and deliver the things that we need in our daily lives.

我们编写的文档中的行为、我们通过各种应用程序发送的消息以及社交媒体上的各种行为都包含大量关于我们自己的信息，这些信息都可以用来更有效地预测和提供我们日常生活中所需的东西。

There is a huge amount of information about how we interact with our physical environments that is not healthcare-related.

有大量关于我们如何与物理环境互动的信息，这些信息与医疗保健无关。

Today, we lack the tools to effectively use this information without creating dystopian privacy nightmares.

今天，我们缺乏有效使用这些信息而不造成反乌托邦隐私噩梦的工具。

Tomorrow, we may have those tools.

明天，我们可能就会拥有这些工具。

The best way to solve these challenges is to use strong cryptography, which can let us get the benefits of sharing data without the downsides.

解决这些挑战的最佳方法是使用强大的加密技术，这可以让我们获得共享数据的好处，而没有缺点。

The need to gain access to data, including personal data, will only become more important in the age of AI, as there is value from being able to locally train and run "digital twins" that can make decisions on our behalf based on high-fidelity approximations of our preferences.

在人工智能时代，获取包括个人数据在内的数据的需求只会变得更加重要，因为能够在本地训练和运行“数字孪生”是有价值的，这些“数字孪生”可以根据我们偏好的高保真近似值代表我们做出决策。

Eventually, this will also involve using brain-computer interface (BCI) technology, reading high-bandwidth inputs from our minds.

最终，这还将涉及使用脑机接口（BCI）技术，从我们的头脑中读取高带宽输入。

For this to not lead to a highly centralized global hegemony, we need ways for this to be done with respect for strong privacy.

为了避免这导致高度中心化的全球霸权，我们需要在尊重隐私的情况下实现这一点。

Programmable cryptography is the most trustworthy solution.

可编程密码学是最值得信赖的解决方案。

My AirValent air quality monitor.

我的 AirValent 空气质量监测仪。

Imagine a device like this that collects air quality data, makes aggregate statistics publicly available on an open-data map, and rewards you for providing the data - all while using programmable cryptography to avoid revealing your personal location data and verify that the data is genuine.

想象一下这样的设备，它收集空气质量数据，在开放数据地图上公开汇总统计数据，并奖励您提供的数据 - 同时使用可编程加密技术来避免泄露您的个人位置数据并验证数据是否真实。

Programmable cryptography techniques like zero-knowledge proofs are powerful, because they are like Lego bricks for information flow .

像零知识证明这样的可编程密码技术非常强大，因为它们就像信息流的乐高积木。

They can allow fine-grained control of who can see what information and, often more importantly, what information can be seen at all.

它们可以对谁可以看到哪些信息以及可以看到哪些信息进行细粒度控制，通常更重要的是。

For example, I can prove that I have a Canadian passport that shows I am over 18, without revealing anything else about myself.

例如，我可以证明我拥有加拿大护照，显示我已年满 18 岁，而无需透露任何有关我自己的信息。

This makes possible all kinds of fascinating combinations.

这使得各种令人着迷的组合成为可能。

I can give a few examples:

我可以举几个例子：

Left: depiction of privacy pools .

左：隐私池的描述。

Right: the Taiwanese Message Checker app, which gives the user the choice to turn on or off multiple filters, here from top to bottom: URL checking, cryptocurrency address checking, rumor checking

右图：台湾消息检查器应用程序，用户可以选择打开或关闭多个过滤器，这里从上到下：URL检查、加密货币地址检查、谣言检查

Recently, ChatGPT announced that it will start feeding your past conversations into the AI as context for your future conversations.

最近，ChatGPT 宣布它将开始将你过去的对话输入到人工智能中，作为你未来对话的背景。

That the trend will keep going in this direction is inevitable: an AI looking over your past conversations and gleaning insights from them is fundamentally useful .

这种趋势将继续朝这个方向发展是不可避免的：人工智能查看你过去的对话并从中收集见解从根本上是有用的。

In the near future, we will probably see people making AI products that make even deeper intrusions into privacy: passively collecting your internet browsing patterns, email and chat history, biometric data, and more.

在不久的将来，我们可能会看到人们开发出对隐私进行更深层次侵犯的人工智能产品：被动收集您的互联网浏览模式、电子邮件和聊天记录、生物识别数据等。

In theory, your data stays private to you.

理论上，您的数据对您来说是保密的。

In practice, this does not always seem to be the case:

在实践中，情况似乎并不总是如此：

" Wow!

“哇！

ChatGPT has a bug , and it pushes questions asked by others to me!

ChatGPT有一个bug，它把别人问的问题推给我！

This is a big privacy leak.

这是一个很大的隐私泄露。

I asked a question, got an error, and then ‘Retry' generated a question that I would never ask."

我问了一个问题，得到了一个错误，然后‘重试’生成了一个我永远不会问的问题。”

It's always possible that the privacy protection worked fine, and in this case the AI hallucinated by generating a question that Bruce never asked and answering that.

隐私保护总是有可能运作良好，在这种情况下，人工智能产生了幻觉，产生了布鲁斯从未问过的问题并回答了这个问题。

But there is no way to verify.

但没有办法验证。

Similarly, there is no way to verify whether or not our conversations are being used for training.

同样，无法验证我们的对话是否用于训练。

This is all deeply worrying.

这一切都令人深感担忧。

Even more disturbing are explicit AI surveillance use cases, where (physical and digital) data about people is being collected and analyzed on a large scale without their consent.

更令人不安的是明确的人工智能监控用例，其中有关人们的（物理和数字）数据在未经他们同意的情况下被大规模收集和分析。

Facial recognition is already helping authoritarian regimes crack down on political dissent on a mass scale.

面部识别已经在帮助独裁政权大规模镇压政治异议。

And the most worrying of all is the inevitable final frontier of AI data collection and analysis: the human mind .

而最令人担忧的是人工智能数据收集和分析不可避免的最终前沿：人类思维。

In principle, brain-computer interface technology has incredible power to boost human potential.

原则上，脑机接口技术对于提升人类潜力具有不可思议的力量。

Take the story of Noland Arbaugh , Neuralink's first patient as of last year:

以去年 Neuralink 的第一位患者 Noland Arbaugh 的故事为例：

The experimental device has given Arbaugh, now 30, a sense of independence.

这个实验装置给了现年 30 岁的阿博一种独立感。

Before, using a mouth-stick required someone to position him upright.

以前，使用口棒需要有人将他保持直立。

If he dropped his mouth-stick, it needed to be picked up for him.

如果他的口棒掉了，需要帮他捡起来。

And he couldn't use it for long or he'd develop sores.

而且他不能长时间使用它，否则会长疮。

With the Neuralink device, he has nearly full control of a computer.

有了 Neuralink 设备，他几乎可以完全控制计算机。

He can browse the web and play computer games whenever he wants, and Neuralink says he has set the human record for cursor control with a BCI .

他可以随时浏览网页、玩电脑游戏，Neuralink 表示，他已经用 BCI 创造了光标控制的人类记录。

Today, these devices are powerful enough to empower the injured and sick.

如今，这些设备功能强大，足以为伤者和病者提供帮助。

Tomorrow, they will be powerful enough to give fully healthy people an opportunity to work with computers, and communicate telepathically with each other (!!), at a level of efficiency that to us seems unimaginable.

明天，它们将强大到足以让完全健康的人有机会使用计算机，并以心灵感应方式相互交流（！！），其效率水平对我们来说似乎难以想象。

But actually interpreting the brain signals to make this kind of communication possible requires AI .

但实际上解释大脑信号以使这种通信成为可能需要人工智能。

There is a dark future that could arise naturally as a confluence of these trends, and we get silicon super-agents that are slurping up and analyzing information about everyone, including how they write, act and think.

随着这些趋势的融合，黑暗的未来可能会自然而然地出现，我们得到了硅超级代理，它们正在吞噬和分析每个人的信息，包括他们如何写作、行动和思考。

But there is also a brighter future, where we get the benefits of these technologies while preserving our privacy.

但还有一个更光明的未来，我们可以在保护隐私的同时享受这些技术的好处。

In 2008, the libertarian philosopher David Friedman wrote a book called Future Imperfect , in which he gave a series of sketches about the changes to society that new technologies might bring, not all of them in his favor (or our favor).

2008年，自由主义哲学家大卫·弗里德曼写了一本名为《不完美的未来》的书，其中他对新技术可能给社会带来的变化进行了一系列概述，但并非所有这些变化都对他有利（或对我们有利）。

In one section , he describes a potential future where we see a complicated interplay between privacy and surveillance, where growth in digital privacy counterbalances growth in surveillance in the physical world:

在一个章节中，他描述了一个潜在的未来，我们看到隐私和监视之间复杂的相互作用，其中数字隐私的增长抵消了物理世界监视的增长：

It does no good to use strong encryption for my email if a video mosquito is sitting on the wall watching me type.

如果一只视频蚊子坐在墙上看着我打字，那么对我的电子邮件使用强加密是没有好处的。

So strong privacy in a transparent society requires some way of guarding the interface between my realspace body and cyberspace ...

在一个透明的社会中如此强大的隐私需要某种方式来保护我的现实空间身体和网络空间之间的接口......

A low-tech solution is to type under a hood.

一个低技术含量的解决方案是在引擎盖下打字。

A high-tech solution is some link between mind and machine that does not go through the fingers – or anything else visible to an outside observer.

高科技解决方案是思想和机器之间的某种联系，这种联系不通过手指或外部观察者可见的任何其他东西。

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The conflict between realspace transparency and cyberspace privacy goes in the other direction as well ...

现实空间透明度和网络空间隐私之间的冲突也走向另一个方向……

My pocket computer encrypts my message with your public key and transmits it to your pocket computer, which decrypts the message and displays it through your VR glasses.

我的袖珍电脑用你的公钥加密我的消息并将其传输到你的袖珍电脑，后者解密消息并通过你的 VR 眼镜显示它。

To make sure nothing is reading the glasses over your shoulder, the goggles get the image to you not by displaying it on a screen but by using a tiny laser to write it on your retina.

为了确保没有任何东西从你肩膀上的眼镜上读取，护目镜不是通过将图像显示在屏幕上而是通过使用微小的激光将其写入你的视网膜上来将图像呈现给你。

With any luck, the inside of your eyeball is still private space.

幸运的话，你的眼球内部仍然是私人空间。

We could end up in a world where physical actions are entirely public, information transactions entirely private.

我们最终可能会进入一个身体行为完全公开、信息交易完全私密的世界。

It has some attractive features.

它有一些吸引人的特点。

Private citizens will still be able to take advantage of strong privacy to locate a hit man, but hiring him may cost more than they are willing to pay, since in a sufficiently transparent world all murders are detected.

普通公民仍然能够利用强大的隐私来定位杀手，但雇用他的成本可能超出他们愿意支付的费用，因为在一个足够透明的世界中，所有谋杀都会被发现。

Each hit man executes one commission then goes directly to jail.

每个杀手执行一项任务后直接入狱。

What about the interaction between these technologies and data processing?

这些技术和数据处理之间的交互如何？

On the one hand, it is modern data processing that makes the transparent society such a threat – without that, it would not much matter if you videotaped everything that happened in the world, since nobody could ever find the particular six inches of videotape he wanted in the millions of miles produced each day.

一方面，现代数据处理使透明社会成为如此大的威胁——如果没有这一点，即使你把世界上发生的一切都录下来也没有多大关系，因为没有人能在每天产生的数百万英里中找到他想要的特定的六英寸录像带。

On the other hand, the technologies that support strong privacy provide the possibility of reestablishing privacy, even in a world with modern data processing, by keeping information about your transactions from ever getting to anyone but you.

另一方面，支持强大隐私的技术提供了重建隐私的可能性，即使在具有现代数据处理的世界中也是如此，通过防止您的交易信息被除您之外的任何人获取。

Such a world may well be the best of all possible worlds: if all goes well, we would see a future where there is very little physical violence, but at the same time preserve our freedoms online, and ensure the basic functioning of political, civic, cultural and intellectual processes in society that depend on some limits to total information transparency for their ongoing operation.

这样的世界很可能是所有可能世界中最好的：如果一切顺利，我们将看到一个几乎没有人身暴力的未来，但同时保留我们的网络自由，并确保社会中政治、公民、文化和知识进程的基本运作，这些进程的持续运作依赖于对总体信息透明度的某些限制。

Even if it is not ideal, it is much better than the version where physical and digital privacy go to zero, eventually including privacy of our own minds, and in the mid-2050s we get thinkpieces arguing that of course it's unrealistic to expect to think thoughts that are not subject to lawful intercept, and responses to those thinkpieces consisting of links to the most recent incident where an AI company's LLM got an exploit which led to a year of 30 million people's private inner monologues getting leaked to the whole internet.

即使它并不理想，它也比物理和数字隐私归零的版本要好得多，最终包括我们自己思想的隐私。在 2050 年代中期，我们得到了一些思考文章，认为期望思考不受合法拦截的想法当然是不现实的，而对这些思考文章的回应包括最近一次事件的链接，其中一家人工智能公司的法学硕士被利用，导致一年内 3000 万人的私人内部信息被泄露。独白被泄露到整个互联网。

Society has always depended on a balance between privacy and transparency.

社会始终依赖于隐私和透明度之间的平衡。

In some cases I support limits to privacy too.

在某些情况下，我也支持对隐私的限制。

To give an example totally disconnected from the usual arguments that people give in this regard, I am supportive of the US government's moves to ban non-compete clauses in contracts , primarily not because of their direct impacts on workers, but because they are a way of forcing the tacit domain knowledge of companies to be partially open-source.

举一个与人们在这方面提出的通常论点完全无关的例子，我支持美国政府禁止合同中的竞业禁止条款的举措，主要不是因为它们对工人有直接影响，而是因为它们是迫使公司的默认领域知识部分开源的一种方式。

Forcing companies to be more open than they would like is a limitation of privacy - but I would argue a net-beneficial one.

强迫公司比他们想要的更加开放是对隐私的限制——但我认为这是一种对网络有利的限制。

But from a macro perspective, the most pressing risk of near-future technology is that privacy will approach all-time lows, and in a highly imbalanced way where the most powerful individuals and the most powerful nations get lots of data on everyone, and everyone else will see close to nothing.

但从宏观角度来看，近期技术最紧迫的风险是隐私将接近历史最低点，并且以一种高度不平衡的方式，最强大的个人和最强大的国家获得了每个人的大量数据，而其他人几乎什么也看不见。

For this reason, supporting privacy for everyone, and making the necessary tools open source, universal, reliable and safe is one of the important challenges of our time .

因此，支持每个人的隐私，并使必要的工具开源、通用、可靠和安全是我们这个时代的重要挑战之一。