Privacy [prahy-vuh-see]
noun.
: the state of being free from unwanted or undue intrusion or disturbance in one's private life or affairs; freedom to be let alone.
: freedom from damaging publicity, public scrutiny, secret surveillance, or unauthorized disclosure of one’s personal data or information, as by a government, corporation, or individual.
Quick Recap:
We now have,
Product Requirement Doc (Live Doc) - PRD:
⚡️⚡️ BetterFriend PRD Building Publicly v1 ⚡️⚡️
A New Logo & Branding: that feels like a family-owned diner than an alarm clock
Vision:
“Remind me my friends’ birthdays where I will 100% see it. Always reliable.”
User Interface: Text focused. Testing Voice & Video in the future.
User Experience: Creating Magic Moments. Evoke emotions. 1st impressions matter.
In my last post about User Interface (UI), I mentioned a few companies that are creating hardware that are always on and can be operated with just voice.
One of them is Limitless.AI. They offer a pendant that’s always on and record just about everything we hear. Concerning, but maybe the future is headed this way???
The parent company of Limitless actually was founded about 5 years ago, called Rewind.AI.
The Founder & CEO went viral on twitter by building Rewind publicly, and raised a lot of money - $33 million to be exact at $350M valuation.
I thought the concept was cool - being able to remember everything you’ve done in the past is a game changer. But as someone who worked in crypto and is very private with my personal life, my internal alarm started sounding louder and louder.
Rewind claims that they are End-to-End Encrypted. What this means is that all the data are putting into a box that’s password protected, and only your machine / phone / computer can open it. The box is stored with them, but they are just storing the box and can’t open the box.
The most important part that I hope you’d take away from today’s post is to “Trust but Verify”. This should practiced in all parts of life. In this case, how do we verify Rewind’s claim?
Well, we can’t. For competitive reasons, they are not publicly showing how they are doing the End-To-End encryption, which is known as Open-Source. The only path here is to “trust the founders”.
Now a quick google search would land you to this reddit post:
Well there are lots of comments. One stood out. It’s from an angry former employee of the Rewind CEO’s previous company called Optimizely. She apparently filed a lawsuit against them and won and wrote a very detailed personal response on Reddit before deleting her account. They stories are pretty bad.
I want to say that we are not here to pick on Limitless or Rewind. We are here to call out products that claim things but don’t allow users to verify them.
Specifically in this case, making a statement of End-to-End Encryption and not making it Open-Source.
In fact, many others have caught on. People like the concept, they see privacy issues.
Rewind Open Source alternative - Reddit
Rewind Open Source alternative - YCombinator
and others have built an open-source verifiable version of Rewind here:
https://community.openai.com/t/openai-powered-open-source-rewind-with-cursor-like-chat/1124197
My stance on this
Basically - personal & relationship information should 100% be encrypted end to end, and open-source so it is verifiable.
BetterFriend.xyz will need to follow this golden standard….but we are having some trouble here with v1.0….
Chatbot Problem
I got super excited about end-to-end encryption and open-source and forgot that not everything is in my control in the v1.0.
Specifically, I can’t do encryption on the user side with Whatsapp in the middle - in other words the part of letting the user have the key that they can only access and keep all the friends information in a safebox that I store for them doesn’t work if I have to give Whatsapp a pair of their keys, and also they are not allowed to have keys with Whatsapp in the middle.
The only way to run this in the future that’s completely encrypted on the user’s side and runs in the background to remind them every month / every week / every day is to be able to encrypt it and decrypt it locally on their phone.
This requires me to have a native iOS and Android app - the same way that 1Password / LastPass and Signal / Whatsapp / Telegram do.
This way in the future, we can encrypt End-to-End to allow photos / videos and other sensitive data to be stored locally on their phone. They hold the keys, I help them store the boxes (big amount of data).
At some point, as a privacy maximalist, I’d want to find an alternative where users can have personal cloud / storage set-up at home. I really do believe personal cloud storage / personal AI processing are the future one day.
This is the best set-up I’ve seen so far and I’m excited to have this set-up one day when I’m more permanent:
Personal Private Cloud by Synology
Nvidia seems to believe in having personal AI at home as well.
Nvidia’s $3,000 ‘Personal AI Supercomputer’ Will Let You Ditch the Data Center
I promise if BetterFriend Project hits 1000 paid users, I will move forward to build an open-source, End-to-End encrypted mobile app to help more people stay in touch with their loved ones, privately.
Quick Update:
Looking at my own reading behavior, I realized I’m not reading every day. I’m reading many things at once, on a specific day.
Therefore, the daily posting is actually not great for people wanting to keep up. It’s like HBO dropping 1 episode per week then you have to wait. The anticipation is good, but I like Netflix’s dropping the entire season for you to binge watch model even better.
I’m still writing every day, I will edit and post all 7 days at once. I haven’t finalized on which day yet. If you have a preference on a day, please let me know in the comments!
Follow the progress here:
(⚡️BetterFriend Project Day 8 - 38)