The Future of Privacy and How to Stop it
Duration: 00:00:00
Speaker: Kurt Opsahl
Type: Talk
Expertise: No prior knowledge
Event: Devcon 8
Date: Nov 2026
Privacy is essential to a free society, as the building block on which our fundamental rights stand, and strong privacy enhancing technologies are necessary to enable people to protect their rights in the face of an increasingly surveilled world. These technologies are increasingly getting targeted, with policymakers pushing for backdoors and other required weaknesses or mandated surveillance capabilities, and more recently threats to the people who write the code and provide the services that make privacy possible, not just the people who use it.
This talk will discuss why we need strong privacy and the tools that enable it, the threat landscape that we face as individuals and as builders, and how we can push back, both with building for resilient privacy enhancing technologies and by working together to create the legal and policy space necessary for a free society.
