felix-from-aircloak

Disclosing potential conflicts of interest is always a good idea...

In your opinion, should all privacy & security companies be crowdfunded?

How about large customers? If you follow the money, you might find companies be dependent on a few large contracts more than others. How much disclosure is needed?

I believe the way to do this is set your tech up in such a transparent way that no trust is needed.

Yes, we have received funding from EXIST Research Transfer, which is coming from a European fund. This fund is "no strings attached", i.e. they didn't have any impact on our direction.

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Is this something that worries you?

Nope. I doubt many of our customers are on Reddit anyway. I genuinely think it's an important and interesting topic to talk about.

Hah, sorry about that...

Obviously no. As I wrote somewhere above, it did serve the important purpose of putting privacy back on the priority list for everyone. Gartner proclaimed privacy to be one of the top 10 strategic topics for 2019. This is, I think, a win for everyone.

But those that didn't care before – I would say they still largely don't care.

Totally stupid. Because you can use one of those guys instead.

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Honestly, before we had them, I thought blocking your webcam was the most ridiculous thing. I've changed my mind significantly. It's weird, but it gives me peace of mind to know that nobody can watch me through there, even if I totally know my life is mostly boring as heck and it would be a pretty pointless thing to do.

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The more you work in this field, the crazier examples of blatant privacy violations you see. We're kind of working towards a world where you don't have to add a sticker to your computer. I like this design by Huawei, for example (yes, I know, it's ironic).

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Having said all that, the highest likelihood for someone watching me without my knowledge would be in case I forget to switch off one of the many video chat solutions we use...