Ente: Private by Design

It’s rare these days to find a well-designed and useful application that was made to be private from the get-go. Too many apps today view your personal data as a cash cow to be mercilessly milked, claiming to value your privacy when they really value the extra revenue they can make off of your private data. When I find useful apps that are private by design, especially ones that can replace more popular apps that harvest our data, I like to call attention to them: in this case, Ente Photos. Today I’ll ask the founder and CEO why privacy is important to him and how it influenced his design approach. Interview Notes Ente Photo: https://ente.io/ Ente Auth: https://ente.io/auth/  Ente’s Machine Learning: https://ente.io/ml/  Ken Thompon’s lecture on trust: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/358198.358210  Further Info My book: https://fdsd.me/book  My newsletter: https://fdsd.me/newsletter  Support the mission: https://fdsd.me/support  Give the gift of privacy and security: https://fdsd.me/coupons  Get your Firewalls Don’t Stop Dragons Merch! https://fdsd.me/merch  Table of Contents 0:00:00: Intro 0:04:08: interview terminology 0:06:44: Why did you start Ente and why do you care about privacy? 0:15:23: Why should we trust Ente with our private data? 0:20:14: What private information does Ente collect? 0:25:12: How hard is it for 3rd party apps to integrate with the OS? 0:29:39: Is Ente more private than Apple Photos with ADP enabled? 0:31:40: How hard is it to migrate from Google or Apple Photos to Ente? 0:34:30: Is facial recognition metadata in a standard, portable format? 0:35:51: How hard is it to export photos from Ente? 0:37:57: Does Ente Auth allow for easy export and backup? 0:39:28: How do you backup your Ente photos? 0:41:12: How much of Ente’s AI photo processing is purely on-device? 0:45:51: How do you vet third party software libraries for privacy? 0:49:07: What data could Ente give, if required, to law enforcement? 0:52:43: How can we pass on our legacy of memories to our kids? 0:54:55: What’s next for Ente? 0:59:43: Interview wrap-up 1:00:56: Patron podcast preview 1:01:36: Looking ahead