Hackfest 2023 - Back to the Future

NOTH1NG T0 HID3
2023-10-14, 13:30–14:20, Track #2
Language: English

This talk revisits the theme of personal privacy in the digital world, this time centring around the "I've got nothing to hide" argument. A beam of intensive light is shed on the motivation behind caring about one's privacy. We go in depth into what we can do to stay private and should we even try to do it at all. We talk about where we as an global society were able to fix privacy and where we have failed. New topics previously not covered are discussed, such as AI/LLMs.


  1. Confusion of the inverse logical fallacy (all criminal activity is hidden, so all that is hidden must be criminal).
    1a. Schrödinger's video camera
  2. Why is privacy important (actual rebuttals to "if you're doing nothing wrong, you've got nothing to hide")
    2a. Data hoarding → Blackmail, impersonation
    2b. Today’s authority might become totalitarian or inhumane
    2c. Herd immunity: many people not hiding anything, make the few stand out more and cause (misplaced) suspicion
  3. What do "normal people" have to say? What reactions have I've been getting since my previous version of the talk on a similar topic?
  4. Real examples of privacy nightmares.
    4a. China & Hong Kong (all the weird stuff)
    4b. Facebook (court rulings, suicide prevention algorithm)
    4c. EU (cookies, GPDR)
    4d. UK
  5. The end of end-to-end encryption
  6. Stories from the privacy zealot (How to achieve privacy and how much it cost me)
    6a. Mobile apps
    6b. IT certification exams
    6c. Airport scanners
    6x. more examples to follow
  7. Specific examples of where we were able to fix privacy
    7a. And where we failed (this is sadly larger than (6))
  8. Summary — do we fix it or what?

Are you releasing a tool?

No

Kirils Solovjovs is an IT policy activist, bug bounty hunter, and the most visible white-hat hacker in Latvia having discovered and responsibly disclosed or reported multiple security vulnerabilities in information systems of both national and international significance. He has extensive experience in social engineering, penetration testing, network flow analysis, reverse engineering, and the legal dimension.

He has developed the jailbreak tool for Mikrotik RouterOS, as well as created e-Saeima, helping the Latvian Parliament become the first parliament in the world that is prepared for a fully remote legislative process. He has spoken at many amazing conferences including Hack In The Box, Hack in Paris, TyphoonCon, MCH2022, 35C3, CONFidence, BalCCon, Nullcon, and of course Hackfest.

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