Ente: Private by Design

Firewalls Don't Stop Dragons Podcast

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