AI is the first major technological revolution where we know what happens when privacy is left out.
This is why “privacy” is booming. Not just reflected in token prices, but how AI products are being rolled out.
Let me explain:
For the last 8 years, I’ve worked across a spectrum of privacy products, both consumer and B2B/infra. My passion for the space started with the work of Shoshana Zuboff and her writing on surveillance capitalism.
Surveillance capitalism emerged from the economic structures that formed around the early internet. The dominant model made human experience legible, extractable, and exploitable. Search engines and the platform economy were instrumental in this shift, creating powerful new incentives around capturing attention, collecting data, and turning the user into the product.
I saw blockchains as part of a structural response to this problem. But building privacy into public ledgers turned out to be incredibly hard. Privacy wasn’t considered at the architectural layer when much of the industry was first being built, and retrofitting has proven challenging.
Now, there has been an incredible amount of progress in privacy infrastructure. Today, privacy is increasingly front and center for people serious about building the next generation of the internet.
But what excites me most is that we’re now witnessing the biggest technological shift and arguably the biggest catalyst for privacy ever: AI.
AI is changing the way we interact with information. Search is already being transformed as AI-generated answers increasingly replace the traditional journey from query → search results → website. Studies of Google’s AI Overviews have found significant reductions in outbound organic clicks when AI answers appear.
And for the first time in my career, I’m seeing privacy being considered from first principles.
AI creates a fundamentally different tension and dynamic with privacy.
We have spent two decades learning the consequences of centralized data extraction: hacks, leaks, profiling, surveillance, and the gradual normalization of handing our most personal information to centralized platforms.
The public is increasingly aware of that tradeoff. People hesitate to put sensitive information into AI chats, give agents access to their phones, finances, messages, or personal accounts. Organizations face the same concerns.
Yet the paradox is that AI becomes more useful as it has more context. The more an AI understands about you, your work, your relationships, your preferences, and your environment, the more useful it can become. Untamed, we risk the biggest honeypot of sensitive data ever.
But this where I think the story of privacy and AI is fundamentally different from the early internet.
We didn’t really solve the privacy problem in the first wave of the internet. Native tech-driven, cryptographic solution lagged behind. Regulatory measures like the EU’s 1995 Data Protection Directive was an early attempt to establish a framework for protecting personal data, but it took more than two decades before the GDPR became applicable in 2018, which was broadly the result of lack of enforcement over the previous decade.
AI is moving far faster but so are the privacy-preserving technologies and social awareness.
We are developing cutting edge encrypted computing infra / privacy products alongside the technology that will consume enormous amounts of personal and organizational data, rather than trying to retrofit it decades later.
That’s what makes this moment so exciting to me.
At Arcium, we’ve been working toward this future for a long time. And we’re now on the verge of introducing some of the most advance private AI tech out there.
Beyond the fear-mongering headlines and doomsday scenarios, I believe there is a future where AI works for us, accelerating human progress at phenomenal rates while preserving the things that make us the most human.
This makes me extremely optimistic about that future.