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