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