The shift to connected vehicles will bring tremendous benefits to their owners – including advanced warning of road hazards, reducing the costs of maintenance, preventing fraudulent used car sales, or pricing driver insurance more accurately. However, these benefits are predicated on the generation of a medley of sensitive data. Put simply, there are few possessions as personal as a personal vehicle.
Four out of five Americans now say that when it comes to companies collecting data about them, the risks outweigh the benefits – they’re mostly referring to their casual, free use of digital products, rather than a US$35,000 purchase, inside which they will spend an average of 8 hours of their week, and which exposes their whereabouts, routines and habits. At the same time, regulations such as GDPR and CCPA are becoming increasingly prevalent and stringent, bolstering privacy consciousness – but even without new rules, anti-surveillance preferences amongst consumers are on the rise. There has never been a better time for a privacy-protecting personal vehicle.
End-to-end encryption (E2EE) together with fine-grained, vehicle owner-led access control will provide the strongest guarantees that their privacy is not being compromised, whilst still unlocking the myriad benefits. In this talk, we will discuss the strategic value, differentiating power and technical viability of E2EE in the context of connected vehicles, including presenting a working demo of OBD data being shared in a trust-minimizing, scaleable, E2EE manner, via the NuCypher network.
About Derek and Arjun
Derek Pierre juggles roles as both a Business Development Lead and an Engineer at NuCypher. He is a former software engineer at BlackBerry and Dell. He studied Computer Science at the University of Waterloo and has an MBA from the University of Toronto. He has worked on a variety of technologies that include product integrations and standardizations, core platform/API development, and proxy re-encryption.
Arjun Hassard works on product, network design and data science at NuCypher, including co-developing the network’s economic protocol. Previously, he led AI/NLP products at Factmata – an anti-misinformation venture backed by Mark Cuban and Biz Stone. He also ran product at SyndicateRoom, one of Europe’s largest crowdfunding platforms. Arjun studied Physics at Imperial College London (UK) and published Energy Policy research whilst at Kyoto University (Japan).
NuCypher
NuCypher is a data privacy layer for blockchain and decentralized applications. It gives developers a way to store, share, and manage private data on public blockchains.