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
Further Info
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
