I’ve been building Confer: end-to-end encryption for AI chats. With Confer, your conversations are encrypted so that nobody else can see them. Confer can’t read them, train on them, or hand them over – because only you have access to them.
The core idea is that your conversations with an AI assistant should be as private as your conversations with a person. Not because you’re doing something wrong, but because privacy is what lets you think freely.
I founded Signal with a simple premise: when you send someone a message, only that person should be able to read it. Not the company transmitting it, not the government, not anyone else on the internet. It took years, but eventually this idea became mainstream enough that even Facebook adopted end-to-end encryption.
These days I spend a lot of time “talking to” LLMs. They are amazing. A big part of what makes them so powerful is the conversational interface – so once again I find myself sending messages on the internet; but these messages are very different than before.
The medium is the message
Marshall McLuhan argued that the form of a medium matters more than its content. Television’s format - passive, visual, interrupt-driven - shaped society more than any particular broadcast. The printing press changed how we think, not just what we read.
You could say that LLMs are the first technology where the medium actively invites confession.
Search trained us to be transactional: keywords in, links out. When you type something into a search box, it has the “feeling” of broadcasting something to a company rather than communicating in an intimate space.
The conversational format is different. When you’re chatting with an “assistant,” your brain pattern-matches to millennia of treating dialogue as intimate. You elaborate. You think out loud. You share context. That’s a big part of what makes it so much more useful than search – you can iterate, elaborate, change your mind, ask follow-up questions.
One way to think about Signal’s initial premise is that the visual interfaces of our tools should faithfully represent the way the underlying technology works: if a chat interface shows a private conversation between two people, it should actually be a private conversation between two people, rather than a “group chat” with unknown parties underneath the interface.
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