Lisbon (AFP)

The growing number of Internet users who want to protect their privacy and personal data has become a must-see market, according to the whistleblowers, pioneers of the digital economy and young entrepreneurs gathered at the Web Summit.

"Undeniably, we are witnessing a movement that is pushing people to want to regain their right to privacy," says Paddy Cosgrave, the Irishman, organizer of this important startup and new technologies fair that is being held this week in Lisbon.

And as a result, "the offer of individual encryption of each device, to make any strummed message unreadable by a third party, is expanding," he cites as an example.

"There is a whole new business sector around digital identity, data management and monetization by all of us," says American Brittany Kaiser.

"People are really worried," says the former Cambridge Analytica repentant who, in the spring of 2018, found himself at the heart of the Facebook data scandal, with the alleged goal of winning the Brexit in the UK and Donald Trump in the US presidential election in 2016.

She has since created the foundation "Own your data" and continues to denounce the abuse of a sector that makes profits from the exploitation of personal data of users without their knowledge.

- "Protective sphere" -

During one of the conferences in which she participated, among the thirty devoted to this theme, the public seems sensitive to its arguments. When asked, "Did social networks destroy our privacy?", Three-quarters of respondents said yes.

Brittany Kaiser admits, however, that it will be "difficult" to make products and services that respond to this new concern reach the threshold of "mass adoption".

But "minorities can transform markets," argues Brendan Eich, chanter of a "confidentiality by default".

Creator of one of the most used programming languages, he came to Lisbon to praise the merits of Brave, an internet browser supposed to allow Internet users to protect themselves against the collection of their personal data and unwanted advertising.

"Awareness is growing and will not go away," said AFP co-founder of Mozilla, a non-profit organization behind the independent Firefox browser.

Presented as the inventor of the first virtual currency, David Chaum also believes that the digital economy is going through "a historic moment". According to him, "it is very difficult to solve all the problems of confidentiality but it is necessary and sufficient to create a protective sphere for each person".

With his project Elixxir, he is working on a mobile messaging application coupled to a virtual payment system type WeChat, flagship platform of the Chinese giant Tencent, but which would be inaccessible to governments.

- "Basic requirement" -

In the wake of these pioneers disappointed by the evolution of the digital economy, the British James Chance is 30 years old to leave Google to launch its startup yourself.online, which offers Internet users to find personal data remained public without their consent .

"The most shocking is the scale of the problem," he told AFP in front of his small booth at the Web Summit.We find personal data for 80% of people who ask us. telephone number, an e-mail address or a date of birth. "

"Some companies collect the traces we leave on the web and use them to determine if someone can get a job or a loan," he says.

Worried around the world for not enough data security, Facebook has recently promised to encrypt conversations from its end-to-end Messenger instant messaging platform, as is its other WhatsApp application.

The protection of privacy has become "a basic requirement of users," admits Jay Sullivan, hired last summer by Facebook to work at Messenger as director of confidentiality and integrity.

The time when his new boss Mark Zuckerberg could brazenly assert that the desire to safeguard his private life was no longer part of the "social norm" seems to be over. It was almost ten years ago.

© 2019 AFP