I called a close member of my family this morning and got to know they fell for an e-KYC impersonation scam which manipulated them to reveal too many personal details. The result - a fully drained bank account. Earlier this week, I learned about Coldcard wallet incident when led to the loss of millions of dollars worth Bitcoin, where the victims did everything in their capacity to avoid such scammy situation, but still ended of getting scammed.
How does this change things for me? I am not sure. Although, this is making me think less about protecting my accumulated modest wealth and put it to work to combat the scams, especially that leverage AI for misinformation and manipulation. I would like to start a "Digital Authenticity" lab and dedicate significant productive time of my life working on frameworks that let us prove our authenticity and provide tools to shield us from misinformation and manipulation. I want to extend this outlook to personal life as well. I will spend my quality time interacting with authentic people. Now I am on a train from Zurich to Zug overseeing Zurich lake from the window, and marvelling at what Switzerland as a society managed to accomplish and be one of the few states that still continues to be trusted.
It is almost 4 PM in Zug, and I'm at the Bibliothek co-working space pondering about the way forward. I think the most immediate actionable thing I can do is to finish my MAS thesis at ETH Zurich due on August 10th. This thesis will be submitted to the chair of Information Management and is focuses around managing authentic and synthetic content using C2PA framework. I will need to find a way to network and connect with people who care about content authenticity in India and grow A10city's contribution footprint in the digital authenticity domain.