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We are told that tracking is the price we pay for free content. Wen-jie Lu is coming to Bangkok to show that the maths says otherwise.
For the last twenty years, the economic model of the Internet has been based on a simple, unspoken contract: “We give you content; you hand over your privacy”.
To fund the websites, videos, and apps we love, we have allowed an entire industry of AdTech intermediaries to build detailed dossiers on our lives. They track where we click, what we buy, and who we are. It is the ultimate power imbalance: they know everything about us, and we know next-to-nothing about how that data is used.
Many of us have responded by opting out entirely, by installing ad-blockers and privacy shields. While this protects the individual it needlessly threatens some of the creators who rely on that revenue. We are trapped on the horns of a dilemma: surveillance or unsustainability.
A third way: cryptography
But what if we didn’t have to choose?
This is the question explored by Wen-jie Lu’s talk for the Cybersecurity & Privacy track at FOSSASIA 2026.
Wen-jie is a privacy engineer who specialises in multi-party computation (MPC). This is a field of cryptography that sounds like magic but is actually just rigorous mathematics: it allows different parties to compute a result (like “Did this ad lead to a sale?”) without any party ever seeing another’s private data.
The session: Privacy-Preserving Ads – What It Means for You
On Monday, March 9, Wen-jie will present Privacy-Preserving Ads – What It Means for You.
This session attacks the surveillance economy at its root. He will demonstrate how we can build ad systems where:
- The advertiser knows their ad worked.
- The publisher gets paid.
- The user remains completely anonymous.
By splitting the data between multiple servers that cannot collude, MPC ensures that no single entity — not the advertiser, not the ad network, not even the browser — can reconstruct your identity.
Why this matters
If we can prove that privacy and profitability are not mutually exclusive then we remove the justification for surveillance capitalism. We can have a thriving, free Internet that respects human rights by design.
Wen-jie is showing us that we don’t need to destroy the ad industry to fix it. We just need to upgrade the maths.
Join us
- Session: Privacy-Preserving Ads – What It Means for You
- Speaker: Wen-jie Lu
- Track: Cybersecurity & Privacy
- When: March 9, 13:45
- Tickets: EventYay
