BlackBerry head makes privacy pitch as he announces smart city offering

BlackBerry Inc. CEO John Chen is so protective of his private data that he refuses to use all of the functions on his BlackBerry KEY2 smartphone. “You know, I don’t even turn on GPS,” Chen said onstage at the Toronto Global Forum on Monday, in conversation with business journalist Amanda Lang.

“I’m amazed how each and every one of us are willing to give up what’s most valuable that we have, which is our data, in exchange for convenience.”

Chen spoke about BlackBerry’s emphasis on privacy and securityfocused software services as it has moved away from competing with the likes of Google and Apple in the smartphone realm.

The event took place the same morning that BlackBerry announced a new Security Credential Management System (SCMS) for cities and car companies, aimed at securing smart cities systems and autonomous vehicles. “BlackBerry is addressing this need by making available today, with no service fees to automakers and public offices involved in smart city and connected-vehicle pilots, a SCMS service which provides the mechanism for vehicles and infrastructure, such as traffic lights, to exchange information in a trustworthy and private manner using digital certificates,” the company’s press materials said. The system will be tested in partnership with Invest Ottawa at a secure 16-kilometre track for autonomous vehicles built to resemble a miniature city. When Chen mentioned this project at the Toronto Global Forum, Lang was quick to ask if this was BlackBerry’s way of taking a shot at Google.

“No, I think we’re just doing things that they would rather not do for free,” Chen replied. Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc. is involved in self-driving cars through a subsidiary called Waymo, and a smart-cities pilot project on Toronto’s waterfront through another subsidiary called Sidewalk Labs.

But unlike the technology companies that traffic in data for advertising purposes, Chen emphasized that BlackBerry’s ethos for things such as autonomous vehicles and data-driven urban technology doesn’t rely on monetizing information about its users. “Everything we do from encrypting your messages to delivering it, storing it, we never used your data, unlike a lot of different companies that unfortunately had a lot of higher market caps. You know, you are their product, because your data is their product. We don’t do anything to touch your data,” he said.

When he was asked if datadriven companies such as Google and Facebook are too big and too powerful to stop already, Chen suggested that the way to shift the balance of power is as simple as government regulation. “I think this is a public-private policy issue. Are they too big ? Well, I’m not suggesting it, but if you cut off their ability to gather new data, then their data becomes stale, then the very big become meaningless. So the answer is no,” he said. “I think we need to have a better set of policies on data privacy, and it has to be a public-private collaboration.”