Tristan Nitot – Keynote Speaker

Tristan Nitot first started developing software in the early 80s, at the age of 14, with the aim of making the digital world better for people. A great defender of free software and digital freedom, he is famous for founding Mozilla Europe in 2003 and managing the launch of the Firefox browser. Tristan is now a successful entrepreneur, author, hacktivist and an acclaimed speaker.

Inspired by his fascination towards micro-computing, computer networks and the Web, he taught himself the skills software development and ethical hacking. In 1997, he joined Netscape and participated in the launch of the Mozilla project.

After 17 years managing the non-profit project Mozilla, Tristan Nitot became Chief Product Officer of the open source project Cozy Cloud, a French startup offering a “private by design” solution for personal cloud.
He joined Qwant, a French ethical search engine, in June 2018 as Vice President of “Advocacy”. From September 2019 to January 2020, Tristan Nitot succeeded Eric Léandri as CEO of Qwant, putting him in charge of the search engine’s entire operational management.

Though, in January 2020, Tristan Nitot publicly announced that he was leaving the executive management of Qwant to devote himself to more technical projects.

After 3 years as a member of the French Digital Council (2013-2016), Tristan published “Surveillance: //” (C&F Éditions) in October 2016, in which he discusses how to protect online privacy in the digital age. He also published the book « Numérique, reprendre le contrôle » / “Digital, take back control” (Framabook) the same year.

As an advocate of open source and true privacy, Tristan Nitot has also been a member of the CNIL Prospective Committee since September 2015, and has also joined the French Consultative Digital Ethics Committee.