offkey

Finding our friends without depending on a social network is the first step to gaining control over our own online lives. Once we’ve found them, the next step is to build a network that enables us to collaborate, share, and communicate with each other however we wish. What we need is a friend-to-friend network.

Our Friends

A friend-to-friend, or f2f network is a secure network built around people you know. It has a lot in common with the VPNs (virtual private networks) companies use to connect remote offices and workers with their main corporate servers. Both are private because they are built around encrypted connections and both are very flexible because almost any service or network traffic can travel over them once a connection is made. Unlike VPNs, friend-to-friend networks are not designed to tie every member into an central office that provides the email, IM, or other communication service to network members. Members of f2f networks are friends, equal peers that are capable of running services on their own, as well as of benefiting from the services provided by their friends.

Our Capabilities

Just like actual networks of friends, f2f networks grow more capable as the network grows and as the individual members grow. When I was in High School, the combined hardware, software, and network connections of all my friends’ computers would not have been capable of much. Maybe we could have run an Instant Messaging service for each other. Today, larger and more public groups have built incredibly capable systems out of those same parts. Folding@Home has turned the spare processor cycles of participants into one of the world’s largest data processing machines. Skype, the peer-to-peer telephone network, is the world’s largest international telephone carrier, while the media files we share from our hard drives using various other peer-to-peer tools account for more web traffic than all the web servers combined.

We can do all that but we still feel like we have to rely on some third party for IM. Maybe the software we have is too hard to configure or use; we’ll look at those issues later. I just want to make clear that we have the technological capabilities to do things far more amazing than share photos and email each other. Those routine communications should be put where they most naturally belong, in our own hands and the hands of our friends.

In Our Hands

Our friends are responsible and responsive in a way that social network operators never will be. Consider the difference between when a friend broadcasts your secrets to the world and when a third party like Facebook does. If your friends start sharing your information, they face risks to their reputation, their own secrets, and the likelihood that people will share information with them in the future. We have social expectations that information shared by such a "gossip" is suspect and we have a feeling that a friend whose trust is betrayed deserves the benefit of the doubt.

We have this whole range of social systems to preserve the privacy of our communications with friends and we have built legal protections around them. When we communicate with each other directly, rights like the 4th amendment protect our letters from government search while the 5th amendment shields us against having to reveal any possibly illegal activities we may get up to with our friends. When you give your data to third parties these protections vanish and all the normal social structures are reversed.

The Alternative

You can’t shun Facebook just because they have broadcast your private information to the world, nor can you stop giving them that private information. Sharing everything with them is built into the network architecture. So when they broadcast your private information to the world, your only social response is to put up with it or leave your "social network" entirely. Your legal options are just as bad. The legal protections we built against government power simply don’t apply to information you voluntarily give third parties. In the hands of a third party, your information transforms into information about you, and information about you can be handed over to government or sold to someone else freely.

The only thing that governs how your information is used when you give it to a service like Facebook is the "privacy" policy you agreed to without reading it. No one reads those things, and with good reason. The basic privacy policy for an internet service says three things: 1) the service operator can do whatever they want with your data, 2) the operator is free to sell information about you to anyone it wishes, and 3) they can change the terms of the privacy policy at any time without your consent. That’s the real law of "social networks".

Our Choice

If that is all the protection we want for the communications in our lives, then we can do nothing. That’s the world we live in now. If we want back any of the social or legal controls over our information that we’re used to having in our daily lives, we must rebuild them. Building a f2f network is one of the most effective things we can do to regain control over our information, both in legal and practical terms. It is also one of the friendliest.

Inside the f2f network we share resources, we enable services for each other, and we stop providing our information to people who want to study us. When you leave a centralized communication tool, you make it harder for data brokers, private and government alike, to learn about your life. You also make it harder for them to learn about your friends and family by studying your interactions with them. Each person who leaves makes everyone a little bit safer. It’s what friends should do.

Posts in this series

Part 1 – The Idea: Freedom Box

Part 2 – Finding each other: Dynamic DNS Facebook

Part 3 – Talking amongst ourselves: Friend-to-Friend Network

Part 4 – Putting the pieces together: Freedom Box schematic

Part 5 – Making it easy: Look and Feel