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 [...]
So you want to take control of your own online life. Where to begin? Our first step is the razzle dazzle of the social networking tools: the ability to find your friends. Social networking tools are made up of mostly unremarkable parts like email, IM, and photo sharing, etc. The selling point is not that [...]
I’ve spent the last few posts trying to explain the philosophical and social reasons why we need to move away from centralized, intermediated tools for communicating with each other. There is more to be said on that topic but, with LibrePlanet later this week, I want to talk directly about how we can replace these [...]
Aaron Williamson, one of my friends and colleagues at the SFLC, put up a great piece yesterday running through the various panoptic services that google offers. It is well put and worth reading in full. Unfortunately, Aaron’s site requires registration in order to leave comments so I’m going to respond here instead and let Planet [...]
Setting the stage Privacy was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. I have spent the last year talking with people about privacy and reading about what it looks like in our new network-connected world and everyone agrees: privacy is dead and it was the birth of our information society that [...]