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Document: WM-032 P. Webb
Category: Life 2018.05.17
Decentralization, Privacy, and Everything Between
Abstract
Rah rah, fight the powah!
Body
This post is a combination of at least *three* different posts I
intended to write and publish over the past year. They inevitably
came to the similar conclusions and it makes sense. In my mind,
decentralization and privacy are mutually beneficial. In the wake of
exposure to privacy violations by Google, Facebook, &c to the general
public, it seemed like now would be a great time to share
my thoughts.
1. Privacy
> If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're
> the product being sold. — Andrew Lewis (blue_beetle)[1]
This oft-referenced quote was posted on MetaFilter on August 26th,
2010. It's been nearly a decade since then and clearly, that quote
is timeless. The increasingly parasitic advertising industry is
fed by a never-ending supply of user-data gathered and sold by
almost every ~~online~~ ~~offline~~ service. Oh yeah, that's
right; you can be tracked ~~offline~~. The data gatherers are your
usual suspects: Facebook, Google, Twitter, as well as unknown data
brokers of which new ones are launching seemingly weekly. Have you
looked at the blacklist of your favorite ad blocker? It's
a *mess*.
The aforementioned data gatherers are in the business of keeping
your attention. The visual redesigns, additional features, and so
on are not created to make a better product for your perusal. Oh
no, these changes are A/B tested and analyzed to ensure that you
spend as much time using those products as possible. Why? So that
app can send usage data and patterns back to the mothership to
collect your info to update their algorithms and sell to
advertisers for a pretty penny and the cycle continues.
Before this year, casual Internet users would roll their eyes at
everything I've said thus far, `¯\_(ツ)_/¯`, and say something
inane like, "It is what it is." or, "I have nothing to hide."
> Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because
> you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't
> care about free speech because you have nothing to
> say. — Edward Snowden
Frustrating as those eye rolls may be, you cannot force someone to
care about something *you* think is important. I've been harping
on about privacy to my friends for years and some of them are
starting to come around. The tech (and mainstream) media's
continued coverage about the evils of (mostly) Facebook and Google
has become a roar too loud to ignore.
FINALLY.
People have realized (or are starting to realize) that they can no
longer depend on the kindness of corporations offering free things
on the Internet…when you think of it that way, it's kind of
surprising that we would think there wouldn't be strings attached.
Huh. Anyhoo, getting away from Facebook is *relatively* easy.
Ironically, if you have a lot of relatives on the platform,
leaving is quite difficult.
2. Cancel Facebook
Your entrenchment level with Facebook varies with the next person
and most likely with me too. I'll share what I did leading up to
and after my leave from Facebook in 2016.
1. I requested a backup of my data.
2. After downloading my data, I went to my profile page and spent
a couple days deleting posts. This was tedious as hell and I
never actually finished. I think I got through my first three
years and then my recent two years before calling it quits with
that task.
3. I also deleted integrations with other services and took the
time to delete accounts with services I barely remembered using
prior the integration deletion.
4. I told close friends, family, and my girlfriend (now wife) my
plans and why I was doing so. I have several family members on
Facebook but I also own a phone. I had zero interest with
staying in contact with people I knew from high school, those
were all passive "friendships" at that point.
3. Cancel Google
Hoo boy, this one's a *doozy*. Entire livelihoods, businesses, and
lifestyles rely on Google in some shape or form…especially if your
daily mobile driver is an Android device. I grew weary of Google
long before my divorce from Facebook and I found an email
replacement in Mail-in-a-Box[2], a self-hosted email solution that
also has calendar and address book capabilities. For search, I use
DuckDuckGo[3]. I'm on iOS/macOS so Apple Maps is a suitable Google
Maps replacement for me (btw, Apple Maps is *fantastic* in Japan).
At this point in time, YouTube is nigh-impossible to replace.
Nintendo doesn't upload their videos to Vimeo. MKBHD or any other
super profitable YouTube creator isn't leaving the platform
anytime soon either so it's a total crapshoot. I'm no longer
logged-in to YouTube but I still get email notifications when a
channel I'm interested in uploads a video. For videos I *really*
want to see again, I download them with youtube-dl[4], an awesome
command line program that is capable of downloading videos from
pretty much any video sharing site (not just YouTube). Here's my
configuration file (located at `~/.config/youtube-dl/config`):
```bash
-f bestvideo+bestaudio
-o ~/Movies/%(title)s.%(ext)s
```
It automatically downloads the best audio and best video sources
for whatever video URL you supply and combines them to create a
single file. That file then gets saved to my `~/Movies` folder. I
alias the `youtube-dl` command in my `.zshrc` config so I can type
`yt` followed by a URL for a super-quick workflow.
Unfortunately, Google Apps for Work exists and that means I have
not fully escaped their ecosystem. When it comes to most
businesses, familiarity and cost-savings often take precedence
over ideals. Make no mistake, finding (worthy) alternatives to
every single one of Google's offerings is expensive in either time
spent searching or cost for a single app. Sometimes both! However,
I think the upfront cost is worth the longtime gain. You will have
to be careful though. There is no shortage of startups with
compelling products that are merely skins on top of Google's
existing services (last year I interviewed for such a company that
I thought was creating a compelling email client only to learn
that it was really Gmail underneath AND there would be no IMAP
support…the conversation made our misalignment apparent).
4. Decentralization
As my concerns about online privacy grew, so did my interest in
decentralization. The core premise of decentralization is
basically self-hosting any online service you may need, yourself.
The open-source community is *fantastic* for that. You may find
some projects with plenty of issues in their git repos and
design/code quality of varying degrees of excellence but they are
*all* great bases to get started from.
One of my favorite aspects of decentralization is discovering a
codebase someone shared eons prior and finding out that a
particular function (or even the entire codebase) fits in
perfectly with whatever I'm working on. It sometimes feels like
spelunking. You'll never know what you find but treasures await!
My other favorite aspect of it is knowing that *I* am in control
of my data. There's no ambiguity there. I don't have to trust a
third-party, I can trust myself. After all, I wrote the code (or
adapted it after I read through it).
*A key aspect of decentralization that scares non-tech-savvy
people is self-hosting.* Of course I can say that it's no big deal
but that's because I've been doing this for years. Some tech-savvy
people just don't want to deal with server updates and the like. I
totally get that because maintenance *can* be a drag. You've
really got to decide what you want for yourself. Personally, I
think self-hosting is important and I advise everyone to try it at
least once. Even if it's just to get over that fear of purchasing
(well, *leasing*) a $5/month server from DigitalOcean[5] or
Exoscale[6] to hack on and test things with.
Here's a list of things I self-host:
- CMS: Noto[7] (super simple Markdown-based "CMS" I created that
runs the blog you're reading right now)
- Email: Mail-in-a-Box[8] (this is *super* simple to setup)
- Git: Gitea[9] (MUCH lighter than GitLab and more
customizable too)
If self-hosting is not your thing, you can sign up and/or join
servers other people have created. For example, Mastodon[10] is a
decentralized Twitter-like social network. You can fire up your
own Mastodon instance or you can sign up for one and start
chatting with people. I'm taking the opposite approach with the
social network I'm developing but I intend to add decentralized
features to it, like PubSub support.
Speaking of which, I am working on a social network and an
analytics service because 1) I was not able to find exactly what I
was looking for, and 2) if you want something done right you gotta
do it yourself. I've already detailed my reasons for starting a
social network[11] before but I never published anything about the
analytics service.
Plain and simple, I abhor trackers. However, I enjoy viewing stats
that tell me how many people visit my site, the most popular link
visited today, and so on. I was using Gauges[12] prior to creating
Chew[13] and one of my tech-savvy friends expressed to me that
while he knows who I am and can trust me, he wasn't going to go
through the trouble of whitelisting my blog. I don't blame him,
the advertising industry is to blame. With more people utilizing
ad blockers, how would anyone get accurate analytics? I realized
that I could utilize the middleware function in Express[14] to get
my analytics. I may go deeper into my thought-process and
inspiration for Chew at a later date but for now, you check it
out[13] and use it in your own apps!
What now?
Getting your family, friends, and community onboard with what
you've just learned is an uphill battle. You can lead by example
though, so *do not feel discouraged* if/when they don't care about
the privacy implications of staying with
~~well~~deceptively-designed services. We did not arrive at this
clusterfuck of invasiveness and moral ambiguity overnight…it took
some time and it will likely take some time to free ourselves
from it.
Good luck. 🕸
References
[1] <https://www.metafilter.com/95152/Userdriven-discontent#3256046>
[2] <https://mailinabox.email>
[3] <https://duckduckgo.com>
[4] <https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl>
[5] <https://www.digitalocean.com>
[6] <https://www.exoscale.com>
[7] <https://git.inc.sh/IdeasNeverCease/Noto>
[8] <https://mailinabox.email>
[9] <https://gitea.io>
[10] <https://mastodon.social>
[11] </WM-023>
[12] <https://gaug.es>
[13] <https://chew.sh>
[14] <https://expressjs.com>
|
