- What is data freedom?
- “Information wants to be free” –Stewart Brand
- You create data that is important to you. Data Freedom is being to access it now and into the future?
- Keep access to your data. Control who has access
- Framework to analyze your data freedom. You can take control.
- Levels of data freedom
- Zero: You have been blocked from your data (Cloud account suspended)
- Low: You don’t own your data, you can be denied access, you do not have rights to persistent access (cloud account)
- Medium: You own your data, you do not have rights to persistent access (Local download of cloud data)
- High: You own your data, you have rights to persistent access (Word processor)
- Full: You own your data, you have rights to persistent access because there are multiple implementations. There is at least one open source implementation. (PDFs, jpeg, text documents)
- Zero & Low Freedom
- Zero cost services have a cost
- We all use a lot of these
- Sold as cloud services - typically consumer cloud services
- High levels of convenience - works everywhere, designed for phones/web
- Administration is expensive - reactions to suspected abuse can be fast
- Reasons can be hard for a regular user to predict - Redirection Service use, capacity, annoyance
- Appeals are difficult
- Medium Freedom
- These are often low freedom services with an export
- You will not lose access to the underlying data but it will be a lot less useful
- Google, Facebook, Microsoft OneNote
- Can also be software that need to regularly check in to license
- Tron: Evolution. Released in 2010. Unlpayable in 2019
- High Freedom
- Traditional Software
- You have a local file and a local program that can access it
- The software does not need to “phone home” to license or keep working - if it does, it ends back up in Medium
- 80’s and 90’s DOS games
- CAD, Word processing and spreadsheet software
- May have an online version/component
- Local-first software
- Mentioned in Episode 2 - Protocols and Products
- Operates as an online-service but can be self hosted and works offline
- In the papers, it relies on some special data structures to work correctly - not necessary in all cases
- Local-first software
- Full Freedom
- Has a local version - could be local-only or “local-first”
- Have local copies of the files
- Documented file formats
- Multiple implementations including open source/fully free
- Text files
- Video files (mp4/x264)
- E-mail software
- Networked software and data freedom
- This is a far more nuanced discussion
- E-mail
- Provider vs program
- Phone vs computer
- Self hosting
- Web Browsers
- Browsers themselves tend to be in the Full (or in some cases High) category
- What they access could be in any category
- Calendars & Contacts
- Generally is high freedom
- Services that can block you
- Chat
- Broad definition of chat
- High Freedom -> Open standards: SMS/Text Messages, Jabber/XMPP, IRC, Jami(ring.cx) and Matrix
- Low Freedom: Whatsapp, Facebook messenger, Hangouts, iMessage, Discord
- File sync clouds
- Dropbox, Nextcloud, Google Drive, iCloud, Syncthing
- Generally high
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Each day you create data that’s important to you. We explore what freedom means relating to that data and give you tools to analyze how free your data is.