| You don't. We lost the war already. [1] You may not store your personal data with the surveillance companies computers, but your friends will store your data there. Your mail, your chats, your contact information. Without even asking you, because our society has during the past two decades completely normalized this. Your local hospital and your police force does this too, at least to some extent, even where legislation disallows it. The largest companies on our planet is now aligned with the largest governments. I am not sure those alive today will own our data again in our lifetimes. In a perhaps desperate hope for ironic turnaround, I now put my hope with laws such as Chat Control and Age Verification. It is a hard sell with techies and Internet aligned people these days, so I tend to stay low about it. But my feeling is that legislative overreach may be one of very few things that can normalize self hosting again. Because in practice, these laws are only enforcable for companies. If I chat with my friend by way of my our own computers only, nobody complains and everyone is happy. I will not fight for these laws but I will be honestly happy when they pass. In fact, having given it a bit of thought, I do not feel it is entirely unreasonable for the surveillance companies to take responsibility for things like CSAM and encouragement to genocide. They do own our data, after all, and they already police it to influence elections and shape consumer trends, to take two well-documented examples, so why should they not also police it in legal ways? Those were my soapbox minutes for today. I will not take questions about how legislative overreach will create moats and economic incentives for centralization, benefit Facebook and hurt Tik Tok, because that already happened and is too late to change now. The outcome of that particular race between competing evils changes nothing. [1] Gonggrijp, 2005. https://media.ccc.de/v/22C3-920-en-we_lost_the_war |