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> So you've traded one big company for a bunch of other big companies? That's neither fair nor accurate. Tom's running his own email server, which is a huge chunk of privacy right there. Distributing your identity across multiple companies means, at the very least, they've got to do more work to create a unified profile of you. One of my major beefs against Google, and a reason why I separate my own use of the company's products among different (or no) identities and browsers is that its usage profile is drawn across such a wide range of products. Google knows my search, my social, my video viewing, my maps usage, my email reading habits, and more. That's ... fine until the regime changes ... or gets pissed off at me. I've started thinking of ways in which the FreedomBox (plug-based cheap computers running Debian and largely self-configuring software tools) could take the place of most of the present generation of cloud computing. The compute power and raw storage are effectively trivial requirements to meet. Distributed storage for redundancy slightly harder, but still very doable. The real key is bringing down the configuration and management elements to the level that Joe and Jane Average Internet User can just plug and play. And I suspect it's not too far off. A few years, but not much more. Whether or not people will buy into it is another matter, but as with Linux, if enough do, it won't matter, and even if this means that small hosted services exist, the idea of separating out and federalizing people's data would be an advantage over the present regime. |