Joseph Nuthalapati 
@njoseph@social.masto.host
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Idealist, technologist and general optimist.
Admin of https://social.masto.host
"I believe strongly in the right to privacy. Without privacy, we can't have agency, and without agency we are slaves. That's why I have dedicated my life to this struggle. Surveillance is a threat to us all, we must stop it."
- Ola Bini
Blaming people for sharing their data with Facebook for what Facebook does with their data is victim blaming.
Facebook gets the majority of its data not from our willingly shared posts but by stealing our behavioral data - location, contacts, offline tracking, financial transactions, buying data from partners, data from every other app in your phone using SDKs, tracking on other websites etc.
A product's privacy claims are only as good as its default settings.
Providing options to change the default privacy-violating settings in some "Advanced" section doesn't make your product a privacy-respecting one.
#TIL about the Panoptykon Foundation.
"Panoptykon Foundation (Polish: Fundacja Panoptykon) is a Polish NGO whose primary goal is to defend basic freedom and human rights against threats posed by the development of modern surveillance technologies. "
Whenever some app or service claims to respect your #privacy, check for two things:
1. Is it open-source on both client and server (if applicable) ?
2. Is the service itself decentralized in some way (federated, allows self-hosting etc.) ?
Now evaluate everything you use - iPhones, WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Gmail etc. using this checklist.
Try to find and use software/services which satisfy both of the above conditions.
Freedom in a Box
My talk about privacy, decentralization, self-hosting, freedom of speech and FreedomBox.
It's a non-technical talk meant to spread awareness about the dangers of mass surveillance and the alternatives that exist to centralized systems.
https://peertube.mastodon.host/videos/watch/48bf6272-d7b0-4943-808b-a0827d1fd99d
Links to slides are in the video description.
Delivered at ThoughtWorks Hyderabad for the 46th edition of GeekNight on 2nd Jan, 2019.
#FreedomBox #SelfHosting #privacy #ThoughtWorks #decentralization #federation
Lack of privacy is like malnutrition.
It stunts your growth and development.
In a parallel universe where Ubuntu hadn't provided the "install alongside Windows" option (which it did about 10 years ago), I'd be writing enterprise Java on a Windows 10 machine, blissfully unaware of the existence of free software and believing that privacy is dead if Mark Zuckerberg says so.
--
Dear #purists and #absolutists,
It's great to be clean and pure yourself, but sometimes you have step into the mud to pull out others who are stuck in it.
Joplin review
Migration from #BoostNote to #Joplin is complete. I am using #Syncthing for synchronization of notes across devices with my #FreedomBox serving as an always-on synchronization point.
It's a good enough replacement for #Evernote. The Android app needs to improve its text editor.
It also has a Web Clipper but I don't know what to use it for since I already use #Wallabag.
See the full list of apps I use at https://njoseph.me/mediawiki/Privacy_Stack
This a list of privacy-preserving and user-freedom-respecting applications that I use on a daily basis.
I wrote it as a wiki page so I can keep updating it.
Firefox Offers Recommendations with Latest Test Pilot Experiment: Advance
It is not possible to book an #Uber on #LineageOS without GApps nor would I expect it to be possible on #Purism's new #Librem5 phone.
Users would be forced to use a provider with a working Progressive Web App (Uber's PWA is a bad joke).
Those of us already using free software would consider inconveniences like these the price we pay for #freedom and #privacy. But they are enough to turn the average user away from free software mobile operating systems.
Another way of looking at #advertising trackers.
"the clothes that we wear are #privacy technologies. We also have norms that discourage others from, for example sticking their hands inside our clothes without permission.
The fact that adtech plants tracking beacons on our naked digital selves and tracks us like animals across the digital frontier may be a norm for now, but it is also morally wrong, massively rude and now illegal under the #GDPR."
All it costs to fulfill the average person's needs for digital services is a $5 per month VPS instance. It's even cheaper if you buy a single board computer and host your services at home.
We've been letting companies steal our personal data and sell it to the highest bidder and destroying democracy in the process all to save what? A coffee a month?
This is one of the worst deals in history.
Locally produced solar energy, community wireless networks and self-hosted servers running free software.
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Idealist, technologist and general optimist.
Admin of https://social.masto.host
