> Feed: Purism
> Title: Technology as it Should Be
> Author: Todd Weaver
> Date: Wed, 25 Nov 2020 07:57:51 -1000
> Link: https://puri.sm/posts/technology-as-it-should-be/
In Imagine a world without apps [1] Shira Ovide asks a wild question: What if we
played games, shopped, watched Netflix and read news on our smartphones --
without using apps? Our smartphones, like our computers, would instead mostly be
gateways to go online through a web browser.
This question can be extrapolated into a larger question: What do we want from
our technology?
The power of control by Big-Tech in the app store is but a small example of
exploitation of our digital lives. If you dont control the software, the
companies who wrote that software control you. You become a digital prisoner.
What people desire from technology is well documented and can be summed up with
a series of buzzwords. The difficulty isnt knowing what society wants, it is
knowing the path to get there.
What do we want from our technology?
* We want the right to change providers.
* We want the right to protect personal data.
* We want the right to verify.
* We want the right to not be tracked.
* We want the right to access.
We want the right to change providers
This one is such an important right, and something I think is completely missed
by most journalists writing on the subject. As an example, lets look at when
cellphone numbers were married to phone carriers. This was a means of stickiness
for the phone carriers. By preventing you from moving your phone number to a
competitor, the carrier locked you into their network.
The US Congress--against the complaints of the phone carriers yelling from the
rooftops that changing to anything else would destroy their businesses by
introducing too much complexity--enacted law that required interoperability.
This allowed an individual to change providers freely while keeping their same
phone number. If Congress--and the media--applied this example to the walled
gardens of big-tech it would allow an individual choice and freedom to move
accounts from one provider to another. Even if you could not transfer your exact
handle within a domain, you could--through interoperability--easily forward,
export, respond, and change providers.
Without regulatory assistance to protect this right, the alternative is to use
services that honor this right. Services that are decentralized offer
interoperability, such as Matrix (for chat, calling, video), Mastodon (for
social), XMPP (for messaging), and Email (for well email). Librem One [2]
provides these services in a decentralized manner.
We want the right to protect personal data
The ability to encrypt your personal data with your own keys on your own device
ensures that you fully control your digital life. With this as the starting
point, you can then choose (aka opt-in) to share what you want with the people
you want. This right is rooted in personal property rights, and is one of the
most egregious abuses by Big Tech and those that have influence over them. If
manufacturers, operating system developers, and software developers took a
Hippocratic-like oath, one area society would agree on is the right that your
personal data is your personal property and something you must retain control
over and consent to share before it leaves your possession.
Without regulatory assistance to protect personal data, society is left to fend
for itself against the pressure from a multi-trillion dollar industry to exploit
that personal data. There is no way to resist that pressure without the market
creating convenient alternatives that honor that right while completely avoiding
Big Tech. Purism creates products that are increasing in convenience daily, that
fully protect you, and these products are the market answer to the worst abuses
of Big Tech companies.
We want the right to verify
This right is simple, but often overlooked. If you cannot verify the claims made
by Big Tech companies, you are left to wonder if any claim is true, and usually
they are quite the opposite. Hearing We care about your privacy from Facebook is
a clear violation of that trust since exploiting your privacy is inherent in
their business model. Other such claims from Big Tech would require verifying
code, and to do that properly all code should be released under freedom
respecting licenses. After 30+ years of the free software movement, we see that
verifying the source code is the proper answer to allow people to retain full
control of their digital lives. It is no wonder why the right to verify is such
an important right.
Without regulatory assistance requiring public money to produce public code, we
are left with addressing it by where we allocate our money within society. If
all those that cared about their digital footprint spent money on products that
protected that digital footprint the positive feedback loop would solve this
within the market itself. Purism releases all our software under free software
licenses and honors this right.
We want the right to not be tracked
We simply want the right to have access to and knowledge of all collection and
uses of personal data; and to obtain, correct, or permanently delete personal
data controlled by any company and to have those requests honored by third
parties; to opt-in consent for only the minimum personal data necessary to use a
service; and to have all personal data permanently deleted once the data is no
longer required, or upon request. If we couple this with the other rights above,
we start off with full protection that then allows opt-in sharing, with a
ratchet-back plan to remove what was shared from any organization.
Without regulatory assistance requiring the right not to be tracked, we have to
solve it by supporting products that honor this right from hardware, operating
system, software, applications, and services. Purism honors this right.
We want the right to access
We as society do not want to be discriminated against nor exploited based on
personal data; to be able to access and use the internet without internet
service providers blocking, throttling, engaging in paid prioritization or
otherwise unfairly favoring content, applications, services or devices; to have
access to multiple viable, affordable internet platforms, services, and
providers with clear and transparent pricing; and not to have any of these
rights removed through any terms of service.
Without regulatory assistance in this right, the market will have to pick-up the
slack and use, fund, and support companies and services that honor this right.
Purism of course honors this right.
If we look at all five of these rights, we know how to create technology as it
should be, but unless the market chooses alternatives or regulatory assistance
is provided or a combination of those two, we will continue to complain about
the abuses of Big Tech without doing anything to solve it.
Purism is creating the alternatives that are ever improving with every purchase
of hardware, every use of software, and every subscription of services. Thank
you for changing the future of computing for the better with us.
The post Technology as it Should Be [3] appeared first on Purism [4].
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