Opting out of Internet Surveillance
updated 2020-05-09, new sources and reduced article length
Countless articles concerning online privacy use the hook “our lives are increasingly dominated by computers/phones/the internet”. And that’s pretty much how I want to start this blog post…
Online messaging means WeChat in China, and to rest of the world mostly WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger. All three operate as sole providers for their service – if you wish to communicate with a WhatsApp user, you must install the official WhatsApp app, and must agree to WhatsApp terms of service, and must let WhatsApp handle all of your conversation. And all three of these services use proprietary communication protocols – it isn’t supported to make your own client, or to host your own version of their service, and no one is permitted to inspect the code.
An investigation into censorship of WeChat uncovered that censorship among non–Chinese accounts (who were previously less impacted by the censorship that is imposed on Chinese citizens) more prevalent than before, but people using WeChat outside of China contributed to the machine learning algorithms which help further censor and repress Chinese citizens.
If we continue to use tools like Facebook for our communication, we leave ourselves entirely vulnerable to wide scale manipulation and suppression, where a very small number of people not only control what media is shared with us, but what we can even directly communicate to our friends.
Free Software?
“Free as in freedom” software is fundamental technology freedom. I would like to write a post specifically on free software in the future (and its benefits to society), but for now here is a definition used by the Free Software Foundation. Free software (as opposed to gratis software) permits individuals to:
- Choose how they use the software, making modifications to suit their needs
- Share the software and modifications to the source code with anyone
Free software is used by scientists (python, R, lots of statistics and modelling libraries), it is the foundation of lots of modern technology (with linux kernel powering android and chrome OS, the free Darwin kernel/BSD under the hood of iOS and mac OS), and it powers 99% of web servers and databases.
A chat service that respects its users, and can guarantee that it isn’t misleading users and misusing their data, fundamentally needs to be free software. Without being free, users have no control over the future direction of the software, and there is an ever present underlying risk of unwanted components being included.
The Tech Monopolies
The five most valuable businesses in 2018 were: Apple, Amazon, Google’s parent company “Alphabet”, Microsoft, and Facebook. Each of these companies has great power in overlapping parts of the technological world. They are each worth between $500-1000 billion USD (£400-800 billion GBP), and they all operate around a strict, closed ecosystem where the user experience is dictated by what will make the share holders profit.
These companies have transitioned from creating a service or product to serve consumers and businesses for a fixed cost, to increasingly creating products at a reduced or no cost which generate revenue through exploitation. Because the ecosystems are so locked down, and the strong network effect locks us into their services, users put up with very anti-competitive and manipulative behaviour.
Limiting Fake News
Centralised proprietary communication protocols offer no just solution to limiting fake news, as they struggle to find a balance between harmful fake news spreading, and censoring legitimate views.
Twitter struggles to moderate its own content and users, dealing with an ever growing army of bots. Caught in the cross fire, for over a month the US Green Party candidate Howie Hawkins was locked out of his campaign twitter account. Hawkins is quoted:
Corporate America fights hard to make sure the public doesn’t get to hear about challenges to the status quo and the two corporate parties. The US has among the most discriminatory and unfair electoral systems in the world among the countries that hold elections. COVID-19 is already blocking our access to the ballot since street petitioning had to be suspended. We have enough problems with trolls and fake news without the corporate owners of social media trying to silence us.
Social networks, online messaging, email and document services are all extremely important in the modern day world. In order for us to limit the growth of harmful online content including fake news, but to also avoid granting complete control of censorship over to a single entity, we must embrace a new software paradigm: federated services.
Federated Communication
Email is an example of a federated communication protocol. When you setup an email account, you can choose who handles all the sending, receiving, and storing of emails.
A business or a technically minded person can even host their own email service. If you move company, or you wish to switch provider, you can download your emails, copy your address book, and start using a new email address (or if you register a domain name, you can transfer your private email address across similar to keeping a mobile phone number when you switch service providers).
On the other hand, a messaging service like Facebook messenger, Whatsapp, or Wechat is proprietary, If they decide to make a change that you don’t like, you either have to put up with it, or be left unable to use the service at all, and unable to communicate with its users.
When using federated communication there is not one company which holds all user data, nor is there one company enforcing censorship. Instead, many different servers interact with each other, each implementing their own content guidelines and allowing user ownership of data and services. This model of user owned open source services is fundamentally different to the centralised profit driven models of Google and Facebook services.
Making the switch
There are already a plethora of different federated software services, including platforms designed to replace twitter, facebook, youtube, dropbox, office software, instagram and more. Many federated services have been designed to integrate with the fediverse. The fediverse is extremely exciting, as it means not only can users connect with other users on the social network who are hosted on different servers, but they can connect with users of entirely different platforms, sending messages, sharing posts or media. This solves the problem of “which platform to join”, as no matter which you or your friends choose, if it is part of the fediverse.
Outside of the fediverse, I think the most exciting federated platform is matrix. This isn’t a social network, but instead implements group End-to-end-encryption (E2EE). It is feature rich and the development of a secure backend and easy to use interface is driven by funding from organisations including the French government (who use it for secure communication which they can self-host). Matrix is the modern answer to email, allowing users to seamlessly communicate between different servers. There are currently over 1000 individual matrix instances, with this number growing almost every day.
One of the novel features of matrix is its bridges - these allow making a connection to proprietary platforms like slack, facebook messenger, whatsapp, and to existing open platforms such as IRC and XMPP, “bridging” the chats so that users of these different services can communicate in one chat room. Bridges are slightly resource intensive (having to communicate with two or more platforms, translating between messaging protocols), so whilst the code to run them is free, the CPU power to do so isn’t currently offered free of charge by matrix.org.
Federated software doesn’t stop with communication protocols and social metworks Platofmrs including NextCloud implement the functionality of “Office 365”, DropBox, RSS feed reader, calender, contacts.
I have made a short list of the social media and messaging services I use and recommend: social media & messaging. A much more comprehensive list of “alternative tos” can be found at switching.software.
Additionally, I have made this guide to choosing free open source software for your personal computing, covering email, word processing, mobile apps and operating sytems.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.