Data privacy is important.
That's something that everyone should be aware of, but unfortunately, it's not really the
case.
In a world of free services from companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and others,
the allure of giving up your privacy is completely understandable.
Over the last few decades, we've slowly-but-surely been conditioned to give away control of our
data to large tech companies, who monetize by harvesting our data, building profiles
of who we are, and then selling that to advertisers.
If that feels a bit gross...well, it's because it kind of is.
Don't leave just yet, there is hope around the corner!
However, before we start, let's take a quick trip through the history of the Internet,
because context is important.
What we think of as the Internet today was originally called Arpanet, an experimental
communication project started by a research department of the US military, to investigate
continued access to communication in the event of a nuclear strike.
Over time, this military network expanded, evolved, and ultimately branched-off to connect
research universities to each other, but was restricted from commercial use.
Eventually, the US Congress enacted a few bills, such as the High Performance Computing
Act of 1991 from Al Gore, and the Scientific and Advanced-Technology Act of 1992 which
opened the network for commercial access, and finally what we think of today as "the
Internet" was officially born.
Now we had a network, but we needed something to do on the network.
In 1990 Tim Berners-Lee designed the first hypertext implementation for this network,
which we know of as HTML today, and used it to create the first website.
Shortly after, with funding provided from the earlier-mentioned Gore Bill, Marc Andreessen
and Eric Bina created the first widely-popular web browser, Mosaic.
With a network, a language for content, and a browser to view it, all the pieces were
in place for the World Wide Web.
So that's a very abbreviated history of the Internet and the World Wide Web.
Like I said, it's important to have this context, because shortly after...that's when everything
went wrong.
You see, shortly after the Internet was cleared for commercial activity, perhaps unsurprisingly,
people began looking for ways to make money.
For some startups, like Amazon, the path was pretty clear: list items on your website,
sell them online.
For others though, such as newspapers, magazines, and companies building digital services, it
wasn't quite so simple.
Getting people to pay directly for services was a challenge, especially when people were
still concerned about giving out payment information online.
With few business model ideas left, these companies turned to the one indirect monetization
model that already existed offline: ads.
This started innocently enough.
Taking a cue from the print world, companies started reserving space for ads alongside
their content.
Over time, the display models evolved, and as advertisers asked for more and more ways
to profile and target users, site owners were more than happy to comply.
Said Ethan Zuckerman, former employee of Tripod.com and the regretful inventor of the infamous
pop-up ad: "Over the course of five years, we tried dozens of revenue models...At the
end of the day, the business model that got us funded was advertising.
The model that got us acquired was analyzing users’ personal homepages so we could better
target ads to them."
With this revelation, companies learned that they could make a "free" product that would
help them rapidly get over the friction of users paying for services.
Ethan would go on to write an article lamenting all of this, and title it "The Internet's
Original Sin", a fitting name because once this fateful decision was made, there was
no way back to how things were.
The seduction of rapid user growth combined with massive revenue from advertisements was
too much for startups to ignore.
The rest of the 90s and early-00s would see a flurry of ad startups and acquisitions,
and by the early 2010s, companies like Facebook and Google had built billion-dollar empires
off of the system.
Very few people stopped to question what the tradeoff might be for all of this, because
at the end of the day, they were getting some great services without having to pay any money.
Lately though, something interesting has been happening.
Partially instigated by events like the 2016 election interference scandals from Cambridge
Analytica, some people began to wonder, "How do these companies know so much about me?"
The answer, of course, is that all this time we've been using these services, companies
have been building incredibly complex profiles about us in the background, and selling targeted
access to these profiles to advertisers.
Like I said earlier...it's pretty gross.
As promised though, there IS good news!
Through a combination of open-source efforts, along with the pace of technology driving
costs down, it's now not only possible to run your own private cloud services...it's
actually neither too hard or expensive.
This is called "self-hosting", and it works like so:
First, you need a server to host your private cloud service.
This CAN be done at home on something like a Raspberry Pi or a spare computer, but another
great option is using a Virtual Private Server, or "VPS".
This is a server that you rent from a company like DigitalOcean, OVH, Hetzner, or a number
of others.
These servers start very cheap, often only costing a few dollars per month.
This will give you access to a computer that you can install an operating system on, attached
to a static IP address.
Next, you will install an operating system on it.
This is usually done through your VPS dashboard, and you'll likely install a flavor of Linux
(though BSD, Windows, and other options are sometimes available).
Finally, you need to decide what service you want to put on your VPS.
This could be anything, from a basic VPN, all the way up to a full cloud office suite
like Nextcloud.
Really, for almost any commercial service you can think of, there will be an open-source,
self-hosted alternative.
And really, that's all there is to it.
Because you control the server, you control what happens with your data.
There is no company building a profile about you and selling it, so your private data stays
private.
Also, by using and supporting open-source and open-web solutions, you're signalling
to the tech world that you won't use commercial services that collect and sell your data.
So if you love the idea of cloud-based services, but want to keep your data private, look into
using a VPS to build your own private cloud.
Thanks for watching "Not For Sale!
Keeping Your Data Private Through Self-Hosting", a Smartyflix production made exclusively for
TILvids.com.
TILvids is an ad-free edutainment video community.
Consider checking out the website at tilvids.com.
If you enjoy, spread the word, or consider donating.