Escape Google! Own your cloud

We take the best open source tools and services and build our own impenetrable castle in the cloud.

“There are plenty of alternative services that don’t involve divulging your personal data.”

Abandoning (or at least reducing your dependency upon) proprietary services needn’t be about being some weird information vegan (to use a phrase from Cory Doctorow). It should be about a genuine concern for the increasing amount of data we’re handing over to companies, how they are using that data to profile our online behaviour and how those profiles and relationships are used to bombard us with targeted advertising.

Microsoft and Google know a great deal about users through their respective smartphone OSes, Facebook and Twitter use the ubiquitous Like or Retweet buttons to track users’ behaviour all over the web.

And this is a shame, because there are plenty of alternative services that don’t involve divulging your personal data to a corporation that will use it to get better at making you buy things or offer it up to whatever government agency asks for it. In fact, by hosting these things yourself (and we’ll show you how to host your own Dropbox-killing Nextcloud instance) you can be the master of your own data. The EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) has a slogan, “There is no cloud, just other people’s computers” and many people would do well to heed it.

We’ll present a couple of alternative services, some of them run on other people’s computers, but those people’s motives are entirely honourable. We cordially invite you to encourage your friends and followers to these greener pastures. But be prepared for some of them not to—you may want to keep your Facebook account alive if you have FOMO (fear of missing out).