The Freedom Search

In the last post, I explained some of the traps in wich we fall when using Google’s services and apps. How can we avoid that our precious information, as our google searches, personal and business mail and/or documents, falling right into Google’s hands without them asking and, most important, without knowing what uses they will make of it?
Most of time, big companies keep saying they will not give away nor sell your data… until the day when they sell you out to the best bid…or government…

The answer would be so simple: don’t use it. But what happens when we are used to certain apps as google mail antispam engine? What about document sharing, rss feed reading…? Not so easy, but with a little time and effort, anyone can fix that.

If you consider it private, then keep it private

The first thing is to be aware of our information streams, and which we want to go public, and which we want to keep in private. And the best way to keep our information in our hands in the internet age is to keep it local on our computer. There is no better place for private data that being archived locally on our hard disk or in a backup CD. No chance to put it in public by mistake or any other reason. But, as we are in the age of ubiquity, data streams flow up, down, left and right. If we can not live without the possibility to access even our most ancient email messages, or someone needs to access any document from office while travelling, there are plenty of tools.

First of all, one should consider to have an internet domain, which identifies you better than anything, and a server where we can have our tools.

Internet domains, with a personal blog or website, is a statement: this is me and this is my website, so the only information about me to be trusted is what comes from here.
On the other we have to look for a good hosting service from the enormous offer pool, and any of them will have email account creation and web access. This way we have all our email placed under our own domain and stored in our own server, where no one can access it without our permission. Obviously, there are crackers and government warrants but, to avoid the latter, you can go for an offshore hosting provider. Offshore jurisdictions are not useful only to financial issues, but also with online hosting, so we can have the server placed in a jurisdiction where privacy is well respected.

But one of the most important service needed, is the capability to install new software on our servers. For instance, the Feng Office platform, formerly known as Open Goo. This is a really great web based office suite software. Completely developed in Uruguay, this is one of the greatest Open Source products I’ve ever used. It has everything needed in an office environment: create, assign and follow the tracking of tasks, keep record of due dates, register the time spent on activities, share and edit documents, contacts, e-mails and comments…just in one place, and accessible 24/7 anywhere in the world, and under your own control.

Talking about reading our feeds, there are plenty of ‘local’ feed readers (meaning installing software in your computer), but if the need comes when we have no access to our machine, there are also web based solutions which can be installed on our server-side. One of them is Gregarius. I’ve been using it for a while. Really simple, useful and practical, and free (as in beer and as in freedom) software.

And finally, how can we avoid being tracked by our searches? Two things do the trick. If you are logged into your google account, log off and do the searches. When you finish, delete the cookies. This can be a simple and automated work. For instance, in Firefox, you can set the browser to clean some of the cookies, along with some more things, everytime you close it. It can’t be easier!

So again, the important thing to remember is: if it is private and you want it to be private, then keep it private. And the best way to keep your information private, is to have control of it and placing it on your own machines.