51 - own your data

Yesterday I had a brief Twitter discussion with @halfbyte and @stilkov about “owning your mail” .

I think the issue is much more important than just mail - it is about owning your data (and moeffju has written more about it here - in german though). Projects like Ebend Moglens Freedombox are (or in that case, were) a great idea - but don’t seem to reach enough traction to be viable and realistic.

I believe we need to own our own data, and we should have computers or servers in our homes that make it easy for us to store files, mail, rss feeds securely and independently of the “big corporations”. Yes, it might be more expensive, yes there might be some hassle involved, but as the history has shown, we can’t rely on the likes of Google to trust our data - their commercial interestes aren’t aligned with ours.

But do we really have to install complicated servers in everyones homes and make them sysadmins and cryptography experts? That is - of course - impossible. However, there actually is a fairly simple solution available. Todays NAS systems (like the old Synology box I have running in my basement) come with almost everything in place to run a private server with minimal hassle. The current version of the Synology firmware offers Mail, File (and private Cloud) storage, Webservers and much more. And they are inherently hackable and the price is affordable.

Go check out what your NAS can do for you.

(This entry also marks halfway in my 100 days blogging challenge - only 50 more to go)