It's mostly about privacy and trust. To share your private data, you need trust, and I never trusted big SaaS companies. I know that's uncommon in this age when either everybody shares everything, or where the Internet gives the illusion of anonymity. But I know here are a lot of conscious people, longing for privacy and digital freedom - that's why I'm sharing my thoughts - especially now, where they exposed their true nature.

AI - the trend, exposing the service providers privacy fraud

I'm really happy about the AI trend - as it helped a lot of people to understand the thing that is obvious, but somehow was not?! you need to control your data for them to be private.

How's that you ask?

No individual is physically capable of following and understanding (in legal terms) constant changes in terms of conditions and privacy policies. Companies always used that for their gains, but the most recent trend is not a threat but direct violation not only of privacy and trust, but literally of property rights. There are notorious cases (see my blog-post following a lot of them here that services are using your data to train their AI. If you do not understand the severity of the issue, let me put it in other words: individuals and companies pay for a service that uses their own data to develop their automated competitors (AI algorithms). There is a clever way of defense from those companies: you can always opt out. But the fact is - before opting out, all your current data was most probably already used - and you just can't do anything about it.

Just think about this for a moment, if some technology trend convinced companies to just take your data for their gains - was there ever any privacy to them? Can you actually trust any service provider?

I know there is a real problem for a "normal user", not capable to spin off a home-lab and deploy their own services, but we - the IT gave the trend the permission to skyrocket and be a thing. We, for our convenience choose cloud and SaaS in our companies, fueling these trends - and not the trend of building easy to use, deploy and integrate privacy focused solutions, which would flourish if more companies just preferred to be private - and put the effort in binding such solutions (and not patchworks for cloud to be even bearable).

What can I do? What can you do?

1. Open Source

Use open source solutions. If not self-hosted/on-premise at least use and recommend to "non-it" people services based on open source solutions.

Building trust is much much easier with open source solutions, where not only the code is open, but also the project governance and communication (with the users and in a lot of cases also internal within the development team). It's completely the opposite of any SaaS/solution provider which guard everything, promise and do marketing instead of just being transparent.

Also, there are the great communities -  where thousands (or millions) of like-minded users guard and look for red flags constantly...

2. Self-host

I'm so genuinely happy to see the self-hosting to gain more and more momentum. This fuels the new trend, that's it's worth to build open source solutions and services based on open source solutions.

Self-hosting is also important, as we - the enthusiasts help the individuals and companies building open source solutions to be better - with our feedback, contributions or just spreading the word.

3. Build open source!

I’m self-hosting all my personal and company solutions (and data) from beginning of my time (which is mid 90’s). I’m also a hardcore Unix and Linux user (since kernel 1.x.x and Slackware 3.x) and have been developing my first open-source project in the early 2000s - but as a way of living, I struggled heavily to understand the open source business model and stayed in the service business for almost 20 years.

Do I understand it now? I’m trying - so if you have more experience than me and are willing to chat reach out please!.