re:publica 2015 - Aral Balkan: Beyond The Camera Panopticon

Approaching the "to google or not to google" question is impossible without stating your casus belli . If you care about opsec, there are many reasons why you would want to use google services: e.g. a hostile actor will have an extremely hard time stealing your emails from Gmail while there's a might higher chance you fucked up a config on your self-hosted setup. Usually, as always, it comes down to smart compartmentalization and using the right tool for the job. Personally, the ethical perspective is a much stronger reason why to stray away from data behemoths like Google and Facebook. First of all I believe the "usefullness" of many of these services is over-exaggerated: Facebook noawadays is more of a brainwashing service to expose you to "content" that does nothing more than dull your mind and keep you mindlessly scrolling and endless stream of irrelevant advertisements. But even if this isn't the case for all online services, some come at a price I am personally not willing to pay. We are entering an era of digital slavery where our entire lives are managed by data monopolies that are bound by no rules other than those they create for themselves. I don't care how convenient these commercial services are, if the price is giving up the sovereignty of my data, and the core liberties of my human existence. I make a conscious choice to not be part of this system, and we will all have to face this choice sooner or later. For more on this topic, I highly suggest Aral Balkan's t

re:publica 2015 - Aral Balkan: Beyond The Camera Panopticon has an excellent further discussion of this problem beyond just Gmail: this video

"Facebook doesn't control it." Unfortunately it's controlled by the Mark Zuckerberg of Russia who still has access to his data brokers. None of the companies with access to our private data seem problematic at first. Google was a gift from the heavens with it's insane 1000MB gmail accounts back in 2003, now it's a private intelligence agency. Facebook was about free fun and connectivity, now it's a private intelligence agency. But Telegram's going to be different and money comes from magic and ICOs even after it reaches critical mass. Aral Balkan explains this better than I ever could this video Also, the security model of Telegram is exactly the same as Facebook Messenger: A bunch of promises about respecting your privacy, coupled with opt-in end-to-end-encryption that doesn't work cross-device, and the use of which reveals the intention to hide messages from server (which is extremely valuable metadata: these messages I want to hide from service provider and governments!)