The Book of Swarm (2020) [pdf]
ethswarm.org
ethswarm.org
"free" access to crucial services on the internet is of course not free. You are paying with a very simple currency: your online behavior. That is super convenient and works fine. The ads you get to see are tailored to you and that - in turn - might make you spend money that - in turn - pays for more ads and keeps those services free. That's very simplistic but essentially what is happening.
And that is perfectly fine by me. There's no privacy on the internet anyways. For services where you do care that data you give away is kept confidential, I'm paying for it. (Like Apple's cloud. I gladly pay a few bucks to give Apple all my pics and documents) This does involve trust: Does the company I'm paying for to keep my data (and money) secure keep their end of the bargain?
So there we have the second currency: Trust.
Do I trust a p2p network that uses my private resources and internet access to store illegal data on my devices? Hell no.
This is a false dichotomy and you're confusion anonymity with privacy.
Privacy is choosing what you want to share and there's always a baseline. The thing with the Big Tech mess is that they want EVERYTHING from you, even what they shouldn't have and that is where the problem lies.
Not only are they not verifiable but also can never be trusted. Paying for services doesn't guarantee privacy, transparency does.
FOSS is the only objective way to maintain true privacy. Privacy needs transparency and FOSS is forever transparent (for the most part).
If you live in a world where you can't trust any corporation, you might need to adjust your views a little bit.
Knowing full well that under capitalism the only goal of a corporation is to maximize profits, it doesn't mean it can't be trusted for certain purposes.
So far, for example, Apple has done nothing to lose my trust. It hasn't lost my data, it didn't have a significant break-in that compromised my data. It provides amazing value to me. (And it sure uses FOSS on its servers)
FOSS in itself doesn't guarantee anything. You still need someone to operate the service, pay for bandwidth, storage, maintenance, power etc.
Not sure what the economic model has to do with a company's morals. There are companies like Valve, AppWrite, Supabase and there are companies like Google, Apple and Facebook. Their ideologies are different, all of them maximize profits, nothing wrong in that but some of them choose not to exploit human psychology. This is more of a cultural and moral issue than an economic one imho.
> Apple has done nothing to lose my trust. It hasn't lost my data, it didn't have a significant break-in that compromised my data
At the end of the day, you have to choose what you wanna share. It's better to stay informed, nothing to lose.
> FOSS in itself doesn't guarantee anything
FOSS guarantees the way my data is handled and collected. Windows has backdoors, we all know it but we can't point them out specifically because it's not FOSS, there's 0 transparency, 0 care for user choice and I honestly do not like to live in a dystopia where spyware is the norm, which is why I support FOSS. It's the only true measure of maximum transparency.
The idea that a scheme like this, which involved effectively universal DRM, could change the current inequality, is just preposterous. Sure, this might threaten a Google or Facebook model but a Disney or Elsevier would love this and the existing success of data aggregators who own their data shows where it would go.