Demand change, transparency and accountability - Cozy as viable alternative | Hacker News Reader

Demand change, transparency and accountability - Cozy as viable alternative

blog.cozycloud.cc

57 pointsDaddyDuck13 comments

According to the FAQ:

" With Cozy, applications run in the user's personal cloud where he keeps ownership of his/her data. This simple paradigm shift changes many things.

" * personal data are aggregated in a trusted environment the user have full control on, * apps can collaborate around data, cross apps integration is made simple delivering a frictionless user experience, * there is no need to communicate personal data to a third party because the processing is made within the user's cloud."

Maybe I'm misunderstanding this, but it seems it runs on a Cozy server instead of the user's own hardware. Therefore it is subject to being secretly copied by the government (of whichever country the server is in), at any time. Is this not correct?

If that is really how it works, I don't see how "the user have full control" as they claim.

Also the third point, "there is no need to communicate personal data to a third party because the processing is made within the user's cloud" is silly because as soon as you send your data to Cozy's servers you have then sent it to a second party and you then no longer have control.

The only real advantage I see here is that the business model (according to the claims ) is not based on the company data-mining the customers. That's a step above the likes of Facebook but it hardly compares to "control of your data".

Cozy is free and open source, so you can host it at home on your NAS, your RasPi or an online server you rent. Cozy Cloud offers facilitators to host your cloud, if Cozy make bad things of your data, most of the users will leave and Cozy Cloud will probably close.

Hi ds9,

you might be interested in visiting this link: cozy.io

Disclaimer, I am from Cozy and wrote the article and the FAQ.

You can self host Cozy on your own hardware or any hosting provider you trust. You are in no way tied to us.

Keep in mind we are relatively young project, in the future we will make possible to move easily your instance from one provider to another.

Thanks that makes it more interesting! Will read more.

We need open source technology that auto-encrypts data before releasing it to third party service (such as emails, chats, skypes, etc...). Although this will piss off not only NSA but all service providers as well - as they get used to like knowing your interests and subsequently spamming you.

This is very close to my dream of a user centered modern web enabled platform. I really like the fact that it promotes sharing by requiring a github account.

Definitely will try it!

I'd like to see every single chat app, mail service, or video-chat app being launched from now on offer OTR, ZRTP and PGP, or some other novelty security technology (like Bitmessage), as competitive advantages over the "big ones" like Gmail and Skype. And they need to make them as painless to use as possible, and enabled by default where's the case.

And allowing payment through crypto-currency.

Bitcoin isn't enough because it isn't anonymous. We'll have to wait for Zerocoin.

It's enough if you know how to use it properly.

Even if you use a Bitcoin laundry service my understanding is that it's clear that your bitcoins went into such laundry. There is no deniability.

Actually not even Zerocoin is enough, because it doesn't offer deniability either, but it's closer to what is needed.

Of course Bitcoin is still much better than our corrupt banking system, but for other reasons, not so much for financial privacy.

You don't need any laundry service to have deniability.

I can pay you from an account I've never used before to pay anyone else and there is no way for you to find out who I am.

In the general case, even if you do things shoddily, it would still take a massive operation so you can short-list me among the possible sources of the payment.

Lately BTC's pseudonimity is being downplayed for social engineering reasons (some of the visible faces in the BTC community have decided so). Supposedly being very anonymous is very hard work now, something for experts. But in reality it's the other way around, making yourself easy to track requires very specific usage patterns. By default almost nobody gets tracked unless they want to.

With such a low contrast, this looks like it's not intended to be read at all. So didn't read.

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