A product's privacy claims are only as good as its default settings.

Providing options to change the default privacy-violating settings in some "Advanced" section doesn't make your product a privacy-respecting one.

#Privacy

"Human progress isn’t measured by industry. It’s measured by the value you place on a life. An unimportant life. A life without privilege. The boy who died on the river, that boy’s value is your value. That’s what defines an age, that’s… what defines a species. "

#DoctorWho #Quotes

" Where the centralised mainstream’s advantage is scale, complexity, and secrecy, ours is lack of scale, simplicity, and openness.

We must think small.

I look forward to exploring the small things in 2019."
- @aral

https://ar.al/2018/12/23/what-does-a-private-communicator-look-like/

In a parallel universe where Ubuntu hadn't provided the "install alongside Windows" option (which it did about 10 years ago), I'd be writing enterprise Java on a Windows 10 machine, blissfully unaware of the existence of free software and believing that privacy is dead if Mark Zuckerberg says so.

--

Dear #purists and #absolutists,

It's great to be clean and pure yourself, but sometimes you have step into the mud to pull out others who are stuck in it.

#windows #ubuntu #privacy #freesoftware

@aral The software called Mastodon is protected from EEE (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish) abuse by the AGPLv3 license. Any changes made to Mastodon must follow the same license and must be made public.

ActivityPub OTOH, is susceptible to the EEE strategy. First some MegaCorpX will make an ActivityPub-based social network and gather a lot of users. Then they will add more features than there are in the spec. The third step is to stop federating with other ActivityPub instances.

e.g. Slack vs. IRC