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Posts in privacy
Yesterday was data privacy day, according to Lifehacker, and they posted a number of tips for protecting your privacy.There is one more thing you can do to protect your privacy, though: use open-source software.
Open-source, while not inherently more secure, has little chance of containing any backdoors or anything you wouldn’t want in your software, since all the code is open. But how does your ability to see the code help you if you aren’t a programmer and/or don’t have tons of time on your hands? You can’t review the code yourself, but there are people that can and do. Perhaps no single person will look at everything, but you can be quite sure that everything or almost everything in the code of something open-source has been at least glanced at by someone knowledgeable.
This doesn’t mean that you can go randomly downloading everything that’s open-source. You still have to be careful and trust the maker, but, when you use popular open-source software, you can be quite sure, no matter how paranoid you are, that your software isn’t doing anything malicious or stupid with your data.
Cloud Computing Is Not Bad: It Just Needs Some Openness
Recently, Richard Stallman called cloud computing “worse than stupidity.” His argument for this view is that, by giving your data away to the host of the web application you are using, you are essentially giving up all rights to that data. After all, they own it and there is little you can do to stop them from doing whatever they want with that data.
I agree with Stallman that there is a potential risk to putting your data in a closed-source, closed standards web application. I do not believe, however, that it is fair to say that web applications in general are a data trap, or, for that matter, in any way something to avoid.
If a web application is open-source, supports open standards, and has a good privacy policy, I see little to worry about. The privacy policy, which you can in part confirm through the source code, ensures that your privacy is protected, assuming there are also some reasonable data protection methods in place; and the open standards ensure that you can easily get data in and out of the application, so you don’t have to worry about losing your data or being locked into the application.
I understand the concerns about locking your data into a web application, but we should keep in mind that, as long as you have good open standards and a good privacy policy, (open-source is, of course, good, but not absolutley needed), you don’t have to worry too much about your data.