More secure alternatives to popular social media?
Hi all, Partly in response to what some are calling "the Snowden Summer" - also including the trial and sentencing of Bradley Manning - I've been poking into these matters a bit more earnestly, including subscribing to a (terrific) email listserv - liberationtech - operated from Stanford and including a number of luminaries, including some well-known AoIR folk. I'm intrigued by the raft of suggestions for more secure alternatives to contemporary and widely popular email services, social media, etc., including, e.g.:
Welcome to Trsst: An Open and Secure Alternative to Twitter
Post your thoughts, share links, and follow other interesting people or web sites, using the web or your mobile or any software of your choice. All of your private posts to individuals or friends and family are securely encrypted so that even your hosting provider - or government - can't unlock them. All of your public posts are digitally signed so you can prove that no one - and no government - modified or censored your writings. You control your identity and your posts and can move them to another site or hosting provider at any time. Think of Trsst as an RSS reader (and writer) that works like Twitter but built for the open web. The public stuff stays public and search-indexable, and the private stuff is encrypted and secured. Only you will hold your keys, so your hosting provider can't sell you out.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1904431672/trsst-a-distributed-secure-bl... -platform-for-the-o/description
I call this to our collective attention as it raises a number of ethical, social, political - and, yea, lo, verily - research questions and possibilities. Beginning with: is anyone doing some close study on the migration(s) to and from such alternatives, possibly alternative practices that emerge as a result of the sense of having greater privacy and security, etc.? Seems like a terrific route to follow - if anyone has resources and helpful signposts, would appreciate your sharing, either onlist or offlist. Many thanks in advance - Charles Professor in Media Studies Department of Media and Communication Director, Centre for Research on Media Innovations <http://www.hf.uio.no/imk/english/research/center/media-innovations/> University of Oslo P.O. Box 1093 Blindern NO-0317 Oslo Norway email: charles.ess@media.uio.no
Those are very good questions and they would make for a great research project. I recently did a survey of several of the top social network alternatives here: https://blogs.law.harvard.edu/internetmonitor/2013/06/14/social-network-alte... The biggest barrier to studying activity on these alternatives was that their emphasis on security and privacy make it very difficult to determine how many people use them, what they use them for, or what groups they attract. However, some networks like Diaspora provide nearly real-time information on how many users they have. Facebook and Twitter still have the most users by far, but several of the alternative networks I looked at also had followers/members on mainstream social networks too. There are many more alternatives available than the ones I examined, but most required considerable technical skills so I didn't include them for the blog's general audience. I'm as interested as Dr. Ess in answers to the questions he posed, but I'd like to add another. Before PRISM, I recall a number of studies which found that people generally would not be willing to pay money for a secure social network which does not mine user data. In addition to Dr. Ess' questions, does anyone know if new studies have been done to determine whether people are now willing to pay for social networks which don't collect and share user data? Rex Troumbley, PhD Candidate Department of Political Science and Alternative Futures University of Hawaii at Manoa
Thanks for sharing this, Charles. I've just been making the shift over to more secure services, in part because I work with activists and need to keep their data safe. I've switched to a riseup email server, full disk encryption, encrypted chat and video call services, and secure browsing. If anyone else is considering making similar shifts, the Tactical Technology 'Alternatives' page is very helpful: https://alternatives.tacticaltech.org/ Part of the research I'm doing at the moment is looking at how activists in the squares movement deal with digital security issues. Our research so far has looked at Occupy Oakland, anti-fascists in Athens, and activists in Tunisia, but we don't have anything published just yet - the first publication is in review at the moment. I'm happy to send you more information if you're interested. On Sun, 2013-08-18 at 11:35 +0200, Charles Ess wrote:
Hi all, Partly in response to what some are calling "the Snowden Summer" - also including the trial and sentencing of Bradley Manning - I've been poking into these matters a bit more earnestly, including subscribing to a (terrific) email listserv - liberationtech - operated from Stanford and including a number of luminaries, including some well-known AoIR folk.
I'm intrigued by the raft of suggestions for more secure alternatives to contemporary and widely popular email services, social media, etc., including, e.g.:
Welcome to Trsst: An Open and Secure Alternative to Twitter
Post your thoughts, share links, and follow other interesting people or web sites, using the web or your mobile or any software of your choice. All of your private posts to individuals or friends and family are securely encrypted so that even your hosting provider - or government - can't unlock them. All of your public posts are digitally signed so you can prove that no one - and no government - modified or censored your writings. You control your identity and your posts and can move them to another site or hosting provider at any time. Think of Trsst as an RSS reader (and writer) that works like Twitter but built for the open web. The public stuff stays public and search-indexable, and the private stuff is encrypted and secured. Only you will hold your keys, so your hosting provider can't sell you out.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1904431672/trsst-a-distributed-secure-bl... -platform-for-the-o/description
I call this to our collective attention as it raises a number of ethical, social, political - and, yea, lo, verily - research questions and possibilities.
Beginning with: is anyone doing some close study on the migration(s) to and from such alternatives, possibly alternative practices that emerge as a result of the sense of having greater privacy and security, etc.?
Seems like a terrific route to follow - if anyone has resources and helpful signposts, would appreciate your sharing, either onlist or offlist.
Many thanks in advance - Charles
Professor in Media Studies Department of Media and Communication
Director, Centre for Research on Media Innovations <http://www.hf.uio.no/imk/english/research/center/media-innovations/>
University of Oslo P.O. Box 1093 Blindern NO-0317 Oslo Norway email: charles.ess@media.uio.no
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-- Due to security concerns with Gmail and other Google services, I'm switching over to Riseup. From now on, please email me at: skyc@riseup.net
participants (3)
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Charles Ess -
Rex Troumbley -
sky