Links: Data Security, Social Networks and Secure Mailing

What is the problem, exactly?

• Read The Price of Hypocrisy by Evgeny Morozov about the affects that our laws have on users in authoritarian states, about the decisions we make headless regarding security and privacy, and that no government can regulate by law.
• People thinking they have #nothingtohide. That’s wrong, wrong, and again wrong.
• Examples of requests to internet services in Germany
• Fefe blog entries about German Interior Minister Friedrich (German)

Decentralized Social Networks: Federation vs. Distribution

• Comparison of software and protocols for distributed social networking from Wikipedia, I tripped up on Diaspora, Friendica and the protocol Tent
• A Critical Look at Decentralized Personal Data Architectures by Arvind Narayanan, Vincent Toubiana, Solon Barocas, Helen Nissenbaum and Dan Boneh
• Simple grapical explanation: What’s a distributed social network? by David Eisenberg, Mike Yeh and Steve Lim
• Modified version of the above story focusing on the problems of unencrypted data storage on someone else’s server: What’s a distributed social network? edited by carlo von Lynx
• Scalability & Paranoia in a Decentralized Social Network by Carlo v. Loesch, Gabor Adam Toth and Mathias Baumann

Solution: peer-to-peer (P2P) networks with all the social functions

• Idea as I understood it: An open framework using open protocols to distribute encrypted parts of shared data on multiple devices of connected people who know each other; arbitrary applications can use these frameworks to decrypt the data only on the users device to display and interact with them without constraints and freely extendable
• GNUnet – a framework for decentralized, peer-to-peer networking
• Secure Share – an end-to-end encryption framework using GNUnet and PSYC, Feature Comparison with Friendica and Facebook
• RetroShare providing filesharing, chat, messages, forums and channels – installation under Ubuntu [Quelle]:sudo add-apt-repository ppa:csoler-users/retroshare-snapshots
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install retroshare
• What else? No system already got all the features federated services like Friendica provide.

Who else is dedicated (highly incomplete, as I said: reducing open tabs)

• Europe versus Facebook
• Social Swarm, an open think tank initiated by the German privacy and digital rights NGO digitalcourage
• Against Mass Surveillance Claims of the Chaos Computer Club, #StopWatchingUs – current protests in Germany against PRISM and TEMPORA on Demonstrare.de
• IndieWebCamp, a 2-day creator camp focused on growing the independent web

Secure Mailing

• Usage of a service that stores only encrypted mails.
  • Lavabit: Enhanced account ($8 / year) – mail storage is asymmetrically encrypted (details)
• Using a home server with software that encrypts mails

Encrypting data on a home server (Ubuntu)

• German article on data encryption from ubuntuusers Wiki
• Is /home encryption useful on a server? Question on askubuntu.com

Possible steps to enhance personal privacy

1. Always think twice
2. Use the Facebook Logout function
3. Refuse to use Facebook for private messaging
4. Find or create alternative systems to migrate from Google Services by keeping most of the functionality you use
5. Use or help to create an alternative social network system to Facebook
6. Give it a try.

Comments and hints are highly appreciated.