![]() You might need a feed reader, a webmail, a calendar, and a file storage solution, or you might just need a todo list and a task manager, with a VPN. What exactly does a personal cloud cover in terms of functionality ? ![]() But the amount of work needed is not overwhelming, and we're going to use standard technologies here, with extensive documentation, communities, and easy-to-access help on all the different stacks. So yes, you need to get a bit under the hood to be able to create your own cloud, that's the culprit. It needs a bit of work to maintain and to update.It needs a bit of work to set up correctly.In case of a problem, it's up to you to fix it.This means you are the technical admin of your cloud apps. To me, here are some pros and cons of this solution: Not perfect, but better than other options. A small provider, that happens to be yourself. So a personal cloud could be a good solution, in this regard. TL DR: Richard Stallman is right on many points, but his position is generally too absolute and radical, and not compatible with a fair and reasonable use of today's tools (I think). Of course I could revoke all these accounts and do everything offline but we're in the 21th century and as a lot of people out there, I'm not ready to trade the practicality of online tools such as mail, calendar, contacts, file repository, readily available on any device anywhere, for an extreme privacy posture. So a small provider is not a really satisfying answer. Now that means that I could find and use smaller, local providers, but how can I be sure that they are well-funded and can provide a full-featured service in the long-run ( I'm happy to pay for a service of course, but even then)? And what if they get bought later on ? How can I assess their security measures and processes ? At least I'm sure Google has a team dedicated ( even many teams) to secure and backup its servers and put them back online in a snap. Now I'm not saying that these providers do a bad job regarding privacy, but regarding all the recent heat a few of them (all of them?) have received, I no longer trust any "big-enough" actor with my personal data. I use various sync services for my browsers (Firefox, Safari). I have quite a bit of history with what I would call "incumbent" service providers, since I've been mainly active on the Internet at the time these providers were gaining a lot of traction: I have Gmail emails and associated Google accounts. The immense amount of data that one generates while using various internet services like social networks, online services or softwares is now more and more a personal stress factor for techies of course but also more and more for the profanes. ![]() Privacy is becoming a mainstream subject right now, and that is good. Your mileage may vary on the definition of privacy, on the risks taken, and on the legitimity of the tools I will describe and implement, but I think this article can give you a good head start if you're looking into this kind of stuff at the moment.ġ. In a nutshell, this article is my personal take on what I value when I say online privacy, and how I decided to try to mitigate the risks by using open-source tools to create my own public cloud ☁️. We're going to deal with self-hosting too, a lot □. Alright, this is going to be quite a long article, about a subject that I have grown particularely fond of lately : online privacy.
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