Our data is an extension of ourselves. It tells third-parties where we are, who we are with, our political and sexual orientations, sites we have visited, our favorite recipes, our favorite topics of interest, and so on.<br /> While a single data point is not always sensitive, the loss of large amounts of aggregated data can be dangerous (for example if you browse topics about cancer before subscribing to a life insurance).<br /> In a world where everything has been digitized (ebooks, TV, phones, music, social networks, etc.), <strong>your private life is an essential part of your individuality</strong>. It would only take a malicious hacker with access to your smartphone a few minutes to cause you serious harm taking control of your identity on Facebook, consulting your professional or medical information, making purchases without your authorisation, etc.).
‘Good accounts make good friends’, as the saying goes. It's easy to deduce from this that the reverse can quickly lead you to fall out with your mates, your family, and so on. Fortunately, there are small software programs (free/libre, and which don't give a damn about the content of your data) to manage shared expenses. They're terribly simple and effective: all you have to do is enter all you have to do is enter everyone's expenses, say who is affected by the expense in question, and BAM! with one click, they'll tell you ‘Who owes how much to whom?’
Major actors of the Internet have become real giants: Facebook has acquired WhatsApp and Instagram, Google owns Youtube and Waze, Microsoft distributes Skype, etc.<br /> This concentration of actors creates multiple issues: what if Facebook were suddenly shut down? And how could we browse the Web if Google went down? <strong>We rely more and more on services provided by a small group of suppliers.</strong> For example, Apple (iPhone), Google (Android) and Microsoft (Windows Phone) dominate almost the entire mobile OS industry.<br /> Furthermore, the size of these actors impedes innovation: it’s hard to launch a startup that can match up to Apple or Google (the first and second worldwide market capitalisations, respectively).<br /> Finally, The lack of diversity of the giants means they can track many people who are unaware that there may be alternatives, and it can influence the kind of data you receive (a Google search will produce different results for the term “nuclear power” depending on whether Google considers you to be an environmentalist or pro-nuclear power).
Web services used on your computer, smartphone, tablets (and other devices)are usually hosted on the “cloud”: servers spread across the planet, that host not only your data (emails, pictures, files, etc.), but also the application code.<br /> For your data, this raises the issue of sustainability (what would become of your files if Dropbox were to close tomorrow?) and of your ability to switch easily between services (how would you recover your data from Facebook or Picasa and import it, with all the adjoining comments, into another service?). <br /> For applications, this means that <strong>you are completely at the mercy of your service provider</strong> when it comes to proliferation of advertisements, changes to the user interface, etc., and that you have hardly any control over the way an application works. It is a “black box” that can exhibit malicious behaviour (sending spam SMS without your knowledge, executing malicious code, and so on).<br /> In short, these companies trap us in gilded cages: gilded yes, but cages nonetheless!
Yes, we've seen you, you who are trying to reproduce an organisation chart in LibreOffice (or PowerPoint) created by Jean-Mi-from-accounting 6 years ago, or you who want to to present your project for an AI-powered-cat-food-dispenser based on a diagram drawn on a pizzeria table, then photographed with a 2009 smartphone. Fortunately, we're offering you the chance to try out (without guarantee or support) two tools to meet these needs.
