The increasingly centralized online services provided by sprawling giants like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, or Microsoft (GAFAM) pose a threat to our digital lives.
These services track us everywhere, while claiming to give us a better “user experience”. But our behaviour is under constant surveillance. This information can be used to display targeted adverts, but the revelations of the Snowden case have also shown that Internet giants have been forced to communicate this data (sometimes extremely private: emails from Gmail, photos shared on Facebook, Skype conversations, smartphone locations, etc.) to government services. <strong>Under the pretense of fighting terrorism</strong>, states are able to gather much more intelligence than a "Big Brother" would ever have dreamed of.
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.).
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!
The story of the Internet itself is one of free software, and this goes for standards as well as protocols. Its potential and popularity are a cause for envy, and large companies would like nothing better than to control it by imposing closed-source, locked-down, and non-interoperable systems.
